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Louise Brooks

Mary Louise Brooks (November 14, 1906 – August 8, 1985) was an American film actress during the 1920s and 1930s. She is regarded today as an icon of the flapper culture, in part due to the bob hairstyle that she helped popularize during the prime of her career.

At the age of 15, Brooks began her career as a dancer and toured with the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts where she performed opposite Ted Shawn. After being fired, she found employment as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals and as a semi-nude dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City. While dancing in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures, and signed a five-year contract with the studio. She appeared in supporting roles in various Paramount films before taking the heroine's role in Beggars of Life (1928). During this time, she became an intimate friend of actress Marion Davies and joined the elite social circle of press baron William Randolph Hearst at Hearst Castle in San Simeon.

Dissatisfied with her mediocre roles in Hollywood films, Brooks went to Germany in 1929 and starred in three feature films that launched her to international stardom: Pandora's Box (1929), Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), and Miss Europe (1930); the first two were directed by G. W. Pabst. By 1938, she had starred in 17 silent films and eight sound films. After retiring from acting, she fell upon financial hardship and became a paid escort. For the next two decades, she struggled with alcoholism and suicidal tendencies. Following the rediscovery of her films by cinephiles in the 1950s, a reclusive Brooks began writing articles about her film career; her insightful essays drew considerable acclaim. She published her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, in 1982. Three years later, she died of a heart attack at age 78.

Early life
Brooks was born in Cherryvale, Kansas, the daughter of Leonard Porter Brooks, a lawyer, who was usually preoccupied with his legal practice, and Myra Rude, an artistic mother who said that any "squalling brats she produced could take care of themselves". Rude was a talented pianist who played the latest Debussy and Ravel for her children, inspiring them with a love of books and music.

Brooks described the hometown of her childhood as a typical Midwestern community where the inhabitants "prayed in the parlor and practiced incest in the barn." When Louise was nine years old, a neighborhood man sexually abused her. Beyond the physical trauma at the time, the event continued to have damaging psychological effects on her personal life as an adult and on her career. That early abuse caused her later to acknowledge that she was incapable of real love, explaining that this man: "must have had a great deal to do with forming my attitude toward sexual pleasure ... For me, nice, soft, easy men were never enough—there had to be an element of domination." When Brooks at last told her mother of the incident, many years later, her mother suggested that it must have been Louise's fault for "leading him on". In 1919, Brooks and her family moved to Independence, Kansas, before relocating to Wichita in 1920.

Brooks began her entertainment career as a dancer, joining the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts modern dance company in Los Angeles at the age of 15 in 1922. The company included founders Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, as well as a young Martha Graham. As a member of the globe-trotting troupe, Brooks spent a season abroad in London and in Paris. In her second season with the Denishawn company, she advanced to a starring role in one work opposite Shawn. But one day, a long-simmering personal conflict between Brooks and St. Denis boiled over, and St. Denis abruptly fired Brooks from the troupe in the spring of 1924, telling her in front of the other members: "I am dismissing you from the company because you want life handed to you on a silver salver." These words made a strong impression on Brooks; when she drew up an outline for a planned autobiographical novel in 1949, "The Silver Salver" was the title she gave the tenth and final chapter. Brooks was 17 years old at the time of her dismissal. Thanks to her friend Barbara Bennett, the sister of Constance and Joan Bennett, Brooks almost immediately found employment as a chorus girl in George White's Scandals, followed by an appearance as a semi-nude dancer in the 1925 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies at the Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street.

As a result of her work in the Follies, Brooks came to the attention of Walter Wanger, a producer at Paramount Pictures. An infatuated Wanger signed her to a five-year contract with the studio in 1925. Soon after, Brooks met movie star Charlie Chaplin at a cocktail party given by Wanger. Chaplin was in town for the premiere of his film The Gold Rush (1925) at the Strand Theatre on Broadway. Chaplin and Brooks had a two-month affair that summer while Chaplin was married to Lita Grey. When their affair ended, Chaplin sent her a check; she declined to write him a thank-you note.

Paramount films
Brooks made her screen debut in the silent The Street of Forgotten Men, in an uncredited role in 1925. Soon she was playing the female lead in a number of silent light comedies and flapper films over the next few years, starring with Adolphe Menjou and W. C. Fields, among others.

After her small roles in 1925, both Paramount and MGM offered her contracts. At the time, Brooks had an on-and-off affair with Walter Wanger, head of Paramount Pictures and husband of actress Justine Johnstone. Wanger tried to persuade her to take the MGM contract to avoid rumors that she only obtained the Paramount contract because of her intimate relationship with him. Despite his advice, she accepted Paramount's offer. During this time, Brooks gained a cult following in Europe for her pivotal vamp role in the 1928 Howard Hawks silent buddy film A Girl in Every Port. Her distinctive bob haircut helped start a trend, and many women styled their hair in imitation of both her and fellow film star Colleen Moore.

In the early sound film drama Beggars of Life (1928), Brooks plays an abused country girl who kills her foster father when he "attempts, one sunny morning, to rape her." A hobo (Richard Arlen) happens on the murder scene and convinces Brooks to disguise herself as a young boy and escape the law by "riding the rails" with him. In a hobo encampment, or "jungle," they meet another hobo (Wallace Beery). Brooks's disguise is soon uncovered and she finds herself the only female in a world of brutal, sex-hungry men. Much of this film was shot on location in the Jacumba Mountains near the Mexican border, and the boom microphone was invented for this film by the director William Wellman, who needed it for one of the first experimental talking scenes in the movies.

The filming of Beggars of Life proved to be an ordeal for Brooks. During the production, she had a one-night stand with a stuntman who—the next day—spread a malicious false rumor on the set that Brooks had contracted a venereal disease during a previous weekend stay with a producer, ostensibly Jack Pickford. Concurrently, Brooks's interactions with her co-star Richard Arlen deteriorated, as Arlen was a close friend of Brooks's then-husband Eddie Sutherland and, according to Brooks, Arlen took a dim view of her casual liaisons with crew members. Amid these tensions, Brooks repeatedly clashed with Wellman, whose risk-taking directing style nearly killed her in a scene where she recklessly climbs aboard a moving train.

Soon after the production of Beggars of Life was completed, Brooks began filming the pre-Code crime-mystery film The Canary Murder Case (1929). By this time she was socializing with wealthy and famous persons. She was a frequent house guest of media magnate William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, being intimate friends with Davies's lesbian niece, Pepi Lederer. While partying with Lederer, Brooks had a brief sexual liaison with her. At some point in their friendship, Hearst and Davies were made aware of Lederer's lesbianism. Hearst arranged for Lederer to be committed to a mental institution for drug addiction. Several days after her arrival at the institution, Lederer—Brooks's closest friend and companion—committed suicide by jumping to her death from a hospital window. This event traumatized Brooks and likely led to her further dissatisfaction with Hollywood and the West Coast.

Brooks, who now loathed the Hollywood "scene", refused to stay on at Paramount after being denied a promised raise. Learning of her refusal, her friend and lover George Preston Marshall counseled her to sail with him to Europe in order to make films with director G. W. Pabst, the prominent Austrian director. On the last day of filming The Canary Murder Case Brooks departed Paramount Pictures to leave Hollywood for Berlin to work for Pabst. It was not until thirty years later that this rebellious decision would come to be seen as arguably the most beneficial to her career, securing her immortality as a silent film legend and independent spirit.

While her snubbing of Paramount alone would not have finished her altogether in Hollywood, her subsequent refusal, after returning from Germany, to come back to Paramount for sound retakes of The Canary Murder Case (1929) irrevocably placed her on an unofficial blacklist. Angered by her refusal, the studio allegedly claimed that Brooks's voice was unsuitable for sound pictures and another actress, Margaret Livingston, was hired to dub Brooks's voice for the film.

European films
Brooks traveled to Europe accompanied by Marshall and his English valet. The German film industry was Hollywood's only major rival at the time, and the film industry based in Berlin was known as the Filmwelt ("film world"), reflecting its self-image as a highly glamorous "exclusive club". After their arrival in Weimar Germany, she starred in the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, directed by Pabst in his New Objectivity period. Pabst was one of the leading directors of the filmwelt, known for his refined, elegant films that represented the filmwelt "at the height of its creative powers". The film Pandora's Box is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind (Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora), and Brooks plays the central figure, Lulu. This film is notable for its frank treatment of modern sexual mores, including one of the first overt on-screen portrayals of a lesbian.

Brooks's performance in Pandora's Box made her a star. In looking for the right actress to play Lulu, Pabst had rejected Marlene Dietrich as "too old and too obvious". In choosing Brooks, a relative unknown who had only appeared—not to very great effect—in secondary roles, Pabst was going against the advice of those around him. Brooks recalled that "when we made Pandora's Box, Mr. Pabst was a man of 43 who astonished me with his knowledge on practically any subject. I, who astonished him because I knew practically nothing on every subject, celebrated my twenty-second birthday with a beer party on a London street." Brooks claimed her experience shooting Pandora's Box in Germany was a pleasant one:

"In Hollywood, I was a pretty flibbertigibbet whose charm for the executive department decreased with every increase in my fan mail. In Berlin I stepped to the station platform to meet Mr. Pabst and became an actress. And his attitude was the pattern for all. Nobody offered me humorous or instructive comments on my acting. Everywhere I was treated with a kind of decency and respect unknown to me in Hollywood. It was just as if Mr. Pabst had sat in on my whole life and career and knew exactly where I needed assurance and protection."

After the filming of Pandora's Box concluded, Brooks had a one-night stand with Pabst, and the director cast Brooks again in his controversial social drama Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), based on the book by Margarete Böhme. In performing Diary of a Lost Girl, Brooks drew upon her memories of being molested as a 9-year-old and then being blamed by her mother for her own molestation, later recalling on that day she became one of the "lost". On the final day of shooting Diary of a Lost Girl, Pabst counseled Brooks not to return to Hollywood and instead to stay in Germany and to continue her career as a serious actress. Pabst expressed concern that Brooks's carefree approach towards her career would end in dire poverty "exactly like Lulu's". He further cautioned Brooks that Marshall and her "rich American friends" would likely shun her when her career stalled.

When audiences and critics first viewed Brooks's German films, they were bewildered by her naturalistic acting style. Viewers purportedly exited the theatre vocally complaining, "She doesn't act! She does nothing!" In the late 1920s, cinemagoers were habituated to stage-style acting with exaggerated body language and facial expressions. Brooks's acting style was subtle because she understood that the close-up images of the actors' bodies and faces made such exaggerations unnecessary. Explaining her method, Brooks said that acting "does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation." This innovative style continues to be used by contemporary film actors but, at the time, it was surprising to viewers who assumed she wasn't acting at all. Film critic Roger Ebert later wrote that, by employing this method, "Brooks became one of the most modern and effective of actors, projecting a presence that could be startling."

Her appearances in Pabst's two films made Brooks an international star. According to film critic and historian Molly Haskell, the films "expos[ed] her animal sensuality and turn[ed] her into one of the most erotic figures on the screen—the bold, black-helmeted young girl who, with only a shy grin to acknowledge her 'fall,' became a prostitute in Diary of a Lost Girl and who, with no more sense of sin than a baby, drives men out of their minds in Pandora's Box."

Near the end of 1929, English film critic and journalist Cedric Belfrage interviewed Pabst for an article about Brooks's film work in Europe that was published in the February 1930 issue of the American monthly Motion Picture. According to Belfrage, Pabst attributed Brooks's acting success outside the U.S. to her seemingly inherent or instinctive "European" sensibilities:

"the eminent Herr Pabst described it to me over a cocktail in the Bristol Bar, Berlin. 'Louise,'' said Herr Pabst, 'has a European soul. You can't get away from it. When she described Hollywood to me—I have never been there—I cry out against the absurd fate that ever put her there at all. She belongs to Europe and to Europeans. She has been a sensational hit in her German pictures. I do not have her play silly little cuties. She plays real women, and plays them marvelously.'"

Belfarge elaborated on Brooks's opinion of Hollywood, and referred to Pabst's firsthand knowledge of that opinion. "The very mention of the place," he stated, "gives her a sensation of nausea." He continued, "The pettiness of it, the dullness, the monotony, the stupidity—no, no, that is no place for Louise Brooks."

After the success of her German films, Brooks appeared in one more European film, Miss Europe (1930), a French film by Italian director Augusto Genina.

Return to America
Dissatisfied with Europe, Brooks returned to New York in December 1929. When she returned to Hollywood in 1931, she was cast in two mainstream films, God's Gift to Women (1931) and It Pays to Advertise (1931), but her performances were largely ignored by critics, and few other job offers were forthcoming due to her informal "blacklisting". As the sole member of the cast who had refused to return to make the talkie version of The Canary Murder Case, Brooks became convinced that "no major studio would hire [her] to make a film."

Purportedly, Wellman—despite their previous acrimonious relationship on Beggars of Life—offered Brooks the female lead in his new picture The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney. Brooks turned down Wellman's offer in order to visit Marshall in New York City, and the coveted role instead went to Jean Harlow, who then began her own rise to stardom. Brooks later claimed she declined the role because she "hated Hollywood," but film historian James Card, who came to know Brooks intimately later in her life, said that Brooks "just wasn't interested ... She was more interested in Marshall". In the opinion of biographer Barry Paris, "turning down Public Enemy marked the real end of Louise Brooks's film career".

She returned to Hollywood after being offered of a $500 weekly salary from Columbia Pictures but, after refusing to do a screen test for a Buck Jones Western film, the contract offer was withdrawn. She made one more film at that time, a two-reel comedy short, Windy Riley Goes Hollywood (1931), directed by disgraced Hollywood outcast Fatty Arbuckle, who worked under the pseudonym "William Goodrich". Brooks declared bankruptcy in 1932, and began dancing in nightclubs to earn a living. She attempted a film comeback in 1936 and did a bit part in Empty Saddles, a Western that led Columbia to offer her a screen test, contingent on appearing in the 1937 musical When You're in Love, uncredited, as a specialty ballerina in the chorus. In 1937, Brooks obtained a bit part in the film King of Gamblers after a private interview on a Paramount set with director Robert Florey, who "specialised in giving jobs to destitute and sufficiently grateful actresses." Unfortunately, after filming, Brooks's scenes were deleted.

Brooks made two more films after that, including the 1938 Western Overland Stage Raiders in which she played the romantic lead opposite John Wayne, with a long hairstyle that rendered her all but unrecognizable from her Lulu days. In contemporary reviews of the film in newspapers and trade publications, Brooks received little attention from critics. The review by The Film Daily in September 1938 provides one example, barely mentioning her, saying only, "Louise Brooks makes an appearance as a female attraction." Variety, the nation's leading entertainment publication, also devoted very little ink to her in its review. "Louise Brooks is the femme appeal with nothing much to do", it reports, "except look glamorous in a shoulder-length straight-bang coiffure."

Economic hardship
Brooks's career prospects as a film actress had significantly declined by 1940. According to the federal census in May that year, she was living in a $55-a-month apartment at 1317 North Fairfax Avenue in West Hollywood and was working as a copywriter for a magazine. Soon, however, Brooks found herself unemployed and increasingly desperate for a steady income. She also realized during this time that "the only people who wanted to see me were men who wanted to sleep with me." That realization was underscored by Brooks's longtime friend, Paramount executive Walter Wanger, who warned her that she would likely "become a call girl" if she remained in Hollywood. Upon hearing Wanger's warning, Brooks purportedly also remembered Pabst's earlier predictions about the dire circumstances to which she would be driven if her career stalled in Hollywood: "I heard his [Pabst's] words again—hissing back to me. And listening this time, I packed my trunks and went home to Kansas."

Brooks briefly returned to Wichita, where she was raised, but this undesired return "turned out to be another kind of hell." "I retired first to my father's home in Wichita," she later recalled, "but there I found that the citizens could not decide whether they despised me for having once been a success away from home or for now being a failure in their midst." For her part, Brooks admitted that "I wasn't exactly enchanted with them," and "I must confess to a lifelong curse: My own failure as a social creature."

After an unsuccessful attempt at operating a dance studio, she returned to New York City. Following brief stints there as a radio actor in soap operas and a gossip columnist, she worked as a salesgirl in a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan. Between 1948 and 1953, Brooks embarked upon a career as a courtesan with a few select wealthy men as clients. As her finances eroded, an impoverished Brooks began working regularly for an escort agency in New York. Recalling this difficult period in her memoirs, Brooks wrote that she frequently pondered suicide:

"I found that the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-six, was that of a call girl ... and (I) began to flirt with the fancies related to little bottles filled with yellow sleeping pills."

Brooks spent subsequent years "drinking and escorting" while subsisting in obscurity and poverty in a small New York apartment. By this time, "all of her rich and famous friends had forgotten her." Angered by this ostracism, she attempted to write a tell-all memoir titled Naked on My Goat, a title drawn from Goethe's epic play, Faust. After working on that autobiography for years, Brooks destroyed the entire manuscript by throwing it into an incinerator. As time passed, she increasingly drank more and continued to suffer from suicidal tendencies.

Rediscovery
In 1955, French film historians such as Henri Langlois rediscovered Brooks's films, proclaiming her an unparalleled actress who surpassed even Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as a film icon, much to her purported amusement. This rediscovery led to a Louise Brooks film festival in 1957 and rehabilitated her reputation in her home country.

During this time, James Card, the film curator for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, discovered Brooks "living as a recluse" in New York City. He persuaded her in 1956 to move to be near the George Eastman House film collection where she could study cinema and write about her past career. With Card's assistance, she became a noted film writer. Although Brooks had been a heavy drinker since the age of 14, she remained relatively sober to begin writing perceptive essays on cinema in film magazines, which became her second career. A collection of her writings, titled Lulu in Hollywood, published in 1982 and still in print, was heralded by film critic Roger Ebert as "one of the few film books that can be called indispensable."

In her later years, Brooks rarely granted interviews, yet had special relationships with film historians John Kobal and Kevin Brownlow. In the 1970s, she was interviewed extensively on film for the documentaries Memories of Berlin: The Twilight of Weimar Culture (1976), produced and directed by Gary Conklin, and Hollywood (1980), by Brownlow and David Gill. Lulu in Berlin (1984) is another rare filmed interview, produced by Richard Leacock and Susan Woll, released a year before her death but filmed a decade earlier. In 1979, she was profiled by the film writer Kenneth Tynan in his essay "The Girl in the Black Helmet", the title an allusion to her bobbed hair, worn since childhood. In 1982, writer Tom Graves was allowed into Brooks's small apartment for an interview, and later wrote about the often awkward and tense conversation in his article "My Afternoon with Louise Brooks".

Marriages and relationships

In the summer of 1926, Brooks married Eddie Sutherland, the director of the film she made with W. C. Fields, but by 1927 had become infatuated with George Preston Marshall, owner of a chain of laundries and future owner of the Washington Redskins football team, following a chance meeting with him that she later referred to as "the most fateful encounter of my life". She divorced Sutherland, mainly due to her budding relationship with Marshall, in June 1928. Sutherland was purportedly extremely distraught when Brooks divorced him and, on the first night after their separation, he attempted to take his life with an overdose of sleeping pills.

Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Brooks continued her on-again, off-again relationship with George Preston Marshall, which she later described as abusive. Marshall was purportedly "her frequent bedfellow and constant adviser between 1927 and 1933." Marshall repeatedly asked her to marry him but, after learning that she had had many affairs while they were together and believing her to be incapable of fidelity, he married film actress Corinne Griffith instead.

In 1925, Brooks sued the New York glamour photographer John de Mirjian to prevent publication of his risqué studio portraits of her; the lawsuit made him notorious.

In 1933, she married Chicago millionaire Deering Davis, a son of Nathan Smith Davis Jr., but abruptly left him in March 1934 after only five months of marriage, "without a good-bye ... and leaving only a note of her intentions" behind her. According to Card, Davis was just "another elegant, well-heeled admirer", nothing more. The couple officially divorced in 1938.

In her later years, Brooks insisted that both her previous marriages were loveless and that she had never loved anyone in her lifetime: "As a matter of fact, I've never been in love. And if I had loved a man, could I have been faithful to him? Could he have trusted me beyond a closed door? I doubt it." Despite her two marriages, she never had children, referring to herself as "Barren Brooks." Her many paramours from years before had included a young William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. Paley provided a small monthly stipend to Brooks for the remainder of her life, and this stipend kept her from committing suicide at one point.

Sometime in September 1953, Brooks converted to Roman Catholicism, but she left the church in 1964.

Sexuality

By her own admission, Brooks was a sexually liberated woman, unafraid to experiment, even posing nude for art photography.

Brooks enjoyed fostering speculation about her sexuality, cultivating friendships with lesbian and bisexual women including Pepi Lederer and Peggy Fears, but eschewing relationships. She admitted to some lesbian dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo. She later described Garbo as masculine but a "charming and tender lover". Despite all this, she considered herself neither lesbian nor bisexual:

"I had a lot of fun writing Marion Davies' Niece [an article about Pepi Lederer], leaving the lesbian theme in question marks. All my life it has been fun for me. ... When I am dead, I believe that film writers will fasten on the story that I am a lesbian ... I have done lots to make it believable ... All my women friends have been lesbians. But that is one point upon which I agree positively with Christopher Isherwood: There is no such thing as bisexuality. Ordinary people, although they may accommodate themselves, for reasons of whoring or marriage, are one-sexed. Out of curiosity, I had two affairs with girls—they did nothing for me."

According to biographer Barry Paris, Brooks had a "clear preference for men", but she did not discourage the rumors that she was a lesbian, both because she relished their shock value, which enhanced her aura, and because she personally valued feminine beauty. Paris claims that Brooks "loved women as a homosexual man, rather than as a lesbian, would love them. ... The operative rule with Louise was neither heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality. It was just sexuality ..."

Death
On August 8, 1985, after suffering from degenerative osteoarthritis of the hip and emphysema for many years, Brooks died of a heart attack in her apartment in Rochester, New York.

Legacy
Since her death in 1985, significant allusions to Brooks have appeared in novels, comics, music, and film.

Film
Brooks has inspired cinematic characters such as Sally Bowles in Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret. For her portrayal of Bowles, Liza Minnelli reinvented the character with "Lulu makeup and helmet-like coiffure" based on Brooks's 1920s persona. Similarly, films such as Jonathan Demme's Something Wild features a reckless femme fatale (Melanie Griffith) who calls herself "Lulu" and wears a bob, and in the 1992 film Death Becomes Her, Isabella Rosselini plays Lisle von Rhoman, a character inspired by Brooks. In Nora Ephron's 1994 film Mixed Nuts, Liev Schreiber portrays a character with a strong resemblance to Ms. Brooks for the cut of her hair, her mannerisms and facial expressions. More recently, in 2018, the PBS film The Chaperone was released, which depicts Brooks's initial arrival in New York and alludes to her career decline as an actress. The film stars Haley Lu Richardson and Elizabeth McGovern.

Novels
Brooks's film persona served as the literary inspiration for Adolfo Bioy Casares when he wrote his science fiction novel The Invention of Morel (1940) about a man attracted to Faustine, a woman who is only a projected 3-D image. In a 1995 interview, Casares explained that Faustine is directly based on his love for Louise Brooks who "vanished too early from the movies". Elements of The Invention of Morel, minus the science fiction elements, served as a basis for Alain Resnais's 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad.

In Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods, the character Czernobog refers to Brooks as the greatest movie star of all time. In Ali Smith's 2011 novel There But For The, the character Brooke Bayoude is revealed at a dinner party to have been named after Louise Brooks, though in a play on Brooks's name the dinner guests apparently mistake Brooks for Debbie Flood or Louise Woodward. In her 2011 novel of supernatural horror, Houdini Heart, Ki Longfellow uses Brooks as an actual character in the leading character's visions. Brooks appears as a central character in the 2012 novel The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty. In Gayle Forman's novels Just One Day and Just One Year, the protagonist is called "Lulu" because her bobbed hair resembles Brooks'.

In 1987, the Dutch author Willem Frederik Hermans published a book, The Saint of the Clockmakers, in which Louise Brooks plays a role.

Comics
Brooks also had a significant influence in the graphics world. She inspired the long-running Dixie Dugan newspaper strip by John H. Striebel. The strip began in the late 1920s and ran until 1966. It grew out of the serialized novel and later stage musical, Show Girl, that writer J. P. McEvoy had loosely based on Brooks's days as a Follies girl on Broadway.

Brooks also inspired the erotic comic books of Valentina, by the late Guido Crepax, which began publication in 1965 and continued for many years. Crepax became a friend and regular correspondent of Brooks late in her life. Hugo Pratt, another comics artist, also used her as inspiration for characters, and even named them after her.

Other comics have drawn upon Brooks's distinctive hair-style. Brooks was the visual model for the character of Ivy Pepper in Tracy Butler's Lackadaisy comic series. More recently, illustrator Rick Geary published a 2015 graphic novel entitled Louise Brooks: Detective in which Brooks, "her movie career having sputtered to a stop," returns to her native Kansas in 1940 and becomes a private investigator who solves murders.

Music
Brooks has been referenced in a number of songs. In 1991, British new wave group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark released "Pandora's Box" as a tribute to Brooks's film. Similarly, Soul Coughing's 1998 song "St. Louise Is Listening" contains several references to Brooks, and the song "Interior Lulu" released the next year by Marillion is a reference to Brooks and mentions her in its first lines.

In 2011, American metal group Metallica and singer-songwriter Lou Reed released the double album Lulu with a Brooks-like mannequin on the cover. In Natalie Merchant's self-titled 2014 album, the song "Lulu" is a biographical portrait of Brooks.

Filmography
As is the case with many of her contemporaries, a number of Brooks's films are considered to be lost. Her key films survive, however, particularly Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, which have been released on DVD in North America by the Criterion Collection and Kino Video, respectively.

As of 2007, Miss Europe and The Show Off have also seen limited North American DVD release. Her short film (and one of her only talkies) Windy Riley Goes Hollywood was included on the DVD release of Diary of a Lost Girl. Her final film, Overland Stage Raiders, was released on VHS and then in 2012 on DVD.

title: Louise Brooks


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Kyoto University

Kyoto University (京都大学), or KyotoU, is a national research university located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded in 1897, it is one of the former Imperial Universities and the second oldest university in Japan.

The University has ten undergraduate faculties, eighteen graduate schools, and thirteen research institutes. The University's educational and research activities are centred in its three main campuses in Kyoto: Yoshida, Uji and Katsura. The Kyoto University Library Network, consisting of more than 40 libraries spread across its campuses, has a collection of more than 7.49 million books, making it the second largest university library in the country. In addition to these campuses, the university owns facilities and lands for educational and research purposes around the country.

As of 2024, Kyoto University counts two or five Prime Ministers of Japan and a President of Taiwan amongst its alumni. 19 Nobel Prize laureates, two Fields Medalists, one Gauss Prize winner, and five Lasker Award recipients have been affiliated with Kyoto University, giving it the most Nobel laureates of all universities in Asia.

Founding
Kyoto University can trace its roots back to the Chemistry School (舎密局), an institution for Chemistry and Physics founded in Osaka in 1869. Seimi is a Japanese transcription of the Dutch word chemie, meaning chemistry. In 1894, this institution was replaced by the Third Higher School, which was a specialised boys' boarding school. Back then, the country had only one university, Imperial University (today's University of Tokyo), and the call for the nation's second university in the Kansai region was gaining momentum. However, due to financial reasons, the government was reluctant to do so.

The situation changed when the aristocratic politician Saionji Kinmochi, who was from a notable kuge family in Kyoto, suggested the founding of the nation's second university using war reparations from the First Sino-Japanese War. This plan was edicted accordingly in 1896, and Kyoto Imperial University (京都帝國大學) was established on June 18, 1897, as the second university in the country. The University started using Third Higher School's buildings, and the higher school moved to a patch of land across the street, where the southern section of the Yoshida Campus stands today. The Imperial University in Tokyo was renamed Tokyo Imperial University following the founding of its counterpart in Kyoto.

It started teaching with the College of Science and Engineering in the year of its foundation, which was followed by the establishment of the College of Law in 1898. Other faculties and colleges were established during its first decade as a university. The low rates of success of its graduates in the Higher Civil Service Examinations led to the Chief Commercial Law Professor Yoshihito Takane (高根義人) adopting a distinct style of teaching, which he called the 'German way of cherishing the freedom of research, teaching, and learning'. He is said to be the originator of the current motto 'freedom of academic culture (自由の学風, Jiyū no Gakufū)'.

Post-war period
The Allied Occupation Period following Japan's defeat in the Second World War saw a radical reform in the country's educational system, and Kyoto University was not immune from it. Along with other Imperial Universities, Kyoto Imperial University dropped the word 'imperial' from its name and came to be known as Kyoto University (京都大学) in October 1947. In May 1949, as a result of the American-led reform, former Imperial Universities merged with higher schools and became four-year universities as they are today. Kyoto University merged with the Third Higher School, which had been coexisting with the university since its founding as a university-preparatory boys' boarding school. The now-integrated higher school became the College of Liberal Arts (教養部) within the university in September 1949, and came to be in charge of equipping all first-year undergraduates with general knowledge such as mathematics and foreign languages. The college was replaced by the Faculty of Integrated Human Studies (総合人間学部) in 1992.

Kyoto University has been incorporated as a national university corporation along with all the other national universities, gaining a greater independence from the MEXT.

Campuses
Kyoto University is organised across three main campuses: Yoshida, Uji, and Katsura, each playing a distinct role in the university's academic and research activities.

Situated in Sakyo, Kyoto, the Yoshida Campus is the oldest and serves as the university's central hub. This campus is characterised by its mix of architectural styles, from historic brick buildings such as the Clock Tower Centennial Hall to modern research facilities. It encapsulates the university's history and is subdivided into seven areas, including the North Campus and the Yoshida-South Campus, which used to be occupied by the Third Higher School.

The Uji Campus, located in Uji, Kyoto, was formerly occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army. The university acquired it just after its reorganisation into its current form, in 1949. Today, it houses several research institutes and centres focusing on natural sciences and energy. Along with its large laboratories, Uji Campus is recongnised for its greenery and serene environment.

The Katsura Campus, in Nishikyo, Kyoto, is recognised as a 'Techno-science Hill' for its forward-looking approach to research and education in engineering and informatics. Established in October 2003, Katsura aims to pioneer new knowledge domains in the 21st century. This campus is organised into four sections, each dedicated to different facets of technological and scientific exploration.

Organization
Kyoto University is organised into 10 undergraduate faculties and 19 graduate schools. The president of the university is Nagahiro Minato, who assumed the office in October 2020 and expected to serve until September 2026.

As of 1 May 2023, the university's student body consists of 13,038 undergraduates and 9,577 postgraduates. Apart from audit students and research students, there are 2,249 international students.

Faculties
Kyoto University has 10 faculties.
 * Faculty of Integrated Human Studies
 * Faculty of Letters
 * Faculty of Education
 * Faculty of Law
 * Faculty of Economics
 * Faculty of Science
 * Faculty of Medicine
 * Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences
 * Faculty of Engineering
 * Faculty of Agriculture

Graduate schools
Kyoto University has 19 graduate schools.

Academic

 * Graduate School of Letters
 * Graduate School of Education
 * Graduate School of Law
 * Graduate School of Economics
 * Graduate School of Science
 * Graduate School of Medicine
 * Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences
 * Graduate School of Engineering
 * Graduate School of Agriculture
 * Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies
 * Graduate School of Energy Science
 * Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies
 * Graduate School of Informatics
 * Graduate School of Biostudies
 * Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies

Professional

 * School of Government
 * Graduate School of Management
 * Kyoto University Law School
 * Kyoto University School of Public Health

Notable research institutes and facilities

 * Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics
 * Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences
 * Primate Research Institute
 * Kosobe Conservatory
 * Seto Marine Biological Laboratory

International Programmes
Kyoto University offers a range of international programmes aimed at both its students and international students seeking to study there, across undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Undergraduate Programmes
Kyoto University provides undergraduate degrees available for international students across all 10 faculties, with core modules available in English to cater to the needs of international students. The Kyoto University International Undergraduate Programme (Kyoto iUP) is a notable initiative, offering a comprehensive 4.5-year programme that consists of a six-month preparatory course (mainly intensive lessons of the Japanese language) followed by a four-year normal undergraduate degree programme. This programme is designed for students with no Japanese language proficiency and offers various financial support options, including admission/tuition fee waivers and monthly scholarships.

Graduate Programmes
At the graduate level, Kyoto University has 18 Graduate Schools offering master's, doctoral, and professional degree programmes, all of which are available for international students. International students are well-represented, with over 2,000 international students enrolled. The university facilitates a conducive learning environment with English-taught programmes, Japanese language education, and scholarships tailored to international students' needs.

Academic rankings and reputation
Kyoto University maintains a high academic reputation, and is regarded as one of the nation's top two universities, along with the University of Tokyo.

Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranked Kyoto University 55th in the world in 2023 (2nd in Japan). QS World University Rankings ranked Kyoto University 46th in the world in 2023 (2nd in Japan). The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2022 ranked Kyoto University 26th in the world (2nd in Japan). The Academic Ranking of World Universities ranked Kyoto University 39th in the world in 2023 (2nd in Japan).

In the Nature index 2023 annual table, Kyoto University was ranked 44th for its output in selected journals in the fields of natural sciences and Health Sciences research, among all leading research institutions in the world (2nd in Japan).

Popularity and selectivity
Kyoto University is one of the most selective universities in Japan. The selectivity for its undergraduate degrees is usually regarded as among the top two, along with the University of Tokyo.

Athletics
Kyoto University competes in 48 sports. The university is a member of the Kansai Big Six Baseball League.

Controversy
Members of the university's American football team, the Kyoto University Gangsters, were arrested in 2006 for gang rape, which had been recently added to the Penal Code in January 2005 following the Super Free rape controversy. The three students had forced a female university student to drink liquor to the point of unconsciousness, at which point they gang-raped her. They were all convicted.

Notable people
Of the nineteen Nobel Prize winners who have been affiliated with Kyoto University in some way, eight attended the university as undergraduate students. Fields Medal winners Heisuke Hironaka (1970) and Shigefumi Mori (1990) and one Carl Friedrich Gauss Prize winner Kiyosi Itô are also affiliated with the university.

Two Prime Ministers of Japan, Fumimaro Konoe and Hayato Ikeda, attended Kyoto University: Apart from these two, Osachi Hamaguchi, Kijūrō Shidehara, and Tetsu Katayama attended the Third Higher School before going on to study at UTokyo. The former President of Taiwan, Lee Teng-hui, attended KyotoU when Taiwan was a Japanese colony but transferred to National Taiwan University after Japan lost the Second World War.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Kyoto University


text: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject German districts


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Man in the Moon

In many cultures, several pareidolic images of a human face, head or body are recognized in the disc of the full moon; they are generally known as the Man in the Moon. The images are based on the appearance of the dark areas (known as lunar maria) and the lighter-colored highlands (and some lowlands) of the lunar surface.

Origin

There are various explanations for how the Man in the Moon came to be.

A longstanding European tradition holds that the man was banished to the Moon for some crime. Jewish lore says that the image of Jacob is engraved on the Moon. Another held that he is the man caught gathering sticks on the Sabbath and sentenced by God to death by stoning in the Book of Numbers XV.32–36. Some Germanic cultures thought he was a woodcutter found working on the Sabbath. There is a Roman legend that he is a sheep-thief.

One medieval Christian tradition claims that he is Cain, the Wanderer, forever doomed to circle the Earth. Dante's Inferno alludes to this:

For now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine On either hemisphere, touching the wave Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight The moon was round.

This is mentioned again in his Paradise: But tell, I pray thee, whence the gloomy spots Upon this body, which below on earth Give rise to talk of Cain in fabling quaint?

John Lyly says in the prologue to his Endymion (1591), "There liveth none under the sunne, that knows what to make of the man in the moone."

In Norse mythology, Máni is the male personification of the Moon who crosses the sky in a horse-drawn carriage. He is continually pursued by the Great Wolf Hati who catches him at Ragnarök. Máni simply means "Moon".

In Chinese mythology, the goddess Chang'e is stranded upon the Moon after consuming a double dose of an immortality potion. In some versions of the myth, she is accompanied by Yu Tu, a Moon rabbit. Another mythology tells the story of Wu Gang, a man on the Moon who is trying to cut down a tree that always regrows.

In Haida mythology, the figure represents a boy gathering sticks. The boy's father had told him the Moon's light would brighten the night, allowing the chore to be completed. Not wanting to gather sticks, the boy complained and ridiculed the Moon. As punishment for his disrespect, the boy was taken from Earth and trapped on the Moon.

In Japanese mythology, it is said that a tribe of human-like spiritual beings live on the Moon. This is especially explored in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.

In Vietnamese mythology, the Man in the Moon is named Cuội. He was originally a woodcutter on Earth who owned a magical banyan. One day, when his wife ignorantly watered the tree with unclean water and caused it to uproot itself to fly away, Cuội grabbed its roots and was taken to the Moon. There, he eternally accompanied the Moon Lady and the Jade Rabbit. The trio has become the personifications of the Tết Trung Thu, when they descend to the mortal world and give out cellophane lanterns, mooncakes and gifts to children.

In Latvian legends, two maidens went naked from the sauna with carrying poles to the well. While collecting water, one of the women noted how beautiful the moon is. The other was unimpressed, saying her butt is more prettier and proceeded to moon the moon. As a punishment, either Dievs or Mēness (Moon deity) put the woman along with a carrying pole on the moon, with her butt now being visible to everyone.

Traditions
There is a traditional European belief that the Man in the Moon enjoyed drinking, especially claret. An old ballad runs (original spelling): Our man in the moon drinks clarret, With powder-beef, turnep, and carret. If he doth so, why should not you Drink until the sky looks blew?

In the English Middle Ages and renaissance, the Moon was held to be the god of drunkards, and at least three London taverns were named "The Man in the Moone". The man in the Moon is named in an early dated English nursery rhyme: The man in the moon came tumbling down And asked his way to Norwich; He went by the south and burnt his mouth With supping cold pease porridge.

Examples and occurrence globally
One tradition sees a figure of a man carrying a wide burden on his back. He is sometimes seen as accompanied by a small dog. Various cultures recognise other examples of lunar pareidolia, such as the Moon rabbit.

In the Northern Hemisphere, a common Western perception of the face has it that the figure's eyes are Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis, its nose is Sinus Aestuum, and its open mouth is Mare Nubium and Mare Cognitum. This particular human face can also be seen in tropical regions on both sides of the equator. However, the Moon orientation associated with the face is observed less frequently—and eventually not at all—as one moves toward the South Pole.

Conventionalized illustrations of the Man in the Moon seen in Western art often show a very simple face in the full moon, or a human profile in the crescent moon, corresponding to no actual markings. Some depict a man with a face turned away from the viewer on the ground, for example when viewed from North America, with Jesus Christ's crown shown as the lighter ring around Mare Imbrium. Another common one is a cowled Death's head looking down at Earth, with the black lava rock 'hood' around the white dust bone of the skull, and also forming the eye sockets.

"The Man in the Moon" can also refer to a mythological character said to live on or in the Moon, but who is not necessarily represented by the markings on the face of the Moon. An example is Yue-Laou, from Chinese tradition; another is Aiken Drum from Scotland.

The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin, published in 1638, is one of the earliest novels thought of as containing several traits prototypical of science fiction.

Scientific explanation
The Man in the Moon is made up of various lunar maria (which ones depend on the pareidolic image seen). These vast, flat spots on the Moon are called "maria" or "seas" because, for a long time, astronomers believed they were large bodies of water. They are large areas formed by lava that covered up old craters and then cooled, becoming smooth, basalt rock.

The same side of the Moon, containing these maria that make up the man, is always facing Earth. This is due to a tidal locking or synchronous orbit. Thought to have occurred because of the gravitational forces partially caused by the Moon's oblong shape, its rotation has slowed to the point where it rotates exactly once on each trip around the Earth. This causes the same side of the Moon to always face toward Earth.

title: Man in the Moon