Louise Brooks - Without Bangs

This YouTube video is a little unusual. It is mostly composed of images of Louise Brooks without her trademark bangs and bob. What do you think?

Louise Brooks: The New Woman in Film

Join Vanessa Rocco, former Associate Curator at ICP, Assistant Professor of Art History at Southern New Hampshire University, and Saul Robbins, Adjunct Professor at ICP and Board Member Emeritus, The Camera Club of New York, as they discuss The New Woman in Film. Rocco and Robbins will present excerpts from such classics as Blue Angel (Marlene Dietrich), Pandora’s’ Box (Louise Brooks), Metropolis (Brigette Helm), and the mythology of Mulan, while also discussing the environment in which Amelia Earhart made best use of newsreel technology to promote herself and her aeronautics adventures.
 

Images of flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, and trampky—all embodiments of the dashing New Woman—symbolized an expanded public role for women from the suffragist era through the dawn of 1960s feminism. Chronicling nearly a century of global challenges to gender norms, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, is the first book to examine modern femininity’s ongoing relationship with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most influential new media: photography and film. This volume of original essays examines the ways in which novel ideas about women’s roles in society and politics were disseminated through new media technologies, probing the significance of radical changes in female fashion, appearance, and sexual identity. Additionally, these essays explore the manner in which New Women artists used photography and film to respond creatively to gendered stereotypes and to re-conceive of ways of being a woman in a rapidly modernizing world.

The event is free and open to the public.

Saturday, September 29, from 4-6 pm at The Camera Club of New York,
336 West 37^th Street (between 8 and 9 Avenues).

http://www.cameraclubny.org/conversations.html

Seating is limited. Please rsvp to: info@cameraclubny.org

Vanessa Rocco is co-editor with Elizabeth Otto of The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870’s to the 1960s (University of Michigan Press). Saul Robbins’ photographs have been widely exhibited and published, including The Bolinas Museum, Blue Sky Gallery, chashama Windows, NYC, Deutsche Haus at NYU, MICA, Museum of Fine Arts – Houston, New Orleans Photo Alliance, Portland Art Museum, Aufbau, Berlin Tagesspiegel, CPW Quarterly, Feature Shoot, FlavorWire, Glo.com, More, The New York Times, Real Simple, and Wired.

http://icphoto.tumblr.com/post/32522891199/the-new-woman-in-film

Bronze medallion depicting Louise Brooks

These show up on eBay from time to time, a bronze medallion depicting Louise Brooks. I believe they were made in France, where the actress is more popular than she is in the United States. For completeists only...... I would guess.

Amateur Photographer magazine features Louise Brooks

Amateur Photographer, the "world's #1 weekly photo magazine," has a long piece by David Clark in their new issue called "Louise Brooks by Eugene Robert Richee - Iconic Photograph." 

"This striking image of Louise Brooks by Eugene Robert Richee captures the spirit of the 1920s and is one of the great Hollywood portraits," writes the author. Check it out here.

Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame

How—and why—do we obsess over movie stars? How does fame both reflect and mask the person behind it? How have the image of stardom and our stars’ images altered over a century of cultural and technological change? Do we create celebrities, or do they create us?

Ty Burr, film critic for The Boston Globe, answers these questions in a new book, Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame, a lively and fascinating anecdotal history of stardom, with all its blessings and curses for star and stargazer alike. From Florence Lawrence and Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin to Archie Leach (a.k.a. Cary Grant) and Marion Morrison (a.k.a. John Wayne) and Julia Roberts to today's instant celebs famous for being famous, Burr takes us on an insightful and entertaining journey through the modern fame game at its flashiest, most indulgent, occasionally most tragic, and ultimately, its most revealing. And yes, there is mention made of Louise Brooks.

Ty Burr will be discussing his new book on Saturday, September 29 at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. Burr will be in conversation with Thomas Gladysz.

Did you see Pandora's Box in Denver?

If you happened to attend yesterday's screening of Pandora's Box at the Denver Silent Film Festival, please leave a comment or observation in the comments field below. We would love to know what you thought of the film or of its star, Louise Brooks. [An expressionistic scene from the the film is pictured above.]

Cool pic of the day: Louise Brooks