This guest post by Victoria Negri appears as part of our theme week on The Great Actresses.
When you think of a flapper, what do you see? The iconic image is a woman with a long dress, often accompanied by long beads and that famous hair cut – a short, slicked bob curled against the face along the cheek bones.
The flapper image was cultivated by the silent film star Louise Brooks through her most famous character, Lulu. Forgotten for years, more attention has been paid to Brooks recently, after her films were rediscovered and re-popularized. This star, whose career ended far too abruptly, deserves much more credit than she’s been given as a trailblazer for feminism and the portrayal of female sexuality onscreen. At the same time, she was a pioneer of naturalistic acting, predating Marlon Brando and James Dean by decades.
Understanding a traumatic event from Brooks’ early life gives shape and context to her career as a performer. As a child growing up in Kansas, Brooks was sexually assaulted by a neighbor. Later, her mother blamed the incident on her. This may be the first instance of Brooks being demonized for speaking out. Needing protection from her mother, she instead received blame. Her most famous characters, especially in Pandora’s Box (1929) and Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), were young women who were punished for behaving in a way that was counter to societal expectations.
She showed her defiance throughout her Hollywood career. At the beginning, she was offered two contracts, one from MGM and one from Paramount. Torn between the two, she turned to her friend Walter Wanger for advice. In Lulu in Hollywood, her autobiography, Brooks explains that Wanger told her to take the MGM contract because if she went with Paramount, people would think it was because of their relationship. She responded, “‘You just say that because you don’t want me at Paramount.”… “And you think I’m a bad actress.’” She signed with Paramount.
When Paramount refused to treat her fairly by offering her a promised raise some years later, Brooks didn’t capitulate. She left the studio, refusing to return to Los Angeles to add voice work to the film The Canary Murder Case and taking G.W. Pabst’s offer to film Pandora’s Box in Germany instead. Paramount bosses announced that Margaret Livingston would finish the dubbing work, because Brooks didn’t have a suitable voice for talkies. Thus began a long period of Paramount and Hollywood unofficially blacklisting Brooks.
It also marked the start of what would become her most famous collaboration.
In Diary of a Lost Girl, Brooks’ Thymian is thrown into a reformatory after she refuses to marry the father of her child because she doesn’t love him. Her morals, true to her core, don’t fit with the times, and she is punished for them. At the start of the film, we see her wearing all white. She is innocent and childlike, surrounded by people in darker colors, and blissfully unaware of her effect on others. After rejecting the aforementioned marriage, she is forced into a reformatory against her will. Eventually, she escapes with a friend. With no other options, she becomes a prostitute. By chance, she runs into her father as she is being “auctioned off” on her birthday and he is embarrassed and devastated to see how she’s turned out. Shortly thereafter, he dies and Thymian blames herself. Once again, Brooks’ character is so accustomed to living in a society where the blame for tragedy is directly linked to a woman’s sexuality. She is overpowered by guilt.
In Pandora’s Box, Brooks’ character Lulu is caught backstage in an intimate situation with Schon, her lover, who is engaged to another woman. This backstage scenes is so powerful in large part because of the look on Brooks’ face: indignant, challenging, and powerful. It’s the same face that stands up to Paramount and goes to Germany to film two brilliant, timeless movies. Above all, her performance registers a real note of defiance, challenging the male gaze. Following her wedding to Schon, he walks in and misinterprets Lulu’s actions with two characters: Schigloch, who she claims is her father, and a fellow performed named Quast. Schon, sure Lulu has been unfaithful, tries to convince his wife to kill herself. But in a struggle, the gun goes off and she accidentally murders him.
In Pandora’s Box, Lulu’s seduction is portrayed as manipulative, without feeling. With nowhere to turn, Lulu resorts to prostitution to survive. We are challenged by the end of the film, when she is murdered by Jack the Ripper. Is it retribution for her actions or is it a tragic circumstance? The most famous image from the film is Brooks in a black veil and dress, attending her own trial as if it were a funeral.
However, in Diary of a Lost Girl, Thymian’s innocence is overpowering. She faints multiple times during the movie after traumatic, stressful events, and even wears a crown of flowers following her confirmation at the beginning of the film. While Lulu dares us to make a judgment call, Thymian is a tragic victim of society. Ironically, both are driven to prostitution in desperation, as Louise Brooks claims to also have in real life.
Brooks and her characters were powerful women, fighting for control of their lives. In Roger Ebert’s review of Pandora’s Box, he states, “Life cannot permit such freedom, and so Brooks, in her best films, is ground down—punished for her joy.” Her real life mirrored her characters; often being punished for her freedom and feminist power.
She played one of the screen’s first bisexual characters in Pandora’s Box. She had multiple romances with directors and co-stars, Charlie Chaplin and supposedly Greta Garbo included. She was volatile, confident, both open and closed off. She was so powerful in silent film and never given the chance to show her voice in the sound era.
Louise Brooks should have had a much fuller film career. After returning to Hollywood from Germany, she spent the ’30s making a few unsuccessful films and retired from Hollywood. The following decades were spent struggling to get by, battling alcoholism, relying on the loyalty of friends and even becoming a call girl in New York. However, unlike the tragic heroes in her films, she resurfaced when she met James Card, the curator at the Eastman House in Rochester, New York. He encouraged her to move to Rochester, where she started to come to terms with her past.
It was in Rochester that Louise Brooks found her voice and wrote one of the most brilliant, brutally honest memoirs, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1974. As years passed, her tragic ending morphed into being rediscovered and appreciated. Film historians, critics and movie fans praise her bold work, her erotic glances, and her unparalleled ability to evoke the truth onscreen. The world will never forget her.
Recommended Reading: Lulu in Hollywood; The Chaperone, by Laura Moriary; Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis by Mary Ann Doane
Victoria Negri is a New York City-based filmmaker/actress currently in preproduction on her first feature, Gold Star, loosely based on her relationship with her late World War II veteran father. When she’s not watching, making, or writing about movies, she’s probably running a race somewhere.
Personal website: http://victorianegri.com/
Film website: http://goldstar-film.com/
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