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Posts: 3513
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
RIP Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Bardot has passed away. RIP. What, you ask, does Brigitte Bardot have to do with flamenco? Back in the mid to late '60s she was the lover of Manitas de Plata. There is a YouTube video, taken in 1968 or 1969, of Manitas de Plata playing for Brigitte Bardot who was his paramour at the time. (BB looks as cute and sexy as ever in the video, sucking on her finger, playing with her hair, and giving adoring looks to Manitas!) The guitar Manitas is playing has a couple of Matadors drawn on the upper bout and something on the lower bout that I cannot make out. In any case, Manitas must have liked drawings on his guitar because there are several of them. And Brigitte certainly looked like she was all-in with Manitas.
Manitas died on 5 November 2014, and his obituary in the Washington Post quoted Brigitte Bardot, in an interview with Agence France Presse, as saying, "Manitas carried with him all the joie de vivre and carefree attitude of my youth.” Not a bad way to be remembered by such as la Bardot.
Bill
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And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Brigitte Bardot had a strong cultural impact, in both Europe and the USA. Evidence of this is the publication in April,1959 by Esquire magazine of a long article by a French cultural heavyweight, the feminist Simone de Beauvoir.
"If we want to understand what B.B. represents, it is not important to know what the young woman named Brigitte Bardot is really like. Her admirers and detractors are concerned with the imaginary creature they see on the screen through a tremendous cloud of ballyhoo. In so far as she is exposed to the public gaze, her legend has been fed by her private life no less than by her movie roles."
De Beauvoir says that "Brigitte Bardot," the cultural figure, represents a woman freed from sexual repression, completely sincere in her total impulsiveness. This figure frightened and angered the old guard moralists, as well as inspiring the young and progressive in France and the USA. You may or may not agree with all of de Beaivoir's detailed analysis, but I think she is correct in this.
I was 18 when "And God Created Woman" came out in 1956. I was away from home and the family I rebelled against, for the second year at university. It was the only time I ever fell in love with a movie star. Looking back, I believe Bardot influenced some of the girls I knew at the time.
Some time in the late '80s-early '90s the Directors' Guild showed a restored print of the film at their theater. I drove down to Hollywood from Santa Barbara to see it. There was a lecture and philosophical discussion beforehand. Even in my fifties, after a 20-year marriage that had begun as a heated love affair, and a handful of "serious relationships" before and after, I was moved by Bardot's performance on the screen.
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