Giudizi celebri II
Andrea Camilleri, Martha Graham, Ruth St. Denis, Angela Carter, Philippe Soupault, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reynaldo Gonzalez, Alexandre Santos Lobão, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Marcel Carné, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Robert Benton, Anita Loos, Hanna Schygulla, Dorothy Mackaill, Richard Arlen, Lauren Bacall e Clive Barker, Fritz Leiber, Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman ed altre dozzine ...

 "Il mio attore preferito e' Alec Guinness. L'attrice con cui vorrei andare a cena è Louise Brooks, magnifica interprete di Lulu".

"I remember that power when she stood remote and distant on the top of a Navajo dwelling in Feather of the dawn; again, that curious individuality, beauty and sense of an inner vision"

Nella sua autobiografia Blood memory, Doubleday, 1991 (ed. it. Memoria di sangue, Garzanti, 1992, presentazione di Leonetta Bentivoglio), la Graham ricorderà con affetto la sedicenne Louise:

"Louise Brooks was a member of the Denishawn company and breathtakingly beautiful. She wore her hair always in that pageboy. Everything she did was beautiful. I was utterly absorbed by her beauty and what she did. Even before she was introduced to me, I remember watching her across the room as she stood with a group of girls from Denishawn, all dressed alike.
Louise, though, was the absolute standout, the one. She possessed a quality of strenght, an inner power that one felt immediately in her presence. She was very much a loner and terribly self - destructive. Of course, it didn't help that everyone gave her such a difficult time. I suppose I identified her as an outsider. I befriended her, and she always seemed to be watching me perform, watching me in the dressing room. She later said, "I learned how to act watching Martha Graham dance".
Louise was quite young, sixteeen or so, and had a habit of wearing a very tight pair of shoes. Well, this made me angry, and before we were to go on the stage one evening for a performance, I grabbed her, shook her, and yelled at her that she was going to ruin her feet with those tight shoes.
i remember one time with Louise in the wings when we received a phone call from Ted Shawn. We were on the road, on the circuit, without him, and he was calling to tell us that our work was unsatisfactory. He wanted us to return home to Los Angeles. I don't know who received the call and was relaying his message to the rest of us. All I know is that that particular phone was the old - fashioned kind you had to crank I said, "The hell with you, I will not be talked to that way".
I got up from my chair, went to the wall, pulled the telephone right off the wall, and threw it onstage. I think that Louise and the rest of the dancers were stunned, but when called upon, my temper was ready. I was a heller! I was capable of great violence, which those around me called my 'black Irish rages'. I had a very bad temper, very bad. I still have it though I do not use it often. I've learned not to allow myself to indulge in it. But I can use it, if need be, on occasion.
Once, Louise and I were backstage preparing to go on, and I was pinning flowers into my hair, arranging the bottles of makeup that were in front of me, deciding which creams to apply. We had our own Denishawn body cream that we used to cover our skin, and since it was specially made for us, we had to carry around our own bottles on tour. Louise was on my right in the dressing room, and a few other girls were there as well.
I cannot say for certain what I was thinking of, but some anger seized me - and I took one of the bottles and smashed it against the mirror, which shattered into a thousand pieces. I said nothing. Louise said nothing. I simply gathered my belongings and moved to another mirror. I happily applied my makeup; we went onstage"

"Louise was one of the finest dancers we ever had. If she had continued with me, she'd have been one of the world's greatest dancers"

 "(...) the straightforward look of hers is what make these 60-year-old photographs so provocative, so disturbing, so unchanged by time. Like Manet's Olympia, she is directly challenging the person who is looking at her; she is piercing right through the camera with her questing gaze to give your look back, with interest

 (...) She was a vain, imperious bitch with a tongue like a knife, yet she was loved far more than she deserved, or acknowledged, and even during her bleakest periods of despair, she always seems to have been buoyed up by a misterious, self-sustaining glee (...) It was a life centred around, given meaning by, an extraordinary accident: that this young American adventuress and budding glamour star, on the advice of her handsome but sinister millionaire lover, accepted, without reading the script beforehand, the role of the Life Force incarnate, Wedekind's earth spirit, the Dionysically unrepressed Lulu, who must die because she is free (...) [In Tagebuch einer Verlorenen] Brooks is, if anything, even more luminous, more like a transparency through which joy and pain, pleasure and heartbreak, are transmitted directly to the audience. The 'lost girl', seduced and abandonned, finds herself in a brothel, makes the best of it. At one point, Brooks is raffled off as a prize. Brooks, laughing, preening her extraordinary neck like a swan, looks as if it is the most exciting adventure in the world, that random chance will bring her a partner for that night. Her particular quality is, she makes being polymorphously perverse look like the only way to be (...) Brooks was presented with a choice betweeen Art and Fame, as straightforwardly as it might have been offered in a Renaissance allegory, and, without even being aware of it, she plumped, as it were, for the eternity promised by poet. I do believe that, in her heart, she knew just what it was she wanted. She wanted 'to rise high in the ranks'. It was the reverse of a Faustian bargain. She bartered her future for her soul."

La Carter aveva già dedicato un saggio all'attrice in Nothing sacred, del 1985, che non ho potuto consultare.

"Sólo una belleza del cine esconde para mí mayor placer y se llama Louise Brooks. Pero la Brooks es un misterio evidente: su cara esconde lo que exhibe: la más immediata realidad del animal debajo de la apariencia sociable: la seda, el pelo peinado a lo paje equívoco, la boca decididamente unívoca: detrás de esa máscara transparente está la voz del sexo: Louise Brooks es el sexo: desnudo, directo, perverso"

Alexandre Santos Lobão (1969). Scrittore brasiliano, autore del racconto lungo A caixa de Pandora reperibile presso il sito http://virtualbooks.terra.com.br/osmelhoresautores/A_Caixa_de_Pandora.htm, in cui viene immaginato un dialogo con l'attrice americana:

“Lá estava ela, radiante como sempre. Não. Mais. De frente para o espelho, penteava o cabelo rapidamente, com seu jeito meio espevitado, um sorriso no rosto".

 Il giovane autore sta ultimando la sua seconda opera To love is simple and needed.

Marcel Carné (1909 - 1996). L'indimenticato, poiché indimenticabile, regista di Quai des brumes, Le jour se lève e del secondo film più bello di tutti i tempi, Les enfants du Paradis (primo e secondo con Jean Gabin;  secondo e terzo con Arletty [ovvero Léonie Bathiat]) recensì sulla rivista "Cinémagazine" sia Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Maggio 1930) che Prix de beauté (Luglio 1930) giudicando l'interpretazione dell'attrice. Eccoli di seguito, su Tagebuch:

"Le rôle de Lucienne, très complexe, est bien interprété par Louise Brooks. Dans les scènes où il lui fait exprimer le dégoût, la fureur ou la rancune, elle est excellente. Mais plaire, être enjouée l'indiffère: on sent un effort et, le plus souvent, un mépris pour ce qu'on lui fait interpréter"

Su Prix de beauté:

"On ne résiste pas à la monotonie qu'on retrouve à chacune des créations de Louise Brooks. Jouant avec une nonchalance, un mauvais vouloir évident, elle n'arrive pas à abdiquer sa personnalité au profit du personnage qu'elle a à interpréter; c'est toujours le contraire qui se produit, et c'est ainsi qu'elle arrive à concevoir de façon absolument identique deux rôles aussi différentes que ceux de Loulou et des Trois pages d'un journal"

"Just think how modern she looks. Oh God, she was a good-looking girl. (...) I've had a little trouble with women [actors]. I don't blame them. They've found out that they're good doing this and not so good doing that, so they don't want to do the bad things. They're a little bit more afraid to take a chance. When that happened, I quit working with women stars, because I wanted a different type of girl. I didn't want what they'd been playing. I wanted a new type. I hired Louise Brooks because she's very sure of herself, she's very analytical, she's very feminine - but she's damn good and sure she's going to do what she wants to do. I could use her today. She was ahead of her time. And she's a rebel. I like her, you know. I like rebels. I like people you can look at and you remember who they are"

"Louise Brooks? What's all this talk about Louise Brooks? She was nobody. She was a nothing in films. What's all this fuss about her?"

Secondo l'asserzione di Morando Morandini alcuni registi italiani come Lattuada, Risi e Comencini furono tra i primi in Europa a rivalutare la figura dell'attrice, senza contare che Michelangelo Antonioni e Marco Tullio Giordana la citarono nelle loro pellicole (rispettivamente in Identificazione di una donna e Maledetti vi amerò, cfr. tributi cinematografici)

"While I was strolling through the park one day, in the merry, merry month of May (1980), just as in the old vaudeville refrain, a polite young stranger approached me to ask, "I beg your pardon, but aren't you Louise Brooks?" (...) At that time[durante gli anni Venti] the two of us had several points in common that might have given that movie fan some basis for his confusion. But to be mistaken for Louise Brooks, at any age, was a double compliment. She was by far the prettiest girl in Hollywood, a fact which was only the beginning of her incredible career. For today's film critics all agree that Louise Brooks became the greatest actress in the history of moving pictures. 

During a span of about twenty years, most of which were spent in idleness, she made only two movies of major importance, but they established a cult for Louise Brooks that is mounting steadily as time goes on. (...)"

"I first knew Louise Brooks in California when she was an early-day sex kitten of the old silent films. At the same time Louise supplied an extremely chic version of the flapper of the Twenties. Her brunette type of good looks had a sort of distinction; bobbed hair was just coming into vogue, but in Hollywood it was generally bleached or tousled in the vulgar manner of Clara Bow, while Louise had the sleek aristocracy of a young François Premier. Her sophisticated appearance in the razzamatazz hangouts of the film capital brought everything to a standstill. By the same token, Louise' films became conversation pieces in the great outside world; she is still discussed by the movie cultists of Europe (...)"

"Bien sûr, on m'a souvent demandé qui était mon idole
Et moin'étais pas si sûre que j'en avais une ...
Ou alors peut-être .. s'il en fallait une alors peut-être
à la sortie de mon adolescence Brigitte Bardot la femme animale
et un peu plus tard: Marylin Monroe la femme séductrice
et un peu plus tard: Jeanne Moreau la femme mystère
et un peu plus tard: Simone Signoret la femme tout court
et encore plus tard: Ingrid Bergman l'être tout court
et puis beaucoup plus tard ... j'étais devenue moi-même actrice de cinéma ...
Je rencontremon étoile-phare
Je la rencontre dans le vieux film muet Loulou de Pabst
celle qui était toutes les autres en une ... Louise Brooks.

A peine je la vois ... je sais que c'est elle
Elle rayonne d'une telle essence de rare pureté
ça donne le vertige comme l'être plus fort des enfants pas encore apprivoisés
ça vient d'une zone où la morale ne s'y est pas encore enracinée
où la vie ne se cache pas encore derrière les masques de nos jeux sociaux
c'est le choc de la pureté sauvage (...)"

"All men liked her ...  She was a peculiar girl - odd, different. When I say she was not an actress, I mean she didn't have any experience. She had the I-don't-care attitude, probably because she didn't go after these things. I liked Louise, but ... She didn't know anything about acting, though she knew she was very much admired. 
She'd go through the picture and - I'm not calling her a Dumb Dora, but it's not ar removed. You couldn't give her a bit acting part, she wouldn't know what to do with it ... But she was damned attractive, and i'd say good-humored, not difficult, about it all. She used to laugh and shrug her shiulders and say: "The hell with it". But they got they wanted. All they had to do with Brooksie was turn the camera on"

La bionda Mackaill fu una delle attrici preferite di Bioy Casares, l'amico di una vita di Jorge Luis Borges e grande ammiratore di Louise Brooks (cfr. giudizi celebri I)

"It sure is too bad about your getting  a divorce from a swell guy like Eddie Sutherland - and a swell director ... Now that you're not his wife anymore, everybody expects Paramount to fire you. They don't know you're a pet of the front office ... Funny thing. I've been working at Paramount for three years - a damned fine actor, too - and I made a stinking four hundred dollars a week, while you ride around in your damn Lincoln town car with its damn 'black satin' finish. You - why, you can't even act! You're not even good-looking. You're a lousy actress and your eyes are too close together" ("È un vero peccato che tu abbia divorziato da un tipo magnifico come Eddie Sutherland - che è anche un ottimo regista (...) Adesso che non sei più sua moglie tutti si aspettano che la Paramount ti licenzi. Non sanno che sei una beniamina della direzione (...)  È curioso. Ho lavorato tre anni alla Paramount - e sono stato anche un attore maledettamente bravo - e guadagno quattrocento fetidi dollari alla settimana, mentre tu te ne vai in giro nella tua dannata Lincoln con le sue dannate rifiniture in raso nero. Proprio tu, che non sai neppure recitare! Non sei nemmeno bella. Sei un'attrice pidocchiosa e hai gli occhi troppo ravvicinati")

Lauren Bacall (1924), dopo aver definito "absolute garbage ... a total lie", l'articolo di Louise Brooks sul marito Humphrey Bogart, così sbuffò sull'autrice:

"Hmmfff. She was a little - I don't know, cuckoo"

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