Sunday, July 7, 2013

Brooksie "The Girl in Tutu" by Fabienne Feketelaere

Video tribute to silent film star Louise Brooks. Clip video with coloured pics made by Fabienne Deketelaere. Pics by Eugène R. Richee. Music by Duke Ellington, "Blues in Orbit".

Friday, July 5, 2013

Hilton Als' new book, White Girls, features Louise Brooks

White Girls (McSweeney's) is one of two new books coming from renown critic Hilton Als. It and The Group (Farrar Straus & Giroux) are both due in November, right around Louise Brooks' birthday on November 14th.

I haven't yet seen a copy, and only learned of it recently. In an email, Als wrote "She was the greatest and appears in my new book coming out in November from McSweeney's."

Here is the publisher description: "White Girls, Hilton Als’ first book since The Women fourteen years ago, finds one of The New Yorker's boldest cultural critics deftly weaving together his brilliant analyses of literature, art, and music with fearless insights on race, gender, and history. The result is an extraordinary, complex portrait of “white girls,” as Als dubs them—an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures as diverse as Truman Capote and Louise Brooks, Malcolm X and Flannery O’Connor. In pieces that hairpin between critique and meditation, fiction and nonfiction, high culture and low, the theoretical and the deeply personal, Als presents a stunning portrait of a writer by way of his subjects, and an invaluable guide to the culture of our time."

Hilton Als (born 1960) is an American writer and theater critic who writes for The New Yorker magazine. Als is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine.

His 1996 book, The Women, focuses on his mother, who raised him in Brooklyn, Dorothy Dean, and Owen Dodson, who was a mentor and lover of Als. In the book, Als explores his identification of the confluence of his ethnicity, gender and sexuality, moving from identifying as a "Negress" and then an "Auntie Man", a Barbadian term for homosexuals.

Als received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2000 for creative writing and the 2002–03 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. In 2004 he won the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin. He has taught at Smith College, Wesleyan, and Yale University, and his work has also appeared in The Nation, The Believer, and the New York Review of Books.

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Summer is here - Happy 4th of July


Looking for a great read? Take The Chaperone with you on your summer getaway. The Louise Brooks Society recommends it!

"The Chaperone is the enthralling story of two women . . . and how their unlikely relationship changed their lives. . . . In this layered and inventive story, Moriarty raises profound questions about family, sexuality, history, and whether it is luck or will—or a sturdy combination of the two—that makes for a wonderful life."— O, The Oprah Magazine

“When silent film star Louise Brooks was a sexually provocative and headstrong 15-year-old from Kansas, she traveled with a chaperone to new York City to attend dance school.  In this fascinating historical novel, her minder, Cora, struggles to keep her charge within the bounds of propriety but finds herself questioning the confines of her own life. Thorough Cora the world of early 20th-century America comes alive, and her personal triumphs become cause for celebration.”People

"Captivating and wise . . . In The Chaperone, Moriarty gives us a historically detailed and nuanced portrayal of the social upheaval that spilled into every corner of American life by 1922. . . . [An] inventive and lovely Jazz Age story."Washington Post

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Booksigning for The Louise Brooks edition of The Diary of a Lost Girl

Louise Brooks in Prix de Beaute
Thomas Gladysz, editor of the Louise Brooks edition of The Diary of a Lost Girl, will be signing copies of his book on July 18 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. The signing takes place following the screening of the 1930 Louise Brooks film, Prix de Beaute, which is being presented by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

About the book, Leonard Maltin said: "Gladysz provides an authoritative series of essays that tell us about the author, the notoriety of her work (which was first published in 1905), and its translation to the screen. Production stills, advertisements, and other ephemera illustrate these introductory chapters. In today’s parlance this would be called a 'movie tie-in edition,' but that seems a rather glib way to describe yet another privately published work that reveals an enormous amount of research — and passion."

Also signing is the celebrated comix artist Kim Deitch, whose new book is The Amazing, Enlightening And Absolutely True Adventures of Katherine Whaley. It includes a silent film storyline. Little known is the fact that Deitch's father, the Academy Award winning animator Gene Deitch, once met Louise Brooks. Kim himself almost did! Also signing his DVDs, including Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu, is the Emmy nominated documentary filmmaker Hugh Neely. It's a "Louise Brooks event" not to be missed.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Louise Brooks film screens in Los Angeles on August 7

The Silent Treatment and the Cinefamily Theater will screen the classic 1929 Louise Brooks film, Diary of a Lost Girl, on August 7 in Los Angeles, California. More information here. Showtime is 7:30 - tickets are $12.00.


"There’s a reason the name Louise Brooks elicits sighs every time it’s mentioned at the Cinefamily: her ferocious charisma and otherworldly beauty cemented her status as an icon well before she retired from the silver screen, at the age of 32. From her comic role opposite W.C. Fields to multiple turns as troubled, willful heroines in the films of legendary German Expressionist auteur G.W. Pabst, Brooks shines as an actress capable of endless nuance and versatility — as she understood the impact both her inner and outer beauty could bring to the screen. Here, in her second and final collaboration with Pabst, Brooks gives a delicately restrained performance as the naive daughter of a prosperous pharmacist who stuns her clan by becoming pregnant. After being put through the repressive reform school ringer, she escapes to a brothel where she becomes liberated and lives for the moment with radiant physical abandon. Pabst’s escalating nightmares are heightened by Brooks’ sensitive portrayal of a truly lost girl whose hard-earned redemption is as beautiful a vision as the star herself. Dir. G.W. Pabst, 1929, 35mm, 116 min. - See more at: http://www.cinefamily.org/films/the-silent-treatment/#the-silent-treatment-louise-brooks-in-diary-of-a-lost-girl"

Inside the Cinefamily Theater in Los Angeles, CA. Notice the portrait on the wall!

See the movie? Read the book. Check out the "Louise Brooks edition" of Margarete Bohme's controversial bestseller, The Diary of a Lost Girl - available through Indiebound and Amazon.

Monday, July 1, 2013

Nitrate Dreams by Colette Saint Yves


Nitrate Dreams from Colette Saint Yves on Vimeo.


Colette Saint Yves (born Hortense Lagrange in 1987) is a French photographer, video artist, and collage artist. Saint Yves is a descendent of the mathematician and astronomer, Joseph-Louis Lagrange. She has said in an interview that she chose her pseudonym in tribute to the French writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, because she read Sido when she was a teenager and was impressed by the book.

Saint Yves is known for taking her inspiration from early cinema and especially from actors and actresses such as Louise Brooks, Theda Bara, Lillian Gish, Musidora, Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre. Her work is inspired by the artist Joseph Cornell.

Her photography has been featured in the magazines Petits Points and We Are Selecters, as well as on the blogs. Her video piece entitled "Nitrate Dreams," a tribute to Louise Brooks, was featured on Eva Truffaut's blog, "Archives & Mythologie des Lucille."
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