Jim Tully

Over the weekend, I received word that something of a Jim Tully revival can be expected this Fall. Tully, as readers of this blog may know, was the author of Beggars of Life, the novel which became the 1928 film of the same name starring Louise Brooks. Just last year, that film was transferred to 35mm and is now enjoying it's own revival in theaters across the country.

Tully was a colorful character as well as a popular writer in the 1920's and 1930's. Gritty and forceful, he also left his mark on some of the hard-boiled writers who followed in his wake. (Some might consider him the Charles Bukowski of his day?) This Fall's revival will see the long awaited release of the first ever biography of the writer by Kent State University press, as well as the reissue of a handful of Tully's seminal books including Beggars of Life, Circus Parade and others. I have been in touch with the biographers, and can't wait to read their book. I will post additional updates as warranted.

p.s. Louise Brooks and Jim Tully met during the filming of Beggars of Life, and from accounts of the time, Brooks did not care for Tully and his gruff manner.

Raymond Kennedy (1934-2008)

Raymond Kennedy, a writer known for his dark, absurdist novels, died last week in Brooklyn. He was 73. Kennedy was the author of the 1988 novel Lulu Incognito. More about the author and his work can be found in this article in the New York Times. The New York Sun also ran an article on the writer.

Louise Brooks on "Lost"

Silent film star Louise Brooks makes an "appearance" on tonight's episode of Lost, the ABC series about a group of castaways on a mysterious island. Continuing the tradition of using a well-placed book to provide clues to the mysteries of the hit show, tonight's episode features the character Sawyer reading the New York Review of Books edition of The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Cesares, which features Brooks on the cover.

Though I posted the cover of the book in my previous entry (on the passing of novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet ), here it is again.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, 85, French Author, Is Dead

Alain Robbe-Grillet, an author and filmmaker who was one of France’s most important avant-garde writers, died on Monday. He was 85 years old. As a novelist, Robbe-Grillet helped establish the New Novel, a genre that rejected conventional storytelling. As a screenwriter, he was best known for his work on Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.

The film was considered "an enigmatic work whose characters, often bored and identified only by initials, live in an otherworldly chateau, not sure whether they are planning seductions or remembering them." Last Year at Marienbad was "released in the United States in early 1962 and became one of the most talked-about art films of the year."

What's the Louise Brooks connection? Last Year at Marienbad was inspired by Adolpho Bioy Casares 1940 novella, The Invention of Morel, one of whose central characters was in turn inspired by Louise Brooks. That connection is spelled out in Thomas Beltzer's rather interesting essay, "Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual Meditation."

(More about Alain Robbe-Grillet can be found here and possibly here.)

Lulu in Derbyshire

Pandora's Box, the 1929 film starring Louise Brooks, will be screened in Derbyshire in England on February 27, according to a brief mention in the February 15th Daily Telegraph. 

The Cinema Expose season continues on February 27 with a screening of the silent classic Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks. There will be musical accompaniment by Derbyshire musician John Hodson.

For more information call 01332 340170.

Babes Whose Babeness Matters

What's most amusing, or perhaps interesting, about City Paper's recent article about the most beautiful actresses of all time is Louise Brooks' inclusion. It's not that I don't think she belongs - but the company that she keeps is a rather odd mix. There's Sally Field, Clara Bow, Alyson Hannigan, Maila Nurmi, Traci Lords, Summer Glau, etc.....) This is what the  alternative weekly had to say about Brooks (who ranked 17th):

17) Louise Brooks

An ethereally beautiful booze hound with a salty tongue and caustic wit that rivaled Dorothy Parker's, Louise Brooks disappeared from film after 1938--but not without leaving a permanent mark in the shape of her trademark spit-curled bob. The quintessential flapper, bristling with wry, intelligent sexuality. See Pandora's Box. (EF)

Check out the article and see for yourself.

Isn't it splendid?

Thank you to Meredith who pointed out that this picture of Louise Brooks ran in yesterday's Guardian newspaper. THe British newspaper ran this piece in anticipation, I believe, of a forthcoming Edward Steichen exhibit. Isn't it splendid?

Secrets of a Soul

Secrets of a Soul, a G.W. Pabst film made just three years before Pandora's Box, is coming to DVD in February. Kino will release the film around mid-month. Here is the product description:

A Psychoanalytic Thriller Restored by the Munich Film Museum and the F.W. Murnau Foundation. In the 1920s, film studios around the world sought to capitalize on the public s curiosity about the newborn science of psychoanalysis. In 1925, Hans Neumann (of Ufa s Kulturfilm office) contacted members of Sigmund Freud s inner circle with a plan to make a dramatic film that explores the mystifying process of the interpretation of dreams. With the help of noted psychologists Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, and under the direction of G.W. Pabst (Pandora s Box), SECRETS OF A SOUL was completed. Werner Krauss, who had played the deranged Dr. Caligari six years earlier, stars as a scientist who is tormented by an irrational fear of knives and the irresistible compulsion to murder his wife. Driven to the brink of madness by fantastic nightmares (designed by Ernö Metzner and photographed by Guido Seeber in a brilliant mix of expressionism and surrealism), he encounters a psychoanalyst who offers to treat the perplexing malady.

Lulu in Dublin

Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks, will be screened at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival on February 24th. This page contains additional information on the film and screening.

http://dubliniff.ticketsolve.com/performances/performances_for_show/10398

Pandora's Box
24th Feb 2008 at 14:30
133 mins / Savoy theatre

"It’s hard to say quite how much one of the great, late masterpieces of the silent era, G.W. Pabst’s extraordinary, erotic and tragic adaptation/conflation of two Wedekind plays, Pandora’s Box, owes to the electrifying, photogenic and iconic presence of the Kansas-born actress Louise Brooks. It’s an Expressionist-Realist walk with love and death, as the sensual and erotic charge of a Berlin prostitute and Kurfürstendamm revue artist sets herself and all who come in contact with her into a destructive social, emotional and physical spiral, ending with her swooning embrace of Thanatos in the person of a mythical, murderous Jack the Ripper. But it may not have seemed quite so modern, vital and powerful, had Pabst chosen, say, Dietrich, or any of the rumoured 2,000 others who the German director screen-tested for the role of the arch femme-fatale, Lulu. In the words of German critic Lotte Eisner, Wedekind’s Lulu was endowed with an ‘animal beauty, but lacking all moral sense, and doing evil unconsciously’. Brooks had the animal beauty alright – and a modicum of self-destructiveness, as her biographical writings testify – but it is her qualities of intelligence and sheer vitality as Lulu, not her putative ‘reflective passivity’, that ensures that her performance seems as exciting and fresh, as well as disturbingly enigmatic, transgressive and deeply moving, today as it did in 1928. That does not diminish, however, the importance of Pabst’s artistry: his psychological insights, atmospheric use of chiaroscuro lighting and thrilling mise-en-scène, not to mention his taboobreaking audacity in flaunting this ‘corn-fed Hollywood flapper’ and exposing the dark appetites and hypocrisies found in the dank, pansexually decadent salons of Weimar Berlin. All offer a perfect context in which Lulu can dazzle and entice, if not – to borrow the line Nic Ray coined in 1949’s Knock on Any Door’ – ‘to live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse’. - Wally Hammond, Time Out London"

"*3EPKANO are a Dublin based, seven piece band/ensemble who specialise in producing original and innovative soundtracks for films from the silent movie era. The band were formed in early 2004 by Matthew Nolan and Cameron Doyle. The line-up includes 2 electric guitars, bass guitar, keyboards/ organ, drums/percussion, cello and viola – the music is minimalist, guitar based, and almost entirely instrumental."