I can’t help getting an eerie feeling whenever I watch this movie. I don’t even remember why I watched it to begin with. Probably because I thoroughly enjoyed Hollywood Babylon. In his trash dish on early Hollywood decadence, Kenneth Anger manages to be insightful, titillating, and engaging, without compromising morbidity or intelligence in the process.
When I watch Invocation of my Demon Brother I feel like I am watching firsthand, the sped up footage of the flowers of rot, blooming into being, at the end of the Golden Sixties.
One of the odd, among many other ‘odd’ things about this movie, is the dark synchronicity between the arise of the Church of Satan, the Manson Murders, and the fact this kaleidoscope of darkness was born in San Francisco in the Summer of Love. Charles Manson tripped for the first time at a Grateful Dead concert, some years earlier, while fresh out of prison. That summer was a summer of flux. It was a time of new beginnings. It was everything and anything. Summer starshowers turned to dust storms of bewilderment and chaos.
Some months after Invocation came out, in December, the Altamont concert debacle happened. For many, this catastrophe of violence and mayhem signified he close of an era that had only just begun. A few months after being involved in the film, Bobby Beausoleil also got himself in some very hot water due to a drug deal gone bad. If Charles Manson is to be believed, his subsequent arrest due to this, was the seed that spawned what came to be known as the Manson murders. Supposedly Anger put a curse on Bobby for stealing film reels. Heresy aside, these events all did occur after Anger created a film that seems to be and can be interpreted as having various meanings and intents. The imagery in the film directly foreshadows events that would unfold later that year. Mick Jagger did his Moog soundtrack, which hauntingly starts and stops in grating jolts adding an unsettling aura of discord to an already arresting catalog of stimuli. Bobby and Jagger would soon find themselves directly experiencing a similar vein of the type of energy that they aided in evoking in this film through their craft and mere presence.
Invocation of my Demon Brother could very well be a genuine invocation of Luciferian and dark forces, but it is also, like a ll great art, a reflection of the chaotic psychic atmosphere everyone was experiencing no matter how aware or unaware they were, at the time. Film is still the most powerful medium available to the artist, ad man or dictator. Film began as almost a lark, with Georges Melies, whom Anger has cited as an inspiration as well. Melies was a stage magician and was always on the lookout for new tricks he could incorporate into his act. When the Lumiere brothers invented the film camera, Melies got a bright idea. He played with film, he used it, not as Anger later would in the more mystical magical sense, but in the outright stage magic format. The message is in the medium, and ever since its advent, film has been used to sell ways of thinking and ways of being to the masses. We use film to sell products, lifestyles, companies, movie stars now more than ever.
Under the guise of entertainment there always lurks an agenda. There is no such thing as pure, innocent entertainment.
I see this film as a dark vision of things to come. The film is compelling because it evokes so many things simply through the use of the sensory stimuli available to the filmmaker. Anger is not a linear storyteller. His films are constellations in a dark sky, moving pictures, in the truest sense of the word. They are tangible, living things. 
LezaBlackSun 