“Sadly, I’m hooked on dreaming,” James Bidgood mentioned in a 2010 interview with Butt Journal when describing his relationship with fantasy. Certainly, throughout pictures and filmmaking, but additionally in window-dressing, styling, costume design and efficiency, Bidgood would translate the land of his goals right into a hyperstylised actuality with shows of magnificence that pulsed with a real aesthetic energy. Regardless of the gorgeous high quality of his work, he would stay dismally and woefully underfunded, spending most of his life in near-abject poverty earlier than passing away in 2022 on the age of 88. Pink Narcissus (1971) was his solely characteristic movie and that really ought to have been the undertaking to catapult him right into a profitable inventive trajectory, however the movie’s ultimate reduce would finally be taken away from him. Bidgood devoted seven painstaking years to creating it, but the movie was edited and launched with out his consent and credited to “Nameless” till 1998, when it was lastly re-released along with his identify over 20 years later.
The movie was all shot with a Tremendous 8 digital camera inside the confines of his New York condo – a house that Bidgood remodeled into a complete cosmos. He meticulously crafted the candy-coloured papier-mâché set items and designed elaborately handmade costumes, lit each shot himself, repurposed discovered objects and supplies… The personal area of the house was was a shimmering, hyper-saturated sexual utopia producing its personal gravity. The result’s a gorgeous piece of erotica that embraces its sheer synthetic expressiveness as a driving drive for cinematic invention, but isn’t loud or declarative. It stays intimate, sensual and surprisingly timeless.
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Beneath the dazzling floor of double exposures and intelligent cinematography tips utilizing lenses and angles to create the phantasm of depth, Pink Narcissus exhibits an extremely intimate understanding of the world of fantasy. Acquainted imagery is reconfigured and filtered via a newly queer, free-form gaze that revels in its personal vibrancy, gazing, intoxicated, over its protagonist’s muscular physique in fawning element. Whereas the unique Narcissus fable serves as an historical cautionary story concerning the perils of solipsism and self-obsession, it’s not unusual to learn Narcissus’ want for his personal reflection as homoerotic and assume {that a} fixation along with his personal reflection is a manifestation of same-sex want. Reaching via one’s reflection to be able to indulge within the self is an act that depends upon the personal realm of the creativeness: it’s within the unfettered sanctuary of the thoughts and its capability to dream, that the act of escape is turned inward and turns into completely one’s personal, making a personal fortress sturdy sufficient to comprise fantasies that may solely be explored in solitude.
As Bidgood’s Narcissus (Bobby Kendall) languishes in his stunning pink condo, reminiscences of sexual encounters are sublimated right into a neverending string of meandering goals and fantasies. Within the fantasy of a bullring, he’s the matador confronted not with a bull as his adversary, however with a Kenneth Anger-style leather-based daddy on a bike. Within the Roman bathtub, he’s each the emperor and his tortured intercourse slave. Within the harem, he’s each sultan and concubine. And within the lush backyard drawn from Greek mythology, he’s now not Narcissus, however Pan: the satyr god of the wild, a image carefully related to fertility and the season of spring.
Watching Pink Narcissus right now, I was struck by the similarities that Bidgood’s sense of marvel, perception in true magnificence and use of masculinity as a supply of inventive inspiration share with a extra up to date earworm: Björk’s ‘Venus as a Boy’. Written by the Icelandic singer-songwriter and produced by her long-time collaborator Nellee Hooper, the 1993 monitor was additionally impressed by a boy who noticed every little thing, within the artist’s phrases, “from a magnificence viewpoint”. Björk approaches her topic with curiosity and enchantment, enveloping us in a sweeping, ethereal ambiance constructed round tabla drums and mild keys, her lyrics – He believes in magnificence / He’s Venus as a boy – remodeling the longing into an imaginative drive that attracts us right into a world of intimacy and romantic ideation. As with Pink Narcissus, want takes flight on the wings of fantasy, carrying a delirious artistry into the realm of fable with a actual understanding of what constitutes magnificence.
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