THE INAUGURAL FILM of postwar queer cinema and a watershed event in the history of the American avant-garde, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks of 1947 is an autobiographical account of the awakening of desire. Shot when the filmmaker was only seventeen years old,1 the film is the sadomasochistic fantasy of a young man, played by the teenage Anger, who dreams he is sexually assaulted by a gang of sailors. Like its young author, the film was precocious. Made in the immediate aftermath of World War II, just as the United States was entering the Cold War, in which it imagined itself to be the policeman of
Paola Corso recalled a walk through her late father’s neighborhood in Brackenridge.
“Luckily, it was windy that day, and I spotted a pair of concrete steps under some leaves,” said Corso, a poet, photographer, literary activist and Harrison native. “I thought about the days my father and grandfather walked those steps.”
She wrote a poem about the journeys Mariano Corso and his father, Anthony Corso, took on those slabs of concrete to and from what was then known as Allegheny Ludlum’s Brackenridge Works.
The work begins “Snapshot of my father as a young man standing at the top of hillside steps wearing a double-breasted suit and tie, pants creased, shoes polished, his back to the steel mill in the valley behind him, his back to the jackhammer he used to drill. …”