Fireworks is a 1947 homoerotic experimental short film by Kenneth Anger. Shot in his parents’ home in Beverly Hills, California, over a long weekend while they were away, it stars Anger himself and explicitly explores homosexuality and sadomasochism. It is the earliest of his works to survive and is often cited as the first gay narrative film in the United States. Anger synopsized it as: “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.” For BDSM media history, Fireworks is a landmark: sailors, beatings, firecracker phalluses, and masochistic desire framed as poetic cinema rather than commercial porn.
Plot
The film opens with a sailor holding a lifeless body. A sleeping man (Anger) wakes, dresses, and walks through a door labeled “Gents” into a bar-like space. He admires a muscular sailor and offers a cigarette; the sailor attacks him, using a flaming bundle of sticks to light the dreamer’s cigarette. Smoking is interrupted when a group of sailors chase the man, pin him down, beat him, and reach into his chest to find a ticking meter inside. White liquid pours down his body. A sailor unbuttons his pants to reveal a Roman candle that shoots sparks into the air. The dreamer then appears with a Christmas tree as a headdress, moving toward a fireplace where photographs of the opening shot burn. Finally the dreamer sleeps in bed beside a man whose head radiates light.
Production: UCLA sailors, Navy stock, and disputed memories
During the Zoot Suit Riots, Anger witnessed sailors in white uniforms chase and attack Mexican men. He had a persistent dream of men in white uniforms attacking at night that became a dream of people chasing him—and then the premise of Fireworks. Anger stars as the dreamer; Gordon Gray plays the sailor from the opening scene. According to Anger, he found the cast while sitting in on UCLA film classes and convinced Navy classmates to steal a few thousand feet of Navy film stock and to act in their summer uniforms. Friend Ed Earle disputed that account, saying the cast were not sailors but people dressed up, and that Anger talked everyone into it “as though he was going to make the ultimate porno film.”
Anger upgraded from a spring-wound camera when his grandmother gave him a Bell & Howell 16 mm camera for his birthday, allowing true 24-frames-per-second shooting. He placed the shoot at his parents’ Beverly Hills home over three days; his older brother Bob later said it was shot at a home in the Hollywood Hills. One scene was filmed in a public bathroom at a park in Olive Hill, California. In post-production Anger scratched the film stock for two scenes: he scratched out his genitals from a brief public-urinal shot, worried about trouble selling prints by mail, and etched a corona of light around a man’s face at the ending. He scored the film with Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome.
Themes: Crowley, pietà, and the hostile sailor
Anger was a disciple of occultist Aleister Crowley, and Fireworks can be read through Crowley’s teachings. The dreamer follows a symbolic process of death, rebirth, and self-realization similar to the Liber Pyramidos, a ritual for self-initiation. The “light” he seeks puns on Lucifer. The opening sailor-and-lifeless-body shot closely follows the Christian pietà—Mary cradling the dead Christ—camp-recreated with intense expressionistic lighting against dark background, thunder and lightning, and a dolly that gradually reveals the scene. That image, and its later return as a burning photograph, conflates masochistic desire with redemptive suffering. Anger described the sailor as “a kind of sex symbol on one level,” and on another as carrying “a great deal of ambivalence and hostility, and fear.”
Release, edits, and the Rohauer obscenity case
Fireworks screened privately several times before a 1947 public premiere at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles. Anger sold the first print to Alfred Kinsey. Cinema 16 acquired and distributed the film. Anger kept editing after release: truncating a bathroom-floor writhing scene before the sailors attack, shortening the moment when Gordon Gray unbuttons his pants to reveal a firecracker, and in one version hand-tinting the Christmas-tree candle and the halo of light—a color bridge to his later Eaux d’Artifice, which likewise ends with a hand-tinted object.
Raymond Rohauer of the Coronet obtained a copy Anger tried to recover. After a screening on 11 October 1957, Rohauer was arrested on obscenity charges. Prosecutor William C. Doran focused much of the case on the Coronet and its homosexual patrons rather than pure film content, zeroing in on the sailor-with-firecracker moment and persistently calling it “the penis scene” despite the lack of nudity. Rohauer was found guilty in February 1958 and received three years’ probation with a $250 fine. Civil-rights attorney Stanley Fleishman appealed to the California Supreme Court, which ruled for Rohauer: homosexuality was a valid subject of artistic expression, and overt reference to it could not by itself be treated as obscenity. The decision became a landmark for freedom of speech in the United States. Fleishman later successfully defended Anger’s Scorpio Rising in a similar obscenity trial.
Critical reception and legacy
Lewis Jacobs of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the taboo subject matter was conveyed through “the film’s intensity of imagery, the strength and precision of its shots and continuity,” making Fireworks a work of “rare individuality which no literal summary of its qualities can communicate.” Tennessee Williams called it “the most exciting use of cinema I have ever seen.” Anger submitted the film to the Festival du Film Maudit in 1949, where the jury awarded it the Poetic Film Prize.
Anger’s 1953 Eaux d’Artifice takes its title from feux d’artifice, the French for fireworks. His 1969 Invocation of My Demon Brother is a remake of Fireworks. Anthology Film Archives added Fireworks to its Essential Cinema Repertory collection. The film influenced Robert Duncan’s poetry: “The Earth” mentions it explicitly, and “The Torso” and “An Illustration” both reference it. For kink-literate viewers, Fireworks remains essential queer SM cinema: not a dungeon how-to, but proof that sailor violence, masochistic ecstasy, and occult rebirth were already film language in 1947—and that the courts eventually had to admit gay desire and its sadomasochistic imagery as art.
