From Payton McCarty-Simas’ article for the Brooklyn Rail:

James Bidgood’s seminal poetic, hyper-artificial investigation of queer beauty and desire, Pink Narcissus (1971), is a lush and solipsistic jewel box jumble of myth and cheesecake; its gorgeous pastel surfaces ironically came to entrap their maker forever in his own doomed, autoerotic reverie. This hyper-aestheticized, 68-minute, 8 and 16 mm experimental film—beautifully restored in 4K by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and playing at Metrograph accompanied by a new book of the director’s photography this month—depicts a lonely, self-obsessed hustler lost in a Cocteau-style hall of mirrors, wandering through elaborate sets where he meets boys with taut muscles, pouty expressions, and lavishly scanty costumes. Each vignette in this tangled web of nested wet dreams (a structure Bidgood once called “an homage to gay whack-off fantasies”) is rendered with the delicate etherealness of one of Jacques Demy’s artfully stylized, queer-coded fairytale confections and the openly lustful, yet oddly innocent, gaze of a mid-century gay softcore magazine.

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Browse all of James Bidgood’s work at CLAMP