As its title suggests, “Pink Narcissus” is something of a hothouse flower. A feature-length movie, shot over a period of seven years on eight-millimeter film and elaborate sets constructed in the filmmaker’s tiny Manhattan apartment, it’s also a labor of love — focusing largely on a single actor.
Originally released anonymously, this homoerotic fantasia created by the photographer James Bidgood, newly restored by the film and television archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, gets its first theatrical run in 54 years at Metrograph, starting April 11.
The breathtaking opening sequence in which a full moon is glimpsed through a tangled forest is as fastidious as a late 1930s Disney animation, an association supported by a musical track heavy on program music like Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” Soon, amid busy butterflies and fluttering flowers, Bidgood’s young star, known as Bobby Kendall, makes his first appearance.
The movie has no dialogue and, so far as I can tell, no women. Dressed variously in tight white jeans and short kimonos, but most often posed as a nude odalisque, Kendall plays a kept rent-boy whose fantasies provide a succession of set pieces, as when he imagines himself as a matador whose bull is a hard-charging biker. Kendall also participates in a toga party and is entertained by a provocative belly dancer in a male seraglio.
Sex acts are implied and full nudity coyly veiled. Explicit yet decorous, “Pink Narcissus” is founded on a dialectic between the erotic and the abject. The rococo apartment and an idealized natural world of rosy sunsets vie with a dank public urinal and an invented, garbage-strewn Times Square where pushcarts sell vibrators and other sex toys. Charles Ludlam can be glimpsed among the denizens of this sordid domain, but more than Ludlam’s “ridiculous” theater, Bidgood’s precursors are taboo-breaking movies like Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures” and Kenneth Anger’s “Fireworks.”
Like Anger and Smith, Bidgood appears to have been deeply impressed by Josef von Sternberg’s gauzy exotic mise-en-scène. Bidgood’s vision is neither as exhilaratingly threadbare as Smith’s nor as perversely opulent as Anger’s — still, blown up to 35-millimeter, the eight-millimeter stock is gorgeously grainy. Anger and Smith are bold, “Pink Narcissus” is not. But if Bidgood’s film feels claustrophobic, it’s worth noting that during the period it was made, homosexual relations were illegal in New York.
“Pink Narcissus” opened in New York in May 1971 and played at the Cinema Village for six weeks, a run coinciding with the second anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion. Arty porn or porny art? Although awash with ads for gay and straight sex films, and featuring frequent articles on gay liberation, The Village Voice did not deign to give “Pink Narcissus” a review — although the New York Times critic Vincent Canby did. Considering the movie an exercise in humorless camp, he compared it unfavorably to Mike Kuchar’s underground hit “Sins of the Fleshapoids.”
Decades passed: Bidgood, whose baroque photographs for Muscle Boy and other male physique magazines were rehabilitated as gallery art, finally took credit for the film. “Pink Narcissus” was belatedly acclaimed in The Voice, as well as The Times, as a “queer classic.” John Waters likened it to “The Wizard of Oz.” If not exactly “Wicked,” the movie is a singular achievement.
Pink Narcissus
Runs through April 20 at Metrograph, Manhattan; metrograph.com.