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.”
