Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Louise Brooks Lulu Forever by Peter Cowie Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever by Peter Cowie. Born 14 November 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas, USA, as Mary Louise Brooks. Died 8 August 1985 in Rochester, New York, USA, of a heart attack. Maried director Edward Sutherland; divorced. Louise Brooks began entertainment work as a professional dancer. Her work on Broadway led to an offer in films from Paramount. Acted in a series of Paramount films from the mid to late 1920s, before leaving the United States for work in Germany and her greatest artistic successes for director G.W. Pabst in the late 1920s. Louise Brooks Silent Era Filmography Book : Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks. Book : Louise Brooks by Barry Paris. SUPPORT SILENT ERA USING THESE LINKS WHEN SHOPPING AT AMAZON. Louise Brooks. Louise Brooks (14 November 1906 – 8 August 1985) was an American dancer, showgirl, and silent film actress. She became, at the end of her life, a writer and critic of the silent film era. Contents. Early life. Born Mary Louise Brooks in Cherryvale, Kansas, she was a daughter of a lawyer who was usually too busy with his practice to discipline his children, and an artistic mother who determined any "squalling brats" she produced could take care of themselves. Although she inspired her children with a love of books and music—she was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for Louise—Myra Brooks failed to protect her eldest daughter from childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a neighborhood predator. This single event was a major influence on Louise's life and career, causing her to say that she was incapable of real love, and that she always had "a passion for some kind of bastard". Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, appearing in her teens with the revolutionary Denishawn modern dance company whose members included Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn. After being dismissed from Denishawn under a cloud, due to her stubborn temperament, she turned to her influential friends and quickly found work as a featured dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, where her beauty was noticed by the then New York-based movie studios. She was also noticed by visiting movie star Charlie Chaplin, in town for the premiere of his film The Gold Rush —the two had an affair that summer. Hollywood film career. Signing with Paramount Studios, where she stayed for most of the remainder of her American film career, her screen debut was in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon, however, she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among others. She was noticed in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the Howard Hawks directed silent "buddy film", A Girl In Every Port in 1928. It has been said that her best American role was in one of the last silent film dramas, Beggars Of Life (1928), as an abused country girl on the run with Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery playing hoboes she meets while riding the rails. Much of this film was shot on location, and the boom microphone was invented for this film by the director, William Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking scenes in the movies. At this time in her life, she was rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, and was a regular guest of William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies, at San Simeon, being close friends with Marion Davies's niece, Pepi Lederer. Her distinctive bob haircut, which became eponymous and still recognised to this day, had started a sensational trend, as many women in the Western world cut their hair like hers. Soon after the film Beggars Of Life was made, Louise, who loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise, and left for Europe to make films for G. W. Pabst, the great German Expressionist director. Paramount attempted to use the coming of sound films to strongarm the actress, but she called the studio's bluff. It was not until 30 years later that this rebellious move would come to be seen as arguably the most savvy of her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit. Unfortunately, while her initial snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her in Hollywood altogether, her refusal after returning from Germany to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist. In Europe. Once in Germany she starred in the remarkable 1928 film Pandora's Box , in which her waiflike role as the doomed flapper, Lulu, who meets her fate at the hands of Jack the Ripper after a series of salacious escapades, made her an icon of life and death in the Jazz Age. This film is notorious for its frank treatment of modern sexual mores, including the first screen portrayal of a lesbian. Louise then starred in the controversial social dramas Diary Of A Lost Girl (1929), and Prix de Beaute (1930), the latter being filmed in France, and having a famous, but mesmerizing, shock ending. All these films were heavily censored, as they were very "adult" and considered shocking in their time for their portrayals of sexuality, in addition to being highly critical of society. Although overlooked at the time because "talkies" were taking over the movies, these three films were later recognized as masterpieces of the Silent Age, with her role of Lulu now regarded as one of the greatest performances in film history. Life after film. When she returned to Hollywood, in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films: God's Gift to Women (1931) and "It Pays to Advertise" (1931). Her performances in these films, however, were largely ignored. She found herself effectively black-listed, and never again enjoyed her previous success. Rumors purportedly sent out by the studios claimed she had the wrong voice for the new sound films, but she actually possessed a beautiful and cultured voice. After the humiliation of being cast in B pictures by studio executives as punishment for her outspokenness and disdain for ill-written scripts, she retired from show business in 1938, briefly returning to Wichita, where she was raised. "But that turned out to be another kind of hell," she wrote. "The citizens of Wichita either resented me having been a success or despised me for being a failure. And I wasn't exactly enchanted with them. I must confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature." She returned East and worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in New York City for a few years, then eked out a living as a sort of courtesan, with a few select wealthy men as clients. Louise unfortunately had a lifelong love of alcohol, and was an alcoholic for a major portion of her life, although she exorcised that particular demon enough to begin writing about film, which became her second life. She was a notorious spendthrift for most of her life, even filing for bankruptcy once, but was kind and generous to her friends, almost to a fault. She was married twice, but never had children—she referred to herself as "Barren Brooks". Her first husband was director A. Edward Sutherland; they Divorced. Her second husband was Chicago millionaire Dearing Davis; they married in 1933, she left him five months later, and they divorced in 1938. Her many lovers from years before had included a young William S. Paley, the founder of CBS, who quietly provided for her while she was an outcast from the entertainment world, and living frugally. Rediscovery. French film historians rediscovered her films in the early 1950s, proclaiming her as an actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon (Henri Langlois: "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!"), much to her amusement, but it would lead to the still ongoing Louise Brooks film revivals, and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country. James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House, discovered Louise living as a recluse in New York City about this time, and persuaded her to move to Rochester, New York to be near the George Eastman House film collection. With his help, she became a noted film writer in her own right. A collection of her witty and cogent writings, Lulu in Hollywood , was published in 1982. She was famously profiled by the noted film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay, "The Girl With The Black Helmet", the title of which was an allusion to her fabulous bob, worn since childhood, a hairstyle claimed as one of the ten most influential in history by beauty magazines the world over. She rarely gave interviews, but had a special relationship with John Kobal and Kevin Brownlow, the film historians, and they were able to capture on paper some of her amazing personality. In the 1970s she was interviewed extensively, on film, for the documentary Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), produced and directed by Gary Conklin. Running 50 minutes, Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll in the year before her death. She had lived alone by choice for many years, and Louise died from a heart attack in 1985, after suffering from arthritis and emphysema for many years. A continuing inspiration. Brooks is considered one of the first naturalistic actors in film, her acting being subtle and nuanced compared to many other silent performers. The close-up was just coming into vogue with directors, and her almost hypnotically beautiful face was perfect for this new technique. Brooks had always been very self-directed, even difficult, and was notorious for her salty language, which she didn't hesitate to use whenever she felt like it. In addition, she had made a vow to herself never to smile on stage unless she felt compelled to, and although the majority of her publicity photos show her with a neutral expression, she had a dazzling smile. By her own admission, she was a sexually liberated woman, not afraid to experiment, even posing nude for "art" photography, and her liaisons with many film people were legendary, although much of it is speculation. Louise Brooks as an unattainable film image served as an inspiration for Adolfo Bioy Casares when he wrote his classic science fiction novel The Invention of Morel (1940) about a man attracted to Faustine, a woman who is only a projected 3-D image. In a 1995 interview, Casares explained that Faustine is directly based on his love for Louise Brooks who "vanished too early from the movies." Elements of The Invention of Morel , minus the science fictional hardware, served as a basis for Alain Resnais' enigmatic Last Year at Marienbad (1961), one of the most influential films of the 1960s. Louise also had an influence in the graphics world - she had the distinction of inspiring two separate comics: the long-running Dixie Dugan newspaper strip by John H. Striebel that started in the late 1920s and ran until 1966, which grew out of the serialized novel and later stage musical, "Show Girl", that writer J.P. McEvoy had loosely based on Louise's days as a Follies girl on Broadway; and the erotic comic books of Valentina , by the late Guido Crepax, which began publication in 1965 and continued for many years. Crepax became a friend and regular correspondent with Louise late in her life. Hugo Pratt, another comics artist, also used her as inspiration for characters, and even named them after her. Modern Influence. this page has no sources. add some. For her Oscar-winning film role in the 1972 movie musical Cabaret, Liza Minnelli was coached by her father, Vincente Minnelli, to fashion her character's appearance on Louise Brooks. The 1986 film Something Wild , directed by Jonathan Demme, features a main character played by actress Melanie Griffith, who sports Louise Brooks' trademark hairstyle, and goes by the moniker Lulu . In 1987, the first book devoted to Louise, "Louise Brooks: Portrait of an Anti-Star", by Rolland Jaccard, was published in France. Soon after, in 1989, Barry Paris wrote the biography, "Louise Brooks". In 1991, the synth-pop group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released "Pandora's Box (It's a Long, Long Way)", and the collage-pop band Soul Coughing released "St. Louise Is Listening" in 1998, both inspired by Louise Brooks' life. In 1992 and 1993, Madonna was inspired by Louise Brooks' look in the videoclips of I'll Remember and Rain, wearing a little black wig. She said later she has been really inspired by her, and another actress of the same era, Dita Parlo. In 1995, the Louise Brooks Society was formed to promote a greater awareness of the life and films of this celebrated actress, dancer, and writer. In 1998, a documentary, Louise Brooks: Looking For Lulu , was broadcast on the Turner Classic Movies network, narrated by Shirley MacLaine. In 1999, the rock band Marillion included on their 1999 album Marillion.com a song inspired by her called Interior Lulu . In the late 1990s, BBC Books based their description of the third incarnation of Doctor Who character Romana on Louise Brooks. Mike Doughty wrote a song called "St. Louise is Listening" with Soul Coughing, which contains many references to Brooks. ISBN 13: 9780847828661. Louise Brooks has become one of the most spectacular icons of early cinema. Her distinctive "bob" haircut looks as modern as they did when she first appeared in films in 1925. Louise Brooks was born on November 14, 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas, and by eighteen had established herself as a dancer with the Ziegfeld Follies, and was receiving film offers from both MGM and Paramount. In 1928, she starred in William Wellman's Beggars of Life . Meanwhile she was mingling with the high and mighty of Hollywood, having a passionate affair with Charlie Chaplin, spending weekends at William Randolph Hearst's castle and captivating such men as William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. Her brief, yet spectacular role in Howard Hawks' A Girl in Every Port impressed G.W. Pabst, the German maestro who was seeking an actress for his upcoming production, Pandora's Box . He rejected Marlene Dietrich in favor of Brooks, who went to Berlin and made not only Pandora's Box but also Diary of a Lost Girl , forever ensuring her status as a screen icon.This exquisitely produced album celebrates Lulu with rare film footage stills, private photos, letters, interviews, and text by renowned film critic Peter Cowie, exploring this influential cult figure and abiding symbol of the Jazz Age. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Peter Cowie , a noted film historian and author of more than twenty books on cinema, corresponded with Louise Brooks from 1965 to 1982. Jack Garner is the chief film critic for the Gannett News Service. "Lulu Forever exists for its art, and on that score it delivers magnificently: I'd never seen fully half of the images in the book. There are scene stills, candids, snapshots, everything documenting the deadly lure of Lulu. Oddly, there are no pictures of Brooks as a ravaged old woman in a small apartment in Rochester-that would violate the masturbatory fantasia the book seeks to evoke." -- 12/18 NEW YORK OBSERVER. "affectionate and insightful portrait" -- Feb MALIBU TIMES MAGAZINE. "presented luminously. " "By turns gleeful, sultry and pensive, the shots are a photographic paean to Brooks' girlish beauty." -- 12/03/06 AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN. ". finding a certain comfort and familiarity in the heft and subtle texture of the cover and gilded lettering." -- SHELTER INTERIORS, April, 2007. "Cowie's new book is a fitting, even fascinating literary tribute . It is a valuable addition to film history." -- PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY, July, 2007. "Fans of the cinema will treasure Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever." -- VOGUE, December, 2006. "This beautiful book is chock-full of the peeling and romantic furnishings, books and mementos Carter surrounds herself with." -- PAPERCITY MAGAZINE HOUSTON, November, 2006. "This beautifully produced album celebrates this early screen star as Lulu with rare film footage stills, photos, letters, interviews, and text by film critic Peter Cowie." -- METROSOURCE NY, October, 2006. "lavishly illustrated. [Peter Cowie's] personal reflections on the ironies of her fate lend this volume an unexpected poignancy." -- VILLAGE VOICE, December, 2006. ". the gorgeously illustrated [book] captures the myth better than any of her films." -- Oct06 OUT. Lulu Forever. F or years, I had assumed Louise Brooks to be dead. That iconic face staring out of posters for Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl seemed, like some fly in amber, a prisoner of the vanished 1920s. When my friend Peter Graham suggested that we use her image for the front cover of his A Dictionary of the Cinema , which I published at Tantivy Press in 1964, I grew intrigued. Soon afterward, after reading in Cahiers du cinéma that she had been rediscovered by James Card, the film curator at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, I plucked up my courage and sent her a copy of the little book. Almost instantly, she typed a letter to me: “Becoming a star thirty-five years after I was pronounced nothing is very heady stuff. It was a great honor to be your cover girl. Your book is evidently a huge success. I have received five copies from all over and could have had ten more from admiring friends.” These remarks disguised the fact that Louise was by then a loner. True friends were thin on the ground, although Kevin Brownlow was about to become one, after he tracked her down for an interview for his book The Parade’s Gone By. Six years later, I was invited to “consult” on a new festival in Rochester, an event purportedly supported by the Xerox Corporation. It had been arranged without Card’s involvement and proved a near disaster, as I may recall in a future flashback, but the highlight of the week was a pilgrimage to Louise’s modest apartment on North Goodman Street. I was accompanied by Murray Grigor, then galvanizing the Edinburgh International Film Festival. We had been told by a local film buff that we should take half a pint of gin as an offering, and Louise was thrilled. “I always drink it in a tooth glass, with milk on the side,” she explained with relish. She drew us into her bedroom, and as we sat on the bed beside her, she showed us a file of production stills from her work in the silent era. Two days later, Murray and I were killing time in one of those ineffable shopping malls when Louise materialized, gliding toward us in a long skirt, her even longer hair descending gaily to her waist. She was petite, like so many great stars, and her features had weathered the years well, while her voice, rarely noted, had an authority that broke continually into peals of laughter. More than forty years later, Kevin sent me a letter he had received from Louise in the wake of our visit. “I liked Peter at once, although he didn’t like me [ sic! ]. He thought I was being grand not going to lunch or to dinner or to the film festival. But then by accident on the day he was leaving we met in the Midtown Plaza, and he glowed at me like a porcelain stove which is so cold-looking from a distance.” Ah, the Englishman abroad! Indeed, in October of 1970, Louise had scribbled a note to me, saying, “You must know that I don’t [not] go out because I think I am somebody, that is not true—it’s because I know that I am nobody. ” During the 1970s, Louise and I corresponded pretty much every three weeks. She delighted in dishing the dirt on silent Hollywood, with Garbo the actress she most loved to hate: “She was always positive about not wanting to play whores kicked around by men, but her absolute lack of intellectual discipline prevented her from being positive about what she wanted to play.” In another letter, she noted that, where Garbo was concerned, “genius seems to balance the pressures put upon it. Here was a big husky dyke who found in Hollywood her escape into the most feminine of women. Her enemy, Louis Mayer, thought to kill her off with Queen Christina , so obviously lesbian, but he had to wait till Two-Faced Woman , with the help of the whole staff, exposing that cruel lesbian face, blotting out her genius.” In her senior years, Louise wrote several sharp and witty articles about the silent period. They were published in magazines like Sight & Sound, Film Culture, and Focus on Film. Louise had a flair for limpid prose that she should perhaps have indulged from the outset of her career. “My purpose in writing,” she said in a letter in 1972, “is to search out those often unnoted incidents which shape life.” She read books, magazines, and newspapers with omnivorous zest. When she had her apartment repainted, she had “a wonderful time in reshaping the shelves, throwing out fifty books. To every book I said, ‘Will I ever need you for reference?’ When the answer was ‘No,’ out went Father’s Homer, Carlyle’s letters, bang, thump, dust—I love getting rid of things.” She adored provocation, telling me that “of course, Mr. Pabst directed the opening sequence of Pandora to direct the audience’s attention to the penis-in-erection—showing me swinging on the wrestler’s flexed arm.” And yet it was only with the advancing years that Louise started to swear like a trooper. She wrote to me once, “Whatever shock value ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ retain for the dainty, they have no value at all in revealing character. My articles have lost nothing by rejecting them.” When she worked with the likes of William Wellman and W. C. Fields, she maintained, “Louise Brooks did not swear. It is part of the obscenity of old age.” Louise gave me one of the best compliments I have ever received. “You are the only person I know who speaks the truth to me,” she wrote in January 1975. “And the truth makes me laugh. It isn’t that other people would not like to speak the truth, but they have grown up in families in which speaking the truth brings punishment. I did not. And I must say this: in childhood is established truth or lies.” The last I heard from Louise was a card in which she thanked me for my review of Lulu in Hollywood (a compilation of her writing) , which had appeared to acclaim from Knopf in 1982. Of course, the Louise I knew in the 1970s was light-years away from “Brooksie,” the flapper girl who had seduced Chaplin in the summer of 1925. Her antic, often brilliant mind surfaced only in middle age, and the iconic “girl in the black helmet,” as Kenneth Tynan had called her, remained tantalizingly beyond reach for my generation. She did not live to see my book entitled Louise Brooks, Lulu Forever, published by Rizzoli in 2006. She would probably have made some scabrous comment about its being too kind! This is the second in a series of pieces devoted to film figures Cowie has gotten to know in the course of his career. Read his introduction to the series here. Peter Cowie’s Top 10. Peter Cowie has provided commentaries for around a dozen Criterion titles. He is the author of many books, including Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever, from Rizzoli. Ingmar Bergman. The Seventh Seal. I’d be hard-pressed to exclude this towering giant of a movie from any list. It’s a film that marked the lives and careers of so many directors and critics of my generation. The miracle is that it stands up so well. The style is classical, the acting impeccable, and the soul of the film throbs and nags at us across the decades. Michelangelo Antonioni. L’avventura. When I first saw this at university, in 1960, I found it boring. Yet something made me watch it a second time that same term, and I fell under the spell of Antonioni’s mesmeric camera movements, his grasp of love and its heartaches, and above all the impassioned beauty of Monica Vitti. The film looks as freshly minted as if it had just been released. Luis Buñuel. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Criterion has produced various Buñuel editions, and they’re all terrific. What I adore about The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is Buñuel’s rapier thrusts at the establishment, allied to an anarchic fury and surrealist imagination. I doubt that there’s a film in the collection that makes me laugh quite so much. George Sluizer. The Vanishing. Sluizer is a Dutch director I met in my early twenties and instantly liked and admired. Finally, in 1988, he made really good with this suffocating horror movie—so bland on the surface, so naturalistic in its acting, and yet as ghastly as any catacomb in its study of crime and perversion. When Sluizer remade the movie for Fox, the whole story lost its relentless, claustrophobic grip. Benjamin Christensen. Häxan. Scandinavian cinema has, I admit, obsessed me for most of my career as a critic. But all credit to Criterion for giving this bizarre and seductive silent film from 1922 the same loving attention as they would a new release by Richard Linklater or Mike Leigh. For extra value, the DVD includes an abridged version of the movie issued in 1968, with a sly offscreen narration by William S. Burroughs. Marcel Carné. Children of Paradise. Another favorite of my vanished youth that withstands the test of time. It’s a huge, rolling pageant of a film, and Carné and Jacques Prévert get down and dirty with the Paris of the mid-nineteenth century, from which Arletty’s Garance surges up irrepressible and unscathed by the turbulence of life about her in the theater world. Jean-Pierre Melville. Bob le flambeur. Melville has been hailed as the father, or godfather, of the French new wave. In fact, he was a classical filmmaker, telling his gangster stories in linear fashion, but with the highest quality control where acting and locations were concerned. Rain-slick streets belong, by some kind of divine right, to Melville, just as rivers belong to Renoir. Yasujiro Ozu. Tokyo Story. While waiting for Late Autumn and An Autumn Afternoon, my favorite Ozu movies, I’m happy to choose Tokyo Story, immaculately transferred and bolstered with a two-hour documentary on Ozu, featuring all the old familiar faces. The extreme simplicity and limpidity of Ozu’s cinematic expression has no equal. Tokyo Story teeters on that exquisite knife-edge between stoicism and sentimentality. Andrzej Wajda. Ashes and Diamonds. Seeing Ashes and Diamonds again after forty years, I realized how beautifully Wajda married his romantic flair and his unerring sense of history. Zbigniew Cybulski looks as timeless as Brando or Louise Brooks, his maimed glance between those sunshades accusing the postwar world of betrayal. Kô Nakahira. Crazed Fruit. Another revelation to come out of left field just when you thought you knew the pantheon of Japanese cinema. Nakahira’s control of his material is apparent from first shot to last, as he charts the frantic duel between two rock and roll–generation youngsters for the sticky, sweaty affections of Mie Kitahara. Here’s a film that not only reflects the rebellious spirit of Japanese youth in the mid-fifties but also sports an intoxicating visual panache. It also features one of Donald Richie’s most engaging commentaries.