Barbarella (1968)

“What’s that screaming? A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming…” – Barbarella

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In cinephile circles BARBARELLA is sometimes described as wacky, eccentric and cult. Not unjustly so. On the one hand the movie is an adaptation of the French comic book by Jean-Claude Forest, that created quite the scandal as one of the first erotic comic books in mainstream print. On the other hand, you feel the zeitgeist of the Swinging Sixties in everything: in the set design, the hairstyles and in the dated representation of women and sexuality. “The film could have been a truly feminist movie”, said lead actress and feminist icon Jane Fonda back then, but producer Dino de Laurentiis and director Roger Vadim (Fonda’s then-husband) turned the movie into a product for the male gaze.

The result is a sort of science fiction sex fantasy, that starts in the year 4000. Life on earth looks quite different. Everything that stands in the way of maximal efficiency has been replaced by a more civilised and more efficient system. Sex, for instance, is now had via pills and psycho cardiograms, thus making the bodily aspect completely redundant. It’s no wonder that Earth is known throughout the planetary system as a cold place. Astronaut Barbarella (Jane Fonda) is tasked by the President with finding the fugitive inventor Durand Durand and bringing him back to earth. He has invented a powerful weapon that could cause mass destruction in the wrong hands. During her intergalactic search for this evil inventor, Barbarella comes into contact with all sorts of things that are unheard of on earth, with all of the (sexual) consequences that entails.

Just like so many other film heritage, BARBARELLA is on a crossroads: it’s a remnant of a time where sci-fi was often considered as a cult genre where makers could go total loss and women were mostly used for seduction, while other makers started to embrace sci-fi as a serious film genre (think of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which was released in the same year). It gets you thinking: what if BARBARELLA had ended up in that last group? What if Fonda, who always wanted to create a remake of the movie with a progressive female astronaut at the helm, would’ve been heard during the production process? The fact that Fonda isn’t involved in the planned remake by Edgar Wright, with the much-discussed actress Sydney Sweeney in the lead, is certainly a missed opportunity.

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BARBARELLA is undeniably one of the first sci-fi sensations with a woman in the main role, tasked with saving the world (scantily clad and with one sexual innuendo after the other). You could say that Barbarella walked to Ellen Ripley could run.

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BARBARELLA comes straight from the counterculture where free love reigned supreme. That certainly explains the colourful bunnies. Get ready for a psychedelic trip and essential cult!

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Roger Vadim FR/IT, 1968, 98 min

Cast Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg

Spoken language English

Subtitles Dutch