Fireworks (1947)

So much average

Must See Movie...

Good movie but grossly overrated

Excellent but underrated film

Kenneth Anger completed his first major work, 'Fireworks (1947),' at age seventeen, which I find remarkable. The film is artistically imaginative, despite employing a rather stodgy hand-held camera, and thematically mature – albeit, with a certain tongue-in-cheek approach to the material. Anger himself described the film as follows: "A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking 'a light' and is drawn through the needle's eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to bed less empty than before." This director's synopsis makes no allusion to the homoeroticism that is most certainly present; the film plays as though Anger is acting out some deeply-entrenched masochistic fantasy in which he is confronted and raped by a pack of burly sailors. Sexual imagery is abound: a wooden statue is briefly confused with an erection; a pyrotechnic phallus presumably simulates the sensation of orgasm. Given the conservative morals of post-War America, 'Fireworks' is certainly a very bold statement of Anger's acknowledged homosexuality, especially at such a young age. Even so, the film is uncomfortable viewing. Anger's uncompromising juxtaposition of sex and violence predates such works as Ed Emshwiller's 'Thanatopsis (1962)' and Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange (1971).'

A young man (played by director/writer Kenneth Anger) is gay and goes to pick up sailors. But the sailors attack him and (maybe) kill him. That's about it.I saw this at a gay cinema class many years ago. I hated it from beginning to end. The print was in terrible shape and the explicit violence and blood was horrific. It was just reissued in a brand new print with commentary by Anger. I respect it a little more now. Like it or not this is a landmark in gay cinema. The sailors are sexualized more than a little and some of the imagery is striking. The director explained this all came to him in a dream which accounts for the lack of story. I still find the fact that his character is beaten by sailors quite disturbing--but this was shot in 1947. So I can't say I like it but it has its place in gay cinema. I'm giving it a 7 but that's mostly for its historical status.

This film is one of the seminal works of underground cinema and hugely influential on what was to follow - including Jean Genet's 'Un Chant d'Amour' - hallucinatory, surreal. Sheer unalloyed genius. Beautifully luminous black-and-white photography and razor-sharp editing. Made when Anger was a mere twenty years old (he claimed seventeen ... those three years make all the difference), and shot for a few dollars on the family 16mm camera, it remains one of the founding texts of the underground, looking back to Eisenstein's montage theories and forward to the explosion in avant-garde film-making in the '50s and '60s. The greatest living film-maker.

'Fireworks' is a violent and disturbing manifesto, a short experimental dream-movie that throws in a couple of images that are real eye-openers, and enough homoerotic weirdness to keep those eyes open. What it 'means' of course is anyone's guess. Anger 'awakes' from troubled sleep, and wanders out to get a light for his cigarette, finding instead only torture at the hands of a bunch of muscle-bound sailors. The title refers, at least superficially, to a particularly jaw-dropping episode of sexual imagery, though as with much of what goes on in the film, there are probably any number of magical and sexual allusions that are tied in with it. Beyond a handful of frames that are burned into my memory, quite possibly until the end of time, I'm not sure what there is to take away from the film when you leave- possibly it has something to say about the all-consuming power of violence, but really that's just a shot in the dark. But of course one could argue that a handful of jaw-dropping frames is enough to justify any film. The fingers- in- nostrils scene is a real wow...