“Unfortunately, I’m addicted to dreaming,” James Bidgood said in a 2010 interview with Butt Magazine when describing his relationship with fantasy. Indeed, across photography and filmmaking, but also in window-dressing, styling, costume design and performance, Bidgood would translate the land of his dreams into a hyperstylised reality with displays of beauty that pulsed with a genuine aesthetic power. Despite the stunning quality of his work, he would remain dismally and woefully underfunded, spending most of his life in near-abject poverty before passing away in 2022 at the age of 88. Pink Narcissus (1971) was his only feature film and that truly should have been the project to catapult him into a successful artistic trajectory, but the film’s final cut would eventually be taken away from him. Bidgood dedicated seven painstaking years to making it, yet the film was edited and released without his consent and credited to “Anonymous” until 1998, when it was finally re-released with his name over 20 years later.
The film was all shot with a Super 8 camera within the confines of his New York apartment – a space that Bidgood transformed into an entire cosmos. He meticulously crafted the candy-coloured papier-mâché set pieces and designed elaborately handmade costumes, lit every shot himself, repurposed found objects and materials… The private domain of the home was turned into a shimmering, hyper-saturated sexual utopia generating its own gravity. The result is a stunning piece of erotica that embraces its sheer artificial expressiveness as a driving force for cinematic invention, yet is never loud or declarative. It remains intimate, sensual and strangely timeless.
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Beneath the dazzling surface of double exposures and clever cinematography tricks using lenses and angles to create the illusion of depth, Pink Narcissus shows an incredibly intimate understanding of the world of fantasy. Familiar imagery is reconfigured and filtered through a newly queer, free-form gaze that revels in its own vibrancy, gazing, intoxicated, over its protagonist’s muscular body in fawning detail. Whereas the original Narcissus myth serves as an ancient cautionary tale about the perils of solipsism and self-obsession, it’s not uncommon to read Narcissus’ desire for his own reflection as homoerotic and assume that a fixation with his own reflection is a manifestation of same-sex desire. Reaching through one’s reflection in order to indulge in the self is an act that depends on the private realm of the imagination: it is in the unfettered sanctuary of the mind and its capacity to dream, that the act of escape is turned inward and becomes entirely one’s own, creating a private fortress strong enough to contain fantasies that can only be explored in solitude.
As Bidgood’s Narcissus (Bobby Kendall) languishes in his beautiful pink apartment, memories of sexual encounters are sublimated into a neverending string of meandering dreams and fantasies. In the fantasy of a bullring, he is the matador faced not with a bull as his adversary, but with a Kenneth Anger-style leather daddy on a motorbike. In the Roman bath, he is both the emperor and his tortured sex slave. In the harem, he is both sultan and concubine. And in the lush garden drawn from Greek mythology, he is no longer Narcissus, but Pan: the satyr god of the wild, a symbol closely connected to fertility and the season of spring.
Watching Pink Narcissus today, I was struck by the similarities that Bidgood’s sense of wonder, belief in true beauty and use of masculinity as a source of artistic inspiration share with a more contemporary earworm: Björk’s ‘Venus as a Boy’. Written by the Icelandic singer-songwriter and produced by her long-time collaborator Nellee Hooper, the 1993 track was also inspired by a boy who saw everything, in the artist’s words, “from a beauty point of view”. Björk approaches her subject with curiosity and enchantment, enveloping us in a sweeping, ethereal atmosphere built around tabla drums and gentle keys, her lyrics – He believes in beauty / He’s Venus as a boy – transforming the longing into an imaginative force that draws us into a world of intimacy and romantic ideation. As with Pink Narcissus, desire takes flight on the wings of fantasy, carrying a delirious artistry into the realm of myth with a real understanding of what constitutes beauty.