Sunday, February 27, 2005

Torrent

Just returned from today's Garbo Festival, where I saw Torrent (1926), which was Garbo's first American film. It co-starred Ricardo Cortez, and also featured Gertrude Olmstead and Lucien Littlefield, who would later be seen in It Pays to Advertise (1931) with Louise Brooks. Torrent was just ok, and I think is largely of interest today as a Garbo film. To me, Garbo still seemed more like the European actress seen in The Saga of Gosta Berling or G.W. Pabst's Joyless Street rather than the American actress she would become in Flesh and the Devil.

Saturday, February 26, 2005

Exploring a Library of Congress collection

             

The Library of Congress has an extraordinary collection of images available on-line through its Prints and Photographs division. This database is searchable by keyword, and some of the images are available in high-resolution scans. A search for "Louise Brooks" only turned up one (rather unusual) result. Nevertheless, fans of silent film, theater, dance, etc.... will certainly find other fascinating and seldom seen images. There are thousands of scans available from more than four dozen collections. Try searching under keywords or names such as "actress," "Ziegfeld," "Ruth St. Denis," "Rudolph Valentino," "Charlie Chaplin," etc....

                                  

Friday, February 25, 2005

Garbo Festival

Just back from the opening night of the Garbo Festival at San Francisco's Balboa Theater. I saw Queen Christina, which I enjoyed a great deal. It was a satisfying film on so many levels. Garbo was terrific - and lovely throughout. John Gilbert was good. Lewis Stone was good. The cinematography / art direction was good. And Adrian's costumes were fabulous. Also in the film, in a small role, was Gustav von Seyffertitz - who acted in The Canary Murder Case. (As well as Akim Tamiroff in an uncredited role - he acted in King of Gamblers.) Film critic David Thomson gave a short, insightful introduction -recounting the time when he was teaching film history at Dartmouth and one of his students discretely revealed that his great aunt was the reclusive actress! (My wife has convinced me that we should attend the Sunday afternoon screening of Torrent, which coincides with the Balboa's 79th anniversary celebration. So, I will be there !)

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Maria Tatar - myth, mayhem, and murder

A professor of German at Harvard University, Maria Tatar is also a scholar and writer whose unusual books include Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature and Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. (This later book discusses Wedekind's Pandora's Box and the films of Fritz Lang, but curiously, not Pabst's Pandora's Box.)  Tatar is also the editor of two recent volumes, The Annotated Brothers Grimm and The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales.

I spotted the author's name again in another recently released title, A New History of German Literature, edited by David E. Wellbery. In this new book, Tatar authored a very interesting essay on Frank Wedekind entitled "Eroticism and the Femme Fatale." What caught my eye was Tatar's discussion of Louise Brooks, her role as Lulu, and the "powerful afterlife" of Wedekind's play. Tatar comments, "Though Pabst's film was not a commercial success, it came to occupy a central position in the iconography of feminine evil and fed into discourses on sexual cynicism in Weimar Germany. . . . In crafting a tragedy of monsters and a monster tragedy, Wedekind was able to disclose phobic anxieties and desires that would lead to a broader understanding of what was at stake in cultural conflicts, large and small." Tatar's five page essay makes for interesting reading. Anyone interested in its subject matters might want to check it out.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Lulu a Hollywood

Today, a book I had purchased over the internet arrived in the mail . . . . I received a copy of Lulu a Hollywood, by Louise Brooks. This is the Italian edition ofLulu in Hollywood. This book was first published in Italy in 1984. My copy was issued by the publishing company Ubulibri in 2003. The book was translated from English to Italian by Marcello Flores d'Arcais.

This edition is pretty similar to the three American editions with which most fans are familiar. Except for a one-page "Scritti di Louise Brooks" (or "Writings by Louise Brooks") added to the end of the book, this Italian edition features the same content as the English-language editions. Interestingly, the portraits of Garbo and Gish included at the beginning of Brooks' essay in the English-language edition have been substituted with different images of the actresses. Otherwise, all of the images included in the English-language editions are included in this Italian edition, though this copy also includes additional images from Capitan Barbablu (A Girl in Every Port) and Lulu (Pandora's Box). The book - which sells for 16 Euros - also has a different cover. The black-and-white front cover is the Eugene Richee portrait of Brooks wearing pearls. The rear cover is its mirror image.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante

The LBS marks the passing of the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929 - 2005). This Cuban-born novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, journalist and translator was regarded as one of the original voices in contemporary Spanish literature. He was also a devotee of film, and of Louise Brooks. He mentioned the actress at least a few times in his various writings.

One newspaper account stated: "Cabrera had long been lauded for his experimental use of language in his novels, essays and cinema criticism, and he won the 1997 Miguel de Cervantes prize for literature, the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world. 'Perhaps his greatest originality was to turn cinema criticism into a new literary genre,' said the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who served on the jury that awarded the prize." For more on Cabrera, check out Google News.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Greta Garbo Festival

There is a Greta Garbo festival taking place at the Balboa Theater in San Francisco. To celebrate what would have been the actress' 100th birthday, the theater is screening nine of her films starting February 24th. The festival concludes March 3rd. (The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about Garbo and the festival, "Seductive Garbo Still Enchanting" on February 20th.) Film critic and author David Thomson (author of the essential New Biographical Dictionary of Film) will be on hand to introduce the opening night's film. San Francisco Chronicle film critic and author Mick LaSalle (author of the excellent pre-code study Complicated Women) will introduce the March 1st screening. I will be attending each of these nights (as staff of The Booksmith), where I will be selling books by these authors in the lobby. We will also have copies of the Barry Paris bio of Garbo for sale. Come see a film, buy a book and get it signed, or say "hello." 
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