OMD video of "Pandora's Box "

Wow, I was just poking around YouTube when I discovered the OMD video of Pandora's Box (It's been a long long way). Check it out at youtube.com/watch?v=HNJ8VS_wh5A I love this song! I love this video. Louise looks lovely - whoever edited this clip way back when did a great job. BTW: its a hard to find video - so this is a rare opportunity . . . . Here is a link to another version of the same video, at youtube.com/watch?v=8P1-ujUmNts

Louise Brooks event on April 20

Here is the press release for an upcoming event . . . .

FROM HOLLYWOOD TO ROCHESTER: THE LIFE OF LOUISE BROOKS
Sponsored in collaboration with the Little Theater
Thursday, April 20th, 6:15 pm - 9:00 pm

The Little Theater, 240 East Avenue
Rochester, NY 14604
$15 for RHS members, $18 for non-members

This November 14th will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of film icon Louise Brooks. Conventional wisdom holds that Brooks — a cult figure in American and European pop culture, and one of the most recognizable symbols of the Jazz Age — ended her career in the late 1930s, only to spend the remainder of her life in seclusion. Here in Rochester, we know that this is only partly true, and certainly misleading. In 1956 at the urging of George Eastman House film curator James Card, Brooks set up home at 7 North Goodman Street and began a second, if less visible, career as a respected film scholar and critic. Never one to pass quietly, this one-time femme fatale left many a biting critique.

Join us at the Little Theater for a special showing of Brooks’s legendary film Pandora’s Box, along with a talk by Rochester Democrat and Chronicle film critic and Brooks acquaintance Jack Garner.

For reservations, call Karen McCally at (585)271-2705 or email at kmccally@rochesterhistory.org

Movie star pics

Doctor Macro's is a nifty web site with lots of high quality scans of movie stars - including Louise Brooks! There are also wallpapers and pics of Ziegfeld girls. Check it out.

Louise Brooks character included in Seattle stage production

According to an article in the current issue of The Stranger, Seattle's alternative weekly, a stage production there features a character based on Louise Brooks. The piece, The Invisible, by Jessica Jobaris and Luke Allen, is being staged at the Chamber Theater (915 E Pine St). This theater piece is described as "part silent film, part Hollywood satire, part surreal comic drama." This from The Stranger review

I thought The Invisible was a wry, if sometimes messy, satire of the movies until I talked to choreographer/director Jessica Jobaris. She said it was actually about the frustration of being an artist in the modern world. "But," she added generously, "there's room for interpretation."

The Invisible is a varied piece of dance theater with five characters from film history—Eadweard Muybridge, Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, Shirley Temple, and Erast Garin—who clown, roll, and pose on the stage in themed scenelets. They dance-fight in a lampoon of action sequences, chase and reject each other like a hacky romantic comedy. In voiceover asides, Garin (a Soviet-era actor) keeps reminding the audience that he's "very intense." Deanna Mustard (as proto-sexpot Brooks) spreads her legs, wiggles her tail, and slams herself viciously on the floor, over and over and over again. (It's painful just to look at her deep yellow bruises.) The Invisible uses dancers for actors, actors for dancers, and a soundtrack ranging from the Kinks to slamming doors in a confusing (usually delightfully so) performance hash.

Then there's the film bit, with its voiceover asking heavy questions about meaning and aspiration while the characters skate around an ice rink. The audience laughed—parts of it were very funny—which surprised Jobaris. "I think that part is really sad," she said. "Maybe I haven't, you know, learned—" I cut her off, saying any jerk can be lugubrious, but it's the rare artist who can translate depth into light, accessible performance—think of sad-but-funny clowns like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Superficiality can be an asset.

For those interested, here is another review.

The search goes on

After a week away, I returned to the library, where three inter-library loans were waiting for me. In short, I excavated some articles, reviews and advertisements regarding Louise Brooks / Denishawn performances in the Stamford Advocate (from Stamford, Connecticut), the Fond du Lac Daily Reporter (from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin), and the Oklahoma City Times (from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma). Louise Brooks was mentioned in a couple of the reviews, and was singled out in one of the reviews. All together, a nice haul. The search goes on.

Prix de beauté review

A review of the new KINO release of Prix de beauté has turned up on-line at dvdtalk.com. "The script by Pabst and Rene Clair repeats the tale of beauty entrapped by possessive men, a pattern almost identical to the Dorothy Stratten tragedy told in Bob Fosse's Star 80." More from the review by Glenn Erickson can be found here.