YouTube, I love you. Behold, Lulu in Berlin, a 1984 documentary by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll, featuring an extensive sit-down interview with the then 78-year old Louise Brooks. Still lucid, witty and enigmatic just a year before her death, Brooks explains how and why she left her studio contract at age 20 to make two films in Germany with G. W. Pabst. The film also includes ample clips from Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl.

Interesting side note: the man at the beginning of the above clip, who brands Brooks “the most seductive, sexual image of woman ever committed to celluloid…the only unrepentant hedonist I think I’ve ever known,” is Kenneth Tynan, the author of the famous 1979 New Yorker profile of Brooks. After her husband’s death, Kathleen Tynan wrote a screenplay about Kenneth’s obsession with Brooks, which in turn may have had something to do with a certain anecdote about Brooks that Tynan revealed in his diaries, which has the distinction of being the dirtiest thing about an elderly woman that I’ve ever read or heard tell of. If Kathleen Tynan’s IMDb profile is any indication, the screenplay was never produced.

Parts 2-4 of Lulu in Berlin follow after the jump.

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