Images of Louise Brooks - Sonchai Körner

Images of Louise Brooks - Sonchai Körner (2011) from Sven Mundt on Vimeo.

Sven Mundt is a Berlin-based stage director and video artist. His latest play, Images of Louise Brooks, brings together three generations of actresses: Hollywood actress Candy Clark (66), Swedish performance artist Marta Oldenburg (51) and Berlin-based actress Sonchai Körner (33). Within the context of three solo performances, they explore the paths their lives has taken, talking about the choices they made and the repercussions of those choices. [If the above video doesn't work, try viewing it at Vimeo.]

Another Valentina exhibit now in Italy

There is another big Valentina exhibit in Italy. "Guido Crepax: Portrait of an Artist" opened June 20 at the Palazzo Reale, Piazza del Duomo, 12 - Milan. It runs through September 15. After only a few days, the exhibit has generated a fair amount of media coverage, including this piece on La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno and another on the AffairItalian website. Be sure and check them out. The latter piece contains not only a slide show, but also a brief Italian TV clip which contains a couple of lovely images of Louise Brooks. 

The exhibit is not the only big Louise Brooks related news out of Italy. Amazon.it announced that Archive Crepax has chosen Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to publish the digital version of the saga of Valentina, the ever-popular comic book series created by Guido Crepax. The first episode, The Curve Lesmahagow: Part One, is now available. Upcoming is The Curve Lesmahagow: Part Two, Hello Valentina and many others. The entire collection will be available exclusively on the Kindle Store for downloading and reading on the Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Fire, Kindle Fire HD and, thanks to the free apps for reading Kindle, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android smartphones and tablets.

On the road with Laura Moriarty & The Chaperone

Bestselling author Laura Moriarty is on the road touring in support of her celebrated novel, The Chaperone (Riverhead). It is now out in softcover. As is evident from the cover, the book features Louise Brooks as a character. If you want to keep up with the author, check out her Facebook page. Here are a few snapshots from her tour.

The Chaperone on display at a local bookstore.

In a round-up of new paperbacks, the June 23 New York Times describes the book this way: THE CHAPERONE, by Laura Moriarty. (Riverhead, $16.) As a willful 15-year-old from Kansas, the silent-film star Louise Brooks traveled with a chaperone to New York in 1922 to attend dance school. In Moriarty’s charming historical novel, Brooks’s staid Midwestern matron has her own reasons for going to New York, and finds herself questioning the confines of her life.

A large display piece.

A group of fans from Dayton, OH hold a copy of
The Chaperone and a portrait of Louise Brooks.

Louise Brooks Denver tattoo

A friend of the Louise Brooks Society snapped this pic on their cellphone. It is of a Denver waitress sporting a Louise Brooks tattoo. Pretty neat.

This is not the only tattoo of the silent film star. Just Google the phrase "Louise Brooks tattoo" and you will see a half-dozen more images. I know of as many others.

Do you sport a Louise Brooks tattoo? If so, send a picture to the LBS. Sometime in the future, the LBS will post some of the best.

New column by Peter Cowie - author of Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu

Peter Cowie, legendary film critic, writer, editor, and friend to the Louise Brooks Society has a new column. Cowie, the author of Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu, will write a series of essays for the Criterion Collection website. His first column, titled "A Series of Flashbacks," can be found here. The LBS encourages everyone to check it out.

Cowie's first column starts this way: "I began writing about films more than sixty years ago. My first review was of Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician, in an arts magazine at Cambridge University. I never followed an orthodox career path for very long, starting as a critic for the weekly What’s On in London, sending dispatches to The Financial Times and Sight & Sound, and writing and publishing numerous books about national cinemas and directors. Across the years, I have seen countless films being made, in places as far apart as Belgrade, Stockholm, Vallejo, Singapore, London, and Rome. I’ve escaped by helicopter with Max von Sydow from an Arctic ice floe during the shoot of Jan Troell’s Flight of the Eagle; I’ve seen celebrated directors physically fighting over politics during the breakup of the Cannes Festival in 1968; and I’ve witnessed what so many actors and technicians had already seen — Otto Preminger flying into a rage."

Wow! If you have read Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu, then you know Cowie also knew Louise Brooks. He has had — and continues to have — a storied career as a film journalist and film historian.

Here is a snapshot of Peter Cowie and Thomas Gladysz (founder of the Louise Brooks Society, that's me) at the Balboa Theater in San Francisco in 2006. The occasion was an LBS sponsored event celebrating Louise Brooks and the publication of Cowie's book. Notice the Louise Brooks Society button Cowie is wearing. He continued to wear it throughout his tour on the United States, including, even, in Rochester, New York.

Don't forget to check out Peter Cowie new column. It starts at http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2805-a-series-of-flashbacks

Louise Brooks :: Cool pic of the day

Here is a rather swell image of Louise Brooks, circa 1927, modelling a frock with a print pattern.

Anny Ondra

Anny Ondra in Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929). Two years later, she appeared in
 the film Die Grosse Sehnsucht with Louise Brooks' one time co-stars
Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, and Fritz Rasp.

From Wikipedia: Anny Ondra (May 15, 1903 – February 28, 1987) was a Czech film actress. She was born Anna Sophie Ondráková in Tarnów, Galicia, Austria–Hungary, now Poland, and died in Hollenstedt near Harburg, Germany.

The daughter of an Austro-Hungarian officer, she spent her childhood in Prague. She acted in Czech, Austrian and German comedies in the 1920s, and in some British dramas, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock's The Manxman and Blackmail (both 1929).

However, when Blackmail was remade with sound, Ondra's thick accent was considered unacceptable, so her dialogue was recorded by actress Joan Barry. Ondra made some forty more films in the sound era before retiring in the late-1930s.

She formed a production company, Ondra-Lamac-Films, with her first husband, director Karel Lamač. Lamač directed her in several silent films, acted with her in films directed by other filmmakers, and continued to work together after their divorce.

On July 6, 1933, she married the boxer Max Schmeling, with whom she appeared in the film Knock-out (1935). They were married until her death in 1987.

Alfred Hitchcock's silent films

Polish-Czech-Austrian-German-French actress Anny Ondra.
In 1931, she appeared with  Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer,
and Fritz Rasp in the film Die Grosse Sehnsucht.

In a career spanning more than half a century, Hitchcock fashioned a distinct directorial style which helped redefine the act of film. Above all, Hitchcock told stories visually. He employed innovative camera angles and editing techniques, and reveled in shots framed to heighten a scene's sense of trepidation. At times, his use of the camera could border on voyeurism.

Recognized as a master of suspense, many of Hitchcock's films have suprise endings, and employ decoys or "MacGuffins" that serve the film's themes and allow for examination of character psychology. Frustration, criminal behavior, muted violence, and murder run throughout -- as do individuals on the run from the law alongside alluring, icy blonde women, the latter being a Hitchcock obsession.

A somewhat quiet Catholic boy from London's East End, Hitchcock (1899 - 1980) began as a production designer during the silent era. He moved up the ranks, and eventually became Britain's leading director before heading to Hollywood in 1939. Hitchcock completed ten films in England before the talkies took over. Nine of those silent films still exist.

Recently, the British Film Institute set about restoring Hitchcock's surviving silents. Missing footage was restored, and decades of damage and dirt removed in what is being described as the largest restoration project ever undertaken by the BFI, which holds some of the earliest surviving copies of the director's silent work.

These little-seen films, which have come to be known as the "Hitchcock 9," reveal the seeds of genius. They show an artist starting to work with the themes, motifs and obsessions which were the hallmark of his best movies. The "Hitchcock 9" includes the director's first completed film, The Pleasure Garden (1925), about chorus girls in London, as well as such rarities as Downhill (1927), Easy Virtue (1928), Champagne (1928), and The Farmer's Wife (1928).

The now familiar Hitchcock style is already evident in four of the films, Blackmail (1929), The Ring (1927), The Manxman** (1929), and The Lodger (1927). The director himself dubbed the latter film "the first true Hitchcock picture." It also features his first cameo appearance, and shows the influence of German directors like Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst. In fact, prior to making The Lodger, Hitchcock had visited Germany to study its film industry.

Hitchcock once said, "The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema." These early works, starring the likes of handsome Ivor Novello and the gorgeous European actress Anny Ondra, shouldn't be missed. Notably, The Pleasure Garden stars Virginia Valli, one of the stars of the 1927 Louise Brooks' film, Evening Clothes. It also stars Carmelita Geraghty, the daughter of screenwriter Tom Geraghty, who wrote another 1927 Louise Brooks film, Now We're in the Air.

A national tour for the "Hitchcock 9" begins at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco (June 14-16) in an event sponsored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Hats off to them for debuting these historic works. The films then make their way to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (June 18, featuring only the silent and sound versions of Blackmail), and BAMcinématek in Brooklyn (June 29- July 5).

Additional screenings are also in the works for Washington D.C., Berkeley, Chicago, Seattle, Houston, Boston, and other American cities. Both the San Francisco and Brooklyn events will feature live music performed by the renown Colorado-based Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, acclaimed British composer-pianist Stephen Horne, and other musical accompanists.

** The Manxman was based on a popular novel by Hall Caine, a well known writer of the day. Caine was also a literary critic who publicly praised Margarete Bohme's The Diary of a Lost One (the English title for The Diary of a Lost Girl) when it was first published in England.

Silent version of Prix de Beauté with Louise Brooks screens July 18th

On Thursday, July 18th, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival will screen a new restoration of the silent version of Prix de Beauté (1930), with musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne. This special  screening opens this year's annual festival, and, it is a very rare opportunity to see the least seen version of one of Louise Brooks' finest films.

Here is what the San Francisco Silent Film Festival website has to say:

Prix de Beauté marks Louise Brooks’s last starring role in a feature. Less known than her work with G.W. Pabst (Pandora’s Box, Diary of a Lost Girl), Prix de Beauté was marred by its foray into early sound (Brooks’s voice was dubbed). Our presentation is the superior silent version recently restored by the Cineteca di Bologna. Brooks is stunning as Lucienne, the “everygirl” typist who enters a beauty contest and is introduced to a shiny world of fame and modernity. But Prix’s script, a collaboration between René Clair and G.W. Pabst, doesn’t leave Lucienne in a fairy tale bubble but leads to a powerful, moving denouement. Cinematographers Rudolph Maté and Louis Née make beautiful use of Brooks’s glorious face. Approximately 108 minutes.

Buy Tickets & Passes Here! General $20 / Member $18