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Fireworks
Fireworks
American underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger was one of the first openly gay filmmakers in the United States. His work consists solely of short films and is considered crucial to queer cinema. His films often mix homoeroticism with surrealism.
1947’s Fireworks is a milestone, as the first American film with a gay narrative. At age seventeen, Anger himself plays the lead character, filming while his parents were away for the weekend. His dreamy protagonist is beaten to death by some sailors, but this only leads to new imaginations. The film illustrates the awakening of a suppressed desire, a gross fantasy.
Anger’s focus on homosexual urges was in line with the emerging gay culture at the time, but the emphasis on queer erotics was a first for American cinema. Moreover, the film was made in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Therefore, Fireworks was also a reaction to the militarisation of public life and to ethnic postwar tensions. In a stimulating and brutal way, Anger transforms historical trauma into his own metaphorical birth, as a filmmaker and as a gay man.
Bio Kenneth Anger
American underground legend Kenneth Anger (1927-2023) produced almost forty experimental short films, nine of which in particular have been grouped together as the ‘Magick Lantern Cycle’. They are the basis of Anger’s reputation as one of the most influential independent filmmakers in cinema history. His films variously merge surrealism with the occult and contain elements of documentary, psychodrama, and spectacle. Anger himself has been described as “one of America’s first openly gay filmmakers, and certainly the first whose work addressed homosexuality in an undisguised, self-implicating manner,” and his “role in rendering gay culture visible within American cinema, commercial or otherwise, is impossible to overestimate.”
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- This film was #44 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025