The contemporary culture center of the Provincial Council, La Térmica, within its program of activities in the province, has inaugurated the exhibition ‘Brigitte Bardot. Myth and clichés in Malaga ‘in the Torremolinos Town Hall exhibition space, (Plaza Blas Infante 1). After showing at La Térmica from February 19 to June 6 of this year, he began his roaming around the province making his first stop in Torremolinos.
This has been announced by the second vice president of the Malaga Provincial Council, Margarita del Cid, together with the mayor of Torremolinos, José Ortiz; the Councilor for Tourism Aída Blanes and the curator of the exhibition, José Luis Cabrera. The exhibition can be visited from Monday to Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
The exhibition is made up of more than 50 photographs about the filming on the Costa del Sol of the film ‘Jewelers in the moonlight’, directed by Roger Vardim in 1957 starring the French myth. They are snapshots that recover the historical memory of the province of Malaga. They show still virgin landscapes and also the clichés, the clichés, that foreign creators sought from a romantic and passionate Spain.
Brigitte Bardot, a true media and sexual icon of the moment, becomes an archetype of freedom and modernity in the face of the traditional and atavistic, a contrast that also occurred with the Costa del Sol itself.
The filming of the film took place in the summer of 1957 in various locations in Malaga such as Mijas, Torremolinos –a Spanish Saint-Tropez, in the words of Bardot herself–, Alhaurín el Grande, Álora, El Chorro and the Desfiladero de los Gaitanes, the El Retiro de Churriana farm, the Miramar hotel in Malaga, and also in the province of Almería.
The exhibition, curated by the writer and researcher José Luis Cabrera, is part of a collection of four hundred photographic contacts recently acquired by La Térmica to join the heritage of the Provincial Council. A material that belonged to the French collector Alain Gomet, an expert in cinematography and whose authorship is unknown.
On the occasion of the discovery of this collection, Brigitte Bardot, from her home in La Madrague, recalled the filming: “I loved shooting that movie on the Costa del Sol, I will never forget it. He lived in a little house called Las Algas, on a deserted beach. A place that did not have any comfort, but it was a wild paradise. I got to know the best and the worst of the Spain of that time. It was both authentic and magnificent, it is the Spain that I carry in my heart. It was there, in those days, where I learned to play the guitar and where they taught me to dance flamenco. “
The movie
In 1957, Roger Vadim shot his feature film “Les bijoutiers du clair de lune” in the province of Malaga, a Franco-Italian production inspired by the homonymous novel by Albert Vidalie. The film was released the following year, although not in Spain due to censorship impediment, being recently published under the name of “The jewelers of the moonlight.”
The cast was led by the international star of the moment, Brigitte Bardot, accompanied by great actors such as Stephen Boyd –who later played the character of Messala in the film Ben-Hur–, Alida Valli and the Spanish Fernando Rey, José Nieto and Maruchi Fresno. . In the script, along with Jacques Rémy, another regular on the Costa del Sol, Pieter Viertel, husband of actress Deborah Kerr, took part.
The feature film presents a sensual, backward and violent Spain, which reels off all the topics –flamencos, aristocrats, bullfighters, scoundrels– in an exaggerated way, but perhaps not so far from the rural reality at that time. The only signs of modernity filmed are a spectacular red 1957 Ford Fairlane, a huge Coca-Cola pop ad in a country bar, and of course Brigitte herself.
Brigitte Bardot is the central figure in this exhibition. The film Jewelers in the Moonlight was directed by her husband, Roger Vadim, and produced by Raoul Lévy. The same ones who, a year earlier, in 1956, had led Bardot to stardom with the movie And God Created Woman.
José Luis Cabrera is a genealogist and researcher, author / co-author of several books: The value of an illustrated woman, María Rosa de Gálvez; Málaga y la Nueva Ola and the Fundación de Escuelas and Banco Agrícola de Macharaviaya and numerous research articles. He has curated various exhibitions, including several for the Malaga Provincial Council: Illustrators of Pop; Children of Torremolinos and Brenan Intimate (s). Together with Lutz Petry, he is the author of the Torremolinos Chic website.