Customer Reviews

Lucifer Rising [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well, as a TRUE fan of Marianne Faithfull, this was MUST for me. It's taken me nearly 35 years to actually see it...heard all the legends and the Manson Family thing (Bobby Beusoleil was their very 1rst victim) and of course Kenneth Anger is somewhat of a weird and eerie dude. In Marianne's autobiogtraphy "Faithfull" she sheds some light on Anger's "masterpiece". She nearly died in a fall from the steps of the Great Pyramid at Giza and crawled around covered in sheeps blood in some graveyard in Germany, known for it's occult standing. All in all, she says the ONLY reason K. Anger made this was his love for Mick Jagger, who WAS to have played Lucifer. (His brother Chris was a dull substitute)
Anyways, it is TOO EXPENSIVE to purchase, but I found a great video store here in San Diego that actually had a copy...and I, like an addict with his "fix" rushed home and duped it. Yeah, I know it's illegal! Who cares?
It was great to see Marianne SO lovely and degraded. Her most shameful moment and wonderous one, all at once!

Filmed in San Francisco, the first 11-minute mini-film, Evocation Of My Demon Brother, consists of a series of magical scenes and rituals interspersed with footage of soldiers alighting from a helicopter and occult symbols, over a monotonous synthesizer note played by Mick Jagger. There is no dialogue. The cast includes Kenneth Anger as the Magus, Anton Szandor LaVey as Satan and Bobby Beausoleil as Lucifer.

The liner notes claim that Lucifer Rising (28 minutes) is a film about the love generation - the birthday party of the Aquarian Age that shows actual ceremonies to make Lucifer rise. The film is a surreal chain of images starting with the birth of Isis, the response of Osiris, shots of crocodiles, the pyramids, the sphinx and occult symbols, one bearing the Gnostic words Babalon, Nuit, Lilith. There is also a shot of a swimming tiger. Marianne Faithfull looks gorgeous as Lilith amidst the Egyptian scenery. The conclusion is a sequence of UFO's flying over the Colossi of Memnon, quite a powerful and evocative scene. No dialogue either, but the music is better.

The cast includes Miriam Gibril as Isis, Donald Cammell as Osiris, Kenneth Anger as Magus, Sir Francis Rose as Chaos and Leslie Huggins as Lucifer. It is an Anita Pallenberg presentation and the music is by Bobby Beausoleil and the Freedom Orchestra. It was filmed in Luxor, Karnak, Gizeh, Externsteine, London and Avebury.

In her autobiography Faithfull (co-written with David Dalton), Marianne Faithfull describes the making of this film in Egypt and at Star Mountain, an ancient neolithic site in Germany: "Smearing myself with Max Factor blood and crawling around an Arab graveyard at 5 o'clock in the morning as the sun rose over the pyramids was absolute insanity." She does not hold Anger in high regard: "... to let someone like that make me perform a ritualistic act of such ghoulish proportions, was just mindless."

According to Faithfull, Anger wanted Mick Jagger for the part of Lucifer but when he refused, his brother Chris Jagger was chosen. He was insubordinate, soon quarrelled with Anger and was put on a plane back to London. Kenneth Anger himself took the part. Faithfull's conclusion about the movie is that it is a piece of "kitch occult." True to a certain extent, and in my opinion both movies resemble an extended rock or pop video. Real rating: three and a half stars.

I've had this in my collection for a good decade and still rate it very highly. The editting and sybolism fuse into a stunning whole which seems to put the viewer into an altered state. My favorite sequence is the bathtub/spear/murder scene. This film works on you, so watch out. I think Anger once said he wished he could bypass film completely and project images directly into the viewer's mind. This comes close enough!

KENNETH ANGER WAS A BIG CROWLEY FOLLOWER...TRIED TO CAPTURE A BIT OF THE MASTER THERION!

Seeing this video tends to put one in a altered state IMO...Of course one does need a magickal background in order to appreciate it fully...lots of esoteric meaning to this video...really kewl images and sound....."Every man and every woman is a cosmic star" (Book of the Law) and Kenneth Anger is truley a star in his own orbit.