Some might describe Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever as a picture book. While that might be accurate on a literal level, it misses the point.
Louis Brooks, the dancer, actress, essayist and silent film icon whose appreciation came long after she retired, is tied inextricably with Louise Brooks the image that reverberates through film and fashion.
So with all due respect to the talented critic, historian and biographer
Peter Cowie, the author of this lavish appreciation is really Louise Brooks herself and the photographers who captured not simply her image but her spirit in photo after photo in this sumptuous volume. As such, it serves as an essential companion to both Barry Paris's definitive
biography, a well-researched and detailed account of her life and career (recommended by Cowie himself), and Brooks's own
Lulu in Hollywood, the superb collection of the actress's literate and reflective autobiographical essays.
The aptly named
Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever is a time capsule that captures the brief flourishing of Brooks's image and iconography between 1926 and 1931. Over 200 studio stills, publicity shots, modeling and glamour portraits, a few well-chosen frame enlargements and just a few crisp candid shots are the featured attraction in the hefty 256-page tome. With the exception of a few pre-movie modeling shots and a single early 60s snapshot, they are all from the defining years of her image on screen, in fan magazines and on film posters, and take on a new life in the clarity and depth in these masterfully produced reproductions.
"[T]his book is intended as a personal tribute rather than a meticulous biography," writes Cowie in his acknowledgements, but his text reads as some unhappy medium, as if the veteran film writer was either constrained or frustrated by the brevity of his contribution. His passion comes to life in the chapter on
Pandora's Box, and the warmth of his affection for Brooks can be felt in his account of her final decades in Rochester. The rest of his text documents the surface details of her free spirit and
joie de vivre without exploring it, offering a dry, dutiful, bloodless history of a woman anything but bloodless. Fiery and self-sabotagingly independent, she snubbed studio politics and sacrificed a career to follow her heart, her impulses and her libido.
That story is better told through the superbly curated and meticulously reproduced photos. Whether playing the alluring exotic, the androgynous sophisticate, the sunny American sweetheart or the elegant high society beauty, we find Louise Brooks in them all. Neither vamp nor virgin, one discovers in the familiar bobbed beauty with the helmet of black hair, the girl next door as sexually knowing woman, a vibrant, vivacious, liberated creature of impulse and intelligence that the text never manages to bring to life.
"'There is no logic in this!' 'I know,' said the scorpion, 'but I can't help it, it's my character.' Let's drink to character." -
Orson Welles as Gregory Arkadin in
Mr. Arkadin
Character has been the cross on which critics and biographers have predictably crucified the life and reputation of Orson Welles, the self-destructive genius whose unreliability, inconsistency and wandering interests sabotaged a brilliant career.
That's the traditional line that
Joseph McBride aims to put to rest with his study, a not always separable mingling of essay, advocacy, criticism and memoir that surveys Welles's entire career but homes in on the much derided final decades of his life, when he toiled over unsold pitches and unfinished films, many of them self-financed. In many ways, it's a critical study and detailed rumination on the themes and revelations of works that do not exist in any complete form. His first person take on
The Other Side of the Wind (in which he was involved as an actor and ambivalent almost-intimate of Welles) segues from remembrance to a critical look at the film, the techniques, the meanings and the place it held in Welles's continuing evolution as a creative artist.
As an advocate, McBride has a tendency to overstate his defense for Welles's reputation as a spendthrift, a dilettante, a chronically unreliable director (the central "character flaw," in McBride's study, is Welles's weaknesses as a businessman, the key to many of his unfinished films). But it's a fair position, considering the decades of fatuous blame tossed his way by otherwise responsible (and some out-and-out irresponsible) critics and biographers. And McBride confronts and grapples with the flaws in works he defends throughout, making sound observations while laying out his considered argument.
McBride's writing and structure are also sound. His easy way with connecting elements of his films, his influences and his life is remarkably cogent and to the point (unlike Peter Conrad's
Orson Welles: The Stories of his Life, which becomes so self-satisfied in its connections that it loses its point along the way). He rescues Welles's progressive convictions, which have been so often characterized as fashionable or insincere by antagonistic biographers, simply by illustrating the enormity of his volunteerism and his public action in support of his causes. And he gives voice to what I believe is the fulcrum of Welles as an artist and a person: he's never happier than when making a film. It comes across in every frame he's ever shot, that sheer joy of vitality and ingenuity and creation radiating from every film at every second.
This is not the definitive portrait of the man - could there ever be one for such a multi-faceted and contradictory figure? - but a welcome and necessary perspective on the artist who has been conveniently presented as either the self-destructive genius who sabotaged his career or the tragic artist destroyed by the system.
A film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a DVD columnist for the Internet Movie Database, Sean Axmaker is also a frequent contributor to MSN Entertainment, Amazing Stories, Asian Cult Cinema
, Greencine and StaticMultimedia.com. His reviews and essays are featured in the recently released Scarecrow Movie Guide.
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