Luminous Procuress (1971): if an alien made a film about human sexuality, it would look like this (Review)

It’s quite an achievement to live your life as a work of art. Steven Arnold, whose film Luminous Procuress has been restored and reissued on Blu-Ray by Second Run, seems to have achieved it. His star and childhood friend, the performance artist Pandora, recalls his bedroom being decorated “like Louis XIV”, while the artist Ira Yeager credits him with creating the hippie look as early as 1960. Everything he did seems to have been as aesthetically minded as his lone feature, a near-plotless, sexually explicit mix of drag revue and mystic symbolism that recalls Kenneth Anger, Barbara Rubin, Tobe Hooper’s still-underrated Eggshells and James Bidgood’s underground gay fantasia Pink Narcissus.

Rubin’s Christmas on Earth had been repeatedly seized by the police as obscene, while Bidgood funded his film by doing photoshoots for the ‘fitness’ magazines that offered a plausible-deniability outlet for gay erotica in less enlightened times. Luminous Procuress, while nobody’s idea of family viewing, is harder to classify as pornographic or even erotic. Aside from the one hardcore scene, whose male performer is the film’s set designer “Skosh”, most of the film’s nudity comes from the Cockettes, the pioneering San Francisco drag troupe. In this age when RuPaul can front advertising campaigns for our national broadcaster, it’s thrilling to be reminded of what drag looked like before it became domesticated. The Cockettes don’t restrict their definition of drag to “female impersonation” – indeed, there are female members of the troupe, who don’t necessarily perform as drag kings. The aim is to mess with gender presentation in any way possible, with lipsticked mouths protruding from bushy beards and diaphanous dresses exposing plenty of hairy skin.

There are, then, things about Luminous Procuress that are decades ahead of their time, as well as things that remind you this could only happen in the early ’70s. There were a lot of art-house films around this time that eschewed plot in favour of pure (often erotic or transgressive) performance, some of which are mentioned above. Some of these films were serving notice that the 1960s party was over, with Shuji Terayama’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Werner Herzog’s Even Dwarves Started Small depicting lusty rebellions that quickly dissolve into nihilistic violence and chaos. Ideologically, these films were making the exact opposite point to Arnold; formally, they’re harder to distinguish from each other. Because these films are so different to anything being produced now, it can be hard to dig underneath their alienating surface and get a grip on what they mean.

Luminous Procuress‘s takes on sex and gender identity aren’t hard to discern, helped, perhaps, by the fact that the debates it wades into are more current now than they have been in many years. The film’s other ideas can be hard to shake out. The soundtrack consists of precisely two ingredients: an astonishing, pulsing, organic electronic drone score by Warner Jepson, and occasional dialogue in an ad-libbed, infantile gibberish language. According to film curator Steve Seid in the bonus features, Arnold had written actual dialogue, but his meticulous attention to costumes and sets did not extend to finding a soundproofed room to shoot in. He was distraught to find his audio was unusable and decided to make it look deliberate in post-production.

Does it matter? Even if Arnold’s dialogue had been lovingly preserved, Luminous Procuress would still be a sensory experience rather than a narrative one. It might have helped viewers through the opaque stretches where you feel tempted to dismiss the film as a bunch of hippies on acid dressing up and having sex. Which it is, obviously – but there are also many striking images, occult and Egyptological symbolism and passages of eerie beauty. My favourite was the extremely wide-angled camera that pans over the exhausted aftermath of an orgy, close enough to make it impossible to tell whose hand is on whose thigh. It’s just a landscape of skin, refusing to differentiate between taboo or non-taboo body parts in the ways mainstream and pornographic films alike would. If an alien came down to film a documentary about human sexual behaviour, it would probably look like this.

Whatever Luminous Procuress‘s strengths and weaknesses are as a film experience, it’s unquestionably a valuable piece of LGBTQ+ cultural history, and the extras are wisely angled towards placing it in its proper context. As well as the talk by Steve Seid mentioned above, there’s an interview with Luminous Procuress‘s producer Harry Tsvi Strauch which offers vital insight into Arnold’s intentions with the film. There are two superb essays in the accompanying booklet by Seid and Elena Gorfinkel, the former full of quotes from unpublished manuscripts that testify to his diligent research. Most of all, there is the restored print, which will be a revelation to anyone who’s seen the inferior bootleg copies the film was previously available in. Mindful of the police raids on screenings of comparable films by Rubin and Paul Morrissey, the first print of Luminous Procuress artificially darkened Skosh’s big cameo, an act of self-censorship reversed on this disc. Second Run has brought many obscure films to light, but rarely as literally as this.

Graham on Luminous Procuress (1971)