I just found out about this screening of the Louise Brooks film
Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) at Spectacle in Brooklyn, New York. I wish I could be there. Sounds like it will be an interesting viewing and listening experience. More info
here.
According to the Spectacle website: "On May 23rd,
Ana Lola Roman
will provide live electronics, synths, beats, live vocal atmospheres,
and drum pads to provide a futuristic, timeless, modular, and modern
soundtrack/score to G. W. Pabst’s first Louis Brooks’ film. Roman’s
haunting, lush, and minimal flourishes will provide a sound-scape that
teeters on suspense, sexuality, raw-eroticism, and danger. This will be a
chance to see silent film’s penultimate Muse; the vivid innocence,
playfulness, and primal, yet refined beauty of Louise Brooks through
Roman’s modern, raw, animistic, refined lens.
Louise Brooks, the silent film star who very well could have been the
first to engage in the earliest version of ‘method’ acting, stars in
Pabst’s
Diary of a Lost Girl. Brooks plays the main character of Thymian, who is forced to face lurid tragedies and brief encounters with scandal and lust.
The premise of the story is disturbingly modern.
Diary of a Lost Girl
plays on fears we could face at anytime. We see Thymian take on a
variety of misfortunes all while forced into a class-system she was not
born into and which is clearly beneath her. Modern viewers will first
notice that this film, released in 1929, is the first of its kind to
deal with problems of exploitation, prostitution, and abandonment. Even
before
Lolita, or before
Taxi Driver, this silent film eerily depicts a new genre of film to come."
Poster by Domokos (Tit’nul) from Future Blondes