I have been working day and night on my latest book project, Around the World with Louise Brooks: the making of an international star. And as of today, I have nearly 550 pages completed, and hope to have the book finished in a few months. Perhaps because I have been so focused on this project, last night I had the strangest dream I ever dreamed before.
I dreamed I was at a screening of the lost Louise Brooks' film A Social Celebrity (1926). Since it is lost, no one today really knows what the film "looked like." But there I was in my dream, viewing whole scenes and anxiously wondering how to record what I had seen. What was this dream, this fevered pitch? Was A Social Celebrity somehow transmitted to me through our collective unconsciousness and through time? If so, who sent this dream to me?
A street scene is vivid in memory, though I don't know that there is any sort of street scene in that particular film. There is such a scene in The Street of Forgotten Men (1925), and perhaps in my dream logic I was conflating the two early Brooks' movies. I have seen that earlier film, and recently came across a remarkable foreign clipping depicting a production still (depicting a street) taken during the making of The Street of Forgotten Men. Below is that production shot. I wonder who the solitary, short haired young women might be in the lower center of the image? Standing apart, day dreaming....
* The print shown above was made by the Japanese artist Onchi Koshiro. It depicts a woman on a movie screen inside the Hogaku-za movie theatre in Toyko. The work is dated 1929, the same year that The Canary Murder Case was shown to great acclaim in that very theatre. Koshiro once said "Art is not to be understood by the mind but by the heart." I think the same can be said for dreams.
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| Onchi Koshiro "Movie Theater (Hogaku-za)" 1929 * |
I dreamed I was at a screening of the lost Louise Brooks' film A Social Celebrity (1926). Since it is lost, no one today really knows what the film "looked like." But there I was in my dream, viewing whole scenes and anxiously wondering how to record what I had seen. What was this dream, this fevered pitch? Was A Social Celebrity somehow transmitted to me through our collective unconsciousness and through time? If so, who sent this dream to me?
A street scene is vivid in memory, though I don't know that there is any sort of street scene in that particular film. There is such a scene in The Street of Forgotten Men (1925), and perhaps in my dream logic I was conflating the two early Brooks' movies. I have seen that earlier film, and recently came across a remarkable foreign clipping depicting a production still (depicting a street) taken during the making of The Street of Forgotten Men. Below is that production shot. I wonder who the solitary, short haired young women might be in the lower center of the image? Standing apart, day dreaming....
* The print shown above was made by the Japanese artist Onchi Koshiro. It depicts a woman on a movie screen inside the Hogaku-za movie theatre in Toyko. The work is dated 1929, the same year that The Canary Murder Case was shown to great acclaim in that very theatre. Koshiro once said "Art is not to be understood by the mind but by the heart." I think the same can be said for dreams.
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