Ideological wretches and moralistic hyenas have rushed to, after the recent death Brigitte Bardot, instead of her films and the entire 'BB phenomenon' that aesthetically redefined European civilization in the fifties and sixties, they talk about the actress's statements and trivial court rulings. Hardly anything shows the ugliness of our new world so precisely as the retarded attempts to reduce everything to politics, to ideologically devalue more creative and diverse cultural points with the stupid logic of political defamation. In the sixties, more people talked about Bardot in France than about anything else, which today, with nostalgia, we must read - taking into account, of course, that the interest in the actress, who surpassed the boundaries of film, was both 'mundane' and tabloid - as a kind of aestheticism and a decadent sense of the supremacy of style and form: isn't it better to talk - after all, it is one of the most serious topics in art - about a beautiful woman than about political clowns?
The spectacular appearance of Bardot marked a moment of crucial recovery for a continent that had gone through the hell of war destruction only ten years before: the change in the sphere of sexuality expressed that precious vitality, and even a discursive orientation in a new horizon. The despair that transformed into glamour was not an ethical banalization, but a return to the classical paradigm, which was defined back in the Renaissance and still represents the worldview foundation of European culture. The film in which this cathartic presentation of Bardot took place was Et Dieu... créa la femme (And God... created woman, 1956), but to truly understand the significance of the actress and her performance, it should be noted that the direction Rogera Vadima was almost mediocre: there was nothing in the visual presentation significantly, nor Bardot sameThe stylization was mediocre, but the effect of the female appearance itself was undeniable, tied to Bardot's inner energy, not to the visual 'infrastructure'.
To further clarify. The naked body of the Bardo in widescreenin the mid-fifties could have been a sensation in itself: the actress's appeal was such that not only a (film) star was born, but an entire phenomenon, which will be discussed later. Simone de Beauvoir to write a famous essay in 1959. However, from our distance it is easy to determine that most of the credit for this belongs to Bardot herself, because Vadim's mise-en-scène in Et Dieu... créa la femme (even if the limitations are taken into account widescreena) a direct contrast to the iconographic dedication to the female form, which we find, for example, in Hitchcock i von SternbergaNamely, throughout the entire film, Vadim Bardot holds in a medium shot or long shotin, perhaps privileging the figure at the expense of details in which an erotic enigma could accumulate. (Beginning Contempt, among other things, can also be read as Godard's a parody of Vadim's style and mode, in which Bardot's body was obligatorily commodified.)
In short, there was not enough visual investment in Vadim's setup since the gradational function was not understood. close upa. The director's voyeurism is of the empty type because it passively embodies glamour, but does not reach a fetishistic (hence iconic, signifier) focus. In this sense, Bardot became, in a way, 'bigger than the film' from the very beginning. The effect, paradoxically, was deeply cinematic: Bardot, almost single-handedly, also offered a new kind of film blonde, who was located exactly between the early, 'proletarian', slightly vulgar, sexually accessible Hollywood version embodied by actresses ranging from Jean Harlow do Marilyn Monroe, and the 'aristocratic', glacially perfect version forever defined by Hitchcock. The Bardot icon was almost self-portrait: she very quickly became BB, Bébé, an iconic sign that was also linguistic, an irresistible formula, globally recognizable initials.
But what kind of actress was Bardot in terms of craftsmanship? And is that even a relevant question, given her absolute visual interpellation? Some critics have lightly criticized the alleged thematic poverty of her roles, but the emphasis has actually shifted to the other side: if the standard understanding consists in emphasizing the diversity of performance through an insistence on the 'complexity' of gestures and intonations, then authenticity Bardot bases her work on the consistency of her habitsBecause, in yet another film by a mediocre director, In case of misfortune (In Case of Accident, 1958) Clauda Autant-Lare, but the way Bardot holds her body, how her movements are the result of a strong internal agent, presents a fundamental challenge (in a double sense) for the most striking representative of the 'old guard', Jean Gabina, who encounters - in the famous skirt-raising shot - the sexual energy of the young generation, after which nothing will be the same again.
Especially in the final stages of their careers, John Wayne always played John Wayne, and Cary Grant - Cary Great. And Hawks, Hitchcock and Ford was to further design and dramatize this intriguing game along the (extra)diegetic axis, where a strong personality was thoughtfully indexed in the mise-en-scène. Brigitte Bardot, already at the start of her career, due to an image that could not be suppressed, was 'condemned' to play Brigitte Bardot, whereby, for the directors, it was of crucial importance how to articulate this necessary 'incorporation' into different narrative lines. The three directors managed, each from a different perspective and each in accordance with their own authorial preferences, to approach the BB phenomenon from an intriguing side, and thus offer works that are, at the same time, small essays on Bardot, or rather, on the variations of how a strong iconographic personality can be creatively 'used' to extract precisely metapoetic implications.
What is particularly interesting is that the most melodramatic intention - the desire to show that Bardot really knows how to act - unexpectedly fell to Henri-Georges Clouzotu, the coldest and most misanthropic of all French directors. The result was triumphant, Truth (The Truth, 1960), a film that - perhaps precisely because of the author's intention - was also responsible for two nervous breakdowns (Bardot's then-husband, as well as Clouzot's husband), one heart attack (Clouzot) and one suicide attempt (Bardot).
In the film, Bardot - to use an adjective usually used for other types of actors - masterfully plays a girl who first casually and then extremely fatalistically experiences issues of love, sexual freedom and promiscuity in a convincing way. l'amour fou narrative. In Clouzot's oppressive courtroom setting where French youth are exposed to misunderstanding and cynical judgment, Bardot creates a character whose dramatic complexity surpasses anything she has played, say, Jeanne Moreau, in representing the depth of psychological motivation. (End in next issue)
Bonus video:
