A cinephilac blog about an actress, silent film, and the Jazz Age, with occasional posts about related books, music, art, and history written by Thomas Gladysz. Visit the Louise Brooks Society™ at www.pandorasbox.com
A special event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Louise Brooks Society and the release of the new KINO DVD and Blu-ray of The Diary of a Lost Girl will take place in San Francisco at 2:00 pm on Saturday, November 14th. (Which also happens to be Louise Brooks birthday.) The event will take place at Video Wave, a video rental business of special significance to the history of the LBS.
Video Wave is now located at 4027 24th Street in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle featured the business. Read the article HERE.
Mark your calendars. This a meet and greet event. There will be NO screening, as reported in an article in the Noe Valley Voice. Thomas Gladysz, Founding Director of the LBS will be present signing copies of the new Diary of a Lost Girl DVD / Blu-ray (which features Gladysz's audio commentary) along with copies of his earlier book, the "Louise Brooks edition" of The Diary of a Lost Girl. Each will be for sale.
Only recently have I come across a reference to A Trip Through the Paramount Studio (1927), a short promotional film produced by the Paramount Studio. The 9 minute short reportedly includes Louise Brooks, along with a number of other well know stars of the time. The existence of the film is referenced on both IMDb and Silentera.com
Unfortunately, I am having trouble tracking down any information on this previously unknown (to me) film. I could not find any information about it searching through the trade journals of the time. Nor does there seem to be a copyright record for it.
A Trip Through the Paramount Studio was reportedly released in August 1927. Among those reportedly seen in the film (according to both of the above mentioned websites) are Richard Arlen, Mary Astor, Clarence G. Badger, George Bancroft, Wallace Beery, Sally Blane, Clara Bow, Evelyn Brent, Mary Brian, Betty Bronson, Clive Brook, Louise Brooks, Chester Conklin, Gary Cooper, Dolores Costello, Shirley Dorman, Fanchon, W.C. Fields, Victor Fleming, Raymond Hatton, Lloyd Hughes, Emil Jannings, Doris Kenyon, Fred Kohler, Blanche Le Clair, Mervyn LeRoy, Harold Lloyd, Dorothy Mackaill, Arlette Marchal, Marco, Frank Morgan, Gene Morgan, Pola Negri, Zasu Pitts, William Powell, Esther Ralston, Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, Milton Sills, Thelma Todd, Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, and Fay Wray.
The source of the this impressive line-up of stars in unknown. According to Wikipedia, "Paramount later released A Trip Through the Paramount Studio (1927) in response to MGM's MGM Studio Tour (1925)." The only other reference to the film which I have been able to find is that it was shown in 2009 at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, California -- along with a few other short films of the time.
Does anyone know anything about this film? Has anyone scene it? I wrote to the Library of Congress asking after the film, as they are listed on SilentEra.com as having a copy of the film. I received the following affirmative response (along with an invitation to make an appointment to view the film in Washington D.C.).
"We have a 35mm print of the Paramount short in our collection:
A TRIP THROUGH THE PARAMOUNT STUDIO (1927, 9 minutes)
FEA 6141; FPB 1240
MAVIS: 1913678
AFI/Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History
Summary: Promotion reel shown solely to exhibitors during the West Coast Greater Movie Season. Featuring: Clara Bow (“That Million Dollar Girl” promotes Hula) W.C. Fields, Fay Wray, Esther Ralston, Richard Arlen, George Bancroft, Betty Bronson, Chester Conklin, Mary Brian, Clarence Badger, Fred Kohler, Arlette Marchal, Fanchon & Marco, The Rube Wolf Band, Sally Blane, Blanche Leclaire, Shirley Dorman."
Alas, no mention of Louise Brooks - but that doesn't necessarily mean she is not glimpsed in the film. The search goes on.
Louise Brooks (left) with other Paramount stars of the time. This is not a still from the film, or is it?
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has long been a supporter of the Louise Brooks Society. Way back in 1997, their newsletter, Intertitle, ran a brief mention of the LBS in their very first issue! And today, some 18 years later, the SFSFF email newsletter mentioned the LBS again.
LOUISE BROOKS DAY!
Celebrate Louise Brooks's birthday (and the 20th anniversary of the Louise Brooks Society) on Saturday, November 14 at Video Wave on 24th Street. Thomas Gladysz will sign copies of the just-released Kino Lorber DVD/Blu-ray of The Diary of a Lost Girl with his commentary. Gladysz came to Kino Lorber's attention after he edited the 2010 "Louise Brooks edition" of Margarete Bohme's 1905 bestseller -- the basis for Pabst's 1929 film. The party starts at 2:00 pm. There will be treats!
Thank you San Francisco Silent Film Festival. I am looking forward to their upcoming Winter event, as should you. It is a full day of silent film on December 5th at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. Don't miss it. There will be great films and special guests a plenty.
The Louise Brooks Society is celebrating its 20th anniversary: here is a link to a piece about the event in the local Noe Valley Voice newspaper. Please note: there will NOT be a screening, just a meet and greet with candy treats, and a booksigning, a DVD release party, and who knows what else? Like pinback button giveaways (while supplies last).
In a filmed interview with Richard Leacock in the 1970s, Louise Brooks spoke of the rather wild nightlife she witnessed in Berlin while she was there filming Pandora's Box in late 1928. Brooks' experience in Berlin - she was there twice, once while filming Pandora's Box and a few months later while filming Diary of a Lost Girl, are detailed as well in Barry Paris' outstanding biography of the actress -- so is her experience in Paris while filming Prix de beaute (1930).
Two books, one a new release, focus on the wild nightlife and sexual underground of Berlin and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. I have both books, as well as a couple of others by the author, Mel Gordon. (Especially fascinating is his The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber.) Each are recommended for those interested.
From the publisher: When Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings.
This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from the
pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of
being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture,
inspiring performers, filmmakers, historians straight and gay,
designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson.
Voluptuous Panic’s expanded edition includes the new
illustrated chapter “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan
cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for
entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” The deluxe hardcover
edition also includes sensational accounts of hypno-erotic cabaret acts,
Berlin fetish prostitution (“The Boot Girl Visit”), gay life (“A
Wild-Boy Initiation!”), descriptions and illustrations of Aleister
Crowley’s Berlin OTO secret society, and sex crime (“The Curious Career
and Untimely Death of Fritz Ulbrich”).
From the publisher: Mel Gordon presents a companion volume to his highly praised pictorial history Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin.
Mel Gordon, author of Voluptuous Panic, the
celebrated history about the sex culture of Weimar Berlin, returns with a
stunningly illustrated look at Paris, The City of Pleasure, prior to
and during German occupation during World War II.
Horizontal Collaboration encompasses the Jazz Age,
Depression, World War and Occupation, and Liberation. It concludes with
the shuttering of the licensed brothels in 1946, which some Parisian
intellectuals thought was the final “destruction of French
civilization”.
The term “Horizontal Collaboration” refers to the sexual
liaisons between French civilians and German occupiers from 1940 to
1944. These were extremely widespread and included both individual
wartime relationships in addition to prostitution. As Allied armies
swept across the French countryside, thousands of young women—and some
men—were savagely punished by the authorities or by vigilante crowds,
becoming a source of deep national shame.
Author Gordon redefines the pejorative term to mean
something much broader: French men and women “horizontally collaborated”
to overcome all social obstacles, divisions, and regulations. These
obstacles include married and unmarried couples, straights and
homosexuals, foreigners and locals, gun-toting soldiers and their
vanquished subjects. The natural yearning for sexual pleasure equally
corrupted all co-habitating partners.
From the publisher: The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is
the first contemporary biography of the notorious
actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin
during the 1920s.
In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber’s celebrations
of “Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy” were condemned and censored. She
often haunted Weimar Berlin’s hotel lobbies, nightclubs, and casinos,
radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging
from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine.
Multi-talented Anita saw no boundaries between her personal life and
her taboo-shattering performances. As such, she was Europe’s first
postmodern woman. After sated Berliners finally tired of Anita Berber’s
libidinous antics, she became a “carrion soul that even the hyenas
ignored,” dying in 1928 at the age of twenty-nine.
• Includes nearly two hundred photographs and illustrations,
including some that recreate Berber’s salacious and enduring “Repertoire
of the Damned.”
• Berber was a lover of Marlene Dietrich and influenced and
associated with Leni Riefenstahl, Lawrence Durrell, Klaus Mann, and the
founder of modern sexology, Magnus Hirschfeld.
• An early movie star, Berber acted in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and the silent epic Lucifer. [ Berber also starred in Dida Ibsens Geschichte, the 1918 sequel to the the originial filmed adaption of Diary of a Lost Girl. ]
Mel Gordon is Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California,
Berkeley. He is the author of twelve books, including The Grand
Guignol, Dada Performance, The Stanislavsky Technique, and the
Feral House title Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant.
Pandora's Box, the G.W. Pabst directed film starring Louise Brooks, will be shown at the Brooklyn Public Library on Sunday, November 8.
The screening is free, and is part of a series of silent film screenings at the library curated and hosted by Ken Gordon. More information may be found HERE.
This special screening of the 1929 film coincides with the William Kentridge staging of the 1937 Alban Berg opera, Lulu, at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan on various dates during the month of November.
The film and the opera are both based on Frank Wedekind's plays Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1904).
The screening, with live piano accompaniment by Bernie Anderson, will take place at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public
Library, at 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11238, which is at the
corner of Flatbush Avenue and Eastern Parkway.
Although the branch does
not open until 1:00 pm, a side-door, on Eastern Parkway, will open at 12:00 noon, to allow entry to the Dweck Center Auditorium, where introductions will begin at 12:30 pm, and the film soon after.
Louise Brooks' birthday takes place on November 14th. Why not attend this special event to celebrate?
Lulumania is sweeping New York, And Lulu, it seems, is everywhere.
Frank Wedekind's legendary femme fatale, who's beguiling behavior inspired nearly as many artists as Helen of Troy's beauty launched ships, can be found all over New York City.
Alban Berg's modernist opera, Lulu, which was based on Wedekind's two "Lulu" plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1904), has just opened a month-long run at the Metropolitan Opera. This new production stars the soprano Marlis Petersen and is directed by the South African artist William Kentridge, who's dynamic art for the staging of the opera proves as seductive and active as Lulu herself. The Met's new production of Lulu runs through December 3. On November 21, Lulu will be live streamed to theaters across the United States.
Meanwhile, across town, the Marion Goodman Gallery
is showing "William Kentridge: Drawings for Lulu." This exhibit
presents the original 67 Kentridge drawings used in the opera. Anyone
who sees Lulu, who appreciates Kentridge's art, or who is inclined toward German Expressionism will want to see and study
this must-not-miss show. (Bravo to the Marion Goodman Gallery website
which so brilliantly displays this brilliant work.) "William Kentridge:
Drawings for Lulu" is on display through December 19th.
Kentridge's Lulu at Marion Goodman Gallery
PHOTO: Marion Goodman Gallery
Also on display at the
Marion Goodman Gallery is a suite of four related linocut prints by
Kentridge, as well as a new fine press edition of the Lulu plays which
utilizes Kentridge's art. The book is from the San Francisco-based Arion
Press, which has just released its edition of Wedekind's The Lulu Plays featuring the 67 Kentridge drawings (printed by four-color offset lithography) bound into the book.
Kentridge's Lulu at Marion Goodman Gallery
PHOTO: Marion Goodman Gallery
The Arion Press edition of The Lulu Plays is a fine achievement.
Four-hundred copies of this limited edition artist's book were printed
by letterpress on luxurious creamy paper utilizing period type in
fittingly black and red inks. The book, which is hand bound and comes in
a slipcase, can be seen and no-doubt fondled at the Arion Press booth
at the IFPDA Print Fair at the Park Avenue Armory through November 8.
Louise Brooks as Lulu in the 1929 film Pandora's Box.
PHOTO: Louise Brooks Society
It is on November 8 that a free screening of the 1929 silent film, Pandora's Box,
starring Louise Brooks -- the greatest Lulu of them all, will take
place at Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. The sensational
G.W. Pabst directed film was drawn from the Wedekind play, and in turn
contributed to Berg's realization of his opera (composed from 1929-1935,
premiered incomplete in 1937) just a few years later.
If you are
looking for a little background on Kentridge's art and its use in the
new production of Berg's opera, as well as the Arion Press edition of The Lulu Plays, check out this video of a recent onstage conversation between Kentridge and Arion publisher Andrew Hoyem which took place last month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Those
in upstate New York who can't make it to NYC can look forward to seeing
some of this work in the future. The newly renamed George Eastman
Museum in Rochester recently announced
that Kentridge has given the definitive collection of his archive and
art -- including films, videos and digital works, as well as his work
for Lulu -- to the museum. Founded in the 1940s, the museum has
one of the world's largest and oldest photography and film collections.
And as fans of the actress well know, it was also the longtime home of Louise Brooks.
Diary of a Lost Girl, starring Louise Brooks, will be shown in Newnham, UK on Friday, November 6th at 7 pm -- with live musical accompaniment by Wurlitza. This should be fun. Check it out if you live in the area.
Although she died countless times on stage and on film, Lulu still lives. Frank Wedekind's immortal character -- the great femme fatale of the 20th century -- first appeared in his once controversial, now celebrated "Lulu" plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box, 1904).
In
the years that followed, Lulu was reborn in other art. Wedekind's plays
were the basis for two great silent films in the 1920s, as well as
Alban Berg's masterful opera of the 1930s. The plays and their stage
performances, the films, and the opera all influenced one another. It is
known, for example, that Berg saw G.W. Pabst's 1929 film Pandora's Box
while composing his great modernist opera, as did his great champion
and correspondent Theodor Adorno, who wrote that he was profoundly
affected by Lulu.
There have been other later film adaptions,
poems, paintings and drawings, comic books, and even erotica inspired by
the character of Lulu, as well as a few rock and pop recordings like
Rufus Wainwright's All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu (2010) and the Lou Reed / Metallica collaboration Lulu (2011).
Her origins remain obscure. Did Wedekind base the character on Lou Andreas-Salomé
and his own frustrated relationship with the vivacious intellectual
(who preferred the company of Nietzsche, Freud, and Rilke)? Or did
Wedekind base Lulu on his mother, a one-time showgirl in Gold Rush San
Francisco? She married Wedekind's father, an older and respectable
professional, not unlike Dr. Schön in the plays.
Or, was Wedekind -- a rogue in his youth
-- smitten with Lulu, a popular circus performer in Paris in the 1890s?
We do know that Wedekind was inspired by the circus as well as Félicien
Champsaur's 1888 circus pantomime, Lulu. In the prologue to Earth Spirit,
the characters are introduced by an Animal Tamer as if they are
creatures in a traveling circus. Lulu herself is described as "the true
animal, the wild, beautiful animal" and the "primal form of woman."
Over
the years, actresses from Eva Gabor to Judy Davis have played Lulu on
stage and in film, while many others have sung the role in opera. Here
is a shortlist of six great, memorable Lulus. Each has shaped the way we
see the character today.
Marlis Petersen as Lulu.
PHOTO: Kristian Schuller/Metropolitan Opera
Marlis Petersen: It would be something of an understatement to say there is great anticipation around the new production of Alban Berg's Lulu that opens at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The excitement building over this new Lulu stems not just from the fact that artist William Kentridge
is behind the staging of this modernist masterpiece, but that Marlis
Peterson will be singing the role of Lulu. The riveting German soprano
(a blonde who sports a dark bob à la Louise Brooks) is appearing in her 10th and just announced final production of the opera. As an interpreter of Lulu,
few have made the role so much their own. No wonder Peter Gelb, the
Met's general manager, calls her "the leading Lulu of the day." Lulu opens at the Metropolitan Opera on November 5 and continues through December 3. On November 21, Lulu will be live streamed to theaters across the United States.
Louise Brooks as Lulu in the 1929 film Pandora's Box.
PHOTO: Louise Brooks Society
Louise Brooks:
The best known Lulu may well be Louise Brooks, the bobbed-hair,
Kansas-born silent film star called to Germany to play Lulu in the G.W.
Pabst directed film, Pandora's Box.
Movie-goers at the time were dismayed. They asked, how could an
American play what was an especially German character? Though she
claimed not to know what it was all about, or even to have read
Wedekind's text until years later, Brooks so convincingly inhabits the
character of Lulu that any actress or singer playing the role is hard
pressed to ignore her. In a recent piece, critic Graham Fuller suggests that Brooks the actress and not Pabst the director is the film's real auteur. It's not a new notion, but still a provocative one. A free screening of Pandora's Box will take place on November 8th at Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.
Asta Nielsen in 1913, as Lulu in 1923, and turned from the camera in 1930. PHOTO: Louise Brooks Society
Asta Nielsen: The first film Lulu was Asta Nielsen, the great Danish actress, who played Lulu in Earth Spirit
(1923). One of the early international movie stars, she was noted for
her large dark eyes, mask-like face, and androgynous figure. (Famously,
she played Hamlet in 1921.) About her, the French poet Apollinaire once
exclaimed, "She is everything! She is the drunkard's vision and the
lonely man's dream." Be that as it may, Nielsen often and movingly
portrayed strong-willed, passionate women trapped by tragic
consequences. Due to the erotic nature of her performances, Nielsen's
films were censored in the United States, and her work to this day
remains obscure to American audiences.
Tilly Newes and Frank Wedekind in Pandora's Box. Tilly Wedekind as Lulu in Earth Spirit. PHOTO: Louise Brooks Society
Tilly Newes: The second actress to play the role on stage was Tilly Newes. Pandora's Box
was first staged in Nuremberg in 1904, but was banned by the German
censor. Austrian writer Karl Kraus produced a private performance in
Vienna the following year, and cast Newes, an Austrian actress, as Lulu.
Newes and Wedekind, who played Jack the Ripper, had an affair, and
after the playwright insulted her, the actress threw herself into a
river. Wedekind rescued her, and soon proposed. Despite a difference of
22 years, they remained together until Wedekind's death in 1918. In
1969, she published an autobiography, Lulu - the role of my life.
Kyla Webb in Lulu: a black and white silent play, which toured the country in 2006
Kyla Webb: Back in 2005 and 2006, the then newly formed Silent Theatre Company
of Chicago staged a brilliant and singular adaption of the Lulu plays.
Taking their cue from the silent cinema, this Lulu was performed without
words. The intent was to say what words often cannot express -- here,
gesture and body language did all the talking. At the heart of Lulu: a black and white silent play was an immensely talented young actress, Kyla Webb,
in the title role. Webb was Lulu incarnate -- throwing her affections
and body about with abandon on a razor's edge of danger and desire. A
revival is in the works.
Melanie Griffith as Lulu in Something Wild (1986).
PHOTO: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc
Melanie Griffith:
Though she didn't play Wedekind or Berg's Lulu, Melanie Griffith was
Lulu to a generation of moviegoers. In Jonathan Demme's 1986 thriller, Something Wild,
Griffith is given the character's name and unpredictable personae, as
well as Brooks' trademark hairstyle. Though a stylistic gloss on some of
Wedekind's more profound themes, Something Wild remains a clever, layered, Hitchcockian take on the nature of desire and uncertainty.
