Country: USA
Year: 2005
Duration: 91'
The life and career of the most famous pin-up of the 1950s, Bettie Page, sex bomb who became one of the first icons of pop culture. Bettie Page was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1923 and grew up during the Depression. She moved to New York in 1950s, where she gained success as a model for erotic pictures. But in 1955 she was put on trial for pornography and charged with instigating juvenile delinquency. In 1957, when she was only 34 years old, she disappeared completely from the public scene. “During the years following World War II, Bettie became a precursor of the pop culture, of unprecedented fetishism. Just think about how her image influenced the obscure allure of photographs taken by Mapplethorpe, Newton, Weston or George Platt Lynes’ nude photos. And then, in recent years, people like Madonna have been taking imagery from Bettie Page films and photographs for years.” (M. Harron)
Biography
film director
Mary Harron
Mary Harron (Canada, 1953) studied literature at Oxford and worked as music critic, publishing on English and American magazines as “Punk,” “New Musical Express,” and “Melody Maker.” She made short films for the BBC series The Late Show and Edge as well as several documentaries for Channel 4 (including the South Africa film, Winds of Change, 1994). She made her first theatrical feature, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), followed by a screen adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, American Psycho, in 1999. In the last years she directed some episodes of several successful TV series, as OZ, The L World and Six Feet Under.
FILMOGRAFIA
Winds of Change (TV, 1994), I Shot Andy Warhol (Ho sparato a Andy Warhol, 1996), Homicide: Life on the Street (ep. Sins of the Father, TV, 1998), Oz (ep. Animal Farm, TV, 1998), American Psycho (id., 2000), Pasadena (TV, 2001), The L World (ep. Liberally, TV, 2004), Six Feet Under (ep. The Rainbow of Her Reasons, TV, 2005), The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), Big Love (ep. Roberta’s Funeral, TV, 2006)