(This famously led to speculation that it was an unfinished work by Andy Warhol or Kenneth Anger.) But what is most striking about the film is its aesthetic and composition. Pink Narcissus was scarcely explicit enough to be considered a blue film, yet too abstract to be thought of as merely softcore it was a genuine, unattributed art film of recent vintage. Courtesy: © Estate of James Bidgood and ClampArt, New York James Bidgood, Harem Boy in Front of Peacock (from Pink Narcissus), mid-1960s, digital C-print. It’s a carnival of sexual horrors on the city streets that is meant to be juxtaposed as the pinnacle of depravity against the film’s more romanticized early scenes.
Ghouls copulate next to blood laboratories and dildo salesmen harangue passers-by alongside buskers, prostitutes and demonic clergymen. The film climaxes in a phantasmagorical manifestation of the Times Square neighbourhood on Jim’s doorstep. He transitions from a hustler pleasing his johns to a john surrounded by hustlers. Revolving around an androgynous catamite, played by real-life hustler Bobby Kendall, the film depicts Narcissus lounging in his pink apartment, entering a spellbinding fantasy of himself in various forms: as a matador in a hall of gilded mirrors, as a Roman slave boy, as an emperor and, ultimately, as the keeper of a harem of male dancers.
Based on the Ancient Greek myth, Pink Narcissus represents an allegory that is almost glib in its obviousness, about eroticism’s journey from innocence to abjection. If adornment is a form of worship – from the Egyptian pharaohs in their tombs to Toddlers & Tiaras (2009–2016) – Jim’s religion would be homosexual lust: beauty, youth, hustlers and oral penetration. Pink Narcissus was a near-constant programming go-to screened at the gay bar the Eagle, at friends’ apartments or at pop-up events in Dolores Park.įor gay men coming of age, discovering Jim’s work resembles, in both aspect and form, an archaeological dig that produces a glittering artefact from some ancient civilization. Late nights, you could run into the erotic photographer Peter Berlin outside the Stud nightclub, or walk Valencia Street with the performer Bambi Lake, as she spun yarns about performing with the Cockettes. Smut rags from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s were archived at The Magazine on Polk Street, a place where twentysomethings would pore over issues of Muscleboy and The Young Physique – two magazines Jim photographed for in his early career – alongside later titles, such as Honcho and Straight to Hell. I first encountered Pink Narcissus in mid-aughts San Francisco. James Bidgood, Pan from Behind (from Pink Narcissus), late-1960s, digital C-print. For 30 years, its author’s identity was unknown – until Bruce Benderson rediscovered Jim’s work, revealing his intricate process in a comprehensive 1999 Taschen monograph.
‘A Film by Anonymous’ reads over the title sequence to this day. Incensed by the distributor’s cut, Jim removed his name. The distributor, an exploitation and erotic films imprint called Sherpix, ultimately wrested the film from his control and put together its own edit, which was released in 1971. It took Jim eight years to reach its endpoint (or, more accurately, its point of no return) his perfectionism became a protracted liability when he was unwilling to submit a finished cut. Shot on 8mm celluloid against homemade backdrops, conjured and constructed in the forbidding confines of his Hell’s Kitchen apartment, the film is marked by obsession: obsessive detail, obsessive craft and obsessive subjects. This year marks 60 years since the artist James Bidgood began production on what would be his only film, Pink Narcissus (1971). It’s also the story of my old friend, Jim.
It’s the natural cycle of a dream that dies. Over the course of one long night – many years long, but that’s beside the point – in an incandescent metropolis, through a seedy men’s toilet, an enchanted field, pink bedroom and haunted neon alleyways, the butterfly is annihilated, ripped to shreds and scattered to the wind, ejaculated into the balmy night. A chrysalis stirs on a glistening branch before it hatches into a beautiful butterfly.
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