Pink Narcissus : James Bidgood, 1970, cores, 70’
Cineclube Imagem-pensamento #6 // 26 novembro
O Delirante mundo de fantasia de um jovem homossexual, amante do requinte e da perfeição. O diretor James Bidgood, não poupou detalhes do imaginário de um adolescente dos anos 70, usando uma linguagem poética, vibrante e de incrível beleza.
Obcecado pela juventude eterna, o personagem de Narcissus explora todos os arquétipos do jovem gay e seus mais vicerais desejos. Passando do extravagante pelo épico ao underground, a mistura de estilos serve para ilustrar com bastante precisão o encantamento pelo nu masculino e sua carga de homo erotismo que imperam no universo homossexual.
James Bidgood is a photographer and filmmaker who worked mostly between 1963 and 1970. He camefrom Madison to New York when he was 18, with the goal of becoming musical comedy star. Working on the set and costume in which he was acting he started photographying in somptuos colors accorfing to some tableaux. From the early photos he made he create a world of fantasy and dreamlike atmosphere which requires series.
Pink Narcissus is Bidgood’s long term, obsessive homage to the young male body. It is a ritual of adoration centering around a single model – Boddy Kendall. The film was painstakingly hand created : most scenes are the result of 20 to 30 takes and miles of footage…/..
Pink Narcissus is Bidgood masterpiece, but as far as he is concerned, it is his ruined masterpiece, for the film waas taken away from him before he could finish shooting and oversee the final editing. The only copy of Pink Narcissus that exists now was pieced together by th editors, some of it after Bidgood was no longer involved. A majority of the images Bidgood shoot are there, as is most of the symbolic narrative intended by him….
Pink Narcissus was Bidgood’s firts attempt to create an allegorical narrative about eroticism based on the myth of Narcissus. He intended the film to be a circular journey – from innocence to the discovery of sensuality to depravity to annihilition and then back to innocence…/…
The allegory of Pink Narcissus could be summed up as follows : In a meadow at night, all seems peaceful and innocent, except perharps a web upon which is perched a fat, predadory spider. A nearby chrysalis opens to release a yellow butterfly, pristine and alluring in its natural settings. That fragile butterfly becomes synonymous with the innocent, budding masculinity of a beautiful young man in a Times Square hotel rooms, who is quickly learning to use his body for pleasure and gain. As he waits for his john to arrive, sensual fantaisies take him into idealized fairy tale worlds of unrestrained appetite and libidinized beauty. But the same pleasures also lead him further into his identity as a prostitute and into anonymous sexual encounters…
Many of the layers and suggestive details of Pink Narcissus were lost during the editing process, or blurred when the footage was blown up from 8mm to a 16mm work print and then to 35mm, and then much later transfered to video. Like Sternberg and Felinni, Bidgood treated the margins of his frame alsmost as important as the center . He never planned for different formats that might be eliminate details at the edges. A storyborad was used during filming, but there was no script. The allegory grew naturally from Bidgood’s experiments with the camera, and from the six and half year, day to day collaboration with Bobby Kendall. Although many of the scenes never reached their finished form, some of th eimages remain precisely linked in a very complicated way.
Bruce Benderson
Cineclube Imagem-Pensamento
Contemplado pelo 7º Edital do Audiovisual de Pernambuco – Funcultura 2013-2014,constitui-se de 10 programas, com sessões semanais de 2h30′
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4as-feiras, em Bcúbico, às 19h . público estimado: 25 pessoas . entrada livre
// Programação Cineclube: Imagem Pensamento //
//08 out // Reminicences to a Journey to Lithuania
Jonas Mekas, 1972, 82′ (legendado em português)
//15 out // Imitations of Life, Mike Hoolboom, 2003, 21′ + Nostalgia, Hollis Frampton, 1976, 36′
( filmes legendados em português)
// 22 out // Programa Peter Rose
Secondary Currents, 1982, 17′ (legendado em português) + Metalogue, 1996, 3′ +Odysseus in Ithaca, 2006, 5’20 + Solaristics, 2013, 10′ + Studies in Transfalumination, 2008, 5′
// 29 out // Reassemblage
Trinh Minh-ha, 1982, 40′ (legendado em português)
// 05 nov // De la servitude moderne / Da Servidão Moderna
Jean François Brient, 2013, 52′ (legendado em português)
//26 nov // Pink Narcissus, James Bidgood, 1971, 65′
// 03 dez // Line Describing a Cone, Anthony Mc Call, 1972, 30′ + Conical Intersect, Gordon Matta Clark, 1975, 18’40
// 10 dez // The Deadman
Peggy Ahwesh & Keith Sanborn, 1989, 36′ (legendado em português )
// 17 dez // Nikita Kino
Vivian Ostrovsky, 2002, 41′ (legendado em português)
// 07 jan 2015 // Curtas de Jonas Mekas
Programação de yann beauvais, cineasta e curador de mostras de filmes e vídeos desde 1982, com assessoria do designer de filmes Ж, designer de filmes formado em direção de fotografia e pós-graduado em artes visuais pelo IUNA (Argentina).
– Programação apresentada por yann beauvais