Warhol and Dalí loved it – but Luminous Procuress, Steven Arnold’s trippy sex film, was never widely released. Now on Blu-ray, it offers a rare glimpse into the artist’s esoteric world
he late 1960s and early 70s was a fecund time for US cinema, but not every revolutionary film from that period has achieved the hallowed status of a Mean Streets or a Badlands. One, at least, has been lost for almost half a century. Emerging out of San Francisco’s countercultural Haight-Ashbury scene, Luminous Procuress is an enigmatic, transgressive and gleefully queer journey to the divine state of enlightenment lurking just beyond the carnal. And you can’t say that about The Godfather.
“Steven said, ‘Let’s make an erotic art film because there’s nothing out there,’” Strauch tells me. “There was I Am Curious Yellow, but that was softcore. We wanted to show. My wife and I decided we would pull together the funds to make the movie.” Among the film’s investors, says Strauch, was someone high up in the fashionable Ernst tie company, as well as “a dentist of ours, who worked on a lot of the famous hippies’ teeth here in the neighbourhood”.
Luminous Procuress was not widely reviewed outside San Francisco, though Molly Haskell in the Village Voice wrote a considered assessment, calling it “not really erotic, nor even sensual, but distanced, stylised, and theatrical”. She also noted that it was being sold in limited editions to collectors, like prints of an artwork. Seid seems surprised to learn this. “Huh. I’m not sure how successful they were. If they sold one or two, I would be impressed.