Featured image: Louise Brooks, interviewed in Lulu in Berlin , Her very image itself underwent a transformation; Louise became a spare, gray-haired and academic type of intellectual without a trace of her early seduction. Though now diminished, the cultural opposition between beauty and intellect lingers.
Based in Rochester from to her death in , Brooks developed into a prolific but fiercely self-critical writer who left behind volumes of unpublished notes, letters, and abandoned projects. In a midcentury era defined by its conservative gender roles, Thirteen Women in Films might have seemed the renegade spark of a rebel star. And, yet Brooks struggled with the project.
Thirteen Hollywood Women was not to be. Idealistically devoted to the pursuit of truth in her writing, Brooks also feared rejection. But I read the reviews of all the acclaimed and the reviled junk in Sat. Review and why should I add up to the destruction of forests? Brooks was not yet known as a writer, but she was also ahead of her time.
For Brooks to have established herself as a feminist film critic and historian in the mids would have been swimming against the tides both of academia and of the emerging, masculinist auteur theory.
Questions remain as to what a completed Thirteen Women in Films might have looked like, and which actresses might have made the final cut. In her notes for Thirteen Women in Films , Brooks pushes against her own mythic construction by exploring feminine duality in the personae of other actresses: including Garbo and Dietrich. Describing the crime thriller Smart Woman , Brooks lauds Constance Bennett, starring as lawyer Paula Rogers, as an actress able to blend personality, voice, and gesture into an unmistakable star persona translating across media:.
