This poem was written by Craig Keller in 2007, and originally appeared in The Masters of Cinema Series DVD release of Diary of a Lost Girl. Copyright 2009 Craig Keller. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author.
In memoriam Nika Bohinc / Alexis Tioseco.
She was an original but
One does not discover her.
She came to my attention
— That’s how it’s called —
By way of another’s homage,
And later I learnt of the
Itinerant nicknames attached
To each mention of her lore —
The “Brooksie” and the “Lulu” that announce her as
Anyone’s good-time girl,
Such that she arrives already-known,
Prix fixe, thirty-secondhand
Intimate. No, even before I saw
The films, I knew the names would not do,
Because I had seen the photographs,
And collective myth does not become her.
(The face that imparts a need
For more quiet-time than the suitors
Could likely conceive . . . ) —
The photographs become her,
They seem enough like the mirror;
And it would be concise, I think,
For two or three to remain
In place of the films,
As the photos attest to imperative silence
And exist on a private scale
Apart from Democracy and En-Masse.
To spin one of these images
Wrongside-up with the fingertips
As though guiding the ouija planchette
And to peer, then, into the eyes —
That is to discover. There lie
Invocation and hazard and dare,
All the coalescings that
Forestall caricature at essence
And figure the life as lived,
L-O-U-I-S-E at last.
----
Louise Brooks was born in Kansas
With a forename-surname pair
Dignified and regal as Gwendolyn Brooks,
Another Kansan name with a rich ring
That conjures the fiction
Signed “George Eliot”
(To Louise so familiar, I do not doubt).
But what do they indicate, names like these,
To the ample corps of the nation’s interior,
The women who sit at cafés
Outside of the major metropoleis,
Or scan the aisles, or make engagements,
Coming, going, knowing nothing
Of women like Louise Brooks,
Maybe because . . . . Maybe because —
All I can say for certain, since the States are my home, is
Municipalities branch, at some point,
Off of the polis, are at their utmost
Wary of this “cultivation of the self.”
Brooks is free American hypothesis,
(America itself hypothesis),
And many exemplars of many designs preside,
Equal in that they preside,
None in their boldness presuming,
Yet all calling for polis again, —
And to speak of Louise Brooks
Is to speak of a certain lost accent
Lateral to that of the Beales,
Of girls’-schools and French-tutors and
Piano-lessons in the home,
Dizzying-games and concussive tumbles of
Those wind-hewn few who in class pull
Sort of middling marks,
And after, dance with their sisters,
Crowd round Zelda and Ella and Scott in the parlour,
Destroyers of sheepishness
In young women given to bloom,
— To speak, distinctly, of
A civics of the soul,
The stately riposte to
The Methodist, Presbyterian,
Baptist and Episcopal pot-lucks
And prescriptions and dicta.
It’s the staging of a twilit playlet,
Eloquent answers to Bengal-lancers,
Tilting the head to take in magnolia, linden, and every scent at stake;
It’s the priming for exile of
The one who, in living, says,
“Philomath is where I’ve been.”
----
By ‘27, those locks were already
Razor-sharp, attracted the attention of
Hawks — Howard, and the others
To whom “one thing” always leads,
And, next thing, Louise was shuttling off with trunks,
Leaving behind those evenings
Trapped in chambers by drunks
For other drunks, financiers and heirlings
In Berlin — all of course by circumstance.
Her business was Pabst, who had
In the near past launched Garbo to fame.
But when Pabst would ask Brooks to dance
Five or six times in front of the lens
Across the following months,
He found himself “extracting” —
From all the moments he’d imagined or
Witnessed his star enacting
In the taverns and districts
Two years before Ellington’s
“Mood Indigo.” And here in the present was Pabst,
All indigestion and cough-drops,
Having to contend with the distracted child.
So he braced himself, became the barest
Of disciplinarians, grumbling this or that to
Louise, that she’s too beautiful to damn herself
To this particular side of the Straße;
Meanwhile taking the chance
(And a risk, make no mistake) to
Harness via defiant Louise
The Twenties’ grand aptitude
For facilitating fiction,
(Note this as the decade
When no setting in cinema,
No matter how fantastical,
Looked fake — looked, instead,
See Nosferatu or Der Golem,
Like magic) — his “Lulu” a retrieval bird
Returning with wings singed.
Pabst, having a world to project,
With this world inside Brooks and Brooks in the world,
Bit down on his cheek and — not exactly acquiescing —
Contemplated in cinema terms
The phrase from Fitzgerald that locates in
Germany, and so, necessarily, in Pabst,
“The direction of tremendous licentious force.”
Not even a whole year passed
And Pabst had calibrated two films
To Louise (and Louise to the films).
The first, Die Büchse der Pandora, or Pandora’s
Box, establishes the pattern of
Diffracting Brooks into three or four
Stations, identities — like flashes in glass that
Breaks into shards. The last reel, in fact,
Recasts the light into numens
To ready drifting Lulu for death.
— “Lulu”-the-role, that is, as inhabited by Brooks,
Reincarnated in “Thymian” for Diary of a
Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen —
Title unwieldy for Germans too).
Here the lighting is harsher, falling more evenly
Over scenes staged against unscored walls
Shot head-on, bodies the only relief, —
A kind of scrub-planed subtraction, a lessening.
The scenario, Pfennigroman melodrama,
Parallels the spatial scheme, and
Together they form the armature, or rood, of
The new incarnation, still the same body,
And I have the sense of willed re-enactment,
That Pabst, in moving Brooks once more through
Stations of “whore,” “damaged goods,” “pitiable savior,”
Activates analysis, initiates mimesis, is
Scouring symptoms for the childhood trauma that
Once located and “worked” can begin to heal.
But who can ever know a life, after all,
A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur.
(How fitting was “Rosebud,” when Welles
Named the sleigh.) Maybe it takes the
Genial bearing of the good doctor
To diagnose on-screen what x-rays do not reach.
An ashenness, in the films of Papa Pabst —
He could smell death, yet he chose
Not to turn away or resist. Countenance
The impulses of the family man,
The host of the jocund front-room,
Big in bulk, fully flanked,
Arteries hardening before — suddenly, —
Sexual lust, rational wife,
Children who in later years
Still cannot acknowledge one turn of
Papa’s mind . . . that the double
Chin and belly hillock could conspire
Toward a forward force that might have
Broken headboards. — An obscure business,
The arts. And in his Diary, Pabst records Brooks
Both as being, and not being,
“There.” Sometimes his camera looks right past her,
The girl who needs attention and has learned to live without it,
To forage and scrap for substitutes, folderol.
It’s really a statement about freedom,
This decentering,
This filming of capitulations, of a human being
Who attempts connections, who premonitors
Rejection, such that when it plays out
She is ready, cool, able herself to adopt an
Anthropological view.
(Was it Godard who said the ultimate movie
Will come when the camera,
Aimed at a mirror, films itself?) This is why one is moved to
Watch Louise in slow-motion:
The presence of an intelligence beyond oblivion,
A ratiocination, a searching that pervades the smile
Similar to that of Dita Parlo
Advanced by “step”
On discs of L’Atalante or The Grand Illusion. —
O nation-states and histories, that such lives could
Always be in abundance.
----
Before Xanax, Zoloft, Lithium,
Louise, acope, was determined
To make an impression. One sees as much in
The mass-produced production-still
From Pandora’s Box: she’s lifting a mourning veil,
And in so doing tells of Death and its thresholds;
Is so like a spider at work on its web
Or, cornered, rearing up to attack —
Is complicit with Pabst who helps destroy her,
Brings her back, in three films total
And one photo-shoot booked at the start
That proves with emulsion the death-shroud of Turin.
Brooks dreamt what freedom might be, while
Pabst had his notions of what freedom was.
Fate draws up for starplayers
Its contracts in advance, and Pabst, knowing what he knew,
Feeling it useless to turn away or resist,
Bestowed upon Brooks the one thing he thought he could:
Eternal resurrection. So even as he pens with Clair
The Prix de beauté script, he ensures an ending that
Will recall the close of Pandora’s Box, and
Open the route to circled return.
But there exists also a fulcrum
Within the middle picture,
Within the middle movement of that film, to be exact;
The prefigurer Pabst places Brooks in a dance
Blitzed asleep from liquor, essentially unconscious,
And her suitor turns her round and round and round
As the formulation recurs.
This film Diary recounts weird spiritualism,
Some presence in that pallid, tranced maneuver of
The second act; while earlier in the first, transmits
An intimation electrickal and cross’d.
To set the scene, backtrack — Brooks pivoting, bare-heeled,
As the voice of Pabst, one day, on-set, intones:
“Louise, meet Sybille,” — three syllables,
To which the American later adds a threadbare sibilance
The first or second time she says it. This name,
In later years, registers as lullaby, or butterfly
That’s shed its specifically Latin descriptor,
When Louise replaces on her nightstand The Gift
Or, bottle in bag, takes a spot on the bank of the Genesee;
Either time, recalling Sybille Schmitz
In off-hand lumina of patience and pain.
Immortalised by Fassbinder in
The Longing of Veronika Voss,
The real Sybille play-drowns in Diary,
Her appearance high-tension tangent
To the fate-line teased out by Pabst for
Thymian’s course. As Elisabeth, Wirtschafterin and mistress
Spurned, disconsolate, Schmitz is hauled to the family,
A body freshly dragged from the river,
And Brooks’ hand accesses the frame,
Draws back the sheet —
She gazes onto the visage vampired of life, and mirroring —
In ‘55, dead; opiate suicide.
----
Close to three decades into my subject’s movie exile,
Godard, who had seen the films of Brooks
At the Cinémathèque as programmed by Langlois,
Related to the world Anna Karina, by then his wife,
And in Vivre sa vie, film en douze tableaux
Gave her Louise’s bob for the role of the whore Nana,
Named after the painting by Manet,
The novel by Zola,
The film by Renoir.
Godard would return to the matter of prostitution and all manifestations thereof
Relentlessly throughout his work,
In Alphaville, in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her,
In Weekend, in Sauve qui peut (la vie),
And so on. But helmeted Nana in Vivre sa vie
Remains the concentrated portrait of a
Soul both “there” and “not there,”
Fluxed envelopments of the interior life in the exterior,
And vice-versa; Godard puts forth not only an allusion to
Brooks, but also a gesture of accord.
Recall the phrase quoted by André Labarthe to Karina
While she fidgets blank-faced at the pinball machine:
“The hen is an animal made up of an inside and an
Outside. If you take off the outside, there remains the
Inside. If you pull back the inside, then you see the
Soul.” Of course here and elsewhere one recalls
Brooks’ own predicaments in Pabst, and can see that Godard even
Adapts the off-kilter quality of the former’s spatial vision
So that anagrammatic Nana is realized as object, commodity,
Or, in the case of the final shot, refuse, detritus.
(The closing downward camera movement, of obscenity and
Grace, eliminates the boundary that separates Out from In,
Camera-brain from subject, so that at the moment the
Apparatus bows its head to mourn the death of Nana,
The film itself dies and comes to an end.)
Godard once said that the history of cinema
Is the history of boys photographing girls; and that
The history of History is the history of boys
Burning girls at the stake. Sometimes I think about the
Tragedy in deliverance, of Nana watching Dreyer’s
Passion of Jeanne of Arc in Godard’s film, and of how the
Same year — ‘62 — saw the premières of Vivre sa vie and
Bresson’s Trial of Jeanne of Arc. And these points remind me,
So much of the sadness in Brooks’ films with Pabst
Helped generate the undercurrent of Godard’s
Lifelong dialogue with Bresson.
What started in Pickpocket was transformed by Vivre sa vie,
Then reconfigured again by Bresson in Au hasard Balthazar and
Mouchette, before being re-resolved by Godard in the
Histoires(s) du cinéma and Eloge de l’amour.
Thus, as though by magic, Martin LaSalle metamorphoses
More than forty years later into street-cabalist,
And the hands that once picked pocketbooks
Now levitate a cigarette which, in a flash, vanishes —
Transubstantiation of the quotidian, that which is “always seen,”
Before a return to the invisible:
This is the power of Cinema.
And when Anna Karina wears a bob cut
Illumined by light from the face of Falconetti —
O, Louise, to reach us at last, what a strange path you had to take.
Such was the life of Louise Brooks;
Sometimes one thing changes into something else.
----
----
An American adrift in the epoch of Big-Pharma,
A copy of Typee crammed in his back-pocket,
Feels a route down dark halls, rugs acrunch underfoot,
And taps an exit just as he reaches to ignite the candle
Kept in the courier-bag slung hip-side.
Why’s the candle in the bag?
For not many reasons but its scent evokes a season past;
This American is Nietzsche-bound;
And the scope of chaos figures vast.
To sniff at its redolent wax is to
See backwards in time through a lens of apology,
One that can set the minutes aflame like
Spiders descending from ceilings over gas stoves,
Unceasing. Yet in this concentration of time preceding,
The promise or possibility in Future becomes detectable:
An expansion-contraction of life as the dream of art,
A sick feedback resonant with the baby-changing station
Unlatched in a men’s-room stall and used for the purpose of a
Cocaine surface; with the nightmare that might be titled “Boy, Meet Girl,”
Wherein the one spots the other,
Door ajar at the Hotel Terminus
In a room filled with music indiscernible,
Either Billie Holiday or The Fall,
Or The Beatles doing “Clarabella,”
And looking into his eyes while some lithe expatriate lies
Smoking at her side, she fastens her straps and declaims:
“I’m a girl with a groin to enjoy;
I get my nucleus right with any member.” —
On that reveal, she walks out of the room
The same way Sarkozy parades through the dung on a bull farm.
Yes, the candle invokes Hazard, but it also poses Dare,
And to follow through on this might lead to the bliss of escape, and new integration.
So at last he emerges, not in the wake of daylight,
But of something noctilucent,
And maybe here he can sigh,
In the exemplary borough
Where he imagined remembering
Life on 7 N. Goodman. —
•
Stay strong, Citizen.
