As the title suggests, “Pink Narcissus” is like a greenhouse flower. Filmed over seven years on an 8-mm film and elaborate set, built in the filmmaker's small Manhattan apartment, the feature film is also a labor of love, focusing primarily on a single actor.
Created by photographer James Bidgood, newly restored by film and television archives at the University of California in Los Angeles, this homoerotic fantasia was originally released anonymously.
The breathtaking opening sequence that glimpses through the forests of the full moon is just as cumbersome as Disney animations of the late 1930s. Soon, among the busy butterflies and wing-flapping flowers, Bidgood's young star, known as Bobby Kendall, made his first appearance.
There is no dialogue in this film, and as far as I know, there are no women. Wore a variety of clothes in tight white jeans and short kimonos, Kendall, who most often posses as a nude odalisc, plays a rental boy whose fantasies offer a set piece sequence when the bull imagines himself as a matador, a hardening biker. Kendall also joins the Toga Party and is entertained by male Seraglio's provocative abdominal dancers.
Sexual behavior is implied, and the complete nude is shyly veiled. The explicit yet decorative “pink narcissus” is based on dialectic between the erotic and the AB faction. Ideal nature in Rococo apartments and rosy sunsets is competing for Times Square, surrounded by Publi's urinals and invented garbage where push carts sell vibrators and other adult toys. Charles Rudrum is a glimpse among the inhabitants of this sleazy realm, but the precursors of Bidgood beyond Rudrum's “outrageous” theatres are taboo-breaking films like Jack Smith's “Flame Creatures” and Kenneth Unger's “Firewalk.”
Like Anger and Smith, Bidgood appears to have been deeply impressed by Josef von Sternberg's gurgy-exotic Mrs. En Skane. Bidgood's vision isn't as refreshingly devouring the thread as Smith's, nor is it as luxurious as anger. Anger and Smith are bold, and “Pink Narcissus” is not bold. However, if the Bidgood movie felt claustrophobic, it is worth noting that homosexual relationships were illegal in New York during the period it was made.
“Pink Narcissus” opened in New York in May 1971 and played in the Movie Village for six weeks. This ran in line with the second anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Artistic porn or porn art? Though ads flooded with gay and straight sex movie ads and featured frequent articles on gay liberation, the village voice didn't resign to give “Pink Narcissus” a review, New York Times critic Vincent Canby did. Given the film is a humorless camp practice, he unfavourable comparison of it to Mike Kucha's underground hit, “The Sin of the Sin of the Flesh.”
Decades have passed: Bidgood, whose physique magazines of Muscle Boys and other men have been rehabilitated as gallery art, has finally honoured the film's achievements. “Pink Narcissus” was praised as a “queer classic” for the voice and the voice of the times. John Waters likened it to “The Wizard of Oz.” If it's not exactly “evil,” then the film is a singular achievement.
Pink narcissism
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