Louise Brooks and the Surrealists

“Louise Brooks is the only woman who had the ability to transfigure no matter what film into a masterpiece. The poetry of Louise is the great poetry of rare loves, of magnetism, of tension, of feminine beauty as blinding as ten galaxial suns. She is much more than a myth, she is a magical presence, a real phantom, the magnetism of the cinema.” — Ado Kyrou, author of Le Surréalisme Au Cinéma (1963)

Louise Brooks has long been popular in France, perhaps more so than anywhere else. And in Paris in 1929, 1930, and 1931 she was seemingly everywhere. The actress passed through Paris at least twice, and was widely written about in the French capital’s many newspapers and magazines. During the span of those three pivotal years, at least five of Brooks’ films were shown in Parisian theaters. Each enjoyed long runs or repeated showings. Brooks’ image, as well, was also seemingly everywhere — not only in newspaper articles and on the covers of French film magazines, but even on display in Parisian storefronts. There is a remarkable picture, shown below, of Brooks’ portrait on display in the window of a photographer’s studio in Paris. If only there were a time machine with which to travel back to the City of Light and purchase some of those lovely portraits!

Among those who took notice of Brooks were the Surrealists. To them, Brooks had the look – a bit transgressive (though they didn’t use that word back then), and strikingly beautiful in an iconic (almost classical), yet very modern sense. For example, it’s known that Brooks was mentioned in articles by the French poet Philipe Soupault and the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí. It is also known that Brooks caught the eye of the photographer Man Ray, whose one time Paramour, Kiki de Montparnasse, somewhat resembled Louise Brooks. As well, two of Brooks films were shown at the Ursulines theater the cinematic home to the Surrealists) alongside such Surrealist films as Le Chien Ansalou (An Andalusian Dog). Other intersections between Louise Brooks and the Surrealists are likely to come to light as more publications and archives are digitized.

I’ve previously blogged about the Surrealists and Brooks, but only in the last few years I come across yet another significant link – this time to Salvador Dalí. If I understand it correctly, the Spanish book, Por qué se ataca a la gioconda? (Ediciones Siruela, 1994), collects some of Dali’s miscellaneous writings. (The book was reissued by Ediciones Siruela in 2003.) According to the publisher: “From the early years, and especially in the moments of greatest creativity – between 1924 and 1945 – Dalí worked in parallel in the fields of literature and painting, which together contribute to the creation of a universe of shapes and symbols that he will not leave until the end of his days. The texts collected in this anthology correspond to different times that go from 1927 to 1978; they were published in the French magazine Oui and this edition rescues them in their entirety. The chronological order of the articles makes it easier to follow the evolution of the artist’s ideas. His obsessions are his main thematic source: eroticism, death and rot, which articulate a very peculiar universe appearing recurrently throughout his life. . . . In his writings he mixes philosophical ideas with seemingly irrelevant anecdotes and is also concerned with surrealism and some of its problems, such as object, automatism or dream, without neglecting other topics such as photography and cinema.”

Por qué se ataca a la gioconda? contains a piece written in Paris in 1929. It is a surreal piece, touching on the factual and the dreamlike. Dali’s piece reads in part, “Transcurren dos minutos de intervalo. Sobre la hoja cae un granito de arena que permanece inmovil en el centro di la hoja. Los cinco minutos expiran sin otra modificacion. Rene Clair, el realizador del popular film de vanguardia Entr’acte, ha comenzado a filmar Prix de beaute, con Louise Brooks. Sera una peli cula documental sobre el desnudo de Louise Brooks. René Magritte acaba de terminnar un lienzo donde “hay” un personaje que se encuentra a punto de perder la memoria, un grito de pajaro, un armario y un paisaje.” In translation, this report on current happenings reads, “Two minutes apart. A grain of sand falls on the leaf and remains motionless in the center of the leaf. The five minutes expire without further change. Rene Clair, the director of the popular avant-garde film Entr’acte, has begun filming Prix de beaute, starring Louise Brooks. It will be a documentary film about Louise Brooks’ nudity. René Magritte has just finished a canvas where “there is” a character who is about to lose his memory, a bird’s cry, a closet and a landscape.”

The poet Philipe Soupault was one of the original Surrealists. Like Dalí, he wrote articles for magazines and journals; once he mentioned the actress in a piece on the 1928 film, Les Mendiants de la vie (Beggars of Life), which in surrealist fashion, he called a “banal film par excellence.” He also wrote about and thought well of the 1928 film A Girl in Every Port, and reviewed the 1929 film, Diary of a Lost Girl. Soupault thought it an “uneven” film due in part to the fact that “the distributors of this film believed [it] necessary to cut a third of the footage.” Soupault wrote that what “we must admire above all is the astonishing humanity of the characters.” He thought director G.W. Pabst “admirably knew how to use the indisputable talent of Louise Brooks who is definitely a first-rate actress…. It’s a film you have to see.” These three reviews were collected in a volume of Soupault’s writings on the cinema, Ecrits de cinema 1918-1931 (Plon, 1979). Its editor, Alain Virmaux, states in a footnote “The surrealists and their followers professed a true cult for Louise Brooks,” which explains why there are 11 references to Brooks and her image appears on the cover.


Portraits of Brooks on display in Paris	Kiki of Montparnasse	Philippe Soupault’s Ecrits de cinema 1918-1931

Another Surrealist drawn to Brooks was the photographer Man Ray. His paramour in the 1920s, Kiki of Montparnasse, who resembled the actress and famously sported Brooks-like bobbed hair and bangs. Man Ray first noticed Brooks in Paris in 1929 or 1930, when she was all the rage and her films dominated Parisian screens. The photographer and the film star met decades later, when Brooks was being celebrated at La Cinémathèque française in Paris in late 1958. At their meeting, Man Ray recounted how he had seen her image in Paris years before. According to Brooks’ biographer Barry Paris, Man Ray “was struck by Brooks’s face when he saw it in the magazines during the Prix de Beauté filming. He never forgot her and in the late fifties sent her one of his abstract paintings, which hung thereafter on the wall of her bedroom.” Another of Man Ray’s paramours, Lee Miller, was also something of fan of Brooks. As a teenager, Miller saw Brooks dance in Poughkeepsie, New York in January, 1923 while Brooks was a member of the Denishawn Dance Company.

In the introduction to Carolyn Burke’s Lee Miller: A Life, Burke writes: “Mesmerized by her features, we look at Lee Miller but not into her. We think of her as a timeless icon. To this day, her life inspires features in the same glossy magazines for which she posed – articles explaining how to re-create her ‘look.’ This approach turns the real woman into a screen on which beholders project their fantasies. Looking at her this way perpetuates the legend of Lee Miller as ‘an American free spirit wrapped in the body of a Greek Goddess’ . . . . In Lee Miller’s time, her admirers were equally spellbound by her beauty, but they also saw her as an incarnation of the modern woman – in the United States of the twenties, as a quintessential flapper; in the Paris of the thirties, as a subversive garçonne or a maddeningly free femme surrealiste – one who sparked creativity in others but played the role of muse only when it suited her, and sought, despite her lovers’ objections, to keep her energy for herself.” It is interesting how applicable this text is to Brooks — and the way we think about her today. While reading Burke’s introduction, I was surprised, as well, come across Brooks herself. Burke writes: “Breaking free of conventional roles for women, whether in traditional or avant-garde circles, Lee Miller stirred up trouble for herself and for those who loved her. Like screenwriter Anita Loos and actress Louise Brooks (whose careers she followed), she helped reshape women’s aspirations through her embrace of popular culture . . . .” Checking the index, I found this is one of nine references to the actress in the book! Though near contemporaries, I don’t think the two ever met – nor does the biographer suggest it.

As many as five of Brooks’ films were shown in Paris during the years 1929 through 1931. Loulou and Beggars of Life were both notably popular and enjoyed extended runs, while Prix de Beauté was a sensation which ran for months. Beggars of Life was seen as a novel and intrinsically American film. It first showed in Paris in late 1929, and was revived time and again as late as February 1931, when it was showing in Gaumont cinemas at the same time

The theater which some of the Surrealists likely first saw at least two of Brooks’ films was called the Ursulines. It was “one of the oldest cinemas in Paris to have kept its facade and founder’s vision” as a “venue for art and experimental cinema.” The Ursulines opened in 1926 with a program of films by André Breton, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, René Clair and Robert Desnos. Over the years it showed a mix of both mainstream and experimental cinema. Between 1926 and 1957, a number of now-classic films premiered at the theater, such as René Clair’s Le Voyage Imaginaire and Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed. According to the Cinema Treasures website, “This little theatre with a balcony has a very charming facade looking like a romantic country house. At the beginning of talking movies, the premiere of Sternberg’s Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich took place here, and ran 14 months.”


Ursulines theater, Fall 1928 A Girl in Every Port with Man Ray’s L’Etoile de Mer and Georges Lacombe’s La Zone	Ursulines theater, November 1930 Joyless Street with two Louise Brooks’ films and 10 minutes of avant-garde cinema	Ursulines theater, December 1930 Diary of a Lost Girl closes ahead of the premiere of Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel

The Louise Brooks film that might well have introduced the actress to the Surrealist was likely A Girl in Every Port, which writer Blaise Cendrars called “the first appearance of contemporary cinema”. The film debuted in Paris at the Ursulines, a kind of cinematic home to the Surrealists. Man Ray likely saw A Girl in Every Port (which kept its English-language title in France) at the Ursulines when it shared the bill with his surrealist short, L’Etoile de Mer, during the months of October, November, and December of 1928. L’Etoile de Mer (The Starfish) was scripted by the surrealist poet Robert Desnos and stars Desnos and Alice Prin, who was better known as Kiki de Montparnasse. Another Brooks film which showed at the Ursulines was Le Journal d’une Fille Perdue (The Diary of a Lost Girl). It played at different theaters throughout 1930, and at one time was shown as part of a trippple bill which began with G.W. Pabst’s Joyless Street, followed by Howard Hawk’s A Girl in Every Port, and ending with G.W. Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl.

A Girl in Every Port

The French weren’t the only exhibitors to pair a surrealist film with a Louise Brooks film. Such a match also occurred in Barcelona, Spain — as seen in the advertisement above when A Girl in Every Port (under the Catalonian title Una xicota a cada port) was paired with the Salvador Dali – Luis Bunuel film, Le Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). Notably, A Girl in Every Port is described in the ad as an avant-garde film. I will end this page with a chance discovery from a while back. It also comes from a Catalonian newspaper which features an article about Beggars of Life (as Captaires de Vida) which by chance sits next to an article about a young Dali (pictured center of page).

El Cinema

Louise Brooks and the Surrealists

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