Showing posts with label Charlie Chaplin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlie Chaplin. Show all posts

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Broadway All Agog! Wichita Beauty May Become Charlie Chaplin's Leading Lady

This noteworthy article, "Broadway All Agog! Wichita Beauty May Become Charlie Chaplin's Leading Lady," appeared on the front page of the Wichita Daily Eagle 98 years ago today --  on October 15, 1925. It is a reprint of an article which appeared in the New York Daily Mirror the day before. I don't think I have ever seen it before.

Years ago, when I went to New York City to research Louise Brooks, I made a point of scouring every New York newspaper, especially those which were printed in 1924 and 1925. New York then had seven, English-language daily newspapers, as well as a handful of other non-English language papers. I was in search of articles and reviews relating to Brooks appearance in the George White Scandals and Ziegfeld Follies, as well as other mentions of the actress not related to those stage shows. I recall the Daily Mirror, a tabloid, was difficult to get at, as a complete run of it has not survived. Thankfully, this particular article has come down through time by having been syndicated to and reprinted in another newspaper with a particular interest.

Almost a couple of months later, the Wichita Daily Eagle ran another article about Louise Brooks. With so much water then under the bridge, and having realized the fallout her brief dalliance with Chaplin had caused, the young actress distanced herself from "that Chaplin person." Years later, both parties spoke positively of one another.

 

THE LEGAL STUFF: The Louise Brooks Society™ blog is authored by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society  (www.pandorasbox.com). Original contents copyright © 2023. Further unauthorized use prohibited. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

Monday, April 24, 2023

Lulu in America : the Lost History of Louise Brooks and Pandora's Box

I have written a long article for Film International focusing on the little documented exhibition history of Pandora's Box in the United States (in the 1930s and 1940s). This lost history includes censorship, wholesale cuts, damning reviews, "thrilling sound effects", adults only screenings, and ads which scream "Sin Lust Evil !" The architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the Little Theater movement, Iris Barry and the NY Museum of Modern Art, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin's FBI file, and others also figure in this story.


My article, “'Sin Lust Evil' in America: Louise Brooks and the Exhibition History of Pandora’s Box (1929)", can be found at https://filmint.nu/louise-brooks-and-the-exhibition-history-of-pandoras-box-1929-thomas-gladysz/

This groundbreaking article overturns a couple of long held beliefs: one is that Pandora's Box wasn't shown in the United States following its NYC debut in 1929 until James Card screened it in Rochester, NY in the late 1950s. The second is that G.W. Pabst choose Louise Brooks for the role of Lulu after seeing her in Howard Hawks A Girl in Every Port (1928).

A reminder.  Pandora's Box starring Louise Brooks, will be shown at the Paramount theater in Oakland, California on Saturday, May 6. More about that special screening, which will feature live musical accompaniment, can be found HERE.

THE LEGAL STUFF: The Louise Brooks Society™ blog is authored by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society  (www.pandorasbox.com). Original contents copyright © 2023. Further unauthorized use prohibited. 


Tuesday, February 1, 2022

The Glories of Poland's KINO Magazine, part one

If you are anything like me (and I realize most people aren't), then you may enjoy surfing the internet and browsing old newspapers and magazines, especially international publications. I like doing so on occasion. In particular, I enjoy looking at old film magazines. They depict a world gone by. A time and place no longer. But what's more, you never know what you will find - rare and unusual images, little known interviews with favorite stars, and more. 

I am drawn to publications from Eastern Europe, especially publications from Poland. (I am of Polish heritage.) One of my favorite magazines to look through is KINO, a Polish film magazines. A small archive of the magazine, dating from the 1930s, can be found online HERE. (Warning, this archive can be problematic to navigate.)

What is especially notable about this magazine (especially in the early 1930s) is its striking, sometimes avante-garde cover art, which utilizes a muted palette and employs portrait photography and illustration, as well as moderne and art deco designs, collage, coloring, patterns, layers, geometric forms, abstraction, "exoticism" and a varied layout (i.e. title placement). It is also worth noticing the predominance of angles over curves. (As the decade progressed, KINO covers were less bold, and began to resemble the covers found on other magazines of the time.)

I found a bit of material about Louise Brooks, of course, as well as many attractive magazine covers which I wanted to share - both because they depict favorite movie stars, but also for their swell graphic design. There are so many interesting images that I need divide this post into a few parts.  

This is part one. I will start with a Louise Brooks cover and go from there.

Louise Brooks 1932

John Gilbert 1930

Ramon Novarro 1930


Charlie Chaplin 1931

Buster Keaton 1932

Pola Negri 1931

Colleen Moore 1930

Clara Bow 1930

Greta Garbo 1934

The next post will feature even more covers. Of course, there are many other interesting / appealing / unusual interior illustrations. Here is one that I came across that intrigues me to no end - a caricature and poem related to Garbo. Can anyone transcribe and translate the verse?

Monday, November 1, 2021

The Rise & Fall of Max Linder, and a couple of tenuous connections to Louise Brooks

A few months ago I received a copy of The Rise & Fall of Max Linder: The First Cinema Celebrity, a remarkable new biography by Lisa Stein Haven. The book, the first English language study of the life and art of the comedic great, is published by Bear Manor Media. I have been slowly making my way through it, not because it is slow going, but because I am relishing reading it. The Rise & Fall of Max Linder is an immersive biography. Reading it, absorbing its rich detail, learning about the life of someone I admittedly knew only little about made me feel like I was displaced back in time to the beginning of the 20th century. 

Before reading Haven's book, I was only a bit familiar with Linder. I knew that he was French. I had seen a few of his short films, and also knew that he was a comedic actor and had influenced Charlie Chaplin. That's about it - except for a tenuous connection to Louise Brooks, which I mention later. What is remarkable about Haven's book is that it pulls back the curtain on a time and place long ago and reveals a distant world from which this comedic genius sprang. That is revelatory.

Max Linder was born Gabriel Leuvielle in St. Loubes, France in 1883; he started in films with the Pathe Brothers in 1905, making him one of the first film comedians to achieve world-wide renown. In fact, according to Haven, there is evidence that Linder was the first screen celebrity to see his name in print. His comedy timing and gags -- Linder started writing his own scenarios early on -- have been copied and imitated by many of his followers, including Charlie Chaplin. (Upon receiving the news of Linder's death, Chaplin is reported to have closed his studio for a day out of respect.)

Notably as well, his high society characterizations as the dapper "Max" also influenced such actors as Adolphe Menjou and Raymond Griffith. (Louise Brooks played in two films opposite Menjou, A Social Celebrity and Evening Clothes, and appeared in another, God's Gift to Women, which was co-authored by Griffith.)

Just how big was Linder? The universality of silent films brought Linder fame and fortune throughout Europe, making him the highest paid entertainer of the day. By 1910, he had become the most popular film actor in the world, and is thought to be the very first movie star with a significant international following. In Russia, he was voted the most popular film actor, ahead of Asta Nielsen. He also had a Russian impersonator, Zozlov, and a devoted fan in Czar Nicholas II. Another professed fan was British playwright George Bernard Shaw. The first feature film ever made in Bulgaria was a remake of one of Linder's earlier movies. He was offered $12,000 to spend a month in Berlin making public appearances with his film screenings, but declined for health reasons. Later, in 1911 and 1912, he began touring Europe with his films, including Spain, where he entertained thousands of fans, as well as Austria and then Russia, where he was accompanied on piano by a young Dimitri Tiomkin. 

via Lisa Stein Haven

Spoiler alert: Of course, nothing lasts forever, and Linder's story is both a comedy and a tragedy. His meteoric rise to fame beginning in 1907/1908 hit a roadblock in 1914 with the onset of World War I, and was dealt a death blow by his attempts to revive his career in America and Austria (and in a changing world). His marriage to a young wife was ill-fated and ill-timed, leading Linder to take the life of his wife and himself on the night of October 31, 1925. Linder himself died on November 1, 1925 - 76 years ago today, leaving behind a 16-month-old daughter named Maud who would devote her life to restoring his film legacy. 

I mentioned a tenuous connection to Louise Brooks. Actually, there are two. The first is the famed singing Frenchman, Maurice Chevalier, who is best known to devotees of Brooks as the singer who popularized "Louise" (a song not about Brooks, though long associated with her). Along with director Abel Gance, Chevalier was once one in the company of actors employed by Linder.

In his native France, Linder was a superstar, hugely popular to the degree that a movie theater was opened in Paris which bore his name. Of course, it showed more than just Linder films. In fact, it was at the Max Linder Pathe (located at 24 boulevard Poissonnière in Paris) that Brooks' sole French film, Prix de beauté, debuted on May 9, 1930. To open at the 1,200 seat Max Linder Pathe was considered an honor, and Brooks' film rose to the challenge and proved popular. At the time, most films played a few days or a week before moving on. However, as this ad shows, Prix de beauté was a hit, and ran more than "2eme mois" or two months at the Max Linder Pathe.

The Max Linder theater is still open to this day, helping keep the memory of this comedic actor alive. I would encourage anyone interested in early film to check out The Rise & Fall of Max Linder: The First Cinema Celebrity. It is a good read.

 


Lisa Stein Haven is an Professor of English at Ohio University Zanesville, specializing in British and American modernist literature, the Beat poets and silent film comedy, especially the work of Charlie and Syd Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Max Linder. In 2010, she organized and hosted "Charlie in the Heartland: An International Charlie Chaplin Conference" at Zanesville, which was attended by participants from 11 countries outside of the United States.

In summer 2014, Haven was the keynote speaker at Charlot 100, a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Chaplin's Little Tramp persona, held in Bologna, Italy and sponsored by Roy Export S.A.S and the Cineteca di Bologna. She is also a member of the executive board for the Buster Keaton Celebration, held every year in Iola, Kansas. 

Stein's earlier books, which I have read and written about in the past, include another first ever study, Syd Chaplin: A Biography (McFarland, 2010), a book about Chaplin, A Comedian Sees the World (University of Missouri, 2014), and Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp in America, 1947–77 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

via Cinema Treasures at http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/16578

Thursday, April 15, 2021

Even More Vintage Movie Star Recipes, including Clara Bow, Fay Wray and Charlie Chaplin

As mentioned in my last couple of blogs, on Sunday April 18th I'll be a guest on Hollywood Kitchen, Karie Bible's entertaining video blog featuring recipes, a bit of cooking, and conversation about Hollywood's Golden Age. The show will stream live at 12 noon (PST - Pacific Standard Time). It will also be archived on its website. More about this program can be found on its website at https://www.hollywoodkitchenshow.com/  

And as promised in my last blog, I said I would post more vintage celebrity recipes. (Recipes associated with Brooks can be found in earlier posts.) So here goes. Let's begin with Clara Bow take on Welsh Rarebit (I think Winsor McCay would approve!), followed by Clara's baked macaroni. (The second clipping also has recipes associated with Ruth Chatterton, and Nancy Carroll.)


And here's one from the great Fay Wray, one of the few stars of the silent and early sound era who I once had the opportunity to meet! (It was at a party at the home of the daughter of an Oscar winning movie director. . . . ) The actress's Chocolate Marshmallow Fudge sounds tempting.

And here is a rarity, an advertisement for Crisco shortening which includes a recipe for Charlie Chaplin's Steak and Kidney Pie. Crisco was in June 1911 by Procter & Gamble, and this newspaper ad appeared just a few years later. I wonder if Charlie knew about this one?

And finally, here is one of the rarest recipes from my small collection of stuff (that is a technical term meaning "stuff") associated with dancer Ruth St. Denis. It is for Chicken Creole, which is described as an East Indian dish. Had Louise Brooks stayed with the Denishawn Dance Company, she would likely have traveled with them to Asia when they toured Japan, India and elsewhere. And who knows, she might well have eaten this dish at one time or another.

Friday, January 15, 2021

Nazi hatred of Charlie Chaplin, along with mention of a Louise Brooks film

Late last year, I ran a short series of blogs highlighting some of the new and unusual material I have come across while researching Louise Brooks' life and career. This was research conducted over the internet during the stay-at-home doldrums of the 2020 pandemic lock-down. My research has continued into 2021, as have the stay-at-home orders. Thanks to longtime Louise Brooks Society supporter Tim Moore, I have recently come across a handful of new and unusual items which I wish to share. This post kicks off another short series of blogs highlighting that material.

In the past, the UK newspaper Daily Telegraph ran a regular feature called "London Day by Day," featuring short news bits about and related to life in the English capitol. In August of 1934, it ran a piece on the English-born actor Charlie Chaplin, followed by a piece on the German actor Fritz Kortner (Brooks' co-star in Pandora's Box), who was then a recent emigrant to England. These two piece reveal the tenor of the times.

Chaplin’s movies were banned in Germany because of the actor’s suspected Jewish heritage. Though Nazi hatred of Chaplin is well known, their deep contempt for the widely loved comedian is still surprising, even shocking, after all these years - especially when one reads the Nazi description of Chaplin as "A nasty little Jew, not yet hanged." This clipping, it is worth noting, came 6 years before Chaplin satirized Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940).

Also surprising to me is the mention of Pandora's Box (a silent film) having shown in Berlin in 1934, some five years after it was first released - that is, four to five years into the sound era and a year after the Nazis assumed power. What also surprised me is the description of Pandora's Box as a "distinctly Liberalistic, if not Marxist" film. (It is unclear to me if that is the attitude of the Nazis, or the newspaper.) The clipping also mentions that Pandora's Box was one of the last films shown at the Camera theatre before it was closed by the Nazis, implying that this "world famous pocket cinema" was shuttered because of the films it showed.

The director behind Pandora's Box, the Austrian-born G. W. Pabst, was known as a left-of-center film-maker, and a number of his films contain subtle and not-so-subtle critiques of German society. (Pabst's critical attitude toward German society is also apparent in the other film he made with Brooks, Diary of a Lost Girl). Despite, or perhaps in addition to Pabst's leftist politics, what likely got the Camera theatre shuttered was the fact that Brooks' co-star in Pandora's Box, Fritz Kortner, was Jewish. (No doubt, Kortner left Germany in 1934 because the Nazis prohibited Jewish individuals from working in the film industry. Also exiled because of the Nazi ban were members of Syd Kay's Fellows, the small jazz band seen playing at Lulu's wedding in Pandora's Box.)

Fritz Kortner looms over Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box. A Menorah  sits on the shelf to the left.

I don't know much of anything about Die Kamera theater, now demolished, except for what can be found on its Cinema Treasures page. Built in 1928, the theater
was badly damaged by Allied bombs during World War II. It was not reopened, and later the Russian Embassy was built at its site. If any reader of this blog knows more, I would certainly be interested to learn what I might about its existence in the early 1930s. I would also be especially interested in obtaining any vintage newspaper advertisements from the time, especially for Pandora's Box. I wonder which German newspaper might have carried them?

Cinema Treasures has a couple of image of this historic theater, one an interior view, and another 1936 image of an exterior, street view. (That image, the image shown below, is a cropped from this Wikipedia image.) Its name, Kamera, can be seen behind the lamp pole above the door in the middle of the image. Another image of the theater, dating from 1934, and with Nazi flags hanging from the building exterior, can be found HERE.

For more on a 1933 screening of Pandora's Box, see this earlier LBS blog, "Amazing letter from Theodor Adorno to Alban Berg," in which the famous philosopher recounts seeing the film in a letter to the famed composer.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Some Charlie Chaplin news, and a bit of Louise Brooks too

First off, let me thank long-time friend Rena Azevedo Kiehn of the Niles Essanay Film Museum for sending me a pair of Louise Brooks face masks. What an unexpected delight. They should help fend off the coronavirus. I think they are very groovy, and they are much liked in this stay-at-home, go-out-very-little California household. Here are the two, modeled by yours truly.


 

Speaking of the Niles Essanay Film Museum. . . . the Fremont, California museum will be hold their annual Charlie Chaplin Days on June 26 through June 28, about a month from today. Unlike the real world events of the past, this year's event is going virtual due to the you know what. There are a bunch of activities planned, and I would encourage everyone to check things out come June.

And speaking of Charlie Chaplin . . . . author and Chaplin authority Dan Kamin has a new interactive presentation available called Red Letter Days Live. It is a complement to his superb book, Charlie Chaplin Red Letter Days, which I wrote about for Huffington Post back in 2017. (Read that piece HERE.) Red Letter Days Live is a multi-media work which looks at the public and private worlds of the comedic legend and how the great comedian affected the WWI and the "war to end all war" affected him. What follows is a short video by Kamin about his new work.

Monday, April 6, 2020

New Find 1 - Mention of Louise Brooks in Charlie Chaplin's FBI file

There is still a lot of interesting Louise Brooks & silent film material yet to discover. This post is the first in an ongoing series highlighting some of the newly found material I have just recently come across while stuck at home due to the coronavirus. With time on my hands, I have turned to picking through some of the many online databases and archives - some of which are newly accessible (due to the physical restrictions put on researchers because of the coronavirus), and some of which I am returning to in order to more thoroughly explore their holdings. As I am always finding out, it pays to not only have more than one set of key words to search under, but to look in the most unlikely places. You never know what you will find. Be sure and follow this blog for more discoveries in the coming weeks. 

As is known, Louise Brooks and Charlie Chaplin had an affair in the summer of 1925. It took place around the time Chaplin was visiting New York City for the premiere of The Gold Rush. Chaplin was married at the time, and was twice Brooks' age. (He was 36 years old, and she was just 18.) The affair was brief, and lasted just a couple-three months. Nevertheless, newspapers of the time took notice, and tongues wagged, if only in an oblique manner. Below is four panel comic strip which alludes to the affair between the then little known showgirl and international film star. It appeared in a NYC newspaper in the Fall of 1925, around the time Brooks' own "draped nudes scandal" was unfolding after she posed in a semi-nude state for the photographer, John DiMirjian.


Gossip made the news. The feature photo shown below, which more directly references their affair, was syndicated across the country. (Despite Chaplin's denials, in later years he recalled his affair with Brooks, vividly describing Brooks' breasts as being like "little pears.")


As is also known, Chaplin liked younger women. His brief affair with Louise Brooks - which had taken place some 18 years earlier - wasn't forgotten when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was interviewing individuals in 1943 as word was beginning to break about his affair with aspiring actress Joan Berry. (Chaplin was 52 years old, and Berry was 22 years old at the time.) A three page section from a FBI file of the time includes a surprising mention of Brooks - with her name highlighted in green.
The passage from the above document which references Brooks reads: "With reference to the individual mentioned in VON ULM's book as 'MAISIE" xxxxxxxx advised he thought it was Louise Brooks. He said she was very young at the time and later married EDDIE SOUTHERLAND (sic), who is a Director in pictures at the present time." Does anyone have an informed guess as to whom the person "advising" the FBI might be? Whoever it is, they are likely wrong about conflating Maisie with Brooks.

I have a copy of Gerith von Ulm's 1940 book, Charlie Chaplin: The Birth of Tragedy, and read the passage which mention "Maisie." First of all, the book isn't very good, and I don't think Maisie is Brooks, but rather Marion Davies (if I were to guess). Von Ulm states in a footnote regarding Maisie, "This is not her name, but because this star has retired into private life, she enjoys a 'legal right to privacy' which is not the writer's wish to invade." For those wishing to check things out, the relevant passages about "Maisie" (which is a garbled almost-anagram of Marion Davies) begin at the bottom of page 203 of Von Ulm's book.


Back to the FBI document, and my shock at having come across Brooks' name in Chaplin's FBI file: I find it surprising that Louise Brooks was mentioned at all in 1943, as she was long forgotten and living in near obscurity at the time. Brooks had been out of films since 1938, and had returned home to Wichita, Kansas in 1940, where she lived in her parents house until January of 1943, when she relocated to New York City in the hopes of finding work in radio. Compared to her heyday in the late 1920's, Brooks was rarely ever mentioned in the press anymore. (I have come across only about a half-dozen mentions of Brooks in 1943, with most of those coming from columnist Dorothy Kilgallen.) The fact that she was mentioned in this FBI document leads me to believe that whoever it was that mentioned her must have known her and known of her affair with Chaplin. Does anyone have an informed guess as to whom the person "advising" the FBI might be? Inquiring minds want to know.

Monday, February 17, 2020

Louise Brooks and Brazil - beginning with Pandora's Box featured in a 1930 Chaplin Club newsletter

I have been researching Louise Brooks for a long time, ever since I began the Louise Brooks Society and launched its website back in 1995. Over those 25 years, I have come across all kinds of interesting, unusual, and even surprising material. However, what I came across a few days ago left me a bit gobsmacked.

I found two articles focusing on Pandora's Box, the 1929 German-made, G.W. Pabst directed film starring Louise Brooks. It wasn't so much that I found two articles that were unknown to me - but where I found them. They appeared in the June 1930 issue of O Fan - the official newsletter of the Chaplin-Club. (More on this remarkable group below.) What astonished me was that something like a local film club printed a newsletter back then, and that ephemeral copies survived to this day. And what's more, this group was based not in the United States or Europe, but in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Here is the table of contents for the June 1930 issue, with Pandora's Box referred to under its Portuguese title, A Caixa de Pandora.


As can be seen above, one article on the film is by Octávio de Faria, and the other is by Annibal Nogueira Jr. Each were noted Brazilian writers. (Additionally, Octavio de Faria was the editor of O Fan.) The first article runs seven and a half-pages. It is subtitled -- "ensaaio para um estudo sobre G. W. Pabst" -- or "essay for a study on G. W. Pabst." Instead of posting images of each page of this first piece, I will instead LINK TO THE ARTICLE so that those who wish to read it may do so.


The second article runs seven pages. Instead of posting images of each page of this second article, I will instead LINK TO THE ARTICLE so those who wish to read it may do so.


The last entry on the table of contents pictured above is "Sessões do Chaplin-Club," a record of the group's sessions or meetings at which they viewed and/or discussed films. Did the Chaplin-Club have their own access to prints of the films they wrote about, or did they rely on theatrical screenings? It is hard to say. But, in announcing the publication of the two articles shown above, the prior issue of O Fan referred to a "special presentation" they had of A Caixa de Pandora.



If that is the case, WOW. If not, then the only public showing of A Caixa de Pandora in Rio de Janeiro prior to June 1930 that I have come across took place in December, 1929 at Rio's Primor theatre, pictured below in an image dating from the 1920s.


This old theater may still stand. James N. Green's a 2001 book, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil (University of Chicago Press), refers to the Primor as "a large old movie theatre in downtown Rio... [and] a popular place for anonymous sexual liaisons."


 

But ... I digress. As well as the two articles, the sessões record in the June 1930 issue of O Fan contains a brief evaluation of A Caixa de Pandora by an author credited only as "A.C." (That author may be Almir Castro.)


My rough, computer assisted translation from the Portuguese reads:

"A major film by Pabst. It is a drama begun in dark tones, charged, morbid. Typically Pabst, it's deeply imbued with his directorial temperament. They are five or six different and equally tragic scenes, which evolve around a young woman, leading to a progressive and almost unconscious fall.

Scenario is well built, few inter-titles, drawing from the artist everything he can give. Symbolism. Great staging, great ambience, great characters, great detail, great sensuality - obsessive sensuality. All of it is compressed, dense, compact ...

Pandora's Box
... and Louise Brooks."

Notably, this issue also contained a still from the film, which I have improved via Photoshop because the original scan was poor.


What was Chaplin-Club? Founded in 1928 by Octavio de Faria and three others, the Chaplin-Club was the first cine-club in Brazil; it's main objective was to study cinema as art rather than as a popular form of entertainment. It should be noted that though they revered Charlie Chaplin and took their name from the actor, the club's interests went beyond the comedian and his films. And, it should also be noted, the club's perspective looked beyond Hollywood and instead looked to ideas about film then percolating in Europe, especially in France and to a lesser degree the Soviet Union.

Since the group's founding, it issued O Fan as a means to spread its ideas. The group's newsletter, which ran between 1928 and 1930, marked the beginning of "serious" Brazilian film criticism. All together, I believe, there were nine issues. The first seven issues, which resemble a professional newsletter of today, ran between four and eight pages, while the last two, which looked like a less professional 'zine, ran approximately 100 pages. Check out the first issue (pictured below) as well as later issues of the publication starting HERE.


Unlike Cinearte, Brazil's leading film-fan magazine, O Fan had no advertisements, printed few photographs, and seemingly had little interest in Hollywood and its stars. It newsletter was instead filled with serious, sometimes technical analyses of European and American silent films. It printed articles on directors such as Abel Gance, Erich von Stroheim, King Vidor, Buster Keaton, E. A. Dupont, D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau and G. W. Pabst. Below is a typical first page, featuring articles on Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch. Other earlier issues critiqued films like City Lights, Fazil, Sunrise, The Patriot, Moulin Rouge, and Broadway Melody. There were also short write-ups of Erotikon, Variety, Piccadilly and other films.


Even with the emergence of sound films, the Chaplin-Club considered silent film the pinnacle of cinematic achievement. According to Maite Conde's 2018 book Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil (University of California Press), the Brazilian group, "decried the talkies as attacking the purity of film's visual discourse, and, worse still, as taking the medium back to its popular origins in the theater.... O Fan knew that it was read by almost no one and that it had no influence in the future of film, but it was not troubled by this."

What film could achieve was an idea whose time had come. Just a couple of months after the two articles about Pandora's Box appeared in O Fan, another of Brooks' European films, the French made Prix de beaute (aka Miss Europa) opened in Rio at the Alhambra, where it proved to be a big hit. That film was Brooks' first sound film, but more than that, it is a film very much concerned with the visual depiction of sound.


Despite their belief that their group had little influence, the ideas put forth by the Chaplin-Club seeped into Brazil's film culture. The Chaplin-Club dissolved in 1930, and its members went on to be film critics, writers, and teachers whose followers and students would in turn go on to form their own film clubs, societies, and groups. In the 1940s, when Orson Welles visited Brazil, he met with members of the disbanded Chaplin-Club and even debated the use of sound and image in film. In the mid-1950s, important national institutions like the Brazilian Cinemateca, and later the Cinemateca of the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, were founded. Both, in part, can trace their origins to the intellectual cinephilia seeded by the Chaplin-Club.

Interestingly, as well, in 1959, Enrique Scheiby, assistant curator of the Brazilian Cinemateca, visited the United States under the State Department's international educational exchange service. He visited for five months, to "study the American film industry." According to an August, 1959 article in a Brazilian newspaper, Correio do Parana, among the various places he visited was the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York -- and among the prominent stars he came into contact with were George Cukor, Otto Preminger, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson and .... Louise Brooks. (My research confirms that Scheiby dined with Brooks and James Card on May 14, 1959.) According to Carlos Roberto de Souza's A Cinemateca Brasileira e a preservação de filmes no Brasil, Scheiby was intent on meeting Brooks, "muse of silent cinema, who signed photographs for the select members of an informal club of Louise Brooks admirers, whose headquarters was the Cinematheque." For a time, one of those autographed photographs would hang in the meeting room of the Cinematheque.

Three years later, French film archivist Henri Langlois also visited Rochester, and was interviewed by Henry Clune of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. He confirmed Brazil's continuing affection for Brooks.


Some of the above material will be included in my forthcoming two volume work, Around the World with Louise Brooks, a transnational look at the career and films of the actress. It is due out later this year. For more interesting, unusual, and even surprising material, stay tuned to this blog. And consider subscribing. The next post will feature material of interest to those interested in early film and it manifestation around the globe.
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