Showing posts with label Denis Marion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Denis Marion. Show all posts

Monday, January 25, 2010

Denis Marion and Louise Brooks

Just yesterday, I received an email from Gianluca Chiovelli, the leading Louise Brooks scholar in Italy. Gianluca maintains an outstanding website at http://xoomer.virgilio.it/louisebrooks/ which is well worth checking out. Gianluca, who is multi-lingual, is always finding new things about about the actress in Europe.

Gianluca wrote to tell me about a somewhat recently published book, Denis Marion: Pleins feux sur un homme de l'ombre (Bruxelles, Le Cri, collection "CIEL", 2008). The book, which is a collection of essays, contains a chapter (pages 113-130) which explores the relationship & exchange of letters between Louise Brooks and Denis Marion.

From what I have been able to find out (via the French-language version of Wikipedia), Denis Marion was a Belgian-born intellectual and a Belgian Francophone writer who worked as a scholar, journalist, film critic and University professor. He started publishing works of literary criticism in the early 1940's, and at one point authored an undated book, Filmographie et bibliographie de Erich von Stroheim, which is listed in the collection of the National Library of Australia.

I hadn't known Brooks had corresponded with Marion. Thus, I intend to try and track down this book, and find out more about the epistolary relationship between the actress and the intellectual.

In early 2009, Denis Marion: Pleins feux sur un homme de l'ombre was reviewed in Le Soir, a Belgian publication.The author of the review, Jacques De Decker, mentioned Brooks in writing about the book. That review can be found on the Le Soir website, or here as a PDF document.

If any Belgian fans of Louise Brooks have access to this book and could send me a pdf or scan of the chapter noted above I would be most grateful.
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