It's taken me a while as a surveyor and consumer of avant-garde films to come up with a decent way to be able to tell if a particular film is actually successful or just artsy and pretentious, but I've discovered that a very good rule-of-thumb is based around how well the film holds up during a second viewing.
I have been waiting a very long time for an opportunity to view Kenneth Anger's work and eagerly ordered Fantoma's first volume, and I'm glad to see that he's already living up to my expectations. He didn't at first, though. "Fireworks" started off with what felt like enough random instances and cuts to make the typical "dreamworld" pay-off. The violence in the later half and the end really intrigued me, but it felt too late in coming.
Seeing it again, however, there's a lot of recurring imagery that helps fit it together, including the broken cast hand and the "Angry Jesus". In fact, this movie is a very disturbing and brooding outlook into masculinity, one that has a stronger rise too it than it initially seems. Kenneth Anger's character seems to be dealing with a general feeling of emasculation (a feeling Anger attributes to the contemporary Zoot Suit Riots) and anxiety around his sexuality... one that at some points is vaguely homo-erotic, but seem to be about ideas of masculinity in general. I think this reading of this movie is particularly telling by the way Professor Kinsey of sexual research fame was the first to buy a print of the short after its first showing.
I think the best thing about this short is the shot of the still photographs burning in the fire. They strike me as a victim's way of trying to block out bad memories by purging, and Anger mentions of them that they are "the slow fading away of memories of dreams." Either way they are a liberating denouement to the earlier scenes of extreme violence (which were actually very well done as well) and help hold the film together very well.
--PolarisDiB
I have been waiting a very long time for an opportunity to view Kenneth Anger's work and eagerly ordered Fantoma's first volume, and I'm glad to see that he's already living up to my expectations. He didn't at first, though. "Fireworks" started off with what felt like enough random instances and cuts to make the typical "dreamworld" pay-off. The violence in the later half and the end really intrigued me, but it felt too late in coming.
Seeing it again, however, there's a lot of recurring imagery that helps fit it together, including the broken cast hand and the "Angry Jesus". In fact, this movie is a very disturbing and brooding outlook into masculinity, one that has a stronger rise too it than it initially seems. Kenneth Anger's character seems to be dealing with a general feeling of emasculation (a feeling Anger attributes to the contemporary Zoot Suit Riots) and anxiety around his sexuality... one that at some points is vaguely homo-erotic, but seem to be about ideas of masculinity in general. I think this reading of this movie is particularly telling by the way Professor Kinsey of sexual research fame was the first to buy a print of the short after its first showing.
I think the best thing about this short is the shot of the still photographs burning in the fire. They strike me as a victim's way of trying to block out bad memories by purging, and Anger mentions of them that they are "the slow fading away of memories of dreams." Either way they are a liberating denouement to the earlier scenes of extreme violence (which were actually very well done as well) and help hold the film together very well.
--PolarisDiB