En movimiento: Louise Brooks’ Multifunctional Film Criticism, Writing as Make-Believe

Written for the December 2022 issue of Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. — J.R.

I’ve recently been working on a book that collects my uncollected film, literary, and jazz criticism, ordering all my inclusions chronologically so that they’re allowed to commingle, meanwhile exploring ways that all three of these art forms (film, literature, music) can inform and reflect one another. Because this project rejects the “targeting” mentality ruling academic presses and their all-powerful publicists—which follows the Reaganite economic principle of exploiting and exhausting markets that already exist, not proposing new ones—it took me some time to find a publisher.

Still more recently, I’ve been rereading Louise Brooks’ informative, thoughtful, and beautifully written Lulu in Hollywood, a collection of essays combining autobiography with criticism, film history with social and fashion history, and even a certain kind of fiction with non-fiction.

The latter combination requires some explanation. While recounting her memories of her own acting in films (especially Beggars of Life and Pandora’s Box) and of Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, the neglected director Edmund Goulding, and the even lesser known Pepi Lederer (lesbian niece of Marion Davies, older sister of screenwriter Charles Lederer, and close friend of Brooks who committed suicide at the age of 25), Brooks renders scenes in such fulsome and intricate detail—extended dialogue, facial expressions and gestures, locations, furnishings, clothes, food and drink at meals—that it quickly becomes apparent that she must be fleshing out whatever she can remember with imagined specifics. Read more

Two Death Scenes of Jean-Pierre Léaud

Commissioned by MUBI (I forget when).

Given the size and variety of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s filmography, 

there must be other memorable death scenes of his apart

from those in Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in USA (1966) and 

Albert Serra’s La mort de Louis XIV (2016), half a century 

apart. My reason for settling on these two is that they 

demonstrate his prodigious range. In the first — a very bizarre 

piece of anamorphic Pop Art self-described as “a political film, 

meaning Walt Disney plus blood” — he plays “Donald Siegel”, 

the abused sidekick of gangster “Richard Widmark” (Laszlo 

Szabo), comically sporting a button that declares “Kiss me I’m 

Italian”. He’s dispatched in a garage by Paula Nelson (Anna 

Karina), a detective investigating her lover’s murder. After 

Siegel pantomimes committing murders of his own and other 

criminal adventures as they’re being recounted by Nelson in 

voiceover, she asks him, “If you had to die, would you rather 

be warned or die suddenly?” He selects the latter and as soon 

as she obligingly plugs him, he shouts out “Mama!” and staggers 

extravagantly in long shot across most of the garage floor before 

finally expiring. It all takes a little over twelve seconds, whereas the 

less showy, more minimalistic and iconic finale as the eponymous 

Louis XIV, shown mainly in regal close-ups, lasts for virtually all of 

the film’s 116 minutes.  –Jonathan Read more