KILLING ME EGO, WITH THIS FILM

Brian Butler is a filmmaker, musician, and occult guy. When he’s not trotting the globe with Kenneth Anger, he lives in LA, in a house with a dried llama fetus by the front door. Say what thou wilt about Anger and his recurrent exercises in Crowleyana, we still think his films are “magickal.” Or at the very least “fun.” We talked to Brian about altered states of consciousness and his new film Night of Pan starring Vincent Gallo and Anger, which just screened as part of Aaron Rose’s Projections series at Roberts & Tilton in LA and screens in London this Saturday (February 20) at the Horse Hospital.

Vice: How did you meet Kenneth Anger? Brian Butler: Through mutual friends. At the time I was producing shows for Disinformation and I wanted to contact Kenneth about appearing on the show. The day before I left New York, I ran into an old friend who happened to be in touch with Kenneth, so it just worked out.

How about Vincent Gallo? I met Vincent through a producer in Los Angeles. At the time, he was going to be cast in the role of Charles Manson. He was in costume and somewhat in character. I had just returned from Portland after interviewing Bobby Beausoleil, so we talked about that. We stayed in touch and became friends.

Have you worked with Vincent on anything else? Not officially. We’ve worked on music together and I was around when he was filming Brown Bunny. Night of Pan is our first official collaboration.

“Night of Pan” refers to a mystical state of mind described by Aleister Crowley. I know Anger is a lifelong devotee of Crowley and the OTO. How did you get into all that business? I felt he had a certain presence or magnetism that radiated from photographs of him. The way his books were published–one in particular, Magick in Theory and Practice–the way the type was set out, the layout, and the way he wrote about magic was all very powerful. I felt I could connect with his energy. He was a legend in his own lifetime.

Would you say Aleister Crowley is someone who united you, Kenneth Anger and Vincent Gallo? Yes, definitely. We all had an interest in the occult, so there was this understanding on the set where everything flowed by intuition. They got it. They got into character. Vincent did an amazing performance. Everything was one take. He went somewhere with his character and almost brought the entire crew to his headspace.They had never seen anything like it before. Vincent completely transformed. He was sitting there and when the cameras started rolling something clicked. It’s a good example of how visually you can alter the consciousness of those around you. A really intense performance is like hypnosis.You go to a certain state of mind and your presence brings those around you to the same place.

Is the film designed to get viewers into that headspace? That’s one of its intentions, and it works on a level that might not be immediately apparent to the viewer. I’ve shown the film to several people privately and later on they have extreme experiences they connected to viewing the film. For example, one friend, who is a director of a large gallery here in Los Angeles, watched it and in the next few days she said, “This whole occult thing is freaking me out. I can’t talk to you,” and she didn’t speak to me for months. Recently we reconnected and she told me that when she went home that night she envisioned a giant centipede on her wall. She attributed that experience to watching the film. To me it sounded like something out of Naked Lunch or something. The film is designed to alter consciousness. In some ways it’s a magical spell I guess.

You forgot the K. Are there any other films you think works this way? Yes, wuite a few: the original Faust film; Die Nibelungen by Fritz Lang; works by Harry Smith; and Kenneth Anger of course. These films create a really heavy atmosphere.

What’s your response to people’s standard grief about “the occult.” You know, the “this guy’s a crackpot,” “this is all hokum,” “hooey!” stuff. The occult is defined as the hidden levels of the mind or the hidden information about how things work. This is stuff that might not be understood from a scientific point of view at this time. So it’s a way of the intuition, of going with your instincts, interpreting things on different levels–a way of looking at the world. A lot of the work I do communicates to a hidden level of the mind, not so much to the ego or personality, but more on a symbolic or subconscious level. The guy who lived in house where we shot Night of Pan had some strange experiences that he attributed to the film. Until we completed the film, a dybbuk, which is a demon appearing in the form of a person, kept manifesting itself in his life. He went to La Paz to the witchdoctor market and brought me back a llama fetus that would protect me from the things that had been raised as a result of this film.

Cool! What did you do with it? I put it by my door to protect my home.

Do have it nailed to the door like one of those Jewish deals? Or do you keep it in like a little bag? It’s small, just a little thing. It looks like a seahorse with yarn on it. It’s next to my door, on a shelf.

MARGO FORTUNY

Versions of Night of Pan have been screened at Cannes Film Festival, and the Athens Biennale. The London premiere takes place this Saturday at the Horse Hospital at 7.30 pm. There’s also an exhibition of Kenneth Anger’s film stills opening this Thursday, February 18 at S SprüthMagers Gallery in London from 6-8 pm.