Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Truly Dreadful Film

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

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.

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).'

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.

Granted, Fireworks is not the kind of movie that is going to lead to a very promising filmmaking career. In fact, it's more likely to END a promising filmmaking career than anything else. It is a perversely brutal depiction of the attack and rape of a young man, played by Anger himself, but you have to take Anger's purpose into account when you watch and judge this film. At a mere 15-20 minute running time, it is not entirely doubtful that Anger may not have made the film for profit at all, but possibly for his own sexual gratification. The question that remains, it seems, is whether he meant to derive that satisfaction during its making or during its viewing. Either way, it is clear that the film's distribution pertains much more to the latter and, assuming that Anger realized this, it can also be assumed that he did not have the hugest aspirations for tremendous commercial success for Fireworks.One of the first things that you learn in the study of Gay and Lesbian film is that films pertaining exclusively to the homosexual community generally do not have much commercial success, if only because of the relatively small size of its target audience. Even under those circumstances, however, I have to admit that I don't feel that the film would have had much of a chance even if it was directed at a more general audience. It is a hugely uncomfortable and un-enjoyable cinematic experience to a much greater extent even than films that are purposely meant to be unattractive and ugly, like Buffalo '66.I spent about the first minute of Fireworks waiting to see something that would justify the fact that I was watching it at a screening for a film class at the University level, and then I spent about the next 19 minutes or so waiting for it to end. I did not enjoy a second of the film, but it is clear that there is a message to be derived from it, maybe about the plight of the young homosexual male in the late 40s or the fact that men get raped, too (although, of course, also be men). In any case, the films of Kenneth Anger seem to have been relegated mainly to below even the status of bottom shelf oblivion, and quite frankly, I can't say so far that it's any huge loss.