New Histories of Photography 11
January 19 through April 29, 2007
The American silent-film actress Louise Brooks (1906-1985) is one of the great female icons in the history of cinema. Although she starred in over thirty films, Brooks is best known for the role of Lulu in the classic German film Pandora’s Box (1929), directed by G.W. Pabst. As played by Brooks, Lulu—the heroine of Pandora’s Box—was a jazz-age beauty wearing high-fashion clothes and a severe black bob. She embodied the ideal of the “New Woman,” in Weimar Germany (1918-33), a social role that connoted political equality, free-spiritedness, and gender ambiguity.
The choice of Brooks, a Kansas farm girl, for Pandora’s Box was controversial as Lulu was considered a quintessential German heroine. But Brooks brought a freedom and freshness to the role that captured the character’s spirit perfectly. Pandora’s Box, and G.W. Pabst’s follow-up film of the same year, Diary of a Lost Girl, cemented Brooks as Pabst’s muse, and emblematic of the New Woman, widely disseminated in the popular press and much argued about during the Weimar era as a threat to traditional roles of womanhood. This can be sensed in stills from other films of the Weimar era—images of threatening females—as well as magazine articles expressing an acute paranoia that post-suffragette, sexually liberated women were becoming too masculine.
Drawing on the vast archives of the George Eastman House Motion Picture Collection, including Louise Brooks’ personal collection, this exhibition will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her birth. It is also a rare opportunity to examine vintage stills, which are often overlooked but were seminal to the creation of cinematic icons, particularly in the 1920s and 30s when the burgeoning picture magazines were feeding off the publicity machines of film capitals like Hollywood and Berlin.
Vanessa Rocco
Assistant Curator
International Center of Photography
The exhibition is the eleventh in the “New Histories of Photography” a project of the GEH/ICP Alliance. The series is made possible by the generous support of the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.
The choice of Brooks, a Kansas farm girl, for Pandora’s Box was controversial as Lulu was considered a quintessential German heroine. But Brooks brought a freedom and freshness to the role that captured the character’s spirit perfectly. Pandora’s Box, and G.W. Pabst’s follow-up film of the same year, Diary of a Lost Girl, cemented Brooks as Pabst’s muse, and emblematic of the New Woman, widely disseminated in the popular press and much argued about during the Weimar era as a threat to traditional roles of womanhood. This can be sensed in stills from other films of the Weimar era—images of threatening females—as well as magazine articles expressing an acute paranoia that post-suffragette, sexually liberated women were becoming too masculine.
Drawing on the vast archives of the George Eastman House Motion Picture Collection, including Louise Brooks’ personal collection, this exhibition will celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her birth. It is also a rare opportunity to examine vintage stills, which are often overlooked but were seminal to the creation of cinematic icons, particularly in the 1920s and 30s when the burgeoning picture magazines were feeding off the publicity machines of film capitals like Hollywood and Berlin.
Vanessa Rocco
Assistant Curator
International Center of Photography
The exhibition is the eleventh in the “New Histories of Photography” a project of the GEH/ICP Alliance. The series is made possible by the generous support of the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.