How Kenneth Anger changed Martin Scorsese’s approach to filmmaking
The late Kenneth Anger, the pioneer of the experimental, cast an influence felt far and wide by filmmakers and artists across the world. He was always at the forefront of the avant-garde, and incredibly innovative in his use of dream sequences, combining surreal imagery with evocative music and sound design.
It’s unsurprising, then, that legendary director Martin Scorsese has cited Anger as a major influence on his work. The extent of that influence, however, may be more significant than you’d think, and the specificity of it came to shape Scorsese’s very approach to making films.
As an impressionable young film student at New York University, the radical and then-controversial films of Anger were held up by Scorsese and his peers as prime examples of ultimate rebellion. In Peter Decherney’s book on the history of copyright, Hollywood’s Copyright Laws, Scorsese recalls precisely what it was about Anger’s films, specifically Scorpio Rising (1964), that made such an impact.
“The shocking thing about it wasn’t the Hell’s Angels stuff, it was the use of music,” he said. “This was music I knew, and we had always been told by our professors at NYU that we couldn’t use it in student films because of copyright.”
Scorsese almost certainly isn’t the only filmmaker who found their creativity to be restricted by copyrighted music, but it’s nevertheless difficult to imagine a time when licensed songs weren’t a main feature of his films.
Scorsese continues: “Now here was Kenneth Anger’s film in and out of the courts on obscenity charges, but no one seemed to be complaining that he’d used all those incredible tracks of Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson and the Rebels. That gave me the idea to use whatever music I really needed.”
From his use of The Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me’ to score the iconic tracking shot through the club in Goodfellas (1990) to the needle drop of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, which announced the entrance of Robert De Niro’s character in the 1976 movie Mean Streets, the soundtracks for Scorsese’s films have become a thing of legend, and his expert use of popular tracks to help tell the narrative is one of his most defining tools as a filmmaker.
As directors like Scorsese have gone on to influence countless others, and his use of soundtracks being adopted by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, the spirit of Anger will live on, and whilst the film and art community will no doubt mourn his recent passing, one should take solace in the fact that we can still see the extent of his legacy in films to this very day.
