Kenneth Anger

An American experimental filmmaker best known for surrealist works centering on homoerotic and occult subjects, Kenneth Anger has produced nearly forty works over his career, including his 1947 Fireworks, a fourteen-minute film that led to his arrest on obscenity charges—a case that made it all the way to the California Supreme Court, which decided the film was art, not pornography. Tennessee Williams called Fireworks “the most exciting use of cinema I have ever seen,” and Anger said it was “all I have to say about being seventeen, the United States Navy, American Christmas, and the Fourth of July.”

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