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Scorpio Rising
One of the first openly gay filmmakers in the United States, the work of Kenneth Anger was crucial within the queer cinema movement. His films often mix homoeroticism with surrealism.
Scorpio Rising is perhaps Anger’s best-known work. Set to the beats of 1960s pop music, the film follows a group of bikers and explores the occult, homosexuality, and Nazism. It also idolises rebellious public figures such as James Dean and Marlon Brando.
Its 1963 premiere in New York did not go unnoticed: the American Nazi Party filed a lawsuit, and the Lutheran Church accused Anger of plagiarism. Nevertheless, critics hailed the film as a game-changer. It not only inspired a lot of music videos but also filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Nicolas Winding Refn.
Bio Kenneth Anger
American underground legend Kenneth Anger (1927-2023) produced almost forty experimental short films, nine of which in particular have been grouped together as the ‘Magick Lantern Cycle’. They are the basis of Anger’s reputation as one of the most influential independent filmmakers in cinema history. His films variously merge surrealism with the occult and contain elements of documentary, psychodrama, and spectacle. Anger himself has been described as “one of America’s first openly gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner,” and his “role in rendering gay culture visible within American cinema, commercial or otherwise, is impossible to overestimate.”
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- This film was #8 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025