Fireworks (1947): Kenneth Anger’s Experimental Film and the Obscenity Case

Fireworks, shot by Kenneth Anger in 1947, is a homoerotic experimental short. It is the earliest of his works to survive, and film history often cites it as the first gay narrative film in the United States. He filmed it over a long weekend at his parents’ home in Beverly Hills, California, and he plays the lead himself. It is not a dungeon manual. It is a poetic film about homosexuality and sadomasochism. Sailors, a beating, and masochistic desire framed as poetry are why it sits in the history of BDSM on screen.

Anger wrote two synopses. The first is: “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.” He later added: “This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July.” That sentence stays as he meant it. It is not a symbol of “youth” pasted on afterwards, and it is not an erotic lesson. This is film history. The beating on screen is expressionist film language, not something to copy.

The picture opens on a sailor holding a lifeless body. A sleeping man, played by Anger, wakes, dresses, and walks through a door marked “Gents” into a bar-like room. He admires a muscular sailor and offers a cigarette. The sailor lights it with a burning bundle of sticks. The smoke is cut off when a group of sailors chase the dreamer, pin him, and beat him. They reach into his chest and pull out a ticking meter. White liquid runs down his body. A sailor unbuttons his pants and reveals a Roman candle that shoots sparks into the air. The dreamer then appears with a Christmas tree on his head and walks toward a fireplace where the photograph from the opening shot is burning. At the end he sleeps in bed beside a man whose head gives off light.

The film comes out of something Anger saw during the Zoot Suit Riots: sailors in white uniforms chasing and beating Mexican men. That picture kept returning in his dreams and became the premise of being chased by sailors. On the cast, Anger said he sat in on UCLA film classes, talked Navy classmates into stealing a few thousand feet of Navy film stock, and had them act in summer uniforms. His friend Ed Earle disagreed. Earle said the cast were people dressed up, not actual sailors, and that Anger talked everyone into it as if he were making the ultimate porno film. Anger started with a spring-wound camera. After his grandmother gave him a Bell & Howell 16 mm camera, he could shoot at a true 24 frames per second. Most of the three-day shoot was at the Beverly Hills house. His brother Bob said it was a house in the Hollywood Hills. One scene was filmed in a public bathroom at a park in Olive Hill, California. In post-production Anger scratched his own genitals out of a brief public-urinal shot, worried about trouble if he sold prints by mail, and he etched a ring of light around a man’s face at the end. The score is Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome.

Anger was a disciple of the occultist Aleister Crowley, and the film can be read as a picture of Crowley’s teaching. The dreamer’s path stands for death, rebirth, and self-realization, close to Liber Pyramidos, a ritual of self-initiation. The “light” he looks for puns on Lucifer. The opening, a sailor holding a lifeless body, parodies the Christian pietà, Mary with the dead Christ, using expressionist light, thunder, and lightning, and it lays masochistic desire over redemptive suffering. Anger described the sailor as a sex symbol and, at the same time, as a figure carrying ambivalence, hostility, and fear.

The release was messy. The film was shown privately several times before a public screening at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles. Anger sold the first print to Alfred Kinsey. Cinema 16 acquired the film and distributed it. After release he kept cutting, shortening a writhing scene in a bathroom and the shot of the firecracker, and he also made a hand-tinted version. On 11 October 1957, Raymond Rohauer screened a print Anger had tried to get back, at the Coronet, and was arrested on obscenity charges. Prosecutor William C. Doran aimed the case at the homosexual audience, and he kept at the sailor-and-firecracker shot, which has no nudity and which he called “the penis scene.” In February 1958 Rohauer was found guilty and given probation. Civil-rights lawyer Stanley Fleishman appealed to the California Supreme Court and won. The court held that homosexuality was a valid subject of artistic expression, and that referring to it openly was not itself obscenity. The decision is a landmark for free speech in the United States. Fleishman later won a similar obscenity trial for Anger’s Scorpio Rising.

The reviews were strong. Lewis Jacobs, in The Hollywood Reporter, called it a work of rare individuality. Tennessee Williams called it the most exciting use of cinema he had seen. In 1949 the Festival du Film Maudit gave it the Poetic Film Prize. Anger’s later Eaux d’Artifice (1953) and Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), a remake of Fireworks, answer it. Robert Duncan’s poetry cites the film directly. For viewers who know this history, Fireworks matters because sailor violence, masochistic ecstasy, and occult rebirth were already a film language in 1947, and because a court eventually treated gay desire, including its sadomasochistic images, as art.