A Comparison Of Fireworks And Kustom Kar Kommandos

Defining certain cultural and artistic movements found in film as a medium, has never been that difficult for me to grasp its primary synthesis. Realist films base their aesthetic off of the belief that elements in film should match the way we perceive reality. The soviet montage movement was a dialectic interpretation of cultural and social change with an emphasis on how to capture it through the camera’s “kino-eye”. These two concepts, among various others, are widely known and theorized about, while playing their part in cinematic history. Even the more broader concepts that are found in experimental films such as re-contextualization. materialist, graphic filmmaking, and even the broader and little more ambiguous concept in surrealism I
Anger’s films Fireworks (1947) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), may be perfect examples of queer film. To start Kenneth Anger is a homosexually man who wrote and directed both films Fireworks and Kustom Kar Kommandos. So, that checks off one of Benshoff and Griffin’s ways to look at queer cinema. The film Fireworks deals with a male protagonist, played by Anger, who seems to dream of sailors and being brutally beaten by them. The film deals with nothing but the representation of the male form, which includes the male body, movements, and expression. The final scene shows the protagonist sleeping with another with another man. So, clearly this film deals with homosexuality and queer sensibility. According to editors at TMC, the depiction played out in Anger’s film Fireworks “show images of guilt-ridden homosexuality and his internal anguish over his homosexuality.” (“Overview”). The article even states that the scene where Anger is beaten by sailor represents, “his punishment and leads to images of sexual liberation and fertility.” (“Overview”). So, with these images and concepts Anger deliberately plays, means his movies deal with queer theory. Furthermore, this means not only was this film made by a queer person, but deals with queer issues such as sexual repression and liberation. His films also connected to the queer community and more than likely to the queer spectatorship at the time. He plays with images in a metaphorical way that show, “Iconic figures of masculinity take on different, fraught resonances (and may come replete with low jokes: seaman, semen)”