About Scorpio Rising 2
Scorpio Rising 2 (The Gospel According to St Matthew/Hells Angels on Wheels) was conceived in 1997 as a kind of remake of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, which (among many other things) intercuts scenes from a Bible movie with Anger’s own biker imagery. According to Anger, the Bible movie was misdelivered to his doorstep while he was in the process of editing his own footage. Kenneth Anger’s work was informed by his engagement with the occultism of Aleister Crowley, and thus his appropriation of Bible imagery was a deliberate inversion of meaning.
Scorpio Rising 2 mixes biker and biblical footage by presenting two entire films (Richard Rush’s Hells Angels on Wheels, and Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew) simultaneously, on a split-screen. By making no edits to this source material, apart from the split-screen process, I intended to return the balance of interpretation towards the median, as compared to Anger’s polemical intercutting.
In doing so, I was not taking a neutral position as regards meaning; the choice of subject matter was particular. However, I am interested in the kind of meaning that can arise when authorship is surrendered to a process.
Viewing Instructions
The entire video work (130 mins) is divided into chapters, listed below - you can either click on a chapter name to jump to that clip, or use the forward and back arrows to the left and right of the current clip’s screen to go to the next/previous clip in the sequence.
tailbiter.com/scorpiorising2: a project by Mark Dean. Site design by applekrate using Wordpress code adapted from Hemingway