Review of Pink Narcissus – bright colors and dreamlike images in the homoerotic vision of 60s New York | Video

JAmes Bidgood’s experimental homoerotic reverie has now been reissued in restored form. The film was shot mostly in Bidgood alone new York houses in the 1960s; it was released in 1971 when Bidgood’s name was removed from the record after an undisclosed dispute with his sponsors and his records were revealed 20 years later.

Pink Narcissus is a film of vivid colors, muted melodrama and dream-like visuals inspired by old movies, perhaps because lip-syncing recording equipment wasn’t available. (The director says that Powell and Pressburger’s Red Shoes was an inspiration even though the title tells more about their melodrama called Black Narcissus.) Interestingly, he connects his pastoral ideas with the urban scene that can be consumed – the city’s movie theater, outside where poverty and conflict were common. Some of the most interesting and successful parts of the piece are the radio sounds and the neon skylines.

A handsome rent boy, played by Bobby Kendall, stretches and sits down; he appears as a matador, doing a strange job in the men’s dining room, then as a slave in Roman times, and then as a dancer. (In the end he seems to have succumbed, even with a humble spirit, to some kind of people associated with bowler hats, which was immediately ended by a mysterious shot.) These pictures go in and out of the group of ugly pictures: they are fiction, but certainly the boy’s customers.

A kind of humor is created, especially in matador games, although humor works against attraction. Bidgood saves his biggest capture for his host-POV money shot at minute 42. For me, the most interesting way is his close-up of the nipple, which for a moment consists of a blade of grass that is pulled back and forth across: a small, transparent cloth.