Kan-Kan, Thursday, November 13, 7:00pm
VELVET VISION: THE STORY OF JAMES BIDGOOD
Velvet Vision is a dazzling exploration of artist James Bidgood, whose 1960s fantasy-laden “beefcake” photographs and cult classic film Pink Narcissus forever changed queer visual culture. Initially shrouded in mystery and misattributed to Warhol and Anger, Pink Narcissus emerged decades later as Bidgood’s singular creation, a dreamworld conjured entirely within the walls of his Manhattan apartment.
Directed by Bart Everly, this 2025 documentary invites audiences into both the mythology and reality of Bidgood’s artistry. Featuring appearances by filmmaker John Waters, art historian Jonathan David Katz, designer Christian Louboutin, and Bidgood himself, the film chronicles his attempts to return to photography after a forty-year hiatus while revisiting his past as a drag artist, window dresser, and costume designer. Through rare archival material and intimate present-day encounters, the film captures the tension between Bidgood’s exuberant imagination and the societal rejection he endured as a queer outsider.
Velvet Vision also situates Bidgood’s legacy within the broader arc of LGBTQ+ art and culture, illustrating how his lushly colored fantasies became lifelines—both for himself and for generations of artists who followed. At once a biography and a meditation on the power of beauty, the film reveals how one man’s devotion to fantasy served as a means of survival, and how his vision continues to inspire today.
There will be a 15-20 minute intermission between the two features.
Directed by Bart Everly | USA | 2025 | 97 Minutes
PINK NARCISSUS
A dazzling work of underground cinema, James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus follows a young hustler who escapes the gritty realities of his life by retreating into vivid dreamscapes of beauty, desire, and erotic fantasy. Shot almost entirely within Bidgood’s New York apartment, the film stands as a fevered vision of queer longing and imagination unlike anything that had come before.
Constructed over seven painstaking years with hand-built sets and intoxicating colors, the film was controversially wrested from Bidgood’s control and completed without his approval—released in 1971 to little fanfare and without his name attached. Yet in the decades since, Pink Narcissus has been reappraised as a landmark of queer cinema, its aesthetic DNA echoed in the work of artists such as Pierre et Gilles and generations of visual stylists who followed.
Now restored in 4K after a years-in-the-making effort, Pink Narcissus’s erotic tableaux shimmer with new life, inviting both longtime admirers and first-time viewers to immerse themselves in Bidgood’s uncompromising vision. More than just a film, it is a mythic artifact of queer art history—achingly beautiful, defiantly imaginative, and eternally seductive.
Directed by James Bidgood | USA | 1971 | 65 Minutes
