Fireworks

I agree with Jean Cocteau, who said of Fireworks, "This film touches the quick of the soul, which is very rare." I also agree with Anger that Stanley Kubrick copied the volcano motif (an explosive motif related to the titular Fireworks motif) from Anger's other films and that Anger did in fact have copies of Kubrick's video store rental receipts showing that Kubrick had rented Anger's films from a NYC video store at the time Kubrick was putting the volcano motifs in his films. I feel you have to look beyond both the United States and England to find anyone who can truly appreciate Anger's contributions to world cinema.

That movie dared to go very far for its time, and Anger made it when he was only 17 years old, which in itself is a real tour de force.

However, it may not be for everyone. Mentalities about the film's theme, homosexuality, evolved a lot since the release date.

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.

A young man with a restless libido steps out of a fantasy world into real-life encounters that are both mercilessly brutal and profoundly liberating. Not for film school students to pick apart in class; they'll never understand it that way. This is a shudderingly intimate film that can only be grasped on an instinctual, visceral level. It is essential to be more than a mere voyeur, to empathize with the film's protagonist (a young Anger himself), and enter with him into his very personal homosexual twilight-world of fantasy. An unflinching and daringly honest examination of Anger's own take on the homoerotic myth associated with sailors, which is both surrealistic a la Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou, and exquisitely ethereal, evoking one of Anger's early cinematic heroes, Jean Cocteau (compare this film to the far more subliminal Blood of a Poet for fascinating parallels). It also owes more than a passing nod in the direction of the great Jean Genet. YES it poetically glorifies homosexual violence; it does this in a way which is far less graphic than contemporary films, and if anyone is offended by this "violence" I might venture to suggest that their reaction has more to do with their discomfort with their own darker sexual fantasies, as this film has the power to touch, even open, this very private, very special place in the viewer's soul. It also surprises me, how frequently the humorous elements of the film seem to escape many reviewers.

As the film is now over 50 years old, it does help to recall its historical context: when it was made, almost all gays and lesbians led fiercely closeted lives, and cowered in terror of "entrapment" (a common device employed by police to bust human beings for the "crime" of same-sex acts). For such a film to explode out of this repressive social context makes it "fireworks" indeed! And it is easy to see why the intelligentsia of the day rightly wanted to lionize the young Anger for this astonishing manifesto that comprises his official cinematic debut. Apparently a powerful scene was later edited out, depicting Anger being humiliated by his tormentors on the floor of the urinal. I wish this scene was still intact; nonetheless, even as it stands, this is one of the most powerful, beautiful, knowing films ever made about fantasy, violence, and eroticism. Amazingly, virtually every film subsequently made by Anger sustains this unique power. Kenneth Anger is truly one of the greatest American artists and filmmakers. Sadly the public focus on his Hollywood Babylon books, his controversial beliefs and life have dwarfed appreciation of his monolithic power as a filmmaker. He has influenced scores of successors and it's time to give this great artist his due.

Fireworks is powerful stuff, and, with the exception of a narrated prologue that explains what fireworks mean in poetic language (at least in the version that's currently online, there are others and they may not include this), is all done through the powerful visual motifs of dreams. Or, at the least, that's how Anger wants to present this vision of what happens when the ideal of MALE-ness is put into danger and promiscuity.

From seeing Scorpio Rising first, Anger's most well-known and semi-notorious film, I knew that this director knew how to shoot a shot of a man below the chest. Now, this doesn't mean to suggest nudity; he has his actors sometimes without a shirt or it unbuttoned (or in the 1964 film in some leather), and jeans being put on or taken off. But in its strange way he has a tastefulness to his erotica, the idea of the visual being the tease, the prolonged state of something that you KNOW is really sexual and provocative, but you're not seeing as much as you are.

This may be why he was arrested on obscenity charges when the film was first screened (where exactly I'm not sure, who knows where underground cinema could get screened in 1947), but it went to the Supreme Court and, in one of those early/landmark decisions, it was ruled as art. But it was the suggestion of sex, and certainly *male*, homo-erotic sex, and remember our friend context which is that in this decade homosexuality was thought to be a crime and/or psychological ailment that could be legitimately cured. So just in the manner of creating this film, whether out of a dream or not, it was a brave act on Anger's part.

The film is basically showing a guy waking up, seeing some (suggestive? likely?) photos that he tosses in the fireplace (though not yet lit), getting dressed, going through a door marked "GENTS", and then coming upon some sailors who... proceed to beat the hell out of him. This is all done in such a stylized manner that it reminded me of how Cocteau treated violence in Blood of a Poet: when blood comes out it feels otherworldly and yet very real in its way, like because it's not the blood we're used to seeing (yes it's graphic in how much comes out and in a sustained shot/angle), it has an effect that is uncanny.

The way music is used adds to the poetry of it all, how it evokes feelings of high drama and curiosity and intense violence - whether it's underscoring the man who is flexing his muscles in such a campy manner (not funny so much as exaggerated), and then when the group of sailors accost our main character (played by Anger himself, the one nitpick I'd have is he doesn't carry a lot of screen presence as an actor, even in, yes I know, a scenario that doesn't ask for naturalism) it takes on the feeling of being in a nightmare you can't escape.

How it ends takes on another feeling, but it's one I can't pinpoint yet. As far as a through-one may be tempted to say it's simply that he's still asleep by the end, but I'm not sure. The power of this whole 14 minute experience is to get into an intense psychological state, meditative even, about what it means to have the male gaze: it can be powerful, it can be imposing, it can be tough, and it can be beautiful, but all the while it can be dangerous as well. It's also worth noting that as this was 1947 this was before sailors and those in the navy were seen as something that could be mockable as 'that's gay' or something derogatory. This was just after WW2, don't forget, and the Navy sailors were among the heroes of the war. At the same time Anger's taking from an event - when sailors beat up a Mexicans on a famous day, I don't recall the name - so that adds to the provocation.

Fireworks may lack some of the visual sophistication in little parts of the cinematography (not overall as far as lighting and composition, more like things involving focus, which makes sense as he shot this over a weekend on extremely limited resources), but that doesn't matter to the full scope: this is a brave little package of a cinematic experience that works much like its title: an explosion and series of things to look at, and from afar it may appear delightful - but get too close and it'll burn your fingers off and make you disfigured.

Ah, Men.