I am a sentient YouTube channel (TALES FROM WEIRDLAND) running a blog. Aesthetics, art, Bardot, weirdness.
The all-new Brigitte Bardot gallery.
(I’ve fired up my BB Instagram account again. Many of the rare and unique photos that I upload online find their way to other BB accounts anyway, often with wrong information or in lesser quality, so I figured I might just as well post them on my own dedicated account—properly. And also, people were very appreciative of my account, which has many photos nobody has seen before, and I kind of missed the fun of doing it. It’s good therapy.)
EDIT: I forgot to change back the privacy settings of my account. So if you weren’t able to follow me—it’s fixed now. Sorry about that.
Brigitte Bardot on the set of Et Dieu… créa la femme (AND GOD CREATED WOMAN) in 1956. She wore her own clothes in the film, as she did in many of her films in fact. The name of her character in Et Dieu…, Juliette Hardy, isn’t very far removed from her own name. Saint-Tropez, the location of the film, was familiar to her because she would spend summers there with her parents (and she lives there of course). Et Dieu…, basically, is Brigitte Bardot as seen through the eyes of a smitten Roger Vadim: a luscious cinematic love letter.
The film was shot in Saint-Tropez and at the Studios de la Victorine in Nice.
Concept paintings by Mary Blair for Disney’s PETER PAN.
“I forget people after I kill them,” Peter Pan says in PETER & WENDY. Was that in the Disney version?
One of the great “lost movies”: in the 1960s, there was talk of making a live action Peter Pan movie with Audrey Hepburn as Peter Pan, Peter Sellers as Captain Hook, and Hayley Mills as Wendy. The world was robbed of something wonderful there…
A nameless extra who would go on to become a screen goddess—and win an Academy Award: a very young Sophia Loren (first image, pink dress) in QUO VADIS (1951). (How did they shoot those crowd scenes?)
A gallery of mid-century blues album covers (and a little bit of jazz). Art by Abner Graboff, David Stone Martin, Milton Glaser, Burt Goldblatt, and others.
First up, BB in Rome in 1967. Photo by Jean-Claude Sauer.
BB photographed by Edward Quinn on the set of Et Dieu… créa la femme (AND GOD CREATED WOMAN) in 1956. The film was shot on location in Saint-Tropez and at the Studios de la Victorine in Nice, which is where this photo was taken.
A previously unpublished photo of BB’s session with Mark Shaw in 1956 (I’ve featured that session HERE).
BB advertizing the Graziella in 1966, a compact and foldable Italian bicycle launched two years before. Like the previous image, this one is a little hazy, but it hasn’t been published before.
Brigitte Bardot photographed by Bill Ray during the making of SHALAKO (1968) in Spain. I often wonder what drove her to do westerns like SHALAKO and FRENCHIE KING. Not that SHALAKO is a bad movie per se, but it’s so run-of-the-mill, so uninteresting. BB kind of squandered her potential from the mid-60s on I feel—or not squandered, but rather watched it drift, bored with cinema as she had become.
Photographed by Terry O’Neill in 1968.
A scene from Et Dieu… créa la femme (1956), BB’s breakthrough film.
A young Brigitte Bardot sculpting a sand profile at the Venice Film Festival in 1953.
Working on her make-up on the set of Une Parisienne (1957). In nearly every film she wore her own clothes and did her own make-up.
At Coco Beach in Nice in 1955. (The seafood restaurant was destroyed by a fire in 2017.)
And BB photographed by Jerome Brierre in Búzios, Brazil, in 1964.
As you might know, I ran a BB Instagram account for a few months. But I closed it down as an act of protest when a photo of a topless BB was censored, when elsewhere on Instagram acts of cruelty of violence are allowed. I can’t stay there in good conscience anymore. Other factors played a role in my decision to quit, but that, the hypocritical Victorian censorship, was the big one. And anyway I don’t like branching out I’ve discovered. I consider Tumblr my Internet home of sorts, and it’s fine like that, I don’t really feel the need to be everywhere with my crap.
Animation art from Disney’s LADY AND THE TRAMP (1955). The storyboards (image 1) are like illustrations from a children’s book: fully formed, ready to be published. Joe Rinaldi and Bill Peet, masters at their craft—were they even capable of making a bad drawing?
Cinema “Le Berlitz”, in Paris, located at 33 Boulevard des Italiens. A major “first run” theatre where many A-films premiered, among them Brigitte Bardot movies such as La femme et le pantin (A WOMAN LIKE SATAN) in 1959, seen here in this photo by Robert Doisneau.
BB in her time: that fascinates me. For example, these Cinémonde readers writing about BB in 1958/9, that give you an idea of the vitriol she received: “She has protruding teeth, sagging breasts, a thick waist, discoloured hair, skinny legs and huge feet”, with another reader adding that she is “repulsive and badly groomed, her hair messy and always unkempt”, while another reader hates “the lice-infected mane of our most sexy star of the moment”. She is often ridiculed for both her appearance and her performances—her bad acting, her embarrassing dancing, her vulgarity. You read these letters and you understand why BB said she never felt much loved in France.
