Sunday, July 27, 2008

Lulu in Augusta

The Sacred Heart Cultural Center in Augusta, Georgia will be screening Pandora's Box, with live musical accompaniment, on Friday, September 19th at 7:30 pm.The center's website carries this announcement.



SILENT MOVIE NIGHT
Featuring "Pandora's Box" & Ron Carter,
Theater Organist
Friday, September 19, 2008, 7:30 pm


It’s movie time once again! As part of the inaugural Westabou Festival Sacred Heart Cultural Center presents Silent Movie Night Friday, September 19, 2008. This year’s feature will be the G. W. Pabst’s 1929 masterpiece starring the iconic Louise Brooks. Once again, the delightful Ron Carter will bring the film alive on Sacred Heart’s fabulous organ – movie palace style.  This groundbreaking and steamy 1929 thriller follows the vampy Lulu on her destructive path through Berlin to her ultimate end.  One historian says this film is “bold for the way it featured a strong, decisive female character, and innovative for the way it broke down stereotypes and barriers.”

Pandora’s Box is perennially on the short list of great silent films and is one no enthusiast should miss.

Ron Carter is dedicated to keeping the art of early 20th century “Movie Palace” organ music alive. His passion for this unique art form keeps him busy accompanying silent film all over the Southeast. He is actively involved in the American Theatre Organ Society which rescues and restores vintage theatre pipe organs, most notably the Fox Theatre organ in Atlanta and recently the original Imperial Theater Wurlitzer in Augusta. Combining the original movie scores with his own improvisations, Ron’s talent for bringing silent film alive is compelling – a treat not to be missed.

$12.00 general seat, cash bar and snacks
(cabaret tables seat 8)
- OR - 
$35.00 Special Seating, courtesy bar and snacks in VIP area

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

A Louise Brooks movie?

According to various news reports . . .
SHIRLEY MacLAINE has developed a script for a movie about the life of screen icon LOUISE BROOKS - and she wants to play the dancer in her latter years. The actress reveals filmmaker Martin Scorsese is interested in directing the movie.
She tells WENN, "I've written a script with Kathleen Tynan and it was a pretty good script. Martin Scorsese is interested in doing it. He took an option on the script, so that might happen.
"I'd love to be part of the film - I'd love to play Brooks in her later years, when she was living an isolated, hermit-like existence in upstate New York."

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

LouLou in Paris


from www.villette.com/spectacles/loulou.html

Mardi 15 juillet
CINÉ-CONCERT
LoulouLoulou
Georg Wilhelm Pabst
Allemagne / 1929 / 1h44,
Avec Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner…






© Tamasa

Loulou, belle fille capricieuse et insouciante, est entretenue par Peter Schoen, un homme très riche qui organise les revues de music hall où elle apparaît. Elle réussit à se faire épouser par son amant, qu’elle ne tarde pas à tromper ! Elle multiplie les conquêtes masculines pour finir par sombrer dans la déchéance.

Composition et interprétation Airelle Besson (trompette, violon), Yonnel Diaz (saxo) et Emmanuel David (clavier)  Interprétation  Siegfried Courteau (percussions), Éric Boffel (guitare) et Julien Reyboz (sonorisation)

Thursday, July 3, 2008

Its What I'm Doing Next Weekend

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2008-07-03/article/30484?hea...

MOVING PICTURES: SF Festival Showcases Cinema’s First Golden Era
By Justin DeFreitas
Thursday July 03, 2008

The Kid Brother (1927) may be Harold Lloyd’s greatest film, bringing a high level of artistry to the bespectacled comedian’s slapstick humor.

Conrad Veidt and Olga Baclanova in Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928), a film that expanded on the sympathetic portrayals of disfigured men that had been so successful on the screen in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. The Man Who Laughs gave rise not only to the series of Universal horror films of the 1930s, but inspired the character of The Joker.

Far from the ragged, blurry, jumpy images in the popular imagination, the silent era of filmmaking was an age of discovery, innovation and supreme achievement in the new medium of cinema. Motion pictures, at first treated as a mere novelty, came into their own between 1910 and 1920, growing from brief, flickering diversions into full-scale narratives. But it was in the 1920s that cinema truly blossomed into the great art form of the 20th century.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, now in its 13th year, showcases the breadth and depth of what was the first golden era of cinema, presenting the full range of film treasures—from slapstick comedy to gothic horror, from experimental animation to stately costume drama—as it was meant to be seen: on the big screen, in a beautiful 1920s movie palace, and with live musical accompaniment.

This year’s program begins Friday night, July 11, at the Castro Theater with Harold Lloyd’s The Kid Brother and continues all day Saturday and Sunday with 10 more presentations from the peak of the silent era.
Friday
Harold Lloyd was not an inherently funny presence as a screen persona. Unlike Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, who rank among the most innately charismatic and unique cinematic artists of all time, Lloyd couldn’t command an audience’s attention simply by appearing on the screen. There were many such comedians struggling to climb their way to the top of the field, to challenge Keaton and Chaplin at the  summit, but Lloyd was the most diligent and talented of them, and he alone managed to scale those heights. Through grit and determination he overcame his limitations as a screen presence and established himself as one of the most popular and enduring comedians of the silent era. In the 1920s he was second only to Chaplin in popularity. In fact, in office receipts, the prolific Lloyd surpassed Chaplin, who only released a handful of films in that decade.

Lloyd took a different and perhaps more pragmatic approach to his comedies than his contemporaries. Chaplin made relatively quiet, character-based narratives, punctuated here and there with explosive bits of slapstick. And Keaton let his films develop slowly, building steadily to dizzying climactic chases and daring stunt work. But Lloyd first and foremost aimed to please, and thus he filled movies with gags from start to finish, rarely allowing the audience much time to breathe.

With The Kid Brother (1927), however, Lloyd altered his style somewhat, adopting some of the techniques of his competitors in pursuit of a more artistic approach. He put more time and effort into technical details, especially the photography, using warm lighting to capture the pastoral beauty of a life in the woods. And he put greater emphasis on pathos; more screen time was spent developing his character, showing us his hopes, his dreams and his humiliations.

Lloyd didn’t make a bad film in the 1920s; all of them are good and many of them are great. Others made more money (The Freshman), crammed in more gags per minute (Why Worry?), or have enjoyed more lasting fame (Safety Last), but The Kid Brother may very well represent Lloyd’s crowning achievement, bringing greater artistry and subtlety to his workman-like career. Lloyd himself cited the film as his personal favorite. Friday’s screening of the film will feature live accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

Saturday

Saturday’s screenings include The Soul of Youth (1920), a portrait of the fate of unwanted orphans in early 20th-century America; Les Deux Timides (1928), a comedy by René Clair; and Mikael (1924), a landmark film in the history of gay cinema, directed by the great Carl Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr) and starring German actor Conrad Veidt.

Veidt also anchors the centerpiece film Saturday night, The Man Who Laughs (1928). Early in the 1920s, German émigré Carl Laemmle, head of Universal, brought Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame to the screen. Centering an epic film on a grossly disfigured lead character was considered a great risk at the time, but Lon Chaney, who would later become known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” used his formidable pantomime skills to create a sensitive and sympathetic portrayal. Laemmle and Chaney then followed Hunchback with The Phantom of the Opera and enjoyed similar success.

Eager to keep the streak alive, Laemmle turned to his fellow countrymen for The Man Who Laughs (1928), enlisting the talents of Conrad Veidt and director Paul Leni for another Hugo adaptation. Veidt had become the face of German Expressionism with his roles in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and in Leni’s Waxworks, and Leni had recently parlayed his success in Germany into a contract with Universal, bringing the shadowy photography and psychological horror of Expressionism to the States with The Cat and the Canary. These silent  classics formed the foundation of what would become a string of classic Universal horror films in the 1930s. Saturday’s screening of The Man Who Laughs will be accompanied by Clark Wilson on the Wurlitzer.

Following The Man Who Laughs Saturday night is the first in the festival’s new “Director’s Pick” series. Director Guy Maddin will be on hand to introduce and narrate (translating the French intertitles) for Tod Browning’s strange and rarely screened film The Unknown (1927), starring Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford. Live piano accompaniment will be provided by Stephen Horne.

Sunday

Sunday’s screenings include The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the earliest surviving feature-length animated film; Her Wild Oat (1927), one of the few surviving films of Colleen Moore, among the most popular actresses of the 1920s; and Jujiro (1928), an avant-garde Japanese film.

The festival concludes Sunday night with The Patsy (1928), starring the great comedienne Marion Davies. Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, had spent much of her career weighed down with the dreary costumes of the myriad period dramas that Hearst wanted to see her in. It was director King Vidor who finally freed the effervescent Davies from such stifling solemnity, and in The Patsy he gave her free reign to satirize her contemporaries, offering sharp and hilarious impersonations of such silent-era stalwarts as Lillian Gish and Pola Negri. Clark Wilson will again provide accompaniment on the Wurlitzer.

The San Francisco
Silent Film Festival
July 11-13 at the Castro Theater,
429 Castro St., San Francisco.
www.silentfilm.org.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Wowza

According to a reliable eBay seller, "ON MARCH 27, 2008, PROFILES IN HISTORY of LOS ANGELES set the highest price to date for an ALFRED CHENEY JOHNSTON PHOTOGRAPH - $9,500.00 for an unsigned 10" X 13" VINTAGE PORTRAIT OF LOUISE BROOKS!!"

Wowza!

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

New book with Brooks on the cover

There is a new book coming out this fall which includes Louise Brooks on the cover. The book is titled Hollywood Movie Stills: The Golden Age, by Joel Finler. It looks like the book is being released in England, but it should be available in the United States as well. I plan on getting a copy.



The author, Joel Finler, was the first film critic for London's Time Out magazine. He is the author of numerous books on cinema, including Alfred Hitchcockand Silent Cinema (which I own and like). I don't know much else about it except for what's included on its Amazon.com page. That text reads

Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe . . . it is through the eye of the stills camera that we experience and recall some of the cinema's most memorable events and faces. Still images are so powerful that they can easily pass for actual scenes from the movies they represent—rather than separately posed, lighted, and photographed shots that may not even find their way into the finished film. This classic study traces the origin of stills photography during the silent era and the early development of the star system, to the rise of the giant studios in the 1930s and their eventual decline. Finler focuses on the photographers, on the stars they photographed, and on many key films and filmmakers. Hollywood Movie Stills is illustrated by hundreds of rare and unusual stills from the author's own collection, including not only portraits and scene stills but production shots, behind-the-scenes photos, poster art, calendar art, leg shots, photo collages, and trick shots. There are also photos showing the stars' private lives and special events in Hollywood, all produced in vast numbers by the great studios in their heyday.
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