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).'
