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As its title suggests, \u201cPink Narcissus<\/a>\u201d 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\u2019s tiny Manhattan apartment, it\u2019s also a labor of love \u2014 focusing largely on a single actor.<\/p>\n Originally released anonymously, this homoerotic fantasia created by the photographer James Bidgood<\/a>, 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<\/a>, starting April 11.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s \u201cNight on Bald Mountain.\u201d Soon, amid busy butterflies and fluttering flowers, Bidgood\u2019s young star, known as Bobby Kendall, makes his first appearance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Sex acts are implied and full nudity coyly veiled. Explicit yet decorous, \u201cPink Narcissus\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cridiculous\u201d theater, Bidgood\u2019s precursors are taboo-breaking movies like Jack Smith\u2019s \u201cFlaming Creatures\u201d and Kenneth Anger\u2019s \u201cFireworks.\u201d<\/p>\n Like Anger and Smith, Bidgood appears to have been deeply impressed by Josef von Sternberg\u2019s gauzy exotic mise-en-sc\u00e8ne. Bidgood\u2019s vision is neither as exhilaratingly threadbare as Smith\u2019s nor as perversely opulent as Anger\u2019s \u2014 still, blown up to 35-millimeter, the eight-millimeter stock is gorgeously grainy. Anger and Smith are bold, \u201cPink Narcissus\u201d is not. But if Bidgood\u2019s film feels claustrophobic, it\u2019s worth noting that during the period it was made, homosexual relations were illegal in New York.<\/p>\n \u201cPink Narcissus\u201d 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 \u201cPink Narcissus\u201d a review \u2014 although the New York Times critic Vincent Canby did<\/a>. Considering the movie an exercise in humorless camp, he compared it unfavorably to Mike Kuchar\u2019s underground hit \u201cSins of the Fleshapoids<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cPink Narcissus\u201d was belatedly acclaimed in The Voice, as well as The Times, as a \u201cqueer classic<\/a>.\u201d John Waters likened it to \u201cThe Wizard of Oz.\u201d If not exactly \u201cWicked,\u201d the movie is a singular achievement.<\/p>\n Pink Narcissus<\/strong><\/p>\n Runs through April 20 at Metrograph, Manhattan; metrograph.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n