Showing posts with label article. Show all posts
Showing posts with label article. Show all posts

Monday, April 25, 2016

Louise Brooks - More Visions of Beauty, from 1940

Two years after Louise Brooks retired from film (and she was largely forgotten by the American public), her name was still evoked as an example of beauty. This two page article dates from 1940.







Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Louise Brooks and the koala bear

We've all seen the picture of Louise Brooks with a koala bear, but did we ever know it's name? Meet Archie.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

New article on Louise Brooks in Jocks&Nerds magazine

There is a new, 6 page illustrated article in Jocks&Nerds magazine (issue 14, Spring 2015). The piece was penned by Chris Sullivan and starts on page 84. Jocks&Nerds is published in London, but can be read online.


Saturday, October 11, 2014

What do Louise Brooks, Nicki Minaj, Lindsay Lohan, and Rosamund Pike have in common?

Louise Brooks and her iconic bob continue to influence and be discussed. And today, she was in the news:



Refinery29
Did Nicki Minaj Just Change The Bob Game?
The 'do she's rocking would put Louise Brooks to shame — it's like a modern take on Vidal Sassoon's iconic cuts. And, while we're having a serious bob moment (and so is all of Hollywood) . . . .

The Lindsay Lohan Mystery
Lindsay Lohan’s development as a screen actor has been unnaturally thwarted, but one thing she has is the rare and purely cinematic quality, never quite visible in stills, which found its fullest expression in the Louise Brooks of Diary of a Lost Girl or Pandora’s Box: a thrill and possibility located not in the body but in the face, especially the eyes, as if someone has turned all the lights on inside.


Telegraph.co.uk
Rosamund Pike's Gone Girl bob: so sharp, it could be a murder weapon
The outstanding filmic hair moments over the past century - from Louise Brooks' almost shockingly modern bob in Pandora's Box (1928), to Cate Blanchett's Freudian red wig in Elizabeth (1998) and Kirsten Dunst's (2006) mauve tinged bouffant in Marie Antoinette - have been awarded to whackos, psychos and shopaholics.
 

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Collegiate perspective from the Jazz Age

Collegiate perspective on the Jazz Age from the newspaper from Penn State University.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Dorothy Knapp: American Venus Discloses Her Beauty Secrets

Here is another nifty article I came across a while back. It is from 1922. I think it nifty because it refers to Dorothy Knapp (Louise Brooks' later friend in the 1925 Ziegfeld Follies) as "The American Venus."




Thursday, June 7, 2012

Louise Brooks - Cover Girl and Secret Muse of the 20th Century

Yesterday, I published a long article on the Huffington Post titled "Louise Brooks - Cover Girl and Secret Muse of the 20th Century." The article, along with its accompanying slideshow, explores Brooks' enduring cultural impact, especially in literature and publishing. Various works of fiction are surveyed which features the actress as a character (minor or major), or which were inspired by her, were based on her, or which reference or allude or give Brooks a literary shout-out. Prominant among them is Laura Moriarty's just released novel, The Chaperone (Riverhead), as well as Adolfo Bioy Casares' 1940 novella, The Invention of Morel (NYRB Classics), which is pictured below.


And pictured above is a screen grab of Saywer, the character from the TV show Lost, reading that very edition of The Invention of Morel with Brooks on the cover in an episode of the hit show.The connection between the novella, Louise Brooks, and Lost is further explained in the slideshow caption.

The slideshow which accompanies the article includes nearly three dozen images of Brooks on books. I titled the article "secret muse" because the actress' literary and cultural imapact is little known. Though ongoing. Indictitive of such is an image taken at the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris, France in 2011. Pictured below on the left holding my "Louise Brooks edition" of The Diary of a Lost Girl is the French translator of the Barry Paris biography (whose name escapes me at present, my apologies), myself in the middle, and on the right holding his Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star is the French journalist and critic Roland Jaccard. Actually, that was my copy of Jaccard's book which, along with others, I carried to France so Jaccard could autograph it.


One of the other books I brought to France was one that I mentioned at the end of my Huffington Post piece. It is also one of my favorite Brooks' covers. It is Jaccards' Portrait d'une Flapper. The book was published in France, but has not been translated and published in the United States. Here is a scan of the cover.


I have gotten some really nice feed back about this article. Please do read it. AND, if you know of other literary references to Louise Brooks, please let me know. Either post something in the comments section below of email the Louise Brooks Society.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Louise Brooks in Vanity Fair

Thanks to film and magazine maven Jim Barter, who pointed out that Louise Brooks is included in an image in the January 2009 issue of Vanity Fair.

The magazine, which has just hit newsstands, includes a picture of the exterior of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which in turn features some of the images included in a traveling photography exhibit, "Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008." Louise Brooks, Gloria Swanson, Jean Harlow and Leslie Howard are among those seen on page 45 of the magazine. Check it out.

Friday, November 21, 2008

New article on Louise Brooks

An article about Louise Brooks ran in today's Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. Jack Garner's excellent article,  "Louise Brooks, star of the silent era, made plenty of noise in Hollywood," looks at Brooks' life in Rochester, New York and notes that  next week the George Eastman House will be screening a couple of Brooks' most celebrated films, Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) and Prix de Beaute (1930).

The article begins: ""There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!" That's what famed French film curator Henry Langlois once put on a giant banner to welcome Brooks to a Paris tribute. And, indeed, there are people who credit Brooks with being among the first great naturalistic actors in film history, as well as one of the most utterly sensual, even by today's standards."

It's a good newspaper article. Check it out here.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Harem pants, the newest rage

According to an article in a newspaper based in India, Harem pants will be the newest rage. "Immortalised by Turkish belly dancers and brought into the realm of fashion by Hollywood icons like Louise Brooks, Harem pants are the rage now." 

So begins the article by Nithya Caleb in the Express from South India. What is interesting to me is the casual reference to a long-dead American silent film star, with any sort of contextualization - as if readers of this paper would know who she is. Is Louise Brooks that much of a trans-cultural icon ?

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Lulu in New York, Louise Brooks in New York Times

Today, the New York Times ran a piece on a new stage production of Lulu, which is playing at BAM as part of the Next Wave Festival. (An earlier, and equally informative article about this new production, "The Nymphet Is a Lethal Weapon," appeared in the 11-25-07 New York Times. The article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/theater/25kalb.html).

Today's article by Caryn James, "A Woman of Thoughtless Erotic Force Has Her Day, and Many Men," reads in part:
Wedekind wrote “Pandora’s Box” and “The Earth Spirit,” which together became “Lulu,” soon after “Spring Awakening,” the 1891 play that is the basis for the current (when the stagehands aren’t on strike) Broadway musical. Although his sexual frankness shattered the mores of his society, we can see now that his plays were not so much ahead of their time as timeless. Just as the musical “Spring Awakening” speaks to the eternal theme of adolescent sexual discovery, this “Lulu” distills the story of a woman and the many men with whom she has lethal affairs to its primal elements: desire, willfulness, blind obsession.

That approach shatters the Lulu stereotype. From Louise Brooks in the 1929 silent film “Pandora’s Box,” staring out from the screen with her dark-rimmed eyes and trademark black bob, to her descendant, Lola Lola, the Marlene Dietrich character in “The Blue Angel,” the typical Germanic femme fatale has swept through men’s lives with the destructive force of a tornado. Mr. Thalheimer offers a nonjudgmental “Lulu,” with a heroine who is more careless than seductive, and men and women who are neither good nor bad, strong nor weak. Until it is undermined by a melodramatic ending, his version has an elemental sexuality that transcends the taboos of any moment.
According to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) website, this performance is sold out for the duration of its short run. I know I have asked this question before, but might there be a Wedekind revival in the works?

Monday, November 26, 2007

Mike Nichols on Natalie Portman and Louise Brooks

Once again, Natalie Portman is associated with Louise Brooks. . . . The first time was in 1994, when Portman appeared in The Professional wearing a bob haircut.

And now again, in an article in today's Guardian newspaper, "The actress was a paragon of principle, a hugely talented brainbox who happened to be both bombshell and bewitcher, who rewrote the rule book for young Hollywood hot shots. 'It confuses people to think that someone so completely beautiful could be a first-rate actor, too,' says veteran director Mike Nichols, to whom Portman is very close. 'It's hard to grasp, but it's happened. It's happened a few times before, with Garbo and Louise Brooks'."

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Short article

rom today's San Francisco Chronicle

Louise Brooks book features rare photos

Peter Cowie is a major international film critic, a British national based in Switzerland who has written 30 books, including "Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography," the most intelligent and lucid book on Bergman in the English language. Cowie is the founder of the International Film Guide, and he is regarded as an authority on Swedish and foreign-language cinema, Francis Ford Coppola, Orson Welles and films of the 1960s. But, in his youth, he was also friends with film legend Louise Brooks (1906-1985), and that friendship has become the occasion for a superb book about the actress, "Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever," a gorgeous, glamour-packed, coffee-table extravaganza just published by Rizzoli.

For most people who buy the book, the photos will be the draw -- there's a 256-page deluge of them, many full-page, some double-page and most of them rare. Yet the text is what makes this book invaluable as film history. Cowie augments the story of Brooks' life with his own recollections and with direct quotes from Brooks' correspondence. A full picture of the woman emerges.

Cowie will be in the Bay Area this weekend promoting the book and its subject. At 7 p.m. Saturday at the Rafael Film Center (cafilm.org), he will introduce a screening of G.W. Pabst's "Pandora's Box" (1929). The program will repeat at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Balboa Theater (www.balboamovies.com). For fans, this is a must-see. Even those immune to the Brooks mystique (myself included) should welcome the chance to hear Cowie's lucid and informed response to her life and work. -- Mick LaSalle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/06/DDGQDM607K1.DTL&feed=rss.entertainment

p.s. please note that the Sunday program at the Balboa starts at 7:30 pm - and that "Pandora's Box" will NOT be shown; there will be other rare Louise Brooks' film shown instead (not shown in San Francisco in 80 years)

Friday, November 2, 2007

Barry Paris article on LB

There is an article by Barry Paris in today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Louise Brooks and Pandora's Box, which screens Sunday evening in Pittsburgh. This mere newspaper article is yet another example of Paris' considerable gifts as a writer. Check it out !

Monday, September 10, 2007

VIP hairstyles website features Louise Brooks

VIPhairstyles.com has an article on its website called "Hollywood's influence through the years," and Louise Brooks is featured prominently. Be sure and check it out.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

Opening up Pandora's Box


British actor (and big Louise Brooks fan) Paul McGann has written an article about  "Louise Brooks silent beauty." The article was published in the September 7th issue of the Guardian  - a British newspaper.
Louise Brooks is unique and immortal. Her face can still command a magazine cover, the breathtaking beauty and the enigma are always instant and contemporary. She never dates or ages. To see her in Pandora's Box is like watching a modern, living actor who had somehow moved into a silent film set. And at the same time she brings home how rich the silent cinema was and how much it can still offer. She is the model and the despair of actors. She simply IS her character. What actor does not dream of that?
Pandora's Box, with the world premiere of a live Paul Lewis score, screens on September 15 at Colston Hall in Bristol, England.

Monday, August 27, 2007

From Rudolph Nureyev to Louise Brooks


here was an article in yesterday's New York Times about Rudolph Nureyev. ** The piece was prompted by the debut of a new documentary about the Russian dancer which airs on PBS later this week. Well anyways, the article began in a most thoughtful kind of way. For me, the situation the reporter depicts rang true. The article began:
A POINT comes in the afterlife of an artist when, for the time being, biography has pretty much done its work. The essential history is known; the ambience is broadly understood; the relationship between the life and the work has yielded its chief mysteries. Barring bombshells any future surprises are apt to be minor: not revelations, just minutiae.
Sometimes, that's the situation I find myself in regarding Louise Brooks. There may not be all that much left to find out. Critics of the Louise Brooks Society - and there are a few - have complained that my efforts are too much focussed on picking through the scraps. Well, that's all I have access to. Sometimes, I find something interesting. . . like the unlikeliness of G.W. Pabst having seen A Girl in Every Port before he decided to cast Brooks in Pandora's Box, or the fact that Pandora's Box was screened in Newark, New Jersey in 1931 with sound effects! These simple facts may not be revelations, only minutiae. But they do alter some long held believes in the story of the actress.

My hunt goes on.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been back to the San Francisco Public Library looking at inter-library loan material. More microfilmed newspapers had arrived. I got a bit of Denishawn material and a few film reviews from the Bangor Daily News (Maine), Reading Times(Pennsylvania), Louisville Post (Kentucky), Virginian-Pilot and Norfolk Landmark (Norfolk, Virginia), and Montreal Gazette (Canada). My request for the Milwaukee Herold (a German-language newspaper from Wisconsin) was rejected as "title not on shelf." Oh well, that sometimes happens. Likewise, nothing turned up in the Morning Register (Eugene, Oregon), though I did find a short article and a large advertisement forBeggars of Life in some January, 1930 issues of the North China Daily News (Shanghai). Bad luck sometimes runs with good.

One unusual source I also examined was the New York Commerical. This New York City financial paper was something like today's Wall Street Journal. (Like so many other publications I have looked at, the Commerical is no longer published. I believe it either folded or merged with another paper in the late 1920's.) Anyways, somewhere along the line I had come across a reference to a Denishawn article appearing in that publication. So, I figure I would request some key dates and see what I could find. As it turns out, I found that review and bit more. Happily, the Commercialran a small amount of "entertainment news" pretty much every day - mostly reviews of New York happenings.

Along with the Denishawn dates, I also requested microfilm for the period when the George White Scandals opened in NYC in 1924. And lo and behold, I came across a June 30th article referencing Brooks as a performer in the Scandals. Wow, she was hardly a principal - but there was her name in an article in a newspaper. That article ran before the show opened. I also came across a interesting review titled "George White Excels His Best Scandals" after the show's debut. Brooks was not mentioned in it.

My luck with the Commerical convinced me to request additional microfilm.Thus, on the docket are microfilm requests for the period covering the opening of "Louie the 14th," the 1925 Ziegfeld Follies, and even the NYC openings of Brooks' early silent films. You never know what you may find. . . . Speaking of things found, here is a nice advertisement I came across in the Evening Bulletin (Providence, Rhode Island).


Last week, I also spent a little time organizing my projected inter-library loan requests. I have pending requests for some additional issues of theEvening Bulletin, as well as the New Orleans States (Louisiana), Hagerstown Morning Herald (Maryland), Evening Telegram (Superior, Wisconsin), and a few other papers. From here on out, I plan on putting in probably no more than two ILL requests per week till I am through. It should take me less than a year to get through  all of those.

** Trivia buffs: which silent film star with whom Brooks was acquainted did Rudolph Nureyev play in a film?

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Berkeley Daily Planet article

I am looking forward to this year's San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Here is what the Berkeley Daily Planet had to report on what has become the best silent film festival in the country.

Moving Pictures: Silent Film Festival a Portal To the Picturesque Past
By Justin DeFreitas
 (07-10-07)


In today’s fully wired world of digital video and handheld viewing devices, it may be difficult to fathom a time when the moving picture was itself a revolutionary technology. In the first few decades of the 20th century, as the new medium was developed and perfected, it brought with it a radical cultural shift, bringing images from all over the world to neighborhood theaters. The cinema essentially held a monopoly on mass entertainment, for this was before television brought the moving image into the home, and even before radio, which first brought the immediacy of live news and entertainment into the living room in the 1930s.

It was likewise before commercial aviation, a time when travel was more daunting, more arduous, and less accessible to the working class. Thus cinema provided a unique and engaging portal to the world for many who might not otherwise venture beyond regional borders.
The 12th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, running this weekend at the Castro Theater, is a portal of its own, taking audiences back to a time when film was establishing itself as the dominant art form of the new century. The festival’s mission is to showcase the art of silent film as it was meant to be seen, with quality prints presented at proper projection speeds and accompanied by period-appropriate live music.

In those early years, cinema, despite the tiredness of the cliché, was a new and universal language. Photography in newspapers and magazines could provide a glimpse of other cultures and other lives, but moving pictures, captured in faraway lands and projected on a screen, brought vivid images of a life beyond: clouds of dust kicked up by wagon trains moving west; waves unfolding on distant shores; the gleam of moonlight on cobblestones in a European village; the very ways in which people moved and lived throughout the world. It was a time when cinema was simpler in means yet just as rich in content, relying almost exclusively on image and motion to convey plot and import.

It was the lack of dialogue in fact which lent the movies much of their universal appeal, establishing film as a visual language that would be undermined once the images began to talk. For along with the advent of synchronized sound came the cultural barrier of language, a gap bridged only by such awkward translation devices such as dubbing, the falsity of which created a visual-verbal dissonance, and subtitling, which detracted from cinema’s impact by drawing the eye away from the image. Silent film instead relied on intertitles, an imperfect device to be sure, but one which at least had the virtue of separating the printed words from the image, leaving the visuals untouched and undiluted. And translation was simply a matter of replacing the title cards as a film crossed international borders.

This year’s festival presents something of the international appeal and range of silent-era cinema by bringing together an eclectic selection of films. The festival kicks off Friday with a mainstream American studio production, The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg. This is Germany by way of MGM, with big Hollywood stars Norma Shearer and Ramon Novarro directed with continental flare by the great Ernst Lubitsch.
Continuing with the international theme, Saturday will feature an afternoon screening of Maciste, an Italian classic that the festival’s programmers—Executive Director Stacey Wisnia and Artistic Director Steve Salmons—came across at the Pordenone Silent Festival in Italy. This was the first in a series of Maciste films starring Barolomeo Pagan as a heroic strong man rescuing damsels in distress. Sunday’s screenings include “Retour De Flamme” (“Saved From the Flames”), a program of early rarities by French cinema pioneers, presented, with his own piano accompaniment, by Parisian film collector Serge Bromberg, and The Cottage on Dartmoor, a British “psycho-noir” by director Anthony Asquith.

Another aspect of the Silent Film Festival’s mission is to educate its audience about the preservation and restoration of our rapidly disappearing cinematic heritage. Thus for the second year the festival is hosting “Amazing Tales from the Archives,” a free Sunday morning presentation on the effort to preserve that history. The program is the brainchild of Wisnia, who, despite the skepticism of her colleagues, thought last year’s presentation might draw a decent crowd. All were surprised when the turnout nearly filled the Castro’s main floor. This year’s program will focus on “peripheral” films—trailers, newsreels and shorts—and on obsolete formats, such as 28-millimeter, a format originally sold for use in homes and schools. Many 28mm films shorts will be screened throughout the festival, including travelogues, educational films and short comedies, even one of Harold Lloyd’s rarely screened “Lonesome Luke” films.

Though Wisnia and Salmons’ tastes may skew toward the lesser-known films from the era, they make an effort to fill a range of genres, from comedy to drama, from blockbuster studio productions to quieter, more experimental work, from star-studded large-scale productions to forgotten gems by actors and directors nearly lost to film history. Other films on the menu include:

• Valley of the Giants, a drama set amid the towering redwoods of the Sierra Nevada, featuring nearly forgotten actor Milton Sills.

• Beggars of Life, a follow-up to last year’s screening of Pandora’s Box, featuring the legendary flapper-vixen Louise Brooks. This time Brooks takes a radically different role, spending most of the film attired in men’s clothes in a story of hobos riding the rails in Depression-era America.

• The Godless Girl, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, one of the greatest showmen to take up film. His films were spectacles, full of melodrama and hysteria, and, more often than not, a steady stream of vice, usually denounced toward the end of the film to accommodate censors.

• Miss Lulu Brett, by William DeMille, a successful Broadway playwright and accomplished film director whose work was often overshadowed by that of his younger, brasher, more ostentatious brother. Miss Lulu Brett is considered his best film, based a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Zona Gale. William takes a quieter, humbler approach than his more famous brother, telling a tale of a small-town girl stuck as a servant in her sister’s household while looking for a path toward a happier and more meaningful life.

• Camille, a distinctive and innovative Warner Bros. production starring Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino.

• And every festival includes at least one program focusing on the silent era’s comic masters. This year spotlights producer Hal Roach, screening four short comedies from Roach Studio stalwarts like Charley Chase and the Our Gang ragamuffins.

SAN FRANCISCO SILENT FILM FESTIVAL
Friday, July 13 through Sunday, July 15 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. (925) 275-9005. www.silentfilm.org.

Photograph: Doris Kenyon and Milton Sills in Valley of the Giants (1927).

Sunday, July 8, 2007

French colors



From an article about the La Rochelle film festival in Le Monde, the French newspaper. ( Click here for the article.) I guess Louise Brooks is something of a pop art star.

Friday, March 30, 2007

Lulu in Malaysia

Louise Brooks was mentioned today in The Star, a Malayasian newspaper. The article about jewelry - and pearls in particular - name-checks the actress. The article, entiled "Ageless Bijoux," begins
O E Jewellery’s founding in 1906 coincided with the the Art Nouveau movement. Icons like Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin ruled the silent movie scene. In Germany, all artistic endeavours stopped during World War I from 1914 to 1918.
A weary world found solace in the Roaring Twenties. It was the Age of the Flapper. Music roared in as jazz took over. Machines became the new fascination. With their snazzy, short bob, women looked androgynous and shocked polite society. Pearls were worn by the yard and sleek elegant designs were the rage. Famous icons of the 1920s included silent stars like Louise Brooks and Marlene Dietrich. 
The 1930s saw a return to a more genteel ladylike appearance. Clothes were feminine and jewellery was beautifully ornate. Greta Garbo was one of the most popular icons of that era.
This is the first reference to Brooks which I have come across in a Malaysian publication.
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