![]() Seventy years later, the film feels just as prescient. Although the modern sexual revolution and the civil rights and gay rights movements were years if not decades away, Fireworks explored the pleasures and perils of same-sex desire and interracial identification in a culture in which homosexuals and racial minorities were demonized and persecuted. Made in the immediate aftermath of World War II, just as the United States was entering the Cold War, in which it imagined itself to be the policeman of world democracy, Fireworks shocked its audiences with violent depictions of sexual brutality and gang rape by military personnel. Like its young author, the film was precocious. Shot when the filmmaker was only seventeen years old, 1 the film is the sadomasochistic fantasy of a young man, played by the teenage Anger, who dreams he is sexually assaulted by a gang of sailors. ![]() ![]() ![]() THE INAUGURAL FILM of postwar queer cinema and a watershed event in the history of the American avant-garde, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks of 1947 is an autobiographical account of the awakening of desire. Kenneth Anger, Fireworks, 1947, 16 mm, black-and-white, sound, 15 minutes. ![]()
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