Scorpio Rising (1963)

There are short films that earn their place in cinema history by doing something no one had quite done before, and Scorpio Rising is very much one of those films. Made in 1963 by Kenneth Anger and released through his own Puck Film Productions, it runs to just 28 minutes, yet its shadow falls across decades of music video culture, avant-garde filmmaking, and the broader language of pop imagery. The premise is spare to the point of being anti-narrative: a group of young bikers, played by a cast including Bruce Byron, Ernie Allo, Frank Carifi, Steve Crandell, and Johnny Dodds, go about their rituals of preparation, the polishing of leather, the revving of engines, the posturing in front of mirrors, while a string of period pop songs plays out over the images. Around this mundane framework, Anger layers homoerotic suggestion, occult symbolism, and a collage of found imagery drawn from Hollywood, religion, and the nascent rebel-youth mythology of the early 1960s. The result landed Anger in an obscenity trial in California, and it caused genuine unease in certain quarters on its release. That biographical and legal context is worth knowing going in.

Anger himself is a fascinating and genuinely odd figure in American independent cinema. Self-taught and fiercely outside the studio system, he had already made a name for himself with earlier short works before Scorpio Rising became the film that cemented his reputation. The piece is frequently cited as a forerunner of the music video format, given its deliberate synchronisation of image and song, and it sits comfortably alongside other formally adventurous work being made on both sides of the Atlantic in the same period. If you're interested in what adventurous filmmaking looked like in 1963 more broadly, it's worth noting that the same year produced Winter Light, a film I've also covered here, which takes an entirely different approach to formal rigour. The comparison isn't unflattering to either film, but it does illustrate just how wide the tent of serious cinema was that year. For a sense of how music functions as the organising principle of a film, you might also find it useful to look back at my piece on Amazing Grace, or at Style Wars, both of which treat music and subculture as subjects in their own right, though in very different registers from Anger's approach here.

The cast are not professional actors in any conventional sense, and Anger makes no real effort to direct performance in a traditional way. What he is interested in is surface, attitude, and the symbolic charge of bodies in particular clothing and settings. The bikers of Scorpio Rising are less characters than icons, figures assembled and arranged to carry meaning rather than to embody individual psychology. Whether that's a strength or a limitation is, of course, something of the central question the film poses to anyone watching it today, particularly anyone encountering it outside of an academic or archival context. It is, by most accounts, a film people are more likely to have read about than actually sat through.

Scorpio Rising (1963) is 28 minutes of leather-clad bikers meticulously polishing boots, adjusting zippers, and posing in front of mirrors, all set to a jukebox soundtrack of 1960s pop hits. Kenneth Anger's experimental short may have been groundbreaking for its time (pioneering the music-video format and layering homoerotic subtext over rebel iconography) but as a viewing experience today, it's glacially dull. There's no narrative, no tension, no evolution, just repetitive tableaus of narcissistic posturing stretched far beyond their conceptual expiration date. The soundtrack is great. The editing occasionally winks with irony. But these flashes of style can't sustain interest when the content itself is so inert. What might have felt transgressive in 1963 now reads as a fetishistic mood board with delusions of depth. A historically notable curio, but a slog to actually watch. Influence doesn't equal entertainment. Sometimes a film's importance is best appreciated in a textbook, not on screen.

I think that last point is the honest crux of it. The film's reputation has, over the years, built up a kind of protective scaffolding around it, the sort that makes it feel almost impolite to say that watching it is a fairly tedious experience by the end. Its influence on music video aesthetics and queer cinema is real and worth acknowledging, and I wouldn't tell anyone not to see it once, especially if they have even a passing interest in the history of experimental film. But once, I think, is likely to be enough for most people. There's a difference between a film that rewards repeat viewing and a film that is simply a point of reference, and Scorpio Rising has quietly become the latter for me. Important, certainly. Essential viewing? That's a harder sell.

Rating: ★  | Year: 1963  | Watched: 2026-03-13

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More music: Style Wars (1983) · 8 Mile (2002) · Chicken for Linda! (2023) · Tender Mercies (1983)