Thanks for the compliment, French Cruller, although I feel it is undeserved, certainly for the post you refer to. When I reread it, I had a little trouble understanding exactly what I had been trying to say!
The pictures you posted are very evocative, and they are the kind of pictures of women I would like to be able to take. The play with mirrors, (Bergman’s Persona revisited, minus the drama), the interplay between his eyes and her eyes, the nonchalant positions she assumes, the slight bow of her head, the bangs just about to conceal her half-closed eyes, (The Breakfast Club 15 years ahead or so), the delicately sculpted profile, with her perfect nose, chin, and ears (sassy short hair in place of the eyes), the body parts ( a wink to Godard’s deconstruction of Bardot in Le Mépris, “Do you like my legs?”, “And my thighs, do you like my thighs?”, on a shapely girl’s body on the sand, not on a goddess’s figure on a bed), and always that distant, inward-looking look, as if she didn’t care whether she was being photographed or not. It is a far cry from the narcissistic pictures of today’s starlets (I blame the photographers and editorial orders), where even a far-away gaze seems artificial and overdone. Haydée here could be an exceptionally beautiful friend who posed for your camera while you were on vacation together. No fuss, no big deal.
Yes, I believe that the sixties and early seventies were an extraordinary time for young avant-gardiste actresses, directed by photographers and directors tired of a limited repertoire and avid to draw on a younger woman’s new kind of seductive power, playing with fluid shapes as it were, like the dreamy ones computer graphics compose for you. I am addicted to the series Madmen, which makes that transitional era so fascinating. Nor more dichotomy between the Marilyn (Ava, Elizabeth, Sophia), and the Jackie (Grace, Audrey) types. The women, raised in a climate of new assertiveness, are thinking and dreaming about who they really are, not just how they are perceived by men, or want to be perceived. They are in a madly creative stage of reshaping themselves while not discarding their femininity, just reevaluating it and taking control of it. And they work as a team with their creative directors.
