1947, black & white, 15 minutes
Concept, direction and editing by Kenneth Anger, Camera assistant: Chester Kessler. Music by Respighi. Filmed in Hollywood. Cast: Kenneth Anger (Dreamer), Gordon Gray (First Sailor), Bill Seltzer (Second Sailor).
Fireworks, made when Anger was only seventeen during a long weekend when his parents were away, with footage stolen from the U.S. Navy, is the earliest of his works to survive. It is a homo-erotic dream within a dream in which a young man, through a series of violent and ecstatic encounters, undergoest his rite of passage.
In Fireworks, I released all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream. Inflammable desires dampened by day under the cold water of consciousness are ignited that night by the libertarian matches of sleep and burst forth in showers of shimmering incandescence. These imaginary displays provide a temporary release. 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 a bed less empty than before. (Kenneth Anger)
The science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will. Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one's conditions. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action. (Aleister Crowley)
On a higher level: the viewer who recognises that Fireworks corresponds to the Magick ritual The Building of the Pyramid (a process of self-initiation, in which the candidate confesses) will appreciate more keenly what the film meant and means to Anger. (Tony Rayns, "A Kenneth Anger Kompendium" Cinema)
The dream of aggression has as its target not only Anger himself, but the external society which acts as omnipotent repressive force. Thus in its iconography of matches, Christmas trees and roman candles, it satirizes social institutions in the manner of Bunuer's L'Age d'Or. As Anger has ironically put it, "This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas and the Fourth of July." (Lucy Fischer)
