TO SAY THAT age hasn’t mellowed legendary filmmaker Kenneth Anger would be an enormous understatement. When reached by phone in Los Angeles to talk about a selection of his output over the last decade, rounded up by Anthology Film Archives in a program to be shown there on July 18 and 19, the man himself was far from forthcoming about his latest offerings.

Clearly agitated from the get-go, Anger ranted about, among other haphazard topics, a fall-out with Vincent Gallo (who was at one point said to be collaborating on an Anger project) and the poor quality of Francis Ford Coppola’s wine—“movies are not forgivable, you can’t go away and make wine in Napa Valley!”—and wished to talk about almost everything but his latest work. When we finally got around to that, Anger abruptly hung up, citing his interview availability only if paid a $1,000 check upfront and leaving this critic and fan surprised, perplexed and faintly amused.

Faintly—professional self-respect prevents me from saying anything close to “fully”—amused because the unexpected and unprovoked blow up accords with Anger’s well-known temperament, with movie-related frustration and passion sometimes unleashed indiscriminately and with little regard for his own best interests. In 2004, the Sunday section of The Guardian reported he had the previous year blown $7,000 in award money in one night. But things have also never been easy for the director.

Now 82 years old, Anger from 1947 to 1980 made some of the most confrontational, sumptuous films of the underground: homoerotic fever dream “Fireworks” (1947), oldies-scored biker nightmare “Scorpio Rising” (1963), deity-invoking “Lucifer Rising” (1970-1980). Perhaps even more than Andy Warhol, Anger became, by trailblazing a dark path through both American pop culture and the esoteric occult, the avant-garde filmmaker with the most lasting influence on both independent and mainstream cinema, and yet his own career has been ironically cursed by projects unfunded, stolen and incomplete.

In the mid-’60s, out of frustration, Anger placed an ad in The Village Voice, “In Memoriam Kenneth Anger 1947-67,” announcing his resignation from the medium. He came back to make a few more films, but from the ‘80s to the beginning of the millennium only rumors of new work were heard of from Anger.

So why wouldn’t Anger want to talk about his new work? Surely his legacy has been secured by the 1947-1980 films comprising the “Magick Lantern Cycle” (transformed into a multimedia experience at a current P.S.1 exhibition), as well as his Hollywood Babylon books on lurid Tinseltown sin and scandal. But there are still a few tricks up the image-conjuror’s sleeve, even if the new films—which have been shown mostly apart from one another throughout the decade—only intermittently match the ambition and scope of his peak period. “The Man We Want to Hang” (2002) and “Brush of Baphomet” (2009) both concern Anger’s guru, Aleister Crowley, covering in slow, patient camera movements art by and about the Wickedest Man in the World compiled for a London exhibition in 1995. For those uninterested in Crowley, the films won’t register, but in any case they represent the increasingly personal nature of Anger’s work. “My Surfing Lucifer” (2008) shows a friend of Anger’s riding a wave as “Good Vibrations” plays on the soundtrack, while “Elliott’s Suicide” (2007) is an elegy for neighbor Elliott Smith, who committed suicide in 2003. Each are loving portraits that don’t even pretend to aspire to the heights of even the fragmentary odds and ends of his earlier efforts like “Puce Moment” (1949) and “Kustom Kar Kommandos” (1965).

But that audacity is still there, even in mutated form. More than any other underground filmmaker, Anger is fascinated with the symbols and symptoms of American pop culture, and it’s not surprising that he’s tackled the biggest one of all in Mickey Mouse.While its subject matter may not be as outwardly transgressive as “Fireworks” or “Scorpio Rising,” “Mouse Heaven” (2005) is vintage Anger: subverted iconography, virtuoso montage and thrillingly unexpected sound/image team-ups. Made up almost entirely of antique Mickey Mouse toys, the film makes these inanimate objects come alive by having them pivot, dance, skate and sing to reveal their eccentricities in loving close-up. All is not so adorable, however: certain moments of “Mouse Heaven”—a frantic, colliding insertion of the out-of-control carousel scene from Strangers on a Train or a zoom in on a Mickey Mouse gas mask—echo the disturbingly macabre study of memorabilia in “Scorpio,” uncovering the diabolic side to cartoonish imagery.

Composed of discrete blocks of action that build upon one another until culminating in a disturbing climax, “Ich Will!” (2008) also calls to mind the structure and strategy of “Scorpio,” in which initially slow-paced episodes of motorcycle machismo and fetishism—each scored to a classic rock ‘n’ roll track—gradually lead to complex and frenzied montage sequences ironically commenting on the destructive “leadership” of the film’s titular anti-hero.

Though “Scorpio” also brings Nazi iconography into its arena of warring symbols, “Ich Will!” works from the start with extremely loaded imagery, immediately confronting viewers with some of the most falsely uplifting footage ever created: squeaky-clean Nazi Youth propaganda that slowly transmogrifies into red-tinted mass parades presided over by Hitler. Anger has called the film a “poetic, ironic reverie.”

Spectacle was a crucial element of the Nazis’ propaganda machine and, like “Scorpio,” “Ich Will!” comments on the deathdrive of such spectacle and its modern incarnation in the insidious lure of cinema itself.Viscerally and intellectually challenging, “Ich Will!” is more than worthy of the master, even if he’d rather not talk about it.

> New Films by Kennth Anger

July 18 and 19, Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave. (at E. 2nd St.), 212-505-5181; 7:30, $8