24 Frames: Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971)

What were some specific influences on the film?
Well, it’s always about MGM musicals and all that kind of stuff. And a movie like The Red Shoes, which was at the time such a phenomenon. God, that picture! They tried to make it into a musical, but it bombed, Jule Styne wrote the music, and they tried it, because it’s really such a terribly corny story … and it is so fabulous…. It’s about a girl that’s in a ballet that they do called “The Red Shoes” [with Russian accent], the Russian guy, the director of the ballet “The Red Shoes,” and it’s about a girl who puts on these magic red shoes and then dances to death … cause she can’t take them off. And that’s pretty much … what the movie is about…. She ends up dying in the end, but they still give the ballet but [whispers] with just the shoes!… [gasps] So then he comes out and cries, oh, it’s so fabulous…. But the color! There had never been a movie with color like that. They did such wonderful things, it was like gelatin floating down, like gelatin, oh, like floating down! It was incredible! I don’t know that there is even a decent [print]. I’m sure they let it go to hell, you know, nobody cared about anything like that, nobody thought it was art until it was too late.

James Bidgood, 2006

Filmes bacanas de cada ano que o cinema viveu: 1971

1- Morte em Veneza (Morte a Venezia, Luchino Visconti)Meu primeiro Visconti ainda na tenríssima idade e seria quase nulo mencionar o tamanho da marca deixada em mim, numa época em que ainda há a sinceridade do gostar, sem afetação externa de fulaninhos dizendo ser Visconti um dos maiores do mundo. Mais do que Thomas Mann