A character has a camera or takes photos*

 

It buzzes on the set of Le mépris. These mosquitos, the Italians say paparazzi, swarm La Bardot and making it merely impossible for anyone – themselves included – to do their job. But Bardot knows them, too well, and gives them what they want, when she wants it.

 

* the Bales 2025 Film Challenge for July is, for unknown reasons, mostly not date-related and follows some sort of vacation narrative.

“Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible”

– May 68 slogan

A Judith or Judy for National Judith Day (USA)

 

By times, The Savage Eye has more in common with mondo than with drama. Judith's betrayed, by her husband. She takes a plane out out out. To Los Angeles, where an angel – it's their town after all – talks to her. About her life, the old one and the new. She tries to reinvent herself with new clothes, a hairstyle, a manicure. It fills the longs days, that too. She attends bloodsports. A burlesque, with her new lover, a married man. There are bleeders and drinkers and jumpers. Sticky sheets. New eyes and fiery tongues, courtesy of Jesus. What is Judith's life if not a stranger's.

“I dream of resurrection in a party dress.”

– Judith X

Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick's lonely exploration of a gritty, hopeless LA was filmed over 4 years by photographers Haskell Wexler, Helen Levitt, and Jack Couffer in wonderful, merely wordless cinéma vérité. It feels naked and raw, and broke ground for the American New Wave that came crashing in almost a decade later.

“I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; Handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; Only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”

– Muhammad Ali

Zbigniew Rybczyński's autobiographical Zupa follows an unnamed couple's faltering monotonous relationship.

 

Produced by the groundbreaking Se-ma-for Studios in Łódź – you may be familiar with their 1981 Oscar-winning Tango by, again, Rybczyński – the story is told through colourised analogue still #photography and electronic music and sound effects created by PRES's Eugeniusz Rudnik.

In typical Western fashion the credits for William Klein's Festival panafricain d'Alger focusses on the French and American participants. After Algeria regained its independence in 1962, it became Africa's – and the #AfricanDiaspora's – centre for postcolonial and liberation moments.

“À bas le colonialisme ! À bas l'imperialisme !”

The 12-day Festival panafricain attracted 5000 people from all over the African continent, as well as liberation fighters from the United States.

A ripple went through France in the early months of 1968. It started when the Communist and socialist party joined forces in an attempt to remove President De Gaulle from office. A month later, students at Nanterre (a Parisian university) teamed up with poets, musicians and small leftist groups to discuss class discrimination and political bureaucracy on campus. The meeting was peacefully disassembled but tensions remained. In May, Sorbonne students stood up for Nanterre, by then shut down. Then, police invaded the university and 20 000 stood up against the police.

“Convert all Parisian universities into reception centres for the revolutionary youth of the whole world.”

– student proposal

Somewhere in that crowd were those whose interest went beyond the main spectacle: the toppling of the new ancien regime. A #JeanRouch​ian anthropologist of sorts, artist, photographer and filmmaker William Klein pushes the eye through the masses. But it's also his eye; each frame is a Klein. However, we see not a documentary. Sound is asynchronous. Suddenly, it's night and flames lick the black sky. When bricks fly, frames follow. And then… the end.

Filmed on location in New York City, with still photography by Arthur “Weegee” Fellig and others. Weegee was a press photographer known for his stark black-and-white crime scene #photography in the city's seedy underbelly.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

– narrator