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Posts: 3514
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.
This is one of the most iconic guitar videos ever made. Those camera angles and close up shots. Props to the camera man. It's like an act of love making. Foreplay-Play-Climax. At 3:35 a prelude to climax.
In my sector of the world, the artists who are ridiculously talented and ridiculously leftist, Bardot isn’t being eulogized positively. The word on the street regarding her is that she was an anti immigration nationalist who associated with the Le Pen political family in France and has been branded bigot.
Personally Bardot never meant a lot to me, but I find it reductionist that she’s placed in a position of being a bigot, when honestly she’s not been relevant as a sex symbol in over fifty years. If the people who call her bigot has been concerned with her actions and opinions, I sure didn’t hear about it the last three decades.
In my sector of the world, the artists who are ridiculously talented and ridiculously leftist, Bardot isn’t being eulogized positively. The word on the street regarding her is that she was an anti immigration nationalist who associated with the Le Pen political family in France and has been branded bigot.
Personally Bardot never meant a lot to me, but I find it reductionist that she’s placed in a position of being a bigot, when honestly she’s not been relevant as a sex symbol in over fifty years. If the people who call her bigot has been concerned with her actions and opinions, I sure didn’t hear about it the last three decades.
I've heard about her racism and far-right views for years, well over a decade, and I was not paying any particular attention. Nothing new here.
Her political activity is what cemented her as a bigot, not any reductionist viewpoints.
RE: RIP Brigitte Bardot (in reply to Bulerias2005)
Yeah, for a short while some portions of the left in France were hopeful because she was coming out strong on animal rights issues. Then some started to notice that she was strangely more concerned about the tiny amount of ritualistic killings in Muslim communities than about the mass killings involved in the food industry. Then she started going RFK Jr. levels of insane by saying sh1t like how in the animal world "bastards" are waste that animals want to get rid of and that it's a shame that in human societies we don't treat "bastards" the same.
She was condemned in court at least a half a dozen times for incitation to racial hatred. No idea if that news was broadly disseminated internationally, but it's common knowledge in France. She wasn't exactly shy about those opinions and about her ties with the far right.
I'd imagine a lot of it is just generational. I'm of a later generation that those here who remember her fondly. To me she was always an old bat with mostly only gross things to say on panels and talk shows. Basically a French Rosie O'Donnell, but sexy when she was young? Beats me. RIP nonetheless.
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My involvement was with the cultural phenomenon which went by the same name as an actual person. As attention faded for the cultural phenomenon the person herself began to emerge, even to change. As time passed, the two diverged radically.
I paid little attention to the embittered old woman who inherited sole ownership of the name. She made use of the name recognition to attract attention to her causes. Her avowed concern for animals didn't compensate for her racism. Hermann Göring reportedly loved animals.
At one time the two personas may have overlapped. In her youth the life of Brigitte Bardot the person often paralleled that of "Brigitte Bardot" the movie star. She was quoted to the effect that what you saw on the screen was just herself. I thought her directors and script writers might have influenced her idea of herself, literally providing a role model. Or maybe the influence went both ways?
I started this thread because, as I pointed out, Brigitte Bardot was at one time the lover of Manitas de Plata. It seems to have morphed into a critique of Brigitte Bardot's later involvement in right-wing politics, bigotry against Muslims, and anti-immigrant stance. This just makes her one in a long line of entertainers, writers, singers, and others who have embraced authoritarian and totalitarian leaders, primarily on the left. Compared to many, Brigitte is pretty small beer.
During his reign as the Soviet Union's dictator, having murdered millions via the KGB and induced famine, Stalin was embraced by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In fact, both had a falling out with Albert Camus because Camus condemned both Fascism and Communism as equally repellent. Sartre and de Beauvoir refused to condemn Stalin and Soviet Communism because he thought it would "play into the hands of the West," which he equated with garishness, if not outright Fascism. A double standard taken to the extreme. In the US, the playwright Lillian Hellman refused to condemn Stalin and never apologized until her death, even though it was evident what his crimes were.
More recently, the number of Hollywood types who genuflected before Fidel Castro after meeting with him is phenomenal. Barbra Streisand, Harry Belafonte, and others made the trek to Havana to pay their respects to "El Comandante." The great Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez was another one who made the double standard his credo. Garcia Marquez once said he would not set foot in Chile as long as Augusto Pinochet was in power, yet he considered Castro his "amigo" and embraced him during many visits to Havana. Pinochet was no angel to be sure, but it is estimated he "disappeared" (killed) 3,000 opponents during his 17-year reign. And he held a plebiscite on his rule according to the Chilean constitution, lost, and stepped down after 17 years. Castro executed an estimated 10,000 so-called "counter-revolutionaries" between 1960 and 1970. Castro and his successors have never had a free election in Cuba, which remains authoritarian after 66 years of Castroite rule. So much for Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
As I say, compared to those above and others, Brigitte Bardot's transgressions were pretty small beer.
Bill
_____________________________
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."
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