He’s type atypical

LONG before “alternative” and “independent” became marketing terms, artists such as Kenneth Anger were striving to make something truly different. Creating works that were mysterious, enigmatic and deeply personal, Anger helped carve a space for filmmaking on the fringes.

Filmforum, an ongoing series of experimental film screenings, pays tribute Sunday to the influential filmmaker and author of the infamous “Hollywood Babylon” books with showings of his best-known works and his most recent film, “The Man We Want to Hang.” Anger is scheduled to attend the event.

The evening also will feature such career highlights as “Fireworks,” “Scorpio Rising” and “Invocation of My Demon Brother.”

Born in 1930, Anger appeared as a young boy in Max Reinhardt’s film adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” while his grandmother worked as a costume mistress at United Artists.

He would never again come into such close contact with the conventional industry of Hollywood, instead forging his own path as an artisan outsider. While still a student at Beverly Hills High School, he began making short films with his family’s home-movie equipment. The only remaining example of these early pieces, which Anger called “cine-poems,” is “Fireworks,” made in 1947.

A non-narrative, dream-logic take on identity and sexual discovery, the film is still radical in form today. Its penultimate images -- a bottle rocket shoots from the crotch of a sailor and a bare-chested man dons a headpiece seemingly fashioned from a tinfoil Christmas tree -- are still startling for their pungent confluence of masculinity, eroticism and violence.

“Fireworks” caught the attention of French filmmaker Jean Cocteau, which led to Anger’s spending most of the 1950s living in France and working for Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francaise. Upon his return to America in the early 1960s, he made the groundbreaking “Scorpio Rising.”

A commentary on popular culture’s growing dominance of public consciousness and the implied fascism of consumerism and conformity, the film intertwines imagery of James Dean and Marlon Brando with a brawny motorcyclist fetishizing his machine and its accessories. The film’s soundtrack is groundbreaking in its use of such seemingly harmless pop tunes of the day as “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “Party Lights” and “Heat Wave,” imbuing them with new meaning through their context in relation to the visuals.

Perhaps the film’s masterstroke is the sequence that intercuts the ominous biker with imagery of Jesus, scored to the ironic accompaniment of the Crystals’ hit “He’s a Rebel.” As Anger recently explained, the connection was one of those fortuitous accidents to which the artist must be receptive.

“While I was cutting the film,” he says, “a film was delivered to me by mistake, a Sunday school film called ‘The Last Journey to Jerusalem.’ It was supposed to go to a Lutheran church with the same street address as where I was living at the time, in Silver Lake. It was left on my doorstep, and I ran it thinking it was one of my films being returned. I’m afraid I never did send it on to the Lutherans.”

As Anger’s interest in mysticism and the occult grew, it was increasingly reflected in his films, including “Invocation of My Demon Brother,” which features an electronic score by Mick Jagger, and “Lucifer Rising.”

If these films, acknowledged inspirations for “Performance” and “Easy Rider,” have over time lost some of their hip luster, they still have a hypnotic power that transcends the vagaries of their original moment.

Anger’s “The Man We Want to Hang” is an intriguing departure. The new work is made up of filmed images of artwork by author and occultist Aleister Crowley. The art was recently gathered for exhibition from the private collections of Anger, musician Jimmy Page and others. It is the first time Anger has so heavily relied on another artist, as well as the first time he has made a film made up almost entirely of static shots.

During the last few years, the iconoclastic Anger has begun to wear the mantle of elder statesman, receiving such accolades as an honorary doctorate and, most recently, a career achievement award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. Rightfully in a pantheon that might also include works by such 20th century icons as Jack Kerouac, Harry Smith and William S. Burroughs, the work of Kenneth Anger -- a visualization of the landscape of dreams -- plants a flag for the right to be weird in America.

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Kenneth Anger in person

What: Program includes “Fireworks,” “Scorpio Rising,” “Invocation of My Demon Brother,” “Rabbit’s Moon,” “Lucifer Rising,” “The Man We Want to Hang” and “The Dead”

Where: Filmforum, the Steven Spielberg Theater at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

When: Sunday, 7:30 p.m.

Admission: $8 (cash only)

Info: www.filmforum.org