was 17, it is part of an ad hoc cycle of what scholar P. Adams Sitney calls "trance" films, in which a protagonist (here
played by Anger himself) takes a psychic, often dream-filled journey through his or her own unconscious. Anger has
said Fireworks was in fact based directly on one of his dreams. By turns comical, introspective, and outright shocking,
it remains a vital part of Anger's oeuvre, and one of the most important films of the American independent cinema.
(
Smith, the notorious underground filmmaker of Flaming Creatures, had
nothing in common but their sexual orientation and their deaths from
AIDS in the late 1980s. Here, they are portrayed by a single actor, Ron
Vawter, whose stunning performance piece Roy Cohn/Jack Smith has been
turned into a dramatically deft, comic, and terrifying film diptych of queer-
on-queer. In this film about the closet, silence is powerful, but it cannot
contain either of these infamous homosexuals, whose privileged knowledge
of queerness leaks out.
partnership with the Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex,
Gender, and Reproduction