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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Mary Pickford Rediscovered by Kevin Brownlow Mary Pickford Rediscovered by Kevin Brownlow Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Mary Pickford Rediscovered by Kevin Brownlow Mary Pickford Rediscovered by Kevin Brownlow. "Mary Pickford Rediscovered: Rare Pictures of a Hollywood Legend" by Kevin Brownlow (Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999, 256 pages.) Anytime a Kevin Brownlow book is published, there's a "buzz" among silent film enthusiasts, and there's plenty of reason for it with this new book. First of all, it's a beautiful book - 9 1/4" x 12", slick, glossy, high quality paper, and photographs reproduced in the same high quality manner as they were in Hollywood, The Pioneers . The contents - a brief forward by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - a lengthy introduction (about 16 pages) by Robert Cushman who is curator of the Academy's photographic stills archive - How the Mary Pickford Collection Came to the Academy Library by Cushman - The Search for Mary Pickford by Brownlow which is an absorbing personal account of his early experiences in "finding" Mary Pickford - and finally something silent film collectors have needed for a long time. a film by film rundown with commentaries, and who better to do those commentaries than Brownlow. Don't be mislead by the title - this is NOT just a picture book. Yes, it has 232 pictures, but it also has plenty of great text, too. This book is everything a Mary Pickford fan could want and certainly won't disappoint. Rediscovered Lost Girl of the Week: Presenting Mary Pickford. Kevin Brownlow was a guest at the University of Antwerp last week. He gave a charming and inspiring talk about his career in silent film at Cinema Zuid. Brownlow’s tireless efforts to encourage students to discover the excitement and wonder of silent cinema reminded me of one of my most cherished books by the British film historian: Mary Pickford Rediscovered , his homage to the first queen of the silent screen. Leafing through the book once more, got me to think about Mary Pickford’s career both in silent film and in film history in general. Everyone who has seen Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994) probably remembers the scene in which infant vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) tries to cut off her curls in an effort to shed her doll-like features. If you do, you’ll also remember Claudia’s devastation to discover that the curls grow immediately back, that she cannot escape her looks of innocence and youth, which are rather ill-suited to her vampire personality. Mary Pickford probably would have wished the same thing to happen to her curls after the cutting of her own doll-like curls in the late twenties turned out to precipitate the end of her illustrious career. Like Claudia, Pickford felt that the curls were a burden to her as a performer and that they truncated her real abilities as an actress. Yet, despite the curls being gone audiences could not quite forget about them. They were gone but not forgotten and the bobbed Pickford no longer seemed to match anyone’s expectations or desire. (Husband Douglas Fairbanks is reported to have burst into tears. Pickford, curiously, felt both frightened by and enjoyed his response.) Yet, the curl-cutting/curl-growing scene from Jordan’s picture fits Pickford’s case for another reason as well, for it appears that the legacy and reputation of Mary Pickford, once America’s and the World’s Sweetheart and Hollywood’s most powerful woman (person, really), is likewise bothered (cursed?) by an excess of ever-returning ‘curls.’ In Pickford’s case, the ‘curls’ represent a convolution of associations, stories, images and clichés about the actress, which work to obfuscate our impression of the quite multi-facetted Mary. The (capitalized) Curls stand for our notion of Pickford as a child-impersonator, as an icon of the sentimental sob story, as an ideal of womanhood très passé . In response to this, various historians, archivists and connoisseurs have tried to disclose Pickford to the world, metaphorically cutting of the ‘curls’ to reveal a subtler, more complex portrait of the actress. They have tried hard for us to rediscover Pickford as she once was to the world. But the Curls have proven quite obstinate, as we will see. The first to discover Pickford was David Belasco, a theatre impresario who was nicknamed ‘the Bishop of Broadway.’ Belasco had had the honour of finding an angelic yet insistent little girl named Gladys Smith showing up in his office one day. As the story goes, eagerly repeated by the Broadway producer himself in a 1915 Photoplay article, Belasco immediately spotted her talent (and ambition) and engaged her for his successful plays (some stories add that it was he that rechristened her ‘Mary Pickford.’) Pickford was discovered anew when she moved from stage to screen, where she worked for D.W. Griffith at American Mutoscope & Biograph. Her recognizable curls and quality of restrained acting were quickly noted by audiences and critics and she became a favourite first and later a true star, moving on to become America’s sweetheart and the queen of the movies in the course of the teens. By 1920 she was married to Hollywood’s favourite hunk – Fairbanks – and had started her own independent company – United Artists. Yet, as it would turn out, Belasco’s, Griffith’s and the world’s discovery almost became one of the lost souls of the silent screen, for already in the early thirties movie audiences and critics started to wonder what ever they had seen in her. And since her films were not available for renewed acquaintance they had no way to find out. Book cover of ‘Mary Pickford Rediscovered’ by Kevin Brownlow (1999) In 1999, Kevin Brownlow published Mary Pickford Rediscovered , a beautiful, lush collection of impossibly gorgeous photographs of a woman whose face had once been among the most recognizable in the world, accompanied by an insightful and generous reappraisal of her career. The book featured pictures ranging from behind the scenes production stills to personal photographs (often taken by the best still photographers of the day). Brownlow’s title made the breadth of his ambitions clear: to offer the chance to rediscover both the quality, versatility and importance of the star and her films. The book also served to revive the photographs themselves, which had been saved – painstakingly, suspensefully so – from a fate of untraceable dispersion and perhaps oblivion by the efforts of several film historians and archivists. (Among them the late Robert Cushman, archivist at Margaret Herrick Library, Joseph Yranski, David Sheppard and Brownlow himself.) A fascinating account of how much of the Pickford memorabilia almost did not make it to the Library of the Academy of Arts and Sciences can be found here. Still one wonders why a woman like Pickford needed to be ‘rediscovered’ at all. Surely, I am not questioning Brownlow’s judgment here: Pickford indeed was in dire need of a rediscovery, but what I do wonder about is how she had become forgotten (and misunderstood) in the first place? And how she was overlooked for such a long time, even by, as Molly Haskell points out in her introduction to the most recent reappraisal of Pickford (Christel Schmidt’s Mary Pickford Queen of the Movies ), ‘the staunch cinéphiles and feminists of the 70s’? If we look at those of Pickford’s contemporaries who can be said to have held similar positions of importance, relevance, fame, or popularity in their days, we find that Chaplin for example was never in want of (renewed) attention. Nor Keaton. Surely, Greta Garbo is not forgotten. Even Lillian Gish, the steely blonde muse of Griffith’s, is not quite forgotten (neither is Griffith for that matter). So why did it almost happen to Mary? Even if we disagree about the historical or aesthetic significance, cultural legacy or cinephiliac resonance of these individual personalities, no one would deny that Pickford’s achievements (from her role in the formation of the star system, her contributions to a new standard for modern film acting to the cofounding of United Artists) are beyond forgetting or overlooking, and thus demand to be rediscovered and written about. But let’s note that the term ‘rediscovery’ implies an explanation of what made her so important (even though that would seem to be quite obvious) and usually a rediscovery includes some sort of an apology for liking her. Brownlow for example acknowledges that Pickford is hard to sell to those who know her from her most popular films like The Poor Little Rich Girl or Little Annie Rooney (for an example, he cites his wife who also dislikes John Ford’s Irish films). Film scholar Gaylyn Studlar, in her essay on Pickford, ties the actress to a cultural gaze that to modern viewers can only be described as ‘paedophilic,’ reflecting unsettling and suspect sexual desires and uncomfortable notions of ‘ideal’ womanhood. So for reasons personal or cultural, we could have our reasons to be squeamish of this woman, but are they warranted? Jeanine Basinger, whose Silent Stars (also from 1999) celebrates ‘a group of silent stars who are somehow forgotten, misunderstood or underappreciated,’ placed Pickford at the front. (But the cover went to Pola Negri.) The other rediscovered stars in the book, among which are the Talmadge sisters, Mabel Normand, Gloria Swanson and Negri, and Rin-Tin-Tin, were not of the stature of Pickford (Douglas Fairbanks who also features excepted I guess,), and it is odd to find Pickford in the line-up at all, as Basinger acknowledges. Yet she was selected, Basinger tells us, because it is rather ‘ironic that the biggest female star in history ends up being the most misunderstood.’ And here ‘misunderstood’ surely also implies a certain dislike.
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