Fireworks (1947)

So much average

Sick Product of a Sick System

Purely Joyful Movie!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

In 1947 there were very few contexts in which a film could portray one man embracing another. Fireworks (1947) opens with one of these (a soldier carrying a man who appears to be wounded or even dead) but quickly begins to subvert this imagine; drastically changing its implied meaning. The film begs for analysis more than review because, while it is as direct as abstract art can be, it is obscure enough to be daunting.A man awakes in bed and removes a phallic symbol from beneath the sheets. He begins to get dressed while the camera lingers on his crotch and naked chest. He gathers up photos scattered around the bed and disposes of them in the fire. Through this sequence we began to think of sex. It is not a stretch to imagine the pictures (of one man holding another) to have been masturbatory material now destroyed implying shame and the desire for secrecy.The man finishes dressing while being framed as a visual mirror of the earlier phallic symbol. This gives a hint into his emotional state. His matchbook is both empty and branded with United States Navy. It is discarded and the man enters the night through a public restroom where he sees a sailor. The sailor removes his shirt and begins to flex his muscles and show off his body, but when asked for a cigarette he is seen to be fully dressed. This implies that the previous shirtless shots may have been the man's subjective view, mentally undressing the sailor as it were.The sailor reacts violently to the request for a cigarette and it is not hard to imagine that the question was a veiled (or even overt as the movie lacks dialogue) pick up attempt. Remembering the matchbook, we can assume the man has tried this approach before. The violence that follows is brief, suggestive, and ends with the man smoking a cigarette; a classic visual shorthand for the conclusion of sex.The original sailor leaves, but a new group arrives. They are armed and angry. The violence here is both extended and graphic, yet far more abstract. The man's reaction to the beating is sensual implying, if not outright rape then, at least, a connection to sadomasochistic sex. Using (to my mind at least) the Soviet Montage theory Anger turns milk into a bodily fluid by having the shots follow shots of blood and ecstatic writhing. This, somewhat appropriately, heralds the unsubtle climax where both patriotic symbols (fireworks), and religious symbols (Christmas tress) are converted into phallic symbols as the music swells triumphantly. We are brought back to the image of one man holding another as it is destroyed by the invasion of of now homoerotic symbols.The final scene shows the man once more sleeping in bed (though this time with a male partner) and suggest that all that preceded was a dream. Here we are recalled to the opening narration we the director talks about dreams expressing emotions that are repressed during waking life, but providing only a "temporary relief."

In Kenneth Anger's first masterpiece, "Fireworks" chronicles the senseless irony of homosexuality and violence as well as the longing for love. Here we see depicted as the plot even calls, "the very rape and torture of Anger himself", and Anger here being metaphor to describe all feelings related to love-leading to anger. For some, it would be considered 'wrong' or 'stupdi' but to others who understand the masterpiece clearly understand the beauty of underground cinema. This is one of these films to prove how brilliant avant-garde Anger truly is. In two thousand years, people will find this film, appreciate, love it, and embrace the darkness of one man (and legacy's) soul for many years to come.

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...