JAMES BIDGOOD - IMPORTADO

James Bidgood moved to New York from Wisconsin in the early 1950s after having been a drag queen, window dresser, vaudeville and experimental theatre author, and he began to work as a photographer of male nudes for American muscle magazines. In 1963 he found a producer for Pink Narcissus, the film that was to become the summation of his poetic spirit, but the budget was so low that he arranged the scene designs in his Manhattan flat, where he lived for seven years in a dreamlike, kitsch world made of chiffon costumes, silk butterflies, polystyrene urinals, rococo mother-of-pearl-like mirrors and telephones studded with coloured stones. For production reasons, Pink Narcissus, signed by ?Anonymous? did the rounds of the New York underground scene for years, every now and then making it into the art cinemas. In spite of its rarity, it became a cult in its genre, even though for years no one knew who the director was: after the film came out, James Bidgood stayed well away from the limelight, until Benedikt Taschen?s monographic work in 1999 once again aroused interest in his works. Since then, photographs from the Photoplay series and from Pink Narcissus have been exhibited in a number of galleries in Europe and America. The film revolves around the figure of a latter-day Narcissus, played by the stunning Bobby Kendall, who wanders through the seedy districts of a fantastical city in perpetual search of sex and of the materialisation of his fantasies, in which he travels through space and time, personifying a bull-fighter, an emperor, a Roman slave, or a gay caliph. It is erotic, witty, romantic, excessive and openly artificial, a parody-homage to the stars and stage sets of 1930s and 40s musicals.