Pink Narcissus      Director: James BidgoodCert: NoneStarring: Bobby Kendall, Charles LudlamRunning Time: 1 hr 11 minsAny culturally semi-aware person coming to James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus for the first time is sure to be taken aback by the breadth of its influence. First released in 1971, this languorous sexual fantasy – complete with double exposure, stop motion and other effects – breathes the same air as the experimental work of Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. But Bidgood’s queer fantasia looks now to have had a deeper (if less acknowledged) reach into the aesthetics of pop video and fashion photography. It hardly seems possible that Morrissey never borrowed an image for a Smiths cover.Arriving in a beautiful 4K restoration for a rare Irish theatrical outing, Pink Narcissus works us through the fantasies of a young hustler as he lounges in a decorative apartment. He sees himself as a matador. The surroundings become a fantastic public lavatory. We get a belly dance for an exotic potentate that indulges in similar orientalism as we once got in advertisements for Fry’s Turkish Delight.The miracle is that all this was, on a minuscule budget, improvised within Bidgood’s tiny Manhattan flat between 1963 and 1970. Much cultural water flowed beneath a great many bridges in that period, but, shot on beautifully imperfect 8mm film (a hair in the gate keeps reappearing bottom left), Pink Narcissus retains an impressively consistent vision throughout. The title seems to be acknowledging Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus – and, sure enough, Bidgood, a pioneer in gay photography, is similarly at home to the exotic and horrible. Perhaps the most impressive scenes now are the grubby, nightmarish re-creations of the downtown decadence that oozes just outside the protagonist’s domain.What does strike one as odd, however, is a tension between the coy and the explicit. A head-on shot of, shall we say, seminal effusion surely influenced a similar sequence from Gaspar Noé’s Love (there in duck-inducing 3D). Elsewhere, diaphanous fabrics fall strategically over proudly tumescent members as their owners gyrate. “As long as whatever was not nude, it evidently was legal,” Bidgood said later. “But legal or not, it seemed to me many times sexier, far more naughty than had it been bare.”That suggests a surprisingly conservative sensibility – and, in fact, most of Pink Narcissus could now be broadcast in primetime. But the sense of adventure, experiment and risk remains. An essential artefact.On limited release from Friday, June 12th