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A primordial landscape burns. A molten river carves its way through a terrain in a ritual older than the words that try to name it. Isis, the holy throne-woman, raises her scepter high, an invocation to her partner Osiris (he who sits upon the throne). He raises his in reply. When their eyes connect, sparks fly, the earth trembles, and a reptile crawls forth from its egg. (You are watching a Kenneth Anger film.) In the beginning, Osiris was the Egyptian god of agriculture, but as his story spread he became God of the Dead. His body, you see, was ripped into fourteen pieces by a truly demon brother (Setekh); but the loving hands of Isis reassembled him and he chose to stay on as Lord of the Underworld. When the plants along the Nile appear each spring, it is Osiris, reborn.
When Anger began shooting his second version of Lucifer Rising sometime around 1970 (the original 1966 footage had been stolen), Donald Cammell's Performance had just been released. At the time, Anger and Cammell were exploring similar themes. Both were fascinated by the allure of iconic fame and performance. Mick Jagger had appeared briefly in and composed the score for Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother ('69), and his rock-star aura propelled Cammell's film into the underground pantheon. (It is no surprise that Anger wanted Jagger to be his Lucifer.) In an increasingly relevant turn of poetic inspiration, Anger cast Cammell as his Osiris.
On April 24th of this year, Donald Cammell committed suicide in his Hollywood home. He was 62 years old. His career as director leaves us with only four feature films, a handful of work from a career fraught with frustrations. Adding to the dismay, his first film-and easily his best-continues to be primarily thought of as a Nicolas Roeg film, Roeg having been Cammell's co-directing cameraman. The irony cuts deep: The male leads, Mick Jagger and James Fox, exchange and merge their narrative identities until the audience is forced into a confused doubletake. (In the real world, Cammell and Roeg would never publicly discuss who was responsible for what. As the copy for Performance's posters put it: "Vice. And Versa.") Indeed, correlations between the two directors' subsequent careers (Roeg's being...