Oi vey meine contrarian friend.. I compared the two due to:
Cinetwist wrote:Just seen this. Considering the competiton of similar German films from the same year and Langlois' quote, all I have to say is this; "There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is no Louise Brooks, there is only Betty Amann!"
I'm talking about the looks of the two women. As women. Brooks' beauty vs. Amann's "beauty".
As to the distinctions between the two characters-- don't buy into it, Tom. It's another whopper of misguided scholarship. I see very little difference, sans random details of character i e looks and occupation, between Ammann of ASPHALT and Brooks. Don't fall into the overhyping critical pit of Lulu's "purity"-- she's a whore, she's devious, glories over the destruction of Schon's marriage and the life of a genuinely "pure" or "oblivious" or "innocent" young woman (Schon's bourgoise fiance), refuses to set him free when he tries to make her see that the arrangement must be terminated... pouts, weeps, flirts upon command as situations require, fucks and is willingly pimped by lecherous and stinking old men who beat her and exploit her, gives free trade fucks as Christmas presents to clearly unstable, unnamed young men right off the street, etc. The Lulu of Pabst is not the Lulu of Wedekind, in my opinion. She connives, she cheats, she manipulates... but this is all excepted because of... what---- she's a hottie?
The mysterious, ethereal, mystical innocence beautysomething that the critical scholarship has attached to
Pabst & Brook's Lulu is a whopper of a red herring to me. Brooks engineers much of the misfortune and crime throughout the picture but she is innocent because.... she's
pretty? So it's all the guy who strained desperately to get away from her-- not because she's blindingly, breathtakingly beautiful and innocent, but because she's a hooker and the whole town knows it and are snickering at him-- it's his fault?
I see Brooks & Pabst failing slightly in portraying a woman so beautiful and oblivious to the effects of that beauty that she
unintentionally causes misfortune around her-- yes this is Wedekind's Germanic Lulu.
Brooks for me is far more modern than this. She is a very modern woman for me
precisely because she is such a sexual dynamo-- she wants what she wants and places a premium on getting what she wants, places a premium on the pleasures and people of the streets as well as the bourgoisie. She can screw a millionaire and can screw a wretched old alcoholic in a garret and it's all the same to her-- the liberation and the modernist mindset (and mise en scene) come from the fact that she is very very smart, aware of all the implications, knows that she is considered to be amoral by all those who would condemn her, and it all
means absolutely nothing to her. That is the revolutionary modernist aspect of the film/character (both of which are indivisibly bound together): to be so thoroughly apart from the bourgoise mindset that bourgoise guilt simply does not exist-- therefore these judgements mean shit to her. This doesn't mean she doesn't know what she is doing-- I read Brooks as a very conscious force of nature, seeking, assessing opponents, obstacles to her pleasure, routes to pleasurable contact. Her liberation is a total state... it is not an unconscious disposition taking place behind a blind spot. So a hooker sees nothing wrong with her behavior.. doesn't make her innocent beyond the bounds of her own judgements.
And because Brooks sees nothing wrong with this behavior-- as the morality of her actions are
second to the pleasure of contact-- so the movie sees nothing wrong with her behavior, judges her not a whit. That was thunderously modern for the time, because of the truth behind Brook's performance, the shame-free liberated persona right there onscreen, causing it all to sparkle with the heat and confusion of the times, sliding across the gleam of Krampf's surfaces... it's a seething combination. The lack of a narrative center, the lack of judgement and morality
So I can understand, in this sense, cinetwists' conceptual linking of Amman & Brook's characters. They are both women of the streets who have reached a station through conscious con and hustle. They survive by their wiles and making their way with the testosterone of men. Schon tries to get away as does the policeman at first. In these first scenes both women literally bulldoze their kisses onto their male protagonists to force the sexual response... to move their own personal cons/survivals along.
Anyhow, 'twist was talking about Amman's beauty I take it, and acting skills-- I find both second to Brooks.
And also-- generally-- I'd say the frieght of blatant excess powder and yardlong false lashes with all their gaudiness are more the tools of the whore than the polished invisible hustler of the haute bourgoisie. Remember Pabst almost went with the Lord High Empress of the false long lash-- Dietrich! The natural beauty of Brooks is the lucky epiphany of casting, and not the stereotyppical tools of the character herself.