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
One month from today, the Kansas Silent Film Festival will be celebrating its 25th annual event when it kicks off the 2022 event in Topeka. More information about the event, including the program of films, notes, directions and more, can be found HERE. Please note, this is a LIVE event with social distancing recommended. And what's more, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, as well as pianists Ben Model, Jeff Rapsis and others will be providing live musical accompaniment.
Among the many highlight are screenings of Herbert Brenon's Peter Pan (1925), Stage Struck (1925, starring Gloria Swanson, The Goose Woman (1925), with Louise Dresser and Jack Pickford, and The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926), with Ronald Colman and Vilma Banky. No Louise Brooks this year.... but maybe in the future.
Yesterday's New York Times ran a story headlined "Was Dorothy Day Too Left-Wing to Be a Catholic Saint?" The article, subtitled "The Archdiocese of New York has asked the Vatican to consider the social activist for sainthood. But church leaders are not entirely comfortable with her politics," examines the real possibility that the well-known Catholic activist might be canonized.
For those not familiar with Dorothy Day (1897-1980), she was according to Wikipedia a "journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social and anarchist activism. She was perhaps the best-known political radical among American Catholics." Day's conversion to Catholicism took place in 1927; in 1933, she founded the Catholic Worker. But before then, she was a journalist and writer.
Should Dorothy Day be canonized, she would become the first and likely only Saint to have ever reviewed a Louise Brooks' film. On July 20, 1925, the New York Morning Telegraph published Day's review of The Street of Forgotten Men, which was headlined “Herbert Brenon Contributes Absorbing Film at Rivoli.” (The review was run again on July 26th.) Day gave the film a good review, describing it as "An absorbing story, done by a cast of people who really know how to act and directed in a skillful manner by Herbert Brenon." She also singled out various actors, particularly Juliet Brenon (the director's niece) and John Harrington, who plays Bridgeport White-Eye, the shudder inducing character to whom moll Louise Brooks was attached. Day did not mention Brooks - no reviewer did, as Brooks' part was just an uncredited bit. Nevertheless....
Interestingly, Louise Brooks developed a serious interest in Catholicism later in life. However, her interest was more mystical than practical or social, like Day's. Back in 2016, the Catholic Saints Guy blog ran a piece on Brooks and Catholicism titled "The Divine Miss Brooks."
I have always been drawn to collage, whether in the visual arts or in film or literature. Despite the jumble, it makes sense. Early modernism, especially dada and surrealism made use the technique, as did futurism. Recently, while looking online through some vintage Italian magazines, I came across this collage featuring some early film stars. It really appeals to me. I believe this Italian futurist magazine dates from 1932. How many film stars can you name? (Unfortunately, no Louise Brooks.)
On Sunday the 16th, the Institut français du Royaume-Uni in London, England screened the classic 1929 silent German silent film, Pandora's Box (aka Loulou). The Institut français is the French Agency of the Ministry of Foreign
and European Affairs in charge of promoting French culture overseas and
international cultural exchanges. More info on this pan-European screening HERE.
Die Büchse der Pandora
134 mins
DEU | 1928/29 | dir. G.W. Pabst, with Louis Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Franz Lederer, Carl Goetz, Krafft-Raschig, Alice Roberts
Based on Frank Wedekind’s two plays Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora,
Pabst’s cinematic interpretation is the ultimate amoral, mesmerising,
and irresistible tale which deservedly found its place in the pantheon
of cinema. Astonishingly modern, the film follows the downward spiral of
flapper girl Lulu. Louise Brooks’s intensely erotic portrayal of the
film’s heroine is seductive and innocent at the same time.
In Weimar Germany, Lulu (Louise Brooks) is an entrancing and
free-spirited girl who lives on the beneficences of the men who fall
under her spell. Her current paramour is the highly-respectable Dr.
Schön, who comes to believe he must marry her, even though he has been
engaged to a more respectable woman. At their wedding, he becomes mad
with jealousy, and tragedy ensues.
In its turbulent history, Pandora’s Box was butchered by censors to a mere 66 minutes, rediscover the film’s beauty in its full running time of 134 minutes.
The screening will be accompanied live on piano by Cyrus Gabrysch
The Provincetown Film Art Series in Provincetown, Massachusetts will screen Diary of a Lost Girl, G.W. Pabst’s silent classic starring Louise Brooks, on Wednesday, January 19 at 7 p.m. Series curator Howard Karren will give an introduction and moderate a post-screening discussion. More information and ticket availability HERE.
The event description reads: "Louise Brooks is an American treasure, partly for her revelatory proto-feminist memoir, Lulu in Hollywood,
and partly for the dazzling performances she gave in two silent G.W.
Pabst movies shot in Germany after she fled La-La-Land and its
tyrannical studios: Pandora’s Box and this, a cautionary
tale about forgotten women." Personally, I don't understand the
meaning or use of the word "forgotten" - but still, this is a rare pandemic screening.
And if you would like to learn more about the sensational book behind the film, let me recommend Margarete Bohme's The Diary of a Lost Girl. In 2010, I edited, wrote the introduction, and published to the "Louise Brooks edition" of Bohme's book.
The Brooks film is based on a
controversial and bestselling book first published in Germany in 1905.
Though little known today, it was a literary sensation at the beginning
of the 20th century. By the end of the 1920s, it had been translated
into 14 languages and sold more than 1,200,000 copies - ranking it among
the bestselling books of its time.
Was it - as many believed -
the real-life diary of a young woman forced by circumstance into a life
of prostitution? Or a sensational and clever fake, one of the first
novels of its kind? This contested work - a work of unusual historical significance as well as literary sophistication
- inspired a sequel, a play, a parody, a score of imitators, and two
silent films. The best remembered of these is the oft revived G.W. Pabst
film starring Louise Brooks.
My corrected and annotated
edition of the original English language translation brought this
important book back into print after more than 100 years. It includes an
introduction detailing the book's remarkable history and relationship to the 1929
silent film. This special "Louise Brooks Edition" also includes more
than three dozen vintage illustrations.
The book received good reviews, including this one from Richard Buller, author of A Beautiful Fairy Tale: The Life of Actress Lois Moran - "Long relegated to the shadows, Margarete Böhme's 1905 novel, The Diary of a Lost Girl
has at last made a triumphant return. In reissuing the rare 1907
English translation of Böhme's German text, Thomas Gladysz makes an
important contribution to film history, literature, and, in as much as
Böhme told her tale with much detail and background contemporary to the
day, sociology and history. He gives us the original novel, his
informative introduction, and many beautiful and rare illustrations.
This reissue is long overdue, and in all ways it is a volume of uncommon
merit."
Nineteen twenty-two was a pivotal year in the life of Louise Brooks. It was a whirlwind year. Brooks was a teenager, just 15 at the beginning of the year, and she was following her passion for dance while performing in local theaters and before clubs and civic organizations in her hometown of Wichita, Kansas. By the end of the year, she was a member of the prestigious Denishawn Dance Company, touring the United States and performing alongside such dance greats as Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn. This blog commences a new series of posts documenting significant happenings in Brooks' life on this day one-hundred years ago.
* * * * * *
On this day in 1922 in the life history of Louise Brooks . . . . Brooks, along with other students from the Mills-Fischer School of Dance and Dramatic
Arts, attends a performance in nearby Hutchinson, Kansas by dance legend Anna Pavlova
and her Ballet Russe. The Mills referenced in the name of the dance school was none other than Alice Mills, who was immortalized as "The Chaperone" in Laura Moriarty's splendid novel of the same name which centers on Brooks and events in her life in 1922.
What a remarkable happenstance -- the coming together of two iconic figures of the 20th century. Its only equivalent was when Ruth St. Denis took Brooks and the other Denishawn dancers to see Isadora Duncan perform.
In case you are not familiar with Pavlova (or Pavlowa), she was one of the great dancers of the 20th century. Her Wikipedia entry begins, "Anna Pavlovna was born Anna Matveyevna Pavlova (12 February 1881 – 23 January 1931), was a Russian prima ballerina of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. She was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. Pavlova is most recognized for her creation of the role of The Dying Swan and, with her own company, became the first ballerina to tour around the world, including performances in South America, India and Australia." Her likeness and legend are commemorated in artwork all around the world.