Luminous Procuress

New Digital Restoration

In Conversation

  • Peter Conheim is a film and audio restorationist (and PFA alum) and the head of Cinema Preservation Alliance in El Cerrito. 

  • Steve Seid was a curator at BAMPFA for twenty-five years. Read more about Luminous Procuress and its history in his article ”Illumination Procured: Steven Arnold and the Body Eclectic.”

  • Harry Tsvi Strauch, an early backer of Luminous Procuress, was its main funder and its executive producer.

A work of gender-bending and surrealist erotic art cinema, and American artist Steven Arnold’s first and only feature film, Luminous Procuress feels like it could only have been made in San Francisco.

Sophia Satchell, Sight & Sound
featuring

Steven Solberg, Pandora, Ron Farrell, The Cockettes, ruth weiss,

A gender-obliterating funfest unleashed by the cantankerous cross-dressing Cockettes, the legendary Luminous Procuress brazenly recounts the mystical 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 Arnold, an art outlier of prophetic leanings, Luminous Procuress—an exotic amalgam of outrageous wearable art, oneiric imagery, and erotically charged tableaux—gloriously drags on.

Steve Seid
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Steven Arnold
  • Steven Solberg
Cinematographer
  • Steven Arnold
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 75 mins
Source
  • BAMPFA