PURPLE PARADISO: “LUMINOUS PROCURESS” by Steven Arnold, 1972, Your Movie Of The Day Curated And Reviewed By Savannah Nolan and Olivier Zahm

Luminous Procuress is an avant-garde experimental queer film from 1971 made by American multidisciplinary artist Steven Arnold, painter, set and costume designer, illustrator, and protégé of Salvador Dali.

It was Arnold’s first and only feature-length film. Shot on 16mm, the surreal Felliniesque picture is an elusive jewel of early ’70s mystical, fantastic, queer cinema. Molly Haskell, writing in the Village Voice in 1971, called it “a West Coast Satyricon.”  The film garnered Steven Arnold an invitation to the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.

Legendary artist Salvador Dalí was so impressed with the movie that he approached Arnold after the screening and asked to “be his new best friend.” Dalí went on to arrange private screenings of the film in New York, where he invited the art elite, including Andy Warhol. Warhol praised the film’s genius. Arnold became a favorite of Dalí and in 1974 went to study and live with Dalí in Spain. He helped Dalí to embellish and inaugurate his Teatro-Museo Dalí.

The 75-minute film — starring The Cockettes (a cantankerous anarchic theatrical group of acid-head drag queens) and Arnold’s muse and best friend dating back to his high-school days, Pandora — shows male and female nudity, and is praised today for its gender-bending sexual attitude. The film is a passage of liberation, in which two young hippie men enter a strange mansion where a magic potion (we surmise LSD) promises glimpses of a transformational realm. They are led by the mystical “Procuress” (played by Pandora).

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