Louise Brooks

A symbol
of what
modern
cinema
would
become

Her Life to Live

Louise Brooks:
Portrait of an Anti-Star
Edited by Roland Jaccard

Columbus Books, 1986 (paper)
ISBN 0-86287-420-3

hat people remember of those years is not from films, but one essential photograph…And when I think of Garbo I do not see her moving in any particular film. I see her staring mysteriously into a camera.” Louise Brooks’s words recall a moment from her own career. In 1928 Paramount publicity photographer Eugene Robert Richee took a photograph of Brooks in which, in a black dress against a black backdrop, Brooks looks off right, her stunning blue-black bob disappearing into the backcloth, a string of beads falling from her pale neck. Occasional shadows betray collarbone, jaw, a neck muscle, nuancing a profile as white as alabaster. Blasted by the light and accentuated with white makeup to hide her freckles, Brooks’s profile, blurring at the edges, resembles ectoplasm pluming in the gloom. It remains the most emblematic image of Brooks, and one of the most extraordinary publicity shots ever commissioned by a Hollywood studio.
That same year, Henri Langlois, future director of the Paris archive Cinémathèque Française, went to the Ursulines cinema to see Howard Hawks’s A Girl in Every Port. One of the reasons we remember Langlois is that he began the Hawks cult in France, one that, by the early ’60s, had spread to Britain and America, just as Brooks was being rediscovered. But at the tender age of 15, what entranced Langlois was a 22-year-old woman. For its drive, its assurance with screen narrative and its modern sensibility, Hawks’s film signalled a shift in cinema’s creative impetus from France to America, said French critics. Hawks was a true modernist whose “simplifying style” underlay “the astonishing seductiveness of his images,” according to Jean-Georges Auriol in La Revue du cinéma. Concurrent with Richee’s precise conceit, one that perhaps epitomizes the quest for the perfect manufactured shape that typified the American 1920s, A Girl in Every Port became a symbol of what modern cinema would become. Of Brooks, Hawks wrote: “I wanted a different type of girl…a new type. I hired Louise Brooks because she’s very analytical, she’s very feminine…She was way ahead of her time.” Of Hawks’s film, Langlois wrote in 1963: “To the Paris of 1928, which was rejecting expressionism, A Girl in Every Port was a film conceived in the present, achieving an identity of its own by repudiating the past. To look at the film, is to see yourself, to see the future.”

Like Hawks, Louise Brooks was one of the last of the moderns. Brooks herself said that her look resembled the defined, massed regions of black and white of an Aubrey Beardsley ink drawing. Consonant with its modernism, the way that chain of beads falls away recalls a mechanical pulley. Above the geometric cut of that neckline, the curl of that bob, as fashioned as park railing, points towards her lips, a recollection of art nouveau before the onset of the future. This helmeted figure, sister surely to the robot Maria in Lang’s 1926 Metropolis, stares off to where it is told, the black dress merging with the black design, the whited-out cheeks, chin and nose suggesting less a face, more a mask lost in a velvet sea.
This picture does not appear in this book, but it is the pictures that make Jaccard’s book happen in your mind, just as it was her image that made Louise Brooks happen in the minds of her postwar followers. Consisting of a series of pieces, written mainly around Brooks’s best known release, G.W. Pabst’s 1928 Pandora’s Box, it is generously filled with stills in all their grainy splendor. Indeed, larded with some bland copy, and unimaginatively titled, the book is saved by its illustrations. (If you want good writing on Brooks, go to Amazon.com and look up Barry Paris’s Louise Brooks: A Biography, or to Brooks’s own Lulu in Hollywood, with its wonderful introduction by Kenneth Tynan). An unpopular view perhaps, but I have found Pabst’s film overlong and dull, save only for Brooks’s lovely face. Translated from a French text that originally appeared in 1982, these French commentaries on Pandora’s Box, its origins and appeal, suffer not only from being translations, but from being placed alongside the direct, informative, and accessible style of Louise Brooks herself.
How incredible it is that this luminescent young Hollywood star, whose style of being seemed so attuned to its moment, was also a writer who contributed literate and intelligent prose on her contemporaries to the likes of Sight and Sound, Cahiers du cinéma and Film Culture. In 1980 I read Kenneth Tynan’s reprinted New Yorker piece on Brooks, and remember being besotted with the mixture of chorine and Cahiers, Paramount and Weimar embodied there. In my late teens, I had been taken in by a procession of popcorn venuses from Hedy Lamarr to Gene Tierney. Here was a symptom of the feminine that seemed as exotic and composed as a woman should be. “As soon as she comes on the screen, fiction disappears along with art, and one has the impression of watching a documentary. The camera seems to have caught her by surprise, almost without her knowing it. She is the intelligence of the cinematic process, of all that is photogenic; she embodies all that the cinema rediscovered in the last years of the silent film: complete naturalness and complete simplicity. Her art is so pure it becomes invisible.” Eulogizing Brooks, Langlois catches my disappointment with Pabst.

And she could write! Amongst a number of Brooks’s astute pieces—this book promises the diva’s image and the diva’s voice—“A Certain Kind of Freedom” stands out. Here she describes how her forebears settled in Kansas, her father becoming a lawyer. While her mother, who had spent a lifetime caring for brothers and sisters, had no intention of doing the same for the children of Leonard Brooks. So Mary Louise and her sister and two brothers had to fend for themselves. Inured to independence, Brooks moved to New York and joined the Ziegfeld Follies, and in 1925 signed a contract with Paramount. But happiness eluded her. “I had no idea that besides owing them a certain number of hours of work, I was also turning over my private life to them.” Three years later, she quit and went to Germany. Willfulness became a theme. She argued with Pabst over Lulu’s clothes. “Cross and restless, I was left to fall asleep listening to the complaints of the other poor caged beasts across Stresemannstrasse in the Zoologischer Garten.” She married twice, but divorced shortly after. By 1971 she was living alone in a retirement community in Rochester, NY. “Over the years, I brought upon myself both poverty and solitude, and came to the conclusion that my mother had fostered in me an idea of freedom that was totally utopian.” Only extraordinary memories, her books, and growing bundles of fan mail kept Louise Brooks with us in the final years.
But ever so briefly in the late ’20s, she burned brightly. It was a unique life. How many chorus girls from the Midwest had the opportunity to sample Berlin during the height of the Cabaret years? In “Pabst and Lulu,” Brooks writes of the street life of a Weimar era teetering on the brink of decadence and despair. You can almost hear the honking taxis. “At the Eden Hotel…the café was lined with the higher-priced trollops. The economy girls walked the streets outside. On the corner stood the girls in boots, advertising flagellation. Actors’ agents pimped for the ladies in luxury apartments in the Bavarian Quarter. Racetrack touts at the Hoppegarten arranged orgies for groups of sportsmen.” Only Billy Wilder, who had been there and had no illusions, could write with the same clear-eyed nonchalance.

Pandora’s Box tapped into the fascinations of sexual activity at a time when traditional western mores were under assault. Lou Andreas-Salomé, the notorious voluptuary and emancipated woman who challenged European sexual standards in the 1890s, was rumored to have inspired playwright Frank Wedekind’s original Lulu. This unfettered spirit found its way, via Brooks’s own modernity, into Pabst’s film. In The Haunted Screen, her book on ’20s German cinema, Lotte Eisner asked whether Brooks herself was “a great artist or only a dazzling creature whose beauty leads the spectator to endow her with complexities of which she herself was unaware?” Brooks herself was flattered by Eisner’s musing. Meanwhile, the one thing that kept me from abandoning Pandora’s Box, with its creaky affronted Victorian sensibilities, was Brooks’s haunting loveliness. For David Thomson, she foresaw the personifying trend in modern screen acting, that sense in which actors don’t imitate emotional states so much as become them, drawing upon and projecting their own singular élan into the role. “Today Brooks in closeup gives a sense of vivacious, fatal intimacy that enormously enriches Lulu’s tragedy,” writes Thomson. Unwilling to give herself to the studios upon her return to Hollywood, Brooks found the studios bad-mouthing her, and her American career never recovered. There is a terrible irony here. If the studios still work hard to bring the actors’ lives and their roles into echoing concision, the moment when Jack the Ripper stabs Lulu echoed the end of Brooks’s Hollywood stardom. For it is when the prostitute offers herself for free that she dies. Just as Brooks “died” when she played this role of showgirl and liberated woman that drew so much upon Brooks herself. As Thomson says, “And perhaps it was in imagining the self-consuming rapture of Lulu that Louise Brooks laid in store her own subsequent isolation.”
But alone as she was in the ’60s and ’70s, Brooks, still beautiful, had the comfort of knowing that there were people out there in the darkness who loved her. In 1965 Italian cartoonist Guido Crepax devised a comic strip/graphic novel around a character called Valentina, based on Brooks. Part of it is included here, and it recalls nothing so much as a minimalist rendition of Pop Art directed by Antonioni and starring Anna Karina, herself famously modeled after Brooks in Godard’s Vivre sa vie, known in English as My Life to Live. The image of Louise Brooks threads through the 20th century, but what we remember is a guileless, slightly pained, ineffably sad glance offscreen, as of one afraid of the dark.

	by Richard Armstrong