Luminous Procuress

Salvador Dalí considered Luminous Procuress ‘a work of genius’. Featuring members of legendary San Francisco performance troupe The Cockettes, the film was directed by the artist and filmmaker Steven Arnold, a muse and model of Dalí's. Dalí always referred to Arnold as his 'prince', and allegedly co-produced (or at least partly funded) the film, for which he held an elaborate screening at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. Andy Warhol and numerous luminaries of New York society attended the spectacular event, and Dalí projected the film upside down, backwards and sideways. The Village Voice called the film ‘a tour de force of the imagination – a journey through peekboxes of naked tableaux, theatres of mechanical dreams, feasts of monsters and piles of humanity.’