Fireworks

Anger's first film was made over the course of a weekend at his family home. His parents were away. He was Seventeen.

The film is a short and immensely effective exploration of sexuality. That the fantasies are of homosexual leaning bears no relevance; it is merely the chosen vehicle for the subject.

The film is fascinated with the violence of sexual submission as well as the fear of it. The narrative seems to take the form of a dream sequence and is laced with astonishingly mature sarcasm and gentle wit. It is by far Anger's greatest film and a landmark of the American avant-garde.

Fireworks (1947)

*** (out of 4)

Kenneth Anger's earliest surviving film was apparently influenced by him trying to pick up a sailor only to be beaten by the man and his friends. Trying to explain what this film is about would be pointless as I'm sure each viewing could watch it and come away with something different. The basic set-up has a man walking into a "Gents" room where he watches a man flex his muscles and then he tries to pick him up. FIREWORKS is certainly a very weird film as is its history, which included Anger being arrested on obscenity charges. Seeing the film today it's hard to believe that anyone would make too much fuss about it and I'd argue that the homosexuality isn't nearly as on display as the reputation of the film would lead you to believe. For the most part Anger has done a pretty good job in regards to the style and images seen in the film. The surrealist nature is really impressive and I thought several of the images were very nightmarish and they really came across as someone a lot more experienced behind the camera. I'm sure this film isn't going to appeal to everyone but fans of the weird should at least give it a shot.

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.

Depicts a dream sequence about the brutal rape and torture of director Kenneth Anger himself (as a teenager) by a group of sailors on the street (after trying to pick one of them up).

Anger later said, "This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July." Holy smokes, guys. This is about as hard-hitting as it comes for the 1940s. The homosexual theme, the intense violence... this is still shocking and revolting in the 2010s... we have have grown soft to violence, but if we have I can only imagine how people in the 40s reacted when they saw this. Terrifying!