Touches You

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Fireworks (1947)*** (out of 4) Kenneth Anger's earliest surviving film was apparently influenced by him trying to pick up a sailor only to be beaten by the man and his friends. Trying to explain what this film is about would be pointless as I'm sure each viewing could watch it and come away with something different. The basic set-up has a man walking into a "Gents" room where he watches a man flex his muscles and then he tries to pick him up. FIREWORKS is certainly a very weird film as is its history, which included Anger being arrested on obscenity charges. Seeing the film today it's hard to believe that anyone would make too much fuss about it and I'd argue that the homosexuality isn't nearly as on display as the reputation of the film would lead you to believe. For the most part Anger has done a pretty good job in regards to the style and images seen in the film. The surrealist nature is really impressive and I thought several of the images were very nightmarish and they really came across as someone a lot more experienced behind the camera. I'm sure this film isn't going to appeal to everyone but fans of the weird should at least give it a shot.

In 1947 there were very few contexts in which a film could portray one man embracing another. Fireworks (1947) opens with one of these (a soldier carrying a man who appears to be wounded or even dead) but quickly begins to subvert this imagine; drastically changing its implied meaning. The film begs for analysis more than review because, while it is as direct as abstract art can be, it is obscure enough to be daunting.A man awakes in bed and removes a phallic symbol from beneath the sheets. He begins to get dressed while the camera lingers on his crotch and naked chest. He gathers up photos scattered around the bed and disposes of them in the fire. Through this sequence we began to think of sex. It is not a stretch to imagine the pictures (of one man holding another) to have been masturbatory material now destroyed implying shame and the desire for secrecy.The man finishes dressing while being framed as a visual mirror of the earlier phallic symbol. This gives a hint into his emotional state. His matchbook is both empty and branded with United States Navy. It is discarded and the man enters the night through a public restroom where he sees a sailor. The sailor removes his shirt and begins to flex his muscles and show off his body, but when asked for a cigarette he is seen to be fully dressed. This implies that the previous shirtless shots may have been the man's subjective view, mentally undressing the sailor as it were.The sailor reacts violently to the request for a cigarette and it is not hard to imagine that the question was a veiled (or even overt as the movie lacks dialogue) pick up attempt. Remembering the matchbook, we can assume the man has tried this approach before. The violence that follows is brief, suggestive, and ends with the man smoking a cigarette; a classic visual shorthand for the conclusion of sex.The original sailor leaves, but a new group arrives. They are armed and angry. The violence here is both extended and graphic, yet far more abstract. The man's reaction to the beating is sensual implying, if not outright rape then, at least, a connection to sadomasochistic sex. Using (to my mind at least) the Soviet Montage theory Anger turns milk into a bodily fluid by having the shots follow shots of blood and ecstatic writhing. This, somewhat appropriately, heralds the unsubtle climax where both patriotic symbols (fireworks), and religious symbols (Christmas tress) are converted into phallic symbols as the music swells triumphantly. We are brought back to the image of one man holding another as it is destroyed by the invasion of of now homoerotic symbols.The final scene shows the man once more sleeping in bed (though this time with a male partner) and suggest that all that preceded was a dream. Here we are recalled to the opening narration we the director talks about dreams expressing emotions that are repressed during waking life, but providing only a "temporary relief."

Quite a remarkable debut film from a 17 year old Kenneth Anger, this is a coming-of-age piece recreating a dream he had: the film explores homosexual attraction, submission and sadomasochistic violence. A young man (Anger himself) wakes up from a dream about being saved by a sailor in a large room of objects: among other thing, several photographs of a sailor carrying an unconscious man who could be Anger's character himself, a hand with its middle finger amputated, a clay figurine. He dresses and goes out into the night; at a bar, he picks up a sailor who struts and poses for the enthralled youngster. The sailor beats up our man who then goes back outside but is accosted by a group of sailors who strip him, gang-rape him and thrash him with chains. The scenes of violence are extreme and painful to watch but are skilfully done so that the viewer imagines the worst being done to Anger's character, not actually see any torture or punishment.The 14-minute film appears to be ambivalent about celebrating gay sexuality: Anger's character experiences liberation but it looks extremely degrading and you wonder how much suffering he undergoes is necessary. Sure, scenes at the end of the film suggest the youngster is fulfilled – the photographs can be disposed of, the hand is mended and the visual narrative hints at an important rite of passage being completed – but all the same, you feel the young man will keep going back for more of the same punishment. Still, the depiction of raw sexual attraction, willing submission, violence and pain leading to transformation and fulfillment is very powerful, even beautiful at times, especially as it's coming from a very young film-maker. There is humour both bawdy and witty, particularly in scenes featuring the pouring of milk over the young man (hint, hint) and some fireworks being set off from an unusual launch-pad! The piece looks conventional enough and Anger hadn't yet learned how to layer images one over the other and edit shots to enhance the narrative and bring the film to a climax. Instead the orchestral music score, sounding very typical melodramatic Hollywood of the period (1940s), is put to work creating the appropriate moods, ratcheting up tension, bringing suspense and celebrating the protagonist's sexual awakening. Though there are a couple of scenes where the joins in the musical soundtrack are awkward, overall the marriage of music to plot and mood is well done. Close-ups at critical points in the film, taking place during the rape and torture scene, bring out the protagonist's pain and the brutality of sailors beating him with chains as he suffers without protest. There's a little bit of a religious element here: the young man is Christ-like in his willingness to suffer and the pouring of milk over his body could be construed as a resurrection.Even at this early stage of his career, Anger was demonstrating a unique vision and a style of filming quite unlike what his film-director contemporaries were making. Sound is completely unnecessary: the protagonist is never named and so he might be considered representative of all young sexual novices who must undergo necessary ordeals to become fully adult and sexually aware.

Kenneth Anger completed his first major work, 'Fireworks (1947),' at age seventeen, which I find remarkable. The film is artistically imaginative, despite employing a rather stodgy hand-held camera, and thematically mature – albeit, with a certain tongue-in-cheek approach to the material. Anger himself described the film as follows: "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." This director's synopsis makes no allusion to the homoeroticism that is most certainly present; the film plays as though Anger is acting out some deeply-entrenched masochistic fantasy in which he is confronted and raped by a pack of burly sailors. Sexual imagery is abound: a wooden statue is briefly confused with an erection; a pyrotechnic phallus presumably simulates the sensation of orgasm. Given the conservative morals of post-War America, 'Fireworks' is certainly a very bold statement of Anger's acknowledged homosexuality, especially at such a young age. Even so, the film is uncomfortable viewing. Anger's uncompromising juxtaposition of sex and violence predates such works as Ed Emshwiller's 'Thanatopsis (1962)' and Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange (1971).'