Film Alert 101: 2025

Monday, 29 December 2025

Remembering Brigitte Bardot

The first Bardot film I saw was titled, when screened in a double bill at the now demolished art deco masterpiece Hoyts Padua in Brunswick, The Night Heaven Fell. In French I later discovered it was titled Les Bijoutiers du Clair de Lune which I think translates as ‘Moonlight Jewelers’ whatever that means. The place was packed, almost entirely male and my mates and I thought the very fleeting views of Bardot near naked were quite a sight. The censor had removed a few frames of nudity.

The Night Heaven Fell was not the first Bardot movie to screen here. And God Created Woman had previously run for weeks in one of Greater Union’s city cinemas and there had been seasons of her earlier films at what were then known as Melbourne’s Continental picture theatres, the Savoy and the Australia & Curzon, sin palaces in their day where schoolboys entered furtively and hoped the cashier wouldn’t bar them from watching a film classified “Suitable Only for Adults”.

Not long after, at the Australia, I got in to see The Bride is Much Too Beautiful aka La Mariée est trop belle made immediately after And God Created Woman in 1956 . It starred Bardot, who leaned over a lot and frequently stripped down to lacy undies and Louis Jourdan. It was shown in Australia years after it had been made. Film distribution was hit and miss in those days and the likes of Sid Blake and Robert Kapferer often waited until the price of an item had fallen way down before they bought the Australian rights. This one had no great distinguishing features even though the place was packed out with young to middle aged to old males. The film was not one of what John Baxter has called the “17 mediocre films” Bardot made before And God Created Woman. But it was made immediately after and was, well, mediocre.

But And God Created Woman was a revelation even in what we were led to believe was the censored copy that circulated in Australia. Fun fact. Visiting Paris years later I noticed that Et Dieu Crea La Femme was playing somewhere and trotted off to what turned out to be a distant fleapit to attempt to discover just what had been cut in Australia (at least according to my memory). The answer, rather disappointingly, was nothing. The version screened in Paris, apart from being in French, seemed exactly as I recalled it.

You do have to wonder whether Bardot would be quite the revered figure she became without Godard’s Contempt/Le Mepris being on her c.v. Here her sullen pouts were perfect as she played the wife of scriptwriter Michel Piccoli, both hanging round in Rome while Fritz Lang is making some version of Homer’s The Odyssey. Like sure. Once again the first viewing of the film in Australia ran into a censorship problem as the full technicolor shots of her naked back and bum were cut, leaving only the tinted red and blue shots of the same for us to get the idea. Apparently the sequence was added when producer Carlo Ponti asked for a bit more nudity. Years later, only when the film came out on DVD did Australians get the chance to see the sequence in toto. That film by the way did lead to one very smart homage in a minor French film called Monsieur Ibrahim made in 2003 by François Dupeyron. In the film Omar Sharif plays a Muslim shopkeeper whose tiny establishment is used by a local Jewish boy for some minor shoplifting. At one point man and boy are stunned as a Bardot lookalike, dressed as Bardot was for the finale of Contempt stops outside the shop in a little red sports car, climbs out, walks in and buys some cigarettes and departs. Homage over, the movie is resumed.

She did work with some interesting directors after And God Created Woman. Claude Autant-Lara directed her with Gabin in the Simenon adaptation En Cas de Malheur. H-G Clouzot had a huge international box office success with La Verite. Julien Duvivier made a mediocre movie, titled out here A Woman Like Satan, of the same novel, “The Woman and the Puppet”, by Pierre Louys that von Sternberg adapted in 1932 as Devil is a Woman and Bunuel in 1977 as That Obscure Object of Desire. Both were rather better versions of the story. (In fact the novel has been adapted to film, in all, eight times between 1920 and 2006 which may be some sort of record.) Louis Malle tried to explore the Bardot as hounded and harassed star myth in Vie Privee and tried to exploit her comedic abilities in Viva Maria.

She made four films with Vadim including her second last Don Juan, Or If Don Juan Were A Woman (1973), notably mostly for a scene where she and Jane Birkin roll around naked in a bit of movie sex. At one point the flimsiness of the set is apparent when a wall shudders after a door is closed. That said a lot about the modest ambition of the project and probably more than anything or any other film caused her to, at the age of 39, as they say, give the game away for ever.

She became a passionate crusader against animal cruelty but her life after movies was also filled with multiple cases of being fined for inciting racial hatred. Her views on gays and feminists were reactionary for the most part and later in life she aligned herself with the Le Pen family and their various political parties.

Sunday, 28 December 2025

At the Greek and Italian Film Festivals - 🎥 Janice Tong embraces a Trilogy: Life's Labyrinths, Part 2 - LA GRAZIA (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 2025)

Nyhterinos ekfonitis | Athens Midnight Radio (2024) Greece, Directed by Renos Haralambidis (Click to read)
La grazia (2025) Italy, Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Il tempo che ci vuole | The Time it Takes (2024) Italy | France, Directed by Francesca Comencini (to be published shortly)

Toni Servillo, La Grazia

Paolo Sorrentino’s La grazia was the second film I saw at this year’s Italian Film Festival. It was also the only film that was advertised on the site without a trailer (some weird AI-generated trailer was available upon searching on YouTube – but you could smell its fishy falsity within a couple of seconds) and the singular marketing I managed to find at the time, was an image of the back of the great Toni Servillo (Sorrentino’s chameleonic long-term collaborator), dressed formally in a black coat and hat, standing looking sideways on what looks to be a country road that leads somewhere into the distance. His gaze unseen by us, his face, in a half profile, yielded little expression, at least none that can be easily deciphered. Even the 20 word blurb gave nothing away. I entered the theatre with only a hastily glanced meaning of the words la grazia in mind.

La grazia is a word that describes not only the translation any English-speaking person would discern upon seeing the word – grace. Its variation in usage and meaning yields a complex but well-rounded description of Sorrentino’s elegant film (note he was also the writer of this film). The word signals multiple meanings concurrently: 1. Favour or benevolence in the form of goodwill; 2. Gratitude – in its signifying of thankfulness or a blessing; 3. Also, it conveys the idea of pardon or mercy in a legal sense, of clemency or formal pardon granted by the head of state; and lastly, 4. The spiritual beneficence of divine favour – where a state of grace is attained.

Just like a modern-day sorcerer, Sorrentino weaves these elements together into the life-tapestry of Servillo’s Italian President, Mariano de Santis, who is serving out the last 6 months of his 7 year term. His daughter, Dorotea (Anna Ferezzeti) runs a tight schedule for him, right down to what he is allowed to eat, (something like boiled fish and potatoes), so as to keep his weight off; a somewhat sardonic recurring theme: the president’s envy of the weightlessness of an astronaut who also has 6 months before returning to earth, and the president’s own earnt nickname of ‘reinforced concrete’ – conjuring a visual image of a slab of that heavy but dull, grey material; but really, this description is in context to his dogmatism in carrying out duties to the letter of the law.

Anna Ferezzeti, La Grazia

And so, his days passed, not unkindly, like that of a groundhog, where one day blends into the next; where history weighs him down and the future is but an abyss, a void eternal in which he must surrender. Sometimes when he is up on the roof top of his residence, we couldn’t help but wonder whether he would leap off its parapet.

In an echo of the eternal city where he lives, eternity is measured by the stretch of his inability to act on (seemingly) just three things: 1. To put his signature to an euthanasia bill that his daughter has prepared; 2. The decision of whether to grant pardon to a woman who has murdered her abusive husband; and 3. Whether or not to grant pardon to a man who had ended his wife’s suffering from Alzheimer's. If we go back to the marketing still for this film, we now know that, despite the straight road that leads ahead, he had turned his head to the side, and in doing so, he is offering up to himself, a different choice, a diverting path to take (somewhere off-frame). And this is how he has to navigate what remains of his term and what remains of his life – the loss of his wife, his knowledge that she has cheated on him at a much earlier juncture of their marriage, and the three things of his governance weighed on him (no amount of dieting would alleviate his heavy burden).

But there are light-hearted moments too: in the form of his larger than life friend, Coco Valori, played here with unforgettable flair and vibrancy by Milvia Marigliano delivers to the camera a rich Fellinesque jewel that Sorrentino reveres. Other moments of hilarity come in the form of Chaplinesque caper: the red-carpeted arrival of the Portuguese prime minister, majestically broken by a sudden rain storm – all in exquisite multi-angled slow motion for our visual enjoyment – a mockery of the absurdity of formalities. Working with his long-term collaborator, Daria D'Antonio at the helm of the camera, provides just the right amount of comedy to offset the gravity of Mariano’s decisions. We mustn’t forget to mention Mariano’s new penchant for listening to rap music in the evenings on his headphones, seated in the official Cabinet’s leather and dark wood office – just when you think any seriousness was checked at the door – Sorrentino raps, to camera, perfectly. In fact, the pulsing techno music that recurs throughout the film acts as that needlepoint of balance on a scale – tipping sometimes to enjoyment, sometimes to endurance; a metaphor for one’s moral compass: the unyielding oscillation between doubt and certainty, right or wrong.

Toni Servillo, Paolo Sorrentino at the Venice Festival
Premiere of La Grazia

In Sorrentino’s 2024 Parthenope, a film I regard as the writer/director’s best work (sadly my sentiment was not shared by other critics), he posed this question: “what happens if you just let go?” – a profound and deeply troubling question, as most people desperately cling onto whatever they deem to be important, when really, nothing is as vital as it may seem – good looks, what other people think of you, the millstone around your neck (unless you’re one of the handful of fortunates who loves your job), politics and government, social media, or things you simply can’t change. Who dares to live authentically themselves these days (despite loud pronouncements of this achievement)? And here in La grazia, the question asked is a simpler one, but no less weighty: “who owns our days?”, a follow-up question of the former. If there is a right answer to this question, does it make it true to your current situation? For me, the dual questions posed by Sorrentino continue to linger long after the film ends.

La grazia won 7 awards at the 82nd Venice Film Festival with Servillo taking the Volpi Cup for Best Actor.

An interesting interview with the director at the 63rd New York Film Festival is available here.

The Italian Film Festival ran in September and October in Australia this year.

The Greek Film Festival ran in October in Australia this year.

Saturday, 27 December 2025

Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - Latin America - 6 (52) - Bolivia - Third Cinema : Sanjinés and the Ukamau Group

Bolivia -

Jorge Sanjinés b.36 Antonio Eguino b.38

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Jorge Sanjinés

The National Bolivian Revolution of April 1952 reinstated the 1951 election victory of the leftist MLR party after the outgoing government had refused to hand over power and a military junta had taken over in what was apparently the 179th coup in the country’s continuously disastrous short history since Bolivia had gained its independence from Spain in 1825. The MLR's reformist program, backed by the well organised tin miners (tin being the country’s main export), in one of the few genuine social revolutions in Latin America, introduced deep structural social and economic change to one of the poorest countries in Latin America. These changes were reflected in the arts, especially film with the founding of the Bolivian Film Institute in 1953. Despite the overthrow of the MLR government of José Torres in a CIA - backed military coup in 1971, the momentum for feature film production, begun in the early sixties, just managed to survive.

Although previously lacking an ongoing film industry and any tradition of film production, features with an established Bolivian realist aesthetic and social identity were produced in the sixties and seventies through the efforts of individuals, notably Jorge Sanjinés and Antonio Eguino, working under difficult conditions and limited funding in a period when the government was increasingly at the mercy of the military. As director of the Film institute Jorge Sanjinés was responsible for the production of 27 newsreels, 4 documentaries and the medium length Aysa (1965). The Ukamau group which he co-founded with writer Oscar Soria and Ricardo Rada when the Insitute was closed in 1966, did get some initial encouragement from the authorities in completing their first indigenous language feature Ukamau (1966) a fictional story made in one of the principal Indian languages with non-professional actors depicting the clash between the Indian and mestizo cultures. The latter representing western culture in a debased form, was completed only because the responsible minister was given one script, when requested, while another was filmed.

“Sanjinés’ réponse to the mixed reception of the film and the uneven impact of some of the stylistic experiments undertaken to form the basis of the extensive theorisation of revolutionary cinema he undertook in the late 1960s and 1970s (Armes 296). As he made clear, Sanjinés´ concept of utility fundamental to his work was “to assist liberation struggles in Latin America” (Framework 10, Spring 1979). All film work of the group was subjected to rigorous self-criticism seeking fresh insights into the requirements of a cinema that is made for, as well as about, the people to develop awareness as well as entertain (297).

The group took their name, adopted in 1967, from the the Ayamara language, a word meaning 'the way it is'. Their first film in 1966 was about the revenge of a man for the rape of his wife. When the Film Institute withdrew further funding, Yawar Maliku/Blood of the Condor (1969), completed at great personal sacrifice to its producers (Keel), was a huge success. It was based on a newspaper report of a sterilisation program carried out by s team of American doctors on indigenous women in a Bolivian region without their knowledge at a Peace Corps maternity clinic. Recreating the Quechuya community response, a scripted flashback structure is used to contrast the lifestyle of the Americans with the poverty of the Indian population. After being initially banned in response to pressure from the American Embassy, Bolivian press campaigns and demonstrations resulted in the lifting of the ban. In release Blood of the Condor became the most widely viewed film in Bolivian history; the Peace Corps was expelled from Bolivia.

The response of peasant viewers to the flashback structure and the portrayal of protagonists as individuals led Sanjinés to question the efficacy of the style in which the group had been working. “The complex narrative built around flashbacks, in a rethink, was subsequently abandoned in favour of linear structure and a tendency towards sequence shots. This style [was] adapted to the traditions of oral narrative; the players on the screen are the historical actors of the events portrayed, they are dramatizing their own experience. “The use of long takes allows them the greatest space to express their collective memory, and a new kind of cinema is born” (Chanan 746).

In El coraje del pueblo/The Courage of the People (1971) financed by Italian State Television (RAI), Sanjinés abandoned the linear docudrama mode deployed in Blood of Condor for historical reconstruction in a collective re-living, rather than an analysis, of the massacre of striking tin miners in northern Bolivia in 1967 - ' the massacre of San Juan' - made in collaboration with actual survivors of the massacre who appear in the film in what Sanjinés termed 'direct dialogue'. RAI, upset by anti-American statements made in the film, cut controversial scenes. It was the last film Sanjinés would direct for the group and was never released in Bolivia. He was immediately expelled from the country when the Torres government was toppled by the military coup in 1971, going into exile where he continued to make films.

In this oppressive political environment, the head of the military junta, General Banzer, making it clear that no dissent would be tolerated, confronted the Ukamau Group with the choice of making concessions or going underground. Their next film, Pueblo Chico/Small Time (1974), was directed by Antonio Eguino, the cinematographer who had worked closely with Sanjinés on earlier Ukamau films including Blood of the Condor. It was hailed on its release by the Bolivian press and succeeded with a very heterogeneous audience. “In its planning and realisation,” Keel concludes that, “the group was driven into the politics of style that finally led to a neo-realist picture. Ukamau wanted the Indians to enact situations from their lives, and part of Pueblo Chico’s success is the achievement of that ambition” (ibid).

The narrative strategy in Pueblo Chico adheres to the major tenets of any realist aesthetic, namely verisimilitude of character and setting, and plausibility of action […] the reluctance to set forth a political program or thesis, or to assume even a precise ideological point of view [… ] Ukamau has ingeniously left the ending [ the immediate defeat of the commitment to the central issue in Bolivia of agrarian reform] suggesting the feeling of ambiguity that exists throughout the film.

Antonio Eguino

Erich Keel describes the theme and story of Pueblo Chico “as eminently Bolivian” in attacking one of the central controversies of contemporary Bolivian politics - Agrarian Reform. Decreed shortly after the 1952 revolution, the measure led to significant changes in the socio-economic structure of the country. The class of Creole ‘latifundistas’ were expropriated and disappeared as a class, much liberated land being returned to the Indians, the “compesinos’. Finally after 400 years of slavery and servitude the Indians had become fully integrated citizens. Set in the regressive period of the late sixties, the fifth feature film of the Ukamau Group tells the story of Arturo, a student of sociology who is returning to his home town to reverse the stagnant order in favour of the native Indians. But rather than overseeing the remaining parts of a large estate, as he is hired to do by his father, Arturo spends more and more time in the nearby Indian pueblo teaching the children and helping the sick. His presence seems to fill the Indians with a sense of pride, courage and assertiveness to demand their rights. Town leaders bribe the agricultural commission into taking land back from the Indians. As he becomes more deeply involved Arturo is increasingly isolated from university friends and threatened by the whites and mestizos in the town.

For Humberto Rios, a Bolivian director of militant films, then living in exile in Buenos Aires. “the Importance of Pueblo Chico was to test the possibilities which would allow cinema to exist in Bolivia” or as Equino insisted and writer Oscar Sofia, contributor to the scripts of all Ukamau’s films, endorsed, “Ukamau makes films for a specific audience […] films for national use, for the middle class and popular groups of Bolivia, and not for the elite.” - Erich Keel

In his 1976 manifesto on the problems of form and content in Latin American cinema, unlike Solanas and Getino with their distinction between first (Hollywood) and second (art) cinema, Sanjinés lumped the two together as “bourgeois cinema” with individualistic subjectivity and narrative suspense as core drivers, closing off spaces and time for reflection.” Hanlon considers that “his critique of bourgeois cinema, although it does not explicitly condemn European art cinema, implies that it is the most bourgeois of cinemas precisely because it appears to emanate from the imagination of an individual rather than a collective author.

The creator in a revolutionary society should be the means and not an end, and everyone should be a means and not an end, and beauty should play the same role. Beauty should have the same function that it has in the indigenous community, where everyone has the ability to create beautiful objects ,,,We try to make the images of the film, the music, the dialogue, etc., coherent with this culture; we set ourselves the problem of aesthetic coherence. (Sanjinés quoted by Hanlon p.356).

Bolivian-born Sanjinés further argued “that the politically committed filmmaker, almost by definition an intellectual educated in the Western tradition, must efface his or her personality in the work.” In Sanjinés assimilation of the response of Andean peasants, unexposed to or uninterested in cinema, to his use of close-ups and a flashback structure in Blood of the Condor, Sanjinés recognised that the viewer cannot be considered as an abstraction but one who is, always historically and socially conditioned. The Western-educated or influenced filmmaker, Sanjinés realised, must shed his or hers conceptions of what beautiful cinema is, in order to make a film “consonant with the spectator’s non-Western culture” (ibid).

According to Sanjinés in his next film, Courage of the People, he and his collaborators began their experiments in collaboration with their non-professional, mostly peasant, performers. In his subsequent two films, El enemigo principal/The Principal Enemy (Peru 1974), and Fuera de acquí!/Get Out of Here! (Ecuador 1977), Sanjinés began experimenting with long takes or sequence shots, techniques that became increasingly central to his theories of film-making “with the people.” Rather than “rejecting all previous cinematic language what we must reject are the objectives, methods and aims of bourgeois art.” The task Sanjinés set himself, as a revolutionary Bolivian filmmaker, was “to screen the available techniques for their aesthetic coherence with Aymara and Quechua culture ” (ibid 358, my italics ) which would have transformed the “transculturation from above” of his early films (most notably Blood of theCondor) to the “transculturation from below” of his later phase.*

Hanlon agrees with Javier Sanjinés, a professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies, that transculturalism* from above and below is of particular value when analysing the career of Jorge Sanjinés, and Hanlon also suggests that the concept is generally applicable to New Latin American Cinema and, in particular, its relationship to European art cinema. More in keeping with the rhetoric of New Latin American cinema theory, in the case of La nacion clandestina/Clandestine Nation (Bolivia 1989), Holman further suggests, the term “dialectical transculturalism” is neatly expressive in the film where “various dialectics are at play : colonizer and oppressed, rural and urban, Eisensteinian ecstasy and Brechtian distanciation, European film technique and local conceptions of time.” Even taking into account the paradox in the heart of The Clandestine Nation Hanlon found “ that despite the return to previously abandoned European styles of filmmaking, particularly evident in Sanjinés´ adaptation of techniques from [Theo Angelopolous’s] The Travelling Players, the film succeeds in expressing the Andean cosmovision and, more important, was and remains well received by [Sanjinés´] desired audience” (359).

Roy Armes concludes that although further work was blocked in the 1980s, in the work of Sanjinés and the Ukamau group, “we have a rare example of a form of filmmaking based on a radical rethinking of the stylistic pattern of film production that allows totally non-western ways of seeing society and depicting interrelationships of individuals to their group to be expressed in a then [historically} predominantly Western medium (304).

* Transculturation is a term for a process, more complex than assimilation or acculturation, where a group, often subjugated, creatively adopts and transforms elements from a dominant culture resulting in new cultural forms involving merging and transformation of elements to create something novel. - John Beverly in an essay “Tensculturism and Subalternity: The Lettered City and Tupac Amaru Rebellion.” His book Subalternity and Representation (1999) begins with a history of the term.

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Michael Chanan “New Cinemas in Latin America” Oxford History of World Cinema ed G. Nowell-Smith 1996

Dennis Hanlon “Travelling Theory and European Art Film” in Global Art Cinema R.Galt & K. Schoonover eds. 2010

Erich Keel “Militant Cinema to Neo-Realism : Pueblo Chico Film Quarterly Summer 1976

Roy Armes Third World Film Making and the West 1987

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism