Film Friday: Kenneth Anger's "Scorpio Rising" and the Film Canon

I've been teaching a course in "Rock and Roll Films" for nearly twenty years.  It's been pretty fun to do, though there are some summers where I feel more distracted (when my kids were very young).  Looking back, it's kind of cool that I was able to turn what was initially a paper I wrote as a freshman in college into a small percentage of my lifetime income.  (I hope the paper has long been buried somewhere in my parents' backyard.  The genesis of the paper came from Greil Marcus's essay on the subject from the 1980 edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, and while he is duly cited, as I remember it, the paper wasn't much more than a distillation of that article.)

I've been careful not to allow the course to ossify, easy enough to do for any academic on any subject.  The first few years I taught the course, I went pretty much with a chronological approach, but for the most part I work around about six or seven different themes, usually covering four in any given term. I think I offer a range of film titles when I teach it as well, and the corpus grows with new films that are worth exploring.  The mid-2000s spate of biopics (Walk the Line, Ray, Beyond the Sea) opening up an avenue back to earlier titles like La Bamba and The Buddy Holly Story.  When I started the course, there was only one Sex Pistols film, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, a cheesy exploitation of the group financed by their former manager; the Pistols -- with the same director, Julien Temple -- produce a more "conventional" documentary in 2000, The Filth and the Fury, which works much better in the context of what I want to get across in the course. When I decided to show Curtis Hanson's 8Mile, featuring Eminem, I was fascinated at the parallels between it and the early Elvis movies -- especially King Creole. A friend of a friend recommended Rusty Cundieff's mockumentary Fear of a Black Hat as a hip-hop Spinal Tap: not quite a classic, but at times quite brilliant. (The discourse surround the L.A. riots of 1992 is devastatingly brought to bear in the song/video "Guerrillas in the Midst." Truth ain't always funny.)

Despite the course's evolving -- new biopics on James Brown and Jimi Hendrix coming very soon! -- there are a handful of films that are canonical, ones that I have shown every time I've taught the course in the summer at Queens College. I always show an Elvis film, one or two of the early ones (King Creole , Jailhouse Rock, Loving You).  I always show A Hard Day's Night, which always leads to at least one episode of The Monkees. I always show the Pistols films, and, of all things, the first Beach movie with Frankie and Annette. (The theoretical spine of the course is Hebdige's classic Subculture: the Meaning of Style. You can't really avoid the Pistols films then, and Beach Party marks an interesting counterpoint.) And you can always count on seeing Kenneth Anger's avant-garde classic Scorpio Rising, from 1963, perhaps the ultimate rock film.

Anger's film is not really possible to describe in a short piece like this.  It's not a narrative film, and has no dialogue.  The bulk of the sound track consists of a dozen pop songs, most of which were recorded in 63.  The imagery centers around a biker subculture that Anger had become friendly with in Brooklyn.  There is footage of the bikers working on their machines,  getting dressed to go out (set to Bobby Vinton's version of "Blue Velvet"), hanging out in Coney Island, and attending a bizarre costume party, featuring glimpses of gay sex (and I think a glimpse of hetero-sex, too but I'm still not sure after twenty-five years) and an initiation ritual of sorts involving mustard.  Anger also mixes imagery of nazis, an old religious film about Jesus, James Dean, and footage of The Wild One, the famous Stanley Kramer-produced biker flick starring Marlon Brando as the leader of the pack. The music is used to powerful and also funny commentary on the images: "He's a Rebel" is played over the shots of the Jesus film and the Brando film; "Party Lights" plays not just over the party sequence, but also as Jesus and his followers enter the temple to confront the moneychangers. "I Will Follow Him" features shots of the Jesus film but also the nazi imagery and again Brando.  The conclusion, perhaps predictably, is over the Safaris' surfing classic "Wipeout."  (But with the nazi imagery around
the film, I can't help think: Wipe Out?) I repeat: there's no story here.  The imagery is overwhelming. In my teaching, Scorpio is for my film class what Howl is for my literature courses: it blows many students away. As one student said of the Anger film, "it freaked me to my soul."  That's what it's supposed to do.

I was a senior in college when I first saw the film, a slightly sepia-toned 16mm print. Over the years of showing it, I've switched from 16mm to a VHS copy I'd rent from Kim's Video, to a copy of a copy I'd made one year (using my old digital videotape camcorder), to links to the film on YouTube to a well-restored DVD copy. It's still the music that makes it, yes, but it's nice to have a clean image to work with, too. I kind of take it for granted that academia has it as part of its canon.  The professor who showed me the film when I was an undergrad earned her doctorate from NYU, as I eventually did. At the time of the film's release, there was a closer relationship between the film-making program and the film studies program at the University, and films like Anger's were being seen by students like Martin Scorsese. (Go watch Mean Streets again if you don't believe me.) As the PhD's began to find work outside the city, they took Scorpio Rising with them.  I more or less assume that you can't get an undergrad degree in film or media studies without having seen it. When I ask my students if they've seen it before, a few hands usually shoot up, though not all (which is good, because you do want to have some shock value).

Despite my sense that Scorpio is part of academia's film canon, I don't see quite as much  discourse about the film in scholarly articles. (You can find a fair share of books about it, but it still seems limited.)  You can read about it as a canonical text of "queer cinema"; as a major example of underground film; even some pieces about representations of motorcycle culture.  Yet it still seems a bit thin.  Maybe it's one of those films critics and scholars do take for granted, something that we feel we've said what there is to say about it already so why bother?  

Outside the academy, I suppose I can understand why the Library of Congress has not yet added Scorpio Rising to its National Film Registry, though I must admit I was surprised that it wasn't already, given the reputation it has.  It was the subject of a famous case of censorship (like Howl was), and just as in the case with Ginsberg's poem, Anger won.  (By the way: I used to think Anger had trouble because of copyright issues with the songs he used, but evidently he did pay the copyright holders to use them.)  It is a landmark film, and one deserving of the attention I think it gets anyway. 
But what is shocking to me is that the film is not even on the list of suggested films that people might nominate for inclusion in the Film Registry.  The list is not exclusive; you can nominate any film you like, but the fact that Anger's film isn't on the suggested list stuns me. The deadline to nominate films is September 1.  I certainly encourage those of you know do know and admire the film to put it on your lists. 

And here is the film, linked from YouTube.