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' Filmmaker's Cinematheque cooperative 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 Filmmaker's Cinematheque, 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]