Rewrite
As the erotic fantasia Pink Narcissus returns to cinemas, we explore the legacy of the late underground filmmaker, with help from fans John Waters and Peter Strickland
Though he only directed one full-length feature film, few filmmakers have left a larger stamp on gay cinema than James Bidgood. Five decades after the release of his hallucinatory porn film Pink Narcissus – now back in cinemas with a new restoration from the BFI – the shockwaves it has sent rippling through queer cinema ever since are unmistakable.
As a male sex worker (Bobby Kendall) lounges around his New York apartment, Pink Narcissus voyages through his sexual fantasies, from a urinal rendezvous to heading up an all-male harem. To enact these erotic reveries, Bidgood transformed his own apartment into various opulent sets, stealing props and materials from his day job as a store window dresser. The results possess the visual splendour of a Gustav Klimt.
“People would always get it mixed up with Pink Flamingos,” says that film’s director, John Waters, who has been involved with Pink Narcissus’s dazzling re-release. “When it was restored, maybe 20 years ago or something, I saw it in the movie theatre and it’s such a beautiful movie, an outsider masterpiece.”
A multihyphenate drag star, photographer, performance artist and filmmaker, Bidgood wanted to bring the beauty of Ziegfeld Theatre burlesque and cabaret into the realm of pornography at a time when full-frontal nudity was prohibited by US censors. But far from seedy, his work is transcendent. “It is very often what you don’t see that is the greater turn-on, because your mind fills in the blanks with what that particular viewer hopes they would discover,” the director told AnOther in 2019, three years before his death from complications relating to Covid-19.
Bidgood’s work has inspired countless other directors. Peter Strickland’s meta-fictional homage Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp) is a steamy, exquisite excursion into the jungle of Bidgood’s film. “The worlds Bidgood concocted were more akin to voyages of discovery or adventure,” says Strickland. “Hollywood missed a trick by not asking him to direct an Indiana Jones offshoot. My short film is in the shadow of Pink Narcissus and the tradition of other New York filmmakers such as the Kuchar brothers, Jack Smith, Barbara Rubin and Wakefield Poole who all made otherworldly and erotic films within the confines of an apartment.”
Beyond Pink Narcissus and those the film has influenced, the queer icon has a significant onscreen footprint. Below is a curated guide to Bidgood’s cinematic legacy.
After a spat with the film’s editors, Bidgood opted to remove his name from his sole cinematic work – and so when the credits rolled, they read, “By Anonymous”. It was only decades later, following much rumour-milling among New York’s intelligentsia, that he claimed this euphoric masterpiece as his own. Featuring underground stars like Charles Ludlam in some of their earliest roles, Pink Narcissus is a torrent of desire awash in sequins, matadors and botany in which even a urinal becomes an object of staggering beauty. “It’s a very sexual movie, in a great way,” enthuses Waters. “It’s a gay sex movie that even straight people can be turned on by – before the hockey show!”
From New York’s first gay film studio Hand in Hand, this extravaganza of queer cinema contains one nugget from Bidgood’s unfinished second film, which he was making under the working title Baghdad. The height of pornographic decadence, the orgiastic clip is shot with Bidgood’s trademark sensual lighting. As Strickland notes, “There might be no gaffer logic as to where a lighting source comes from, but when it makes flesh look that glamorous, why would one care?”
Bidgood himself appears in this documentary about the making of Pink Narcissus, which takes us inside the Wisconsin-born artist’s home in New York City. Bidgood is grounded, eccentric and even a little cranky in the film, which is scattered with insights into his creative philosophy and also offers sharp insights into gentrification in the Big Apple.
Though slightly more prosaic than Bidgood’s other work, this doc is just as essential. Its director, Michael Jacoby, tussles with the problems faced by New York’s senior queer community, from the nitty gritty of legislation to testimonies from landmark artists such as Bidgood. The film only goes to show there is still much progress to be made towards equal gay rights.
An exquisite slice of New Yorkian queer history, Cary Kehayan’s documentary short dredges up archival materials and interviews relating to gay porn photographer Avery Willard. Bidgood reminisces on his moment in the spotlight as a female impersonator at the notorious East Village drag spot Club 82, where he met Willard and other key players in the city’s drag network.
Ira Sachs’ bruising, messy and mournful gay love story follows filmmaker Erik (Thure Lindhardt) – working, as it happens, on a documentary about Avery Willard – and listless lawyer Paul (Zachary Booth), whose on-off romance wends through themes of queer shame, history and oppression. Sachs’ work often tips its hat to figures important to the city’s queer creative history, so it is fitting that Bidgood briefly cameos here as himself.
Two years before his death at the age of 88, Bidgood made one final bow in this sumptuous drag documentary. Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera’s film hinges on a dusty box of letters gone unopened for 60 years and discovered afresh, the correspondence between former drag stars shedding new light on the colourful daily lives of those frequenters of a bygone scene.
Pink Narcissus is out in cinemas on 12 June and on BFI Blu-ray on 15 June.
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As the erotic fantasia Pink Narcissus returns to cinemas, we explore the legacy of the late underground filmmaker, with help from fans John Waters and Peter Strickland
Though he only directed one full-length feature film, few filmmakers have left a larger stamp on gay cinema than James Bidgood. Five decades after the release of his hallucinatory porn film Pink Narcissus – now back in cinemas with a new restoration from the BFI – the shockwaves it has sent rippling through queer cinema ever since are unmistakable.
As a male sex worker (Bobby Kendall) lounges around his New York apartment, Pink Narcissus voyages through his sexual fantasies, from a urinal rendezvous to heading up an all-male harem. To enact these erotic reveries, Bidgood transformed his own apartment into various opulent sets, stealing props and materials from his day job as a store window dresser. The results possess the visual splendour of a Gustav Klimt.
“People would always get it mixed up with Pink Flamingos,” says that film’s director, John Waters, who has been involved with Pink Narcissus’s dazzling re-release. “When it was restored, maybe 20 years ago or something, I saw it in the movie theatre and it’s such a beautiful movie, an outsider masterpiece.”
A multihyphenate drag star, photographer, performance artist and filmmaker, Bidgood wanted to bring the beauty of Ziegfeld Theatre burlesque and cabaret into the realm of pornography at a time when full-frontal nudity was prohibited by US censors. But far from seedy, his work is transcendent. “It is very often what you don’t see that is the greater turn-on, because your mind fills in the blanks with what that particular viewer hopes they would discover,” the director told AnOther in 2019, three years before his death from complications relating to Covid-19.
Bidgood’s work has inspired countless other directors. Peter Strickland’s meta-fictional homage Blank Narcissus (Passion of the Swamp) is a steamy, exquisite excursion into the jungle of Bidgood’s film. “The worlds Bidgood concocted were more akin to voyages of discovery or adventure,” says Strickland. “Hollywood missed a trick by not asking him to direct an Indiana Jones offshoot. My short film is in the shadow of Pink Narcissus and the tradition of other New York filmmakers such as the Kuchar brothers, Jack Smith, Barbara Rubin and Wakefield Poole who all made otherworldly and erotic films within the confines of an apartment.”
Beyond Pink Narcissus and those the film has influenced, the queer icon has a significant onscreen footprint. Below is a curated guide to Bidgood’s cinematic legacy.
After a spat with the film’s editors, Bidgood opted to remove his name from his sole cinematic work – and so when the credits rolled, they read, “By Anonymous”. It was only decades later, following much rumour-milling among New York’s intelligentsia, that he claimed this euphoric masterpiece as his own. Featuring underground stars like Charles Ludlam in some of their earliest roles, Pink Narcissus is a torrent of desire awash in sequins, matadors and botany in which even a urinal becomes an object of staggering beauty. “It’s a very sexual movie, in a great way,” enthuses Waters. “It’s a gay sex movie that even straight people can be turned on by – before the hockey show!”
From New York’s first gay film studio Hand in Hand, this extravaganza of queer cinema contains one nugget from Bidgood’s unfinished second film, which he was making under the working title Baghdad. The height of pornographic decadence, the orgiastic clip is shot with Bidgood’s trademark sensual lighting. As Strickland notes, “There might be no gaffer logic as to where a lighting source comes from, but when it makes flesh look that glamorous, why would one care?”
Bidgood himself appears in this documentary about the making of Pink Narcissus, which takes us inside the Wisconsin-born artist’s home in New York City. Bidgood is grounded, eccentric and even a little cranky in the film, which is scattered with insights into his creative philosophy and also offers sharp insights into gentrification in the Big Apple.
Though slightly more prosaic than Bidgood’s other work, this doc is just as essential. Its director, Michael Jacoby, tussles with the problems faced by New York’s senior queer community, from the nitty gritty of legislation to testimonies from landmark artists such as Bidgood. The film only goes to show there is still much progress to be made towards equal gay rights.
An exquisite slice of New Yorkian queer history, Cary Kehayan’s documentary short dredges up archival materials and interviews relating to gay porn photographer Avery Willard. Bidgood reminisces on his moment in the spotlight as a female impersonator at the notorious East Village drag spot Club 82, where he met Willard and other key players in the city’s drag network.
Ira Sachs’ bruising, messy and mournful gay love story follows filmmaker Erik (Thure Lindhardt) – working, as it happens, on a documentary about Avery Willard – and listless lawyer Paul (Zachary Booth), whose on-off romance wends through themes of queer shame, history and oppression. Sachs’ work often tips its hat to figures important to the city’s queer creative history, so it is fitting that Bidgood briefly cameos here as himself.
Two years before his death at the age of 88, Bidgood made one final bow in this sumptuous drag documentary. Michael Seligman and Jennifer Tiexiera’s film hinges on a dusty box of letters gone unopened for 60 years and discovered afresh, the correspondence between former drag stars shedding new light on the colourful daily lives of those frequenters of a bygone scene.
Pink Narcissus is out in cinemas on 12 June and on BFI Blu-ray on 15 June.
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