Magick Lantern Cycle

New York: Film-Makers' Cinematheque, 1966. Original film program for the 1966 screening of six Kenneth Anger films, being shown on the Spring Equinox (March 21, 1966). Screened at Jonas Mekas' Film-maker's Cinematheque coopperative theater, then located at 125 West 41st Street in New York.

Films at the screening included "Kustom Kar Kommandos," "Fireworks," "Scorpio Rising," "Eaux d'artifice," and a prelude entitled "Anger Aquarian Arcanum." Also included was the premiere screening of the "Sacred Mushroom Edition" of his film "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome," which condensed an earlier three-screen edition of the film into a single, superimposed image. In hip late-1960s fashion, the program includes specific instructions for "psychedelic researchers" who wished to view the film as it was fully intended: "in that Holy Trance called High."

Anger, one of the most significant filmmakers to come out of the American avant-garde in the mid-1960s, was born in Southern California and began making films when he was only ten years old. His work often prominently featured homosexual themes, and his career-long fascination with the mystical and magical is prominently on display in the "Magick Lantern Cycle" as well. The Film-maker's Cinemantheque, co-founded by Jonas Mekas in 1962, would offer a home, albeit with an oft-shifting location, to avant-garde New York filmmakers, and would later grow to become the Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film.

8.5 x 11 inches, nine pages, with plastic spine protector binding as issued. About Near Fine, with a light crease at the top of the front wrapper.

[Book #158821]