As a follow-up to yesterday's blog post, I wanted to excerpt and add to something I posted back in 2019 regarding Jonas Mekas, one of the founder's of Anthology Film Archives. For those who may not be aware, Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema.
"Opened in 1970 by Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, and Stan Brakhage, Anthology in its original conception was a showcase for the Essential Cinema Repertory collection. An ambitious attempt to define the art of cinema by means of a selection of films which would screen continuously, the Essential Cinema collection was intended to encourage the study of the medium’s masterworks as works of art rather than disposable entertainment, making Anthology the first museum devoted to film as an art form." (Read more on the history of the Anthology Film Archives and the Essential Cinema Repertory collection.)
When Mekas passed away back in 2019, I posted a blog titled "I don't think they ever met, but Jonas Mekas played a small role in the later day life of Louise Brook". What follows is adapted from that blog.
Mekas wrote an influential column for the Village Voice. In fact, he was that publication's first film critic. Mekas also co-founded the influential magazine Film Culture with his brother Adolfas Mekas. According to the obit in the Guardian (UK), "The brothers founded one of the great American movie journals, the quarterly Film Culture,
in 1954 – at a time when mainstream culture did not think those two
words belonged next to each other. The quarterly was a forum for the
exchange of ideas and information about the emergent avant garde cinema
that would convulse the art and movie worlds for three decades: the new
American cinema, as Mekas dubbed it, or American underground film, as it
is now more commonly known. In Film Culture and his weekly column in the Village Voice
(1959-1981), Mekas for years banged the drum for other and minor,
alternative and iconoclastic kinds of film-making: a cinema, as he
called it, 'less perfect and more free'. His ecumenical approach to film
culture, by no means characteristic of the wider, often schismatic
avant garde for which he was the foremost impresario, was part of his
saintly appeal: if you were making film-art that was personal and
sincerely conceived, Mekas was on your side, come what may."
I don't think that they ever met, but Jonas Mekas played a small role
in the later life of Louise Brooks, in that other's noticed what
Mekas noticed.
At a time when old movies and forgotten film stars didn't receive all
that much press, Mekas name-checked Louise Brooks in his September 23,
1959 column in the Village Voice -- noting the forthcoming showing of a Brooks' film at the Film Center at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA. [The film was Prix de beaute (1930),
which was making its American debut thirty years after it was first
shown in Paris. Notably, among those in attendance were the poets Frank
O'Hara and Bill Berkson, each of whom would write a poem inspired by
Brooks.]
And, at a time when Louise Brooks was little
remembered, she also appeared on the cover of the Fall 1965 issue of Mekas'
magazine, Film Culture. (see above) It was only her third post WWII cover.
Additionally, Mekas published an early article by Brooks,
"Charlie Chaplin Remembered," in the Spring 1966 issue of Film Culture. It was only her
second published piece in the United States, and it certainly helped
raise her profile among the film world's intelligentsia.
In the years that followed, Film Culture
would publish other pieces by Brooks including "On Location with Billy
Wellman" (Spring 1972) and "Marion Davies' Niece," (October 1974) and
"Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs" (issue 67-68-69, 1979). In the
latter issue, she is name-checked on the cover, alongside other
significant figure like Brooks-devotee Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, and Blaise Cendrars
(each of whom also figure to some degree in Brooks' later life and legend.)
A couple days ago, November 18th, would have been Bruce Connor's birthday. Conner (1933 – 2008) was an American artist renowned for his work in assemblage, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography, among other disciplines, including film. In fact, three of his films, along with a number by Kenneth Anger, are included among the Anthology Film Archives listing of Essential Cinema Repertory.
Conner was also a devotee of Louise Brooks. And on more than one occasion, he told me of his lifelong interest in the actress. They both grew up in Wichita, Kansas.
Back in 1997, I mounted a small exhibit about Louise Brooks at a small neighborhood cafe in San Francisco. Conner, who lived in the next neighborhood over, read about it in the local paper and visited the exhibit. Conner must have appreciated my little exhibit, which was made up of film stills, vintage magazine covers, sheet music, and other ephemera I had collected. Conner even wrote a note in the guestbook. I was wowed, and flattered, to say the least, as I had long been interested in Bruce Conner's art. (I can't really fix a date on the beginning of my deep interest in the artist, but it could date to around the time I read Rebecca Solnit's brilliant 1990 book, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era.) Well, anyways, here is that note.
In 2006, the Louise Brooks centenary was celebrated by many including the San Francisco Silent Film Festival when they showed a new restoration of Louise Brooks' celebrated film, Pandora's Box. I was asked to introduce the film, and to introduce a special guest with a special connection, Bruce Conner; the artist spoke about what the actress meant to him and his near encounter with the silent film star years before. Here is a snapshot of the occasion.
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