gavin6942 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!

jennyhor2004 Quite a remarkable debut film from a 17 year old Kenneth Anger, this is a coming-of-age piece recreating a dream he had: the film explores homosexual attraction, submission and sadomasochistic violence. A young man (Anger himself) wakes up from a dream about being saved by a sailor in a large room of objects: among other thing, several photographs of a sailor carrying an unconscious man who could be Anger's character himself, a hand with its middle finger amputated, a clay figurine. He dresses and goes out into the night; at a bar, he picks up a sailor who struts and poses for the enthralled youngster. The sailor beats up our man who then goes back outside but is accosted by a group of sailors who strip him, gang-rape him and thrash him with chains. The scenes of violence are extreme and painful to watch but are skilfully done so that the viewer imagines the worst being done to Anger's character, not actually see any torture or punishment.The 14-minute film appears to be ambivalent about celebrating gay sexuality: Anger's character experiences liberation but it looks extremely degrading and you wonder how much suffering he undergoes is necessary. Sure, scenes at the end of the film suggest the youngster is fulfilled – the photographs can be disposed of, the hand is mended and the visual narrative hints at an important rite of passage being completed – but all the same, you feel the young man will keep going back for more of the same punishment. Still, the depiction of raw sexual attraction, willing submission, violence and pain leading to transformation and fulfillment is very powerful, even beautiful at times, especially as it's coming from a very young film-maker. There is humour both bawdy and witty, particularly in scenes featuring the pouring of milk over the young man (hint, hint) and some fireworks being set off from an unusual launch-pad! The piece looks conventional enough and Anger hadn't yet learned how to layer images one over the other and edit shots to enhance the narrative and bring the film to a climax. Instead the orchestral music score, sounding very typical melodramatic Hollywood of the period (1940s), is put to work creating the appropriate moods, ratcheting up tension, bringing suspense and celebrating the protagonist's sexual awakening. Though there are a couple of scenes where the joins in the musical soundtrack are awkward, overall the marriage of music to plot and mood is well done. Close-ups at critical points in the film, taking place during the rape and torture scene, bring out the protagonist's pain and the brutality of sailors beating him with chains as he suffers without protest. There's a little bit of a religious element here: the young man is Christ-like in his willingness to suffer and the pouring of milk over his body could be construed as a resurrection.Even at this early stage of his career, Anger was demonstrating a unique vision and a style of filming quite unlike what his film-director contemporaries were making. Sound is completely unnecessary: the protagonist is never named and so he might be considered representative of all young sexual novices who must undergo necessary ordeals to become fully adult and sexually aware.

preppy-3 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.

Polaris_DiB It's taken me a while as a surveyor and consumer of avant-garde films to come up with a decent way to be able to tell if a particular film is actually successful or just artsy and pretentious, but I've discovered that a very good rule-of-thumb is based around how well the film holds up during a second viewing.I have been waiting a very long time for an opportunity to view Kenneth Anger's work and eagerly ordered Fantoma's first volume, and I'm glad to see that he's already living up to my expectations. He didn't at first, though. "Fireworks" started off with what felt like enough random instances and cuts to make the typical "dreamworld" pay-off. The violence in the later half and the end really intrigued me, but it felt too late in coming.Seeing it again, however, there's a lot of recurring imagery that helps fit it together, including the broken cast hand and the "Angry Jesus". In fact, this movie is a very disturbing and brooding outlook into masculinity, one that has a stronger rise too it than it initially seems. Kenneth Anger's character seems to be dealing with a general feeling of emasculation (a feeling Anger attributes to the contemporary Zoot Suit Riots) and anxiety around his sexuality... one that at some points is vaguely homo-erotic, but seem to be about ideas of masculinity in general. I think this reading of this movie is particularly telling by the way Professor Kinsey of sexual research fame was the first to buy a print of the short after its first showing.I think the best thing about this short is the shot of the still photographs burning in the fire. They strike me as a victim's way of trying to block out bad memories by purging, and Anger mentions of them that they are "the slow fading away of memories of dreams." Either way they are a liberating denouement to the earlier scenes of extreme violence (which were actually very well done as well) and help hold the film together very well.--PolarisDiB