Steven Arnold's Luminous Procuress
A gender-obliterating funfest unleashed by the cantankerous cross-dressing Cockettes, Luminous Procuress (1971) is an elusive masterwork of early seventies mystical queer cinema. Restored in an immaculate new print, Luminous Procuress brazenly recounts the passage of two lissome hippie lads who enter a strange mansion where a magic potion promises glimpses of a transformational realm. Led by the mystical "Procuress" (the ever-sculptural Pandora), the two naïfs are privy to a delirious vision of consciousness unbounded by gender or desire. Created in San Francisco's Mission District by Steven Arnold,Luminous Procuress, an exotic amalgam of outrageous wearable art, oneiric imagery, and erotically charged tableaux, gloriously drags on. - Steve Seid
Introduced by Steve Seid, former film and video curator at BAM/PFA who spearheaded the preservation and Bradford Nordeen, Director/Founder, Dirty Looks.
In person: Steve Seid and Bradford Nordeen
"The film's power, like that of Performance or Flaming Creatures, orChant d' Amour by Genet, is in its creation of an alternative world, a new way of seeing and living that alters experience itself, including the film viewing experience." - Bill Nichols, The Staff, Los Angeles
Presented in collaboration with Dirty Looks
Funded in part by the Ostrovsky Family Fund. Curated by Bradford Nordeen, Steve Anker and Bérénice Reynaud, as part of the Jack H. Skirball Series.