Fireworks (1947)

Depicts a dream sequence about the brutal rape and torture of director Kenneth Anger himself (as a teenager) by a group of sailors on the street (after trying to pick one of them up).Anger later said, "This flick is all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July." Holy smokes, guys. This is about as hard-hitting as it comes for the 1940s. The homosexual theme, the intense violence... this is still shocking and revolting in the 2010s... we have have grown soft to violence, but if we have I can only imagine how people in the 40s reacted when they saw this. Terrifying!

This film has a dozen images in it that will stay tucked away in your head long after you can remember why exactly they're clawing at you. I guess the most interesting aspect from watching this film is how I was constantly repeating to myself, "This was made in 1947?".It is hard to believe that a film so overtly homo-erotic could find such a large audience at that time. That alone speaks to the overall impact the images from this film have on the viewer. Almost equally as amazing is that Anger was only 17 when he made this film. That's very brave, but strictly as a movie, it really didn't do much for me. Sometimes surrealistic images and their meaning can be lost on me, though there's quite a lot of this movie that is unmistakably "on the nose".I'm not sure quite what to make of it, but I hope that Anger worked out whatever it was he was going through at that time.

This film is one of the seminal works of underground cinema and hugely influential on what was to follow - including Jean Genet's 'Un Chant d'Amour' - hallucinatory, surreal. Sheer unalloyed genius. Beautifully luminous black-and-white photography and razor-sharp editing. Made when Anger was a mere twenty years old (he claimed seventeen ... those three years make all the difference), and shot for a few dollars on the family 16mm camera, it remains one of the founding texts of the underground, looking back to Eisenstein's montage theories and forward to the explosion in avant-garde film-making in the '50s and '60s. The greatest living film-maker.

Anger's first film was made over the course of a weekend at his family home. His parents were away. He was Seventeen.The film is a short and immensely effective exploration of sexuality. That the fantasies are of homosexual leaning bears no relevance; it is merely the chosen vehicle for the subject.The film is fascinated with the violence of sexual submission as well as the fear of it. The narrative seems to take the form of a dream sequence and is laced with astonishingly mature sarcasm and gentle wit. It is by far Anger's greatest film and a landmark of the American avant-garde.