BARBARELLA PSYCHEDELA

Jane Fonda takes a trip through outer and inner space.

We’ve shared plenty of promo material from the watershed 1968 cult landmark Barbarella. Why wouldn’t we? It’s one of the most visually beautiful sci-fi movies ever made. In order to be complete in our coverage we needed to include two of its very best promo posters—this pair painted by Kája Saudek for its run the former Czechslovakia, where it opened today in 1971. Saudek was a legend in the world of comics, so he was a natural choice to put together posters for a film that itself grew from a comic character created in 1962 by French illustrator Jean-Claude Forest. You’ve heard us say it before but we’ll say it again anyway—you don’t see movie posters like this anymore. After all, why pay a brilliant artist when you can underpay a graphic designer and rake off the savings for the shareholders? Profit seeking always eventually cannibalizes the industries it first nurtures.

There isn’t a person reading this website who doesn’t already know what Barbarella is, at least anecdotally. Jane Fonda stars as the titular character, a five-star double-rated astronavagatrix, who’s physically superior (duh), if perhaps overly credulous. The film’s far distant, fur-lined, unsubtly phallic future is brought to life with outrageous costumes, acid-drenched visual effects, small scale models, and fantastic sets sometimes built at huge scale. Fonda occupies the center of all this dazzle as a government agent charged with locating a missing scientist named Durand Durand before he teaches the inhabitants of the galaxy’s Tau Ceti region the workings of a weapon he invented—the positronic ray. The universe is at peace. At least, the center of it is. But the positronic ray and all it represents could spread “archaic insecurity, selfish competition, and war.”

The gag that runs through the movie is that, superior though Barbarella may be, she hasn’t experienced the more corporeal pleasures of life. In other words, she’s never had any dick. Some contrarians think—or at least pretend to think—that Barbarella being sexually inexperienced indicates anti-woman attitudes. But she isn’t sexually inexperienced. She’s hyperexperienced in a form of sex that is super-advanced—i.e. completely psychic. Other forms of sex are considered where she

comes from to be primitive, therefore worthless, if not even taboo. But not out in Tau Ceti. The physical pleasures out in the galactic boonies throw Barbarella for a loop, but the subtext isn’t about women or feminism, but merely the idea that the future must be sleek, clean, and controlled. Barbarella’s non-coital status, then subsequent embrace of sex in all its sticky joy is an anti-corporate, anti-repression, anti-assimilation message.

But as an enduring cult classic promoting unashamed attitudes about sex, Barbarella is ripe for revisionism and deliberate misrepresentation. Ultimately, it’s not a movie that holds up long to big-brained academic analysis because it’s no more than a contradictory fun-filled romp made by horny filmmaker Roger Vadim. There are unavoidable pro-feminist tropes, but also unavoidable anti-feminist clichés. It’s unavoidably steeped in the liberation ethos of the era, but also portrays the sort of non-diverse fantasy world fascists adore. Digging deep into Barbarella is like parsing the lyrics of a ’70s disco song. It was probably never meant to be anything but fun. It’s a voyage through deep space with a simple premise allowing Fonda to tease the audience with flashes of skin. That’s more than adequate.

We hear there’s a new version in development, but we don’t have hopes for anything good. Yes, we were wrong about Blade Runner‘s sequel, but that was the only time. The sexual insouciance of the late 1960s that gave us Barbarella is gone. Journalist Kim Newman insightfully remarked that the film was the product of a generation “that thought sex was, above all, fun.” So what can result from a generation for whom sex is dangerous, not only because of more disease than in the past but because of government enforced consequences? With the original Barbarella‘s glowing sex positivity dissipated only cynicism can remain. But we’ll give the filmmakers credit for guts. It’s a bold move to remake a movie that helped define the term cult classic.

A new tabloid hits the newsstands with a twist on the usual formula.

In our continuing search for rare magazines of high entertainment value (if sometimes dubious quality), we stumbled across the above gem—the first issue of the self-described sexploitation film graphic Flick. Published in the U.S. out of Libertyville, Illinois, it was basically just reviews of x-rated films in tabloid form. The publishers admit in their introductory editorial that the tabloid market is glutted, but insist America needs a magazine that helps porn consumers separate the wheat from the chaff. They do it with utter seriousness and, as a bonus, also throw in some musings on film history, with discussions of Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, Jean Harlow, and Hedy Lamarr, who all had pre-Hays Code flirtations with screen nudity.

It might be difficult to imagine actors appearing nude on screen during the 1920s and 1930s, but the idea back then was that, because the medium was considered an art form, motion picture nudity was no different from nudity in sculpture, photography or painting. Theda Bara’s and Jean Harlow’s screen nudity was merely implied, but Hedy Lamarr went all the way in her 1933 Czech-made romance Ekstase, aka Ecstasy, in which she ran starkers through the woods, giving audiences a gander at her backside and breasts. She was known at the time as Hedy Kiesler, but it’s her.

There’s also a non-nude love scene containing what some critics believe is the first cinematic depiction of an orgasm. As you can imagine, Ekstase was controversial. Only four-hundred prints were ever made, and most of those were butchered by censors. By the 1940s, the only complete copy known to exist was in Russia. It had first been Hungarian property and had been exhibited in Budapest in ’33, but because the Hungarians had fought alongside Nazi Germany and helped conquer swaths of Russian territory in the early 1940s, when the Russians reversed those gains and occupied Budapest in 1944, they sort of helped themselves to a few choice cultural treasures.

Elsewhere in this inaugural Flick you get reviews of the adult films A Hard Man’s Good To Get, Sisters in Leather, College Girls, and Jack Hill’s first full-length effort Mondo Keyhole. The editors remind readers that their magazine is a collector’s item. At the time—January 1970—they probably imagined it would be quite valuable in forty-one years. Well, we got it for $4.00. But just for the hell of it, maybe we’ll hang onto it for another forty-one years. You never know. By the way, if you’re curious, you can actually see that famous Hedy Lamarr nude scene here. It is not a complete version, though. We doubt a complete one exists. See ten scans from Flick below. 

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the panting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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