fireworks ( 1947 film )
kenneth anger, fireworks, 1947, 16 mm, black - and - white, sound, 15 minutes. kenneth anger .
kenneth anger, fireworks, 1947, 16 mm, black - and - white, sound, 15 minutes. united states navy sailors .
kenneth anger, fireworks, 1947, 16 mm, black - and - white, sound, 15 minutes. kenneth anger and gordon gray .
ka: what i call my magick lantern cycle, nine films. it starts with fireworks and ends with lucifer rising. incidentally, this is the 50th anniversary of fireworks; i made it in 1947 .
6. kenneth anger, audio commentary, fireworks (1947), from the films of kenneth anger, vol. 1 (san francisco: fantoma, 2007), dvd .
completed at the tender age of 17, fireworks – an audacious pre - stonewall exploration of homosexuality, violence, and american youth – was the breakthrough film for avant - garde film legend kenneth anger .
…in his first successful film, fireworks (1947), shot at his parents’ home while they were away. the brief movie featured anglemyer as a young man who fantasizes about and is then abused by a group of sailors. (anglemyer credited himself as anger and later as kenneth anger .) the overt homoerotic…
the term “trance - film” is taken from p. adams sitney, whose visionary film: the american avant - garde (oxford: oxford university press, 2002) has become the bible of american avant - garde film history .
my favourite queer, film making icon once again makes a short film that' s so beautiful it' s hard to explain. everything he makes i really love. he' s an icon of film making and also soundtracks .
pictures at an october gallery, london, exhibition of drawings and objects by and about the occult master aleister crowley (1875 - 1947). exhibit titled
an old master
.
shot this film over the course of one weekend, while his parents were out of town .
founded in 1999, senses of cinema is one of the first online film journals of its kind and has set the standard for professional, high quality film - related content on the internet .
this year marks the seventieth anniversary of kenneth anger’s fireworks, widely considered the ur - film of american queer cinema. in the pages that follow, artist and film scholar ara osterweil reexamines the seminal short as a response to profound social tensionsracial, sexual, and nationalisticthat came to a head in the aftermath of world war ii .
germany year zero is the closest that italian neorealism came to reckoning with the psychic life of children. made at the same time, fireworks meditates on the generative possibilities of psychic and sexual shattering. in so many ways, fireworks anticipates the explosion of the queer underground cinema that blossomed in the united states in the ’60s and in which anger’s later film scorpio rising (1963) played a central role. yet fireworks is also a product of its own “queer time and place. ” 19
christopher meir received his ma in film studies from concordia university. come the fall, he will begin work on his doctorate in film studies at the university of warwick. he will be writing his dissertation on new scottish cinema .
fireworks is not only anger’s first major film, but it also introduces many of the themes and motifs which would come to populate his later works. foremost among these is the concern with light. from the film’s title and opening image of a torch being thrown into water, through the lightning flashes and subsequent journey into darkness that the protagonist takes (and concluding with pyrotechnic orgasms and a lover surrounded by a corona scratched onto the film’s surface), fireworks is a film obsessed with the technical and metaphoric use of light. the dreamer of anger’s synopsis ultimately finds his ‘light’ in the sailor with a phallic roman candle who becomes a god - like figure, laying in bed with the dreamer at the film’s end. throughout the rest of his career anger has remained fascinated with this idea of light and the character of lucifer, who is literally the god of light. (3 )
i have remarked before that anger' s work falls either into the mystic camp or the homoerotic camp. this is firmly in the latter, with fireworks as a fairly blatant metaphor for sexual expression (which both a euphemism and not). it' s worth it for the eye candy, if that' s your thing, and it' s, of course, impressive to see this kind of imagery in 1947 .
the claim that this was made in 1947 feels like an elaborate hoax - this thing is decades ahead of it' s time, that is, if we' ve even caught up with it today. homoerotic is perhaps too subtle a term. anger is a genius .
no other picture could so perfectly initiate the film career of such a brilliant, complicated, ego - maniacal, queer wizard .
ara osterweil is a painter, a film scholar, and an associate professor of cultural studies at mcgill university in montreal. she is the author of flesh cinema: the corporeal turn in american avant - garde film (manchester university press, 2014) .
a collection of queer characters, representations, and sensibilities on film. from queer masterpieces to camp classics, documentaries to romantic comedies, …
9. according to scott macdonald, fireworks was shown twice at cinema 16 in new york, in 1952 and 1953. see his cinema 16: documents toward a history of the film society (philadelphia: temple university press, 2002), 171, 195. also see david e. james and adam hyman, eds. , alternative projections: experimental film in los angeles, 1945–1980 (london: john libbey, 2015), 132 .
fireworks ’ insistence on the actuality of homoerotic desire and sexual activity was a first in american cinema. yet the sexual desires that animate the film did not ignite in a vacuum: they were part of an emerging gay culture in midcentury los angeles. they were also a response to the militarization of public life during the war and to the racial and ethnic tensions that convulsed los angeles in the immediate postwar period. in its brutal staging of sexual violation, fireworks erotically transforms historical trauma into anger’s own metaphorical birth and baptism .
fireworks revolves around a young man (played by anger himself) associating with various navy sailors, who eventually turn on him, stripping him naked and beating him to death, ripping open his chest to find a clock ticking inside. several fireworks then explode, accompanied by a burning christmas tree and the final shot shows the young man lying in bed next to another topless man .
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 .
not everyone was so discouraging. in 1949, anger submitted fireworks to the festival du film maudit in biarritz, and his filmmaker hero jean cocteau awarded it the poetic film prize. cocteau then wrote to the young director expressing his admiration for the work, which persuaded anger to move to paris. in 1950, he took cocteau’s advice. he found a job at the cinémathèque française as an assistant to henri langlois and remained in france for a decade. while there, fireworks was exhibited at several european festivals, where it was better received than it had been in the states. of course, european audiences had not only experienced the war and its ravaging of innocence firsthand but had witnessed the transformation of the representation of adolescence in the various national cinemas that emerged from the rubble .
ka: i' ve had everything from large spaces to smaller, experimental ones. i met bertolt brecht with charles laughton in the very same theatre where fireworks was first shown, at the coronet film society. this is a theatre that seats about 300, an intimate theatre, but it' s perfect for showing experimental kinds of films. it really was a place where you met all sorts of people. james whale - - the director of frankenstein - - came, and dr. kinsey. dr. alfred kinsey was there and he invited me to do one of his famous interviews for his book on human sexual behavior, and he also said he wanted to buy a print of fireworks for the collection at the kinsey institute, which was the first time i sold a print of my film .
in closing, i would like to point out the remarkable synthesis anger achieves in bringing together the nocturnal longings of a gay teenage boy (and a sense of the cultural climate of the 1940s america he inhabits) and the work of cocteau, a companion soul the film openly acknowledges. in fireworks, anger melds together a lampoon of american culture and authority and his life - long obsessions with lucifer – and his play with light – into a work which explores the inextinguishable flames of youth and eros. he also made a film which is aware of its own context in the history of avant - garde cinema .
kenneth anger (b. 1930, santa monica, usa) is one of the greatest and most notorious living american avant - garde filmmakers. drawn to cinema, glamour and scandal early on – his grandmother worked in hollywood as a dresser and he knew shirley temple from school dances – he made his first film of note, fireworks (1947), at the age of 17. it set the mold for his later oeuvre, silent films of intense sensual imagery combined with mesmerizing musical soundtracks. a follower of necromancer aleister crowley, anger describes his lifework as being “magick”. his films may be seen as cinematic manifestations of his occult practices, appealing directly to the subconscious mind. anger also wrote hollywood babylon. his filmography includes puce moment (1949), inauguration of the pleasure dome (1954), kustom kar kommandos (1965), rabbit’s moon (1972) and lucifer rising (1980) .
like alice in wonderland and the wizard of oz, fireworks pivots on a dream: an “innocent” young protagonist falls asleep and dreams up a world of desires too dangerous to be acknowledged in waking life. in most hollywood dream films, viewers are immersed in the screen’s wonders until the end of the film, when they are yanked abruptly from its fantasy mode and assured that all they have witnessed was “just a dream. ” with this return to reality, what might be called queer desire is once again repressed, along with the vital contradictions between public and private life that such dreams engender. yet when anger’s character awakens at the end of fireworks, he discovers that evidentiary traces of his fantasy have permeated his waking life .
fireworks also screened alongside curtis harrington ’s 1946 experimental film fragment of seeking at rudolph and pauline schindler ’s famous kings road house around 1948. john cage and merce cunningham were in attendance, as were other radical artists and intellectuals. the screening did not go well: cage apparently told anger and harrington that their films had “ nothing to do with art. ” 13 according to anger, mrs. schindler called the filmmakers a week later to tell them that they were both “very sick young men. ” 14
] 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 relief .
in addition to demonstrating an affinity with avant - garde filmmakers in america, anger’s fireworks also shows a great deal of international ‘cine - savvy’ through its homages to french filmmaker jean cocteau, particularly his classic experimental work le sang d’un poète (1930). this can be seen in both films’ use of baroque set design, while the strange artifact hanging from the protagonist’s ceiling in fireworks is a direct quotation of the multiple wire sculptures which are so important to cocteau’s film. apart from similar set design and decoration, the films share a concern with youthful angst and the usually concomitant social repression of sexuality. in both films, this angst finds an outlet in the form of extreme acts of gory violence. the films likewise share a dream - like structure in which their respective protagonists search for some kind of spiritual and sexual fulfillment. it is no wonder that cocteau would become such a fervent admirer of anger’s work, as fireworks shows that anger was also a big fan of cocteau, and was obsessed with many of the same formal and thematic concerns as the french cinéaste .
emerging simultaneously in the immediate aftermath of world war ii, both fireworks and italian neorealism reimagine adolescence through a dark glass, rendering lingering notions of juvenile innocence obsolete. the children in these films are not passive figures but knowing subjects whose keen understanding emerges from the circumstances of their precarity. squired by war, neorealism ’s queer children have complex political agency, perverse desires, sadomasochistic proclivities, and a penchant for navigating the broken world through what stockton calls “sideways” forms of growth. 18 they also, like anger’s alter ego in fireworks, tend to mediate encounters between national identity and ethnic and racial otherness .
10. mick brown, “ kenneth anger: where the bodies are buried, ” esquire, january 3, 2014, urltoken culture / news / a5483 / kenneth - anger. anger also mentions this in the audio commentary for fireworks on the films of kenneth anger dvd, although he doesn’t give a year for the coronet screening .
in the history of american cinema, dream structures serve a variety of purposes, whether as strategic attempts to avoid censorship or as ways of introducing surreal content into more standard narratives. dreams often function as sites where characters and audiences alike can explore forbidden intimacies. these explorations can be deadly or ecstatic. in kenneth anger ’s fireworks, they are both .
ka: i have a couple of film projects. i hope to be filming one of aleister crowley' s works, gnostic mass. it' s a short, it' ll be a half - hour, but it will involve about a dozen people and have music and dialogue .
1. anger has always claimed that he was seventeen at the time. other sources, including biographer bill landis, suggest he may have been older. in his anger: the unauthorized biography of kenneth anger (new york: harpercollins, 1995), landis gives anger’s birthday as february 3, 1927, which would have made the filmmaker twenty when fireworks was completed .
17. jaimey fisher, “on the ruins of masculinity: the figure of the child in italian neorealism and the german rubble - film, ” in italian neorealism and global cinema, ed. laura e. ruberto and kristi m. wilson (detroit: wayne state university press, 2007), 28 .
ac: let me ask you a
thematic
question about some of your works. i' m thinking of rabbit' s moon and fireworks but also the babylon books, where in all of them there' s an almost relentless, sped - up pace. that' s certainly true of the babylon books; you can get through them really quickly ...
ka: well, that he was a poet in many fields - - among them film - - that he was fascinated with and was able to work with. he started in 1930 with blood of a poet. and i was fortunate enough to meet him when i went to europe. he was on the jury at a festival where i sent fireworks. he wrote me a letter saying that he liked it, so i decided i had to meet him the next year, in 1950. i stayed [ in paris ] 12 years. i was fortunate for an american to find a job almost immediately. i worked for 12 years for henri langlois at the cinématheque française and had a very close relationship with him .
ka: well, i had a good crowd the last time i was in austin. i suppose it will be perhaps some of the art community, maybe some film students and then the groups that are interested in aleister crowley, on which i' m an expert; there' s a little clan there (in austin) .
the climax of the film is signified by the liquefaction of the dreamer’s body in milky ejaculate. poured from above, cream flows over the man’s mouth, throat, and chest. we see a quick shot of anger lying nude on the floor of a public urinal and then another image of the door marked gents. a lone sailor with a bulging erection cuts a heroic figure, but when he lights the phallus protruding from his fly, it turns out to be a roman candle that showers fireworks. anger’s character reemerges, wearing a gilded christmas tree on his head, awkwardly positioned for penetration. as the tree is consumed by fire, photos of the earlier pietà scene ignite, destroying the dream’s archive of queerness. the distinction between fantasy and reality bends as we see anger, sleeping again in his room, alongside a shirtless man whose visage is erased in an explosion of painted white rays intended to obscure the actor’s identity. the film ends with a false image of reparation, as the severed fingers of the plaster hand are reattached only to bid a fond “fuck you” to the audience .
ka: i' ve never made a film using dialogue or speech, so this will be quite a departure for me. i' ve planned several projects using speech but never have actually done them, mostly because of the tremendous cost to make them. my films up to now have been silent with musical accompaniment. this will be quite different .
ka: this is my host' s idea, because, actually, it' s kind of a surprise for me. i think he' s going to have the balcony arranged in some kind of decor echoing my film inauguration of the pleasure dome, which already inspired... did you see pillow talk with rock hudson and doris day ?
this eruption of violent, sexualized conflict between dominant and marginalized forms of masculinity had a profound impact on anger. as he has acknowledged, the zoot - suit riots served as an artistic and sexual awakening. not only did these disturbances spark “his fascination with the image of the sailor, ” 29 they helped to forge an erotic, masochistic identification with america’s racialized others. although the racial dynamics that inspired the film are nowhere in evidence in its whitewashed cast of characters, fireworks uses a fantasy of being beaten to dramatize the radical implications of anger’s growing sense of identification with those mexicans and african americans who were beaten in the streets and vilified by the media. for anger, the zoot - suit riots served as a primal scene for the emergence of a sexual identity in opposition to heteronormative conceptions of masculinity .
the articulation of postwar queer identity was, as fireworks suggests, inextricable from the prohibitions against it. victimized in an incident of police entrapment, 30 anger recognized the kindred plight of the oppressed zoot suiters while simultaneously perceiving shadows of his own desires in the rioters’ mutual attraction and hostility. putting his own body in the place of the abjected mexicans and african americans, anger fantasizes his violation by a gang of sailors. inviting punishment and then exhibiting his own metaphoric castration by the sailors, the filmmaker offered his adolescent body up as a sacrifice to a social order that was as inimical to queers as it was to americans of color. yet by staging his own surrender to the crushing forces of homophobia in what is essentially his coming - out film, anger constructed an image of his selfhood in the very terms of its destruction .
anger began making films in 1937, when he was ten. he used his family’s 16 - mm kodak movie camera and the end scraps of their home - movie reels; the spring load on the camera allowed him to shoot for only thirty seconds at a time. by the time he made the fifteen - minute fireworks, anger had a bell & howell camera that operated at 24 fps. 4 he shot the film in his family’s home in beverly hills over the course of three nights while his parents were away. his production materials were modest. shooting on stock supposedly stolen from the us navy, 5 anger transformed his family home into a hotbed of “inflammable desires” with the help of a large canvas depicting a saloon that he had lifted from the abandoned set of a western. a scene in which anger appears nude on the floor of a public urinal was shot on location in the public men’s room of olive hill park while a friend kept watch outside. 6
born in santa monica and raised in beverly hills, anger stitched his self - image from the dream stuff of hollywood. it should thus come as no surprise that fact and fantasy bleed in his biography, as they do in his famously incendiary book of gossip, hollywood babylon (1959). anger’s beloved grandmother was, according to the filmmaker, a costume mistress during the silent film era. 2 supposedly it was she, working with max reinhardt, who got young kenneth a role in the famed austrian - born theater director’s 1935 cinematic adaptation of a midsummer night’s dream: anger claims to have appeared as the changeling prince. but while hollywood was bursting with child actors in the 1930sanger danced with shirley temple at the santa monica cotillion and went to high school with her stand - in, with whom he collaborated on an early film 3 child auteurs were a far more singular breed .
( 34 m) 5th studio mirror :
and about the sky
berlin: outdoors for film. hans albers speaks with rubble women. director joseph von báky brings to recording hans albers. hans albers sits down on a chair, large, and is melted. he eats bread and look at in the mirror, large. intake valve. hans albers climbs ladder. cameraman swings with camera. joseph by leanna in stage directions, great .
on the other side of the door, anger’s double meets a contemptuous muscle queen who taunts him by assuming a variety of poses that might have been lifted from the pages of vim or your physique. rebuffed for asking for a light, anger is slapped silly and then offered, in one of the film’s visual puns, a bundle of blazing sticks. it’s a lame joke, but one that would have resonated with any viewer who had ever been called a faggot .
a wordless film, save for a voice - over introducing us to the imagery of dreams. a shirtless young man dreams of awakening to finds photographs of a muscular sailor carrying him in his arms. he goes to a bar where the sailor from his dream displays his muscular upper torso. a gang of sailors, swinging chains, enters menacingly. he watches, smoking. they surround him and an assault begins. surreal touches accent the dream - like qualities. a phallic firework, a flaming christmas tree, and the burning photographs provide climax and closure as the young man, back in bed, is beside the sailor .
ka: yes, it' s been about 10 years or so. i spent some time at the hrc [ ut' s humanities research center ] collection, looking at the film collections. the gloria swanson collection is there, and i looked at that. i hope i' ll be able to consult some of the things there. i don' t think they have any zanuck material, because zanuck was my neighbor here in palm springs and his estate is just around the corner. i live in the al jolson estate, in al jolson' s last house. but i think the zanuck material has ended up in wahoo, nebraska, in his birth house. i' ve got quite a few zanuck things. he was a wild game hunter and i have some of the pieces that he shot .
after a momentary respite, the young man turns around only to encounter a menacing group of sailors swinging chains and clubs. again, reality punctures fiction: the gang members were played by authentic american sailors who were studying to be cameramen at the university of southern california. 22 they approach and attack him. blood erupts from the young man’s nose as he is beaten mercilessly. upside - down close - ups of his face show the man in an agony easily mistaken for ecstasy. in one of the film’s many unsubtle references to ejaculation, a bottle of milk shatters beside him. the young man’s chest is pierced with broken glass and we see gruesome shots of the man’s eviscerated chest cavity. we glimpse a wavering electrometer buried in the mess. refusing to provide a sentimental image of a dead queer child, anger provides an image of an eviscerated body that is actually a machine. erotically charged by his own annihilation, he supplants the hypocrisy of the american dream with this vision of nihilistic ecstasy .
but if his films are subversive, that aesthetic hasn' t hindered numerous
borrowings ,
which, as he alludes to in this interview, are both bane and potential boon to anger. the kitsch, irony, and montage editing of anger' s best - known work, scorpio rising (1964), is indeed replicated by today' s unknowing generation of mtv filmmakers, as anger is only too aware. anger describes his sacrilegious 30 - minute tribute to the myth of the american motorcyclist as
the power machine seen as a tribal totem, from toy to terror... thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans .
scorpio is a catalogue, an iconography of the eternality of the american tough and his depiction in film, and ends with what, in anger logic, is the result of all that adulation: an orgiastic rite. if anger' s summary reads somewhat enigmatic and mystical, understand that that' s no mistake on his part. in addition to being an avant - garde filmmaker, anger is an occultist. as any good supplicant of the notorious english magus aleister crowley should be, anger has proved to be his own best experiment or invention .
interracial, intergenerational encounters figure prominently in neorealist cinema. in paisan (1946), the second film in roberto rossellini ’s wartime trilogy, a drunken african american soldier named joe meets pasquale, a young neapolitan urchin. when we first see him, joe longs to go home, only to recall, suddenly and bitterly, that the home to which he wishes to return is racially segregated america. throughout paisan, the characters speak different languages and thus fail to understand one another. nonetheless, pasquale recognizes (though does not fully comprehend) the social implications of joe ’s blackness. he takes advantage of joe ’s inebriated state, “buying” him from fellow street kids. later, when joe falls asleep, pasquale steals his boots. apprehending the child thief on a subsequent day, joe demands the return of his boots and takes the child “home” to retrieve them. yet when joe witnesses the squalid cave in which the orphaned child dwells with dozens of other homeless neapolitans, he leaves without his boots and without any further retributive justice. despite their ethnic and racial differences, joe and pasquale come to recognize each other as kindred. such cross - cultural identifications became the basis for many of the intergenerational intimacies in postwar cinema .
wandering a devastated world in which the normative structures of civilization are overturned, neo - realism’s children are often confronted with erotic energies that have run rampant. in the third film of rossellini’s trilogy, germany year zero (1948), the shattering of a young boy’s innocence serves as a metaphor for the ruined topos of bombed - out berlin. wandering around the city hustling for money, edmund and his environment are posed as phenomenological equivalents. edmund succumbs to the pedophilic seductions of a former teacher, a nazi whose musings on survival of the fittest are taken literally by the boy, who then begins plotting his aging father’s death. after being rebuffed and abandoned by his exploiter, the boy is broken, and his undoing proves fatal. edmund has been so tragically queered by money, war, and nazism that he relinquishes the future he has been denied, and throws himself off a building. nearly simultaneously, but worlds away, an (allegedly) teenage kenneth anger embraces the erasure of his own future by celebrating his ecstatic submission to violence. whereas edmund’s suicide is an act of desperation so melancholic that it is hard to imagine the future of childhood in its wake, anger eroticizes his own nullification, fashioning a queer mode of survival. what might these queer boys have to say to each other across the ocean of their desires ?
kenneth anger, who will be in austin this halloween weekend, is a premier figure of american avant - garde cinema. legendary as an underground filmmaker, anger prefers to regard himself as a maker of magick, albeit one who uses the camera as his medium to the occult. born around 1930 (the year varies slightly by source), anger (an adopted name) grew up in santa monica, california. he started making his own movies at a young age in 1941 with who has been rocking my dream boat? and numerous other shorts, all of which were later destroyed by the filmmaker' s own hand. while still a child, anger appeared (uncredited) in max reinhardt' s visually lush hollywood feature a midsummer night' s dream (1935) and he also partnered with shirley temple at dance school cotillions. anger' s fascination with hollywood' s early decades has remained constant, as seen in his two tell - all, slash - and - burn hollywood babylon volumes, virtual picture books chronicling the seamier, more lurid details of the lives and deaths of hollywood past .
austin chronicle: i think the first order of business is finding out what you' ve been up to lately .
kenneth anger: well, i have a book i' m working on [ hollywood babylon 3 ] and i' ve done two of them, so that is an ongoing project and i expect to have it done soon, at least that is my hope .
ka: yes. i made it over one weekend. i wish i could still do that .
ka: well, they' re picture books and they' re almost like movies because i' m very visually oriented. the pictures are certainly as important as the text and there' s a lot of jokes and surprises as you turn pages. you find illustrations that may not seem to go with the text .
ka: yes, he certainly is one of my influences. he was much more than a filmmaker; he didn' t get into filmmaking until middle age. but he was a child prodigy poet and did very experimental work and choreographed for dance and was involved in so many things .
ac: well maybe i should be more specific - - what i' m asking about is this kind of thread that runs throughout your career of returning to previous works and doing revisions and i just wanted to hear a bit more ...
ka: no, this will be a departure for me, but i use ritual in my other films, sometimes in a humorous way, sometimes quite serious. in fact, i admire cocteau for that because you never know when he' s kidding and when he' s serious, and i admire that .
ka: yeah, i have a water buffalo that he shot; i' ve got pictures of him shooting. i' m not much into blood sports, but these things came my way when his daughter moved away from palm springs, these things she didn' t really want in her new house. she said i could have them .
ac: if i could switch gears again to hollywood babylon - - i guess for lack of a better term, currently there' s a
gossip industry .
i mean there are tabloid shows, of course there are tabloid papers. is hollywood babylon in any way a forerunner of this phenomenon ?
ka: well, of course it was, i mean i sort of made a lot of these kind of tabloid gossip papers and things if not respectable at least legitimate. but frankly my interest is more in hollywood' s past than its present .
ka: well, i go up to the o. j. case and the hugh grants and all those things but, basically, i treat them with a certain contempt. the glamour is just not there for me with the current crop. i mean some of them are good actors and so forth; i just can' t get very excited about them .
ac: now tell me about this event called the
re - inauguration of the pleasure dome
that' s supposed to take place when you come .
ac: well i guess you know that will be one of the panel topics when you come to town - - the influence of the avant garde on mainstream cinema .
ka: well, of course, people steal from me and it doesn' t mean that i' m particularly happy about it, but there' s nothing i can do about it and i can' t copyright my images. i will say i' m
bemused ,
particularly by borrowings by mtv. and there are several groups that have done practically carbon copies of certain scenes from my films. and of course they' ve never given me a call saying ,
why don' t you make a music video for us ?
i could use the money. unless i didn' t absolutely despise the music, i might even think of doing it. but it' s never happened. it' s much easier for them just to steal. and the younger generation, people that are making mtv, some of them have moved into hollywood films, but they are a generation of magpies, outrageous thieves, stealing ideas right and left. and they have amazingly little imagination of their own. if they didn' t have people to steal from, i mean they' d really be hard up. and that' s my opinion of them. i hope that doesn' t sound bitter! i' m mostly just bemused .
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depicts a dream sequence about the brutal rape and torture of anger himself (as a teenager) by a group of sailors on the street (after trying to pick one of them up) .
hotel transylvania 3: summer vacation stars plan their dream summer getaways to some memorable movie settings .
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pierrot waxes romantic, entranced by the moon. harlequin appears and bullies him, then uses a magic lantern to project an image of columbine. pierrot tries to court the illusory columbine... see full summary »
a soundtrack plays folk rock as a woman prepares, at noon, to take her borzois for a walk. she goes through her dresses, all 1920s style flapper gowns, holding them one at a time, shaking... see full summary »
a slavonic mass by leos janácek plays as historical figures, biblical characters, and mythical creatures gather in the pleasure dome. aphrodite, lilith, isis, kali, astarte, nero, pan, and... see full summary »
a man in tight jeans buffs his car to the strains of
dream lover
.
a gang of nazi bikers prepares for a race as sexual, sadistic, and occult images are cut together .
experimental short, featuring strobe - like erotic imagery with several shots of the rolling stones in performance and an original synthesizer score by mick jagger .
egyptian gods summons the angel lucifer - in order to usher in a new occult age .
a woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on - screen .
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video: kinsey' s meeting with kenneth anger at aleister crowley' s abbey thelema .
the blood being pulled from the nostrils. the shower of semen. the roman candle cock .
and so, underground cinema is inaugurated with anger' s visionary and
buñuelian
homoerotic masterpiece heavy on the symbolisms and on the subjects of repression and personal suffering. voilá .
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styles of substance: the extraordinary image: orson welles, alfred hitchcock, stanley kubrick, and the reimagining of cinema, by robert p. kolker
anger has correctly pointed out in interviews that lucifer is indeed the light - bearer of the gods and not satan, which he calls a “christian slander. ” on this point i am especially indebted to william c. wees analysis of anger’s work in light moving in time (oxford: university of california press, 1992) 107 - 123 .
the swine who rewrote f. scott fitzgerald: joseph l. mankiewicz as producer
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1st caring for injured disabled in self - propelled wheelchairs. disabled sit in wheelchairs and are used in. east frisia: war invalids work retraining village - in the nursery. dinner bell is rung. disabled go door - to - door. at the door writing classroom. lessons in schneider stube .
( 36 m) 02. streiflichter from germany a. munich: exhibition of youth exhibition of children' s drawings. laughing children. stands for career choices. craft booth. workers shows patches on a street. carpenter, plumber, mason. swing on a figure sculpture. artfully forged box .
( 33 m) b. obersalzberg: hitler' s estate is agricultural school landscape of the obersalzberg. reconstruction of the court to the agricultural school. women when wiping table and bed - making. pig and piglet the pig. the haflinger stud horses run manor. farmers harvesting hay before grazing herd. cows and horses in the meadow. the berchtesgadener land. (25 m) c. crowded holiday trains queues of people before the ticket office. crowded platform with people on the train. people go with luggage in the train window. train with passengers on the running boards and on the roof of the train .
houses are under water (26 m) 03. flood in china in the southern provinces of china. people riding in boats. chinese are working on dikes. flooded rice fields. farmers to try to salvage rice plants out of the water. chinese in line up for food. distribution of rice. children eat with chopsticks, great. mother feeding child with chopsticks .
( 42 m) 04 sports a. mannheim: german rowing championships qualifying run of the eights, totally. accompanying train along with spectators on the shore. spectators sit on the shore. home to the limit of the aft. 5 boats are in the race, including mannheim amicitia, mühlheim rowing club, frankfurt germania. passing to rubble. it wins the rowing community of flörsheim rüsselsheim, germany. see the rowers of the winning boat of georg von opel, of the race in the one won, half close, congratulations .
( 32 m) b. berlin: police sports festival group demonstration of self - defense. 4 x 100 m relay. it wins the police school in spandau. the winning team receives a silver cup .
( 22 m) c. wuppertal: german water polo championships swimming pool with water ballspielern. spectators around the basin, total. play it: water sports hanover with swimming friends barmen. spectators waving flags. barmen wins with 5: 3. endgame: duisburg 98 against swimming friends barmen. ball flies over gate. goal throw. it wins barmen with 4: 3 spectators clap .
mattsee: dance course harald kreutzberg harald kreutzberg dances. kreutzberg displays dance movement. young girl dancing in group with harald kreutzberg .
( 17 m) 06. siena: at a gallop to the marketplace the marketplace in siena. start the horse at a gallop around the market square. horse crashes into the curve, rider falls, total .
( 20 m) 07. a feast day in heidelberg - inauguration of the old bridge aerial view of the city. people in boat trip and get to the other shore of the neckar. the castle. panoramic view over the roofs of the old town. the hotel zum ritter. the university. students. the old neckar bridge. decorated main street. people at festival meeting at inauguration of the bridge .
mannheim; berlin; wuppertal; munich; heidelberg; bremen; berchtesgaden; china; east frisia; mattsee; siena; st. louis
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an iconoclastic and homoerotic look at a man who dreams of sailors, made when anger was a teenager. shot over a weekend when his parents were out of town, anger stated, “this flick is all i have to say about being 17, the united states navy, american christmas and the fourth of july. ”
canyon cinema 145 9th street, suite 260, ca 94103, san francisco united states of america tel: + 1 415 626 2255 fax: + 1 415 626 2255 e - mail: films @ urltoken www: www. urltoken
roberto rossellini, paisà (paisan), 1946, 35 mm, black - and - white, sound, 120 minutes. joe (dots johnson) and pasquale (alfonsino pasca) .
kathryn bond stockton has argued that the child of the twentieth century was queered by innocence, color, money, and freud. 15 to this damning catalogue, let us add war. images of devastated childhood are among the most memorable in war’s distended photographic archive: a doomed boy, arms upraised, stands with other warsaw ghetto jews under the watch of an armed german soldier. one is certain that this child, as roland barthes muses about another boy elsewhere, is both dead and going to die. 16 in another searing image, a naked vietnamese girl, her body scorched by napalm, runs down a road screaming. the silent frame, vibrating from her howl of pain, can barely contain her agony. these are the nightmare visions from which postwar conceptions of childhood cannot awake .
decimating the myth of childhood innocence, war transforms children into witnesses, participants, and casualties. in the twentieth century, war also fundamentally changed the representation of children in visual culture. simultaneously the most vulnerable locus of war’s treachery and the last hope for the future, the child is everywhere in the italian neorealist cinema of the 1940s. in answer to the “representational problems that arise from the surrender of the heroic male protagonist, ” 17 the male child parallels and highlights the limitations of adult male characters. gendered male, neorealism ’s child is a wanderer, an urchin, an orphan, a miniature partisan, and a mimic of adult atrocity. queered, we can find him in neorealism ’s alternate cast of cripples, masochists, suicides, thieves, and murderers. these queer children refuse the paltry forms of reparation and futurity that they are offered. whenever we meet them, we discover that normal conceptions of time and place have been razed .
the tensions that charged midcentury los angeles profoundly shaped anger’s ecstatic vision of besieged sexuality. for anger, who had grown up in santa monicawell known for its gay beaches and nightlifela was a city of desire and oppression. while gay populations had thrived in the city of angels since the turn of the century, wartime brought an upsurge of police entrapment. it also solidified the growing identification of queer desire with aspects of military and physique culture, especially sailor iconography .
following the bombing of pearl harbor, los angeles saw itself as on the front lines of the war in the pacific. civilian patrols were established throughout the city, and beaches were fortified with antiaircraft guns. with la functioning as a “major training and transit point for military personnel, ” 23 up to fifty thousand servicemen could be found there on any given weekend. members of the armed services frequented the local cruising grounds. during the war, diarist donald vining wrote of cruising downtown pershing square for soldiers on leave, as gay men commonly did. 24
the militarization of los angeles was a response to the fear of external threats. but these fears were also internalized. america’s relation to its own racial, ethnic, and sexual others grew increasingly paranoiac. prejudicial violence was directed most explicitly against asian americans, latinos, and african americans. but, as anger experienced personally, it was also directed against gays and lesbians.
fireworks ( 1947 ) is a homoerotic experimental film by kenneth anger . filmed in his parents ' home in beverly hills , california , over a long weekend while they were away , the film stars anger and explicitly explores themes of homosexuality and sado-masochism . it is the earliest of his works to survive . anger synopsizes the film thus : " 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 . " adding later , " this flick is all i have to say about being seventeen , the united states navy , american christmas , and the fourth of july . " anger was arrested on obscenity charges following the release of fireworks . in 1958 , a lawsuit was brought against the manager raymond rohauer of l.a. 's coronet theatre for screening fireworks . the case became " an epic obscenity trial " in the california supreme court which declared the film to be art .
fireworks (1947) is a homoerotic experimental film by kenneth anger. filmed in his parents' home in beverly hills, california, over a long weekend while they were away, the film stars anger and explicitly explores themes of homosexuality and sado-masochism. it is the earliest of his works to survive. anger synopsizes the film thus: " 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. " adding later, " this flick is all i have to say about being seventeen, the united states navy, american christmas, and the fourth of july. " anger was arrested on obscenity charges following the release of fireworks. in 1958, a lawsuit was brought against the manager raymond rohauer of l.a.'s coronet theatre for screening fireworks. the case became " an epic obscenity trial " in the california supreme court which declared the film to be art.
fireworks (1947) is a homoerotic experimental film by kenneth anger. filmed in his parents' home in beverly hills, california, over a long weekend while they were away, the film stars anger and explicitly explores themes of homosexuality and sado-masochism. it is the earliest of his works to survive. anger synopsizes the film thus: " 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. " adding later, " this flick is all i have to say about being seventeen, the united states navy, american christmas, and the fourth of july. " anger was arrested on obscenity charges following the release of fireworks. in 1958, a lawsuit was brought against the manager raymond rohauer of l.a.'s coronet theatre for screening fireworks. the case became " an epic obscenity trial " in the california supreme court which declared the film to be art.