We are not very knowledgeable about Kenneth Anger’s work. To us, he is an old reference point for homoerotic imagery that has been filtered through multiple reinterpretations, giving his work a mixed feeling of familiarity and avant-garde. An almost classical homoerotism that uses symbolism as a language tool that, for the Instagram brain, is quite the trip.
Yet, what we did not know was that Fireworks was directed by a 20-year-old Anger, who also happened to be the main actor -the guy who gets his ass kicked. Besides, he was very influenced by the philosophical ideas of Aleister Crowley, a hugely influential occultist figure, which explains why Anger’s film Lucifer Rising, is not about the actual Christian idea of Lucifer. In that sense, Fireworks could be seen as a transformative journey of death towards self-knowledge or liberation.
There is an increasing discourse about young filmmakers being “discovered” on YouTube, either to save Hollywood or social media as a whole, which makes us wonder: who are the twenty-something artists making experimental homoerotic cinema today?!
