title: Berry Gordy

text: Berry Gordy owned the colt Powis Castle whom he raced under the "nom de course" Vistas Stables. Racing in California, Powis Castle won the 1994 Oceanside Stakes and Malibu Stakes then finished 8th in the Kentucky Derby and 9th in the Preakness Stakes, the first two legs of the U.S. Triple Crown series.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Downfall (, ) is a 2004 German-language historical war drama film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel from a screenplay by its producer, Bernd Eichinger. It is set during the Battle of Berlin in World War II, when Nazi Germany is on the verge of defeat, and depicts the final days of Adolf Hitler (portrayed by Bruno Ganz). The cast includes Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes, Juliane Köhler, Heino Ferch, Christian Berkel, Alexander Held, Matthias Habich, and Thomas Kretschmann. The film is a German-Austrian-Italian co-production.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Principal photography took place from September to November 2003, on location in Berlin, Munich, and in Saint Petersburg, Russia. As the film is set in and around the "Führerbunker", Hirschbiegel used eyewitness accounts, survivors' memoirs, and other historical sources during production to reconstruct the look and atmosphere of 1940s Berlin. The screenplay was based on the books "Inside Hitler's Bunker" by historian Joachim Fest and "Until the Final Hour" by Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries, among other accounts of the period.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on 14 September 2004. It was controversial with audiences for showing a human side of Hitler, and for its portrayal of members of the Third Reich. It later received a wide theatrical release in Germany under its production company Constantin Film. The film grossed over $92million. Critics gave favourable reviews, particularly for Ganz's performance as Adolf Hitler and Eichinger's screenplay. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 77th Academy Awards.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: In November 1942, at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, Fuhrer of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler invites a number of young women to interview for the position of his personal secretary. Traudl Junge is overjoyed when he chooses her. Two and a half years later, the Red Army has pushed Germany's forces back and surrounded Berlin. On Hitler's 56th birthday, the Red Army begins shelling Berlin's city centre. "Reichsführer-SS" Heinrich Himmler tries to persuade Hitler to leave Berlin, but Hitler refuses. Himmler leaves to negotiate terms with the Western Allies in secret. Later, "Gruppenführer" Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's adjutant, also attempts to persuade Hitler to flee, but Hitler insists that he will win or die in Berlin. SS doctor "Obersturmbannführer" Ernst-Günther Schenck is ordered to leave Berlin per Operation Clausewitz, though he persuades an SS general to let him stay in Berlin to treat the injured. In the streets, Hitler Youth child soldier Peter Kranz's father approaches his son's unit and tries to persuade him to leave. Peter, who destroyed two enemy tanks and will soon be awarded a medal by Hitler, calls his father a coward and runs away.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: At a meeting in the "Führerbunker", Hitler forbids the overwhelmed 9th Army from retreating, instead ordering "Obergruppenführer" Felix Steiner's units to mount a counter-attack. The generals find the orders impossible and irrational. Above ground, Hitler awards Peter his medal, hailing Peter as braver than his generals. In his office, Hitler talks to Minister of Armaments Albert Speer about his scorched earth policy. Speer is concerned about the destruction of Germany's infrastructure, but Hitler believes the German people left behind are weak and thus deserve death. Meanwhile, Hitler's companion Eva Braun holds a party in the Reich Chancellery. However, her brother-in-law Fegelein tries to persuade Eva to leave Berlin with Hitler, but she dismisses him. Artillery fire eventually breaks up the party.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: On the battlefield, General Helmuth Weidling is informed he will be executed for allegedly ordering a retreat. Weidling comes to the "Führerbunker" to clear himself of his charges. His action impresses Hitler, who promotes him to oversee all of Berlin's defences. At another meeting, Hitler learns Steiner did not attack because his unit lacked sufficient force. Hitler becomes enraged at what he sees as an act of betrayal and launches into a furious tirade, shouting that everyone has failed him and denouncing his generals as cowards and traitors. He finally acknowledges that the war is lost, but that he would rather commit suicide than leave Berlin.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Schenck witnesses old men being executed by German military police for supposedly refusing to take part in the fighting. Hitler receives a message from "Reichsmarschall" Hermann Göring, requesting state leadership. Hitler declares Göring a traitor, ordering his dismissal from all posts and his arrest. Speer makes a final visit to the "Führerbunker", and admits to Hitler that he has defied his orders to destroy Germany's infrastructure. Hitler, however, does not punish Speer, who decides to leave Berlin. Peter returns to find his unit dead and runs back to his parents. Hitler continues to imagine fantastic ways for Germany to turn the tide. At dinner, Hitler learns of Himmler's secret negotiations. Hearing that one of his most loyal followers has abandoned him sends him into another rage, and he quickly orders Himmler's execution. He also finds out that Fegelein has deserted his post, having him executed despite Eva's pleas. SS physician "Obergruppenführer" Ernst-Robert Grawitz asks Hitler's permission to evacuate for fear of Allied reprisal. Hitler refuses, leading Grawitz to kill himself and his family.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: The Soviets continue their advance, Berlin's supplies run low, and German morale plummets. Hitler hopes that the 12th Army, led by Lieutenant General Walther Wenck, will save Berlin. After midnight, Hitler dictates his last will and testament to Junge, before officially marrying Eva. The following morning, Hitler learns that the 12th Army is unable to relieve Berlin. Refusing surrender, Hitler plans his death. He administers poison to his dog Blondi, bids farewell to the bunker staff, and commits suicide with Eva. The two are crudely cremated with petrol in a ditch in the Chancellery garden.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels assumes the Chancellorship. General Hans Krebs fails to negotiate a conditional surrender with Soviet Marshal Vasily Chuikov. Goebbels declares that Germany will not surrender as long as he is alive. Goebbels' wife Magda poisons her six children with cyanide, before committing suicide with Goebbels; Weidling announces unconditional surrender of German forces in Berlin afterwards. Many government and military officials including Krebs commit suicide after learning of Germany's defeat. Peter discovers his parents were executed. Junge leaves the bunker and tries to flee the city; Peter joins her as she sneaks through a group of Soviet soldiers before the two find a bicycle and leave Berlin.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Additional cast members in smaller roles include Alexander Slastin as Soviet Marshal Vasily Chuikov, Elena Dreyden as Inge Dombrowski, Norbert Heckner as Walter Wagner, Silke Nikowski as Frau Grawitz, Leopold von Buttlar as Sohn Grawitz, Veit Stübner as Tellermann, Boris Schwarzmann as Matvey Blanter, Vsevolod Tsurilo as Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky, Vasily Reutov as Weidling's chief of staff Theodor von Dufving. The Goebbels children are portrayed by Alina Sokar (Helga), Charlotte Stoiber (Hilda), Gregory Borlein (Helmut), Julia Bauer (Hedda), Laura Borlein (Holde), and Amelie Menges (Heide).


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Producer and screenwriter Bernd Eichinger wanted to make a film about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party for twenty years but was, at first, discouraged after its enormity prevented him from doing so. Eichinger was inspired to begin the filmmaking process after reading "Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich" (2002) by historian Joachim Fest. Eichinger also based the film on the memoirs of Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries, called "Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary" (2002). When writing the screenplay, he used the books "Inside the Third Reich" (1969), by Albert Speer, one of the highest-ranking Nazi officials to survive both the war and the Nuremberg trials; "Hitler's Last Days: An Eye-Witness Account" (1973), by Gerhard Boldt; "Das Notlazarett unter der Reichskanzlei: Ein Arzt erlebt Hitlers Ende in Berlin" (1995) by Ernst-Günther Schenck; and "Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936–1949" (1992) by Siegfried Knappe as references.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: After completing the script for the film, Eichinger presented it to director Oliver Hirschbiegel. Though he was interested in exploring how the people of Germany "could have plumbed such depths", as a German, Hirschbiegel hesitated to take it as he "reacted to the idea of Nazism as a taboo". Hirschbiegel eventually agreed to helm the project.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: When Bruno Ganz was offered the role of Hitler, he was reluctant to accept the part, and many of his friends advised against it, but he believed that the subject had "a fascinating side", and ultimately agreed to take the role.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Ganz conducted four months of research and studied a recording of Hitler in private conversation with Finnish Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim in order to properly mimic Hitler's conversational voice and Austrian dialect. Ganz came to the conclusion that Hitler had Parkinson's disease, noting his observation of Hitler's shaky body movements present in the newsreel "Die Deutsche Wochenschau", and decided to visit a hospital to study patients with the disease. Ganz auditioned in the casting studio with makeup for half an hour and tested his voice for Hirschbiegel who was convinced by his performance.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Alexandra Maria Lara was cast as Traudl Junge; she was given Junge's book "Until the Final Hour" (2002), which she called her "personal treasure", to read during filming. Before she was cast, she had seen André Heller's documentary film "Im toten Winkel" which impressed her and influenced her perspective on Junge.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Principal photography lasted twelve weeks from September to November 2003, under the working title "Sunset". The film is set mostly in and around the "Führerbunker"; Hirschbiegel made an effort to accurately reconstruct the look and atmosphere of World War II through eyewitness accounts, survivors' memoirs, and other historical sources. Hirschbiegel filmed in the cities of Berlin, Munich, and Saint Petersburg, Russia, with a run-down industrial district along the Obvodny Canal used to portray the historical setting in Berlin. Hirschbiegel noted the depressing atmosphere surrounding the shoot, finding relief through listening to Johann Sebastian Bach's music. Alexandra Maria Lara also mentioned the depressing and intense atmosphere during filming. To lighten the mood, Lara's colleagues engaged in activities such as football, while Ganz tried to keep a happy mood by retiring during shooting breaks.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: The film was produced on a €13.5million budget. The bunker and Hitler's Wolf's Lair were constructed at Bavaria Studios in Munich by production designer Bernd Lepel. The damaged Reichstag building was depicted through the use of CGI. Hirschbiegel decided to limit the use of CGI, props and sets so as not to make the set design look like that of a theatre production, explaining:


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: According to Eichinger, the film's overlying idea was to make a film about Hitler and wartime Germany that was very close to historical truth, as part of a theme that would allow the German nation to save their own history and "experience their own trauma". To accomplish this, the film explores Hitler's decisions and motives during his final days through the perspective of the individuals who lived in the Führerbunker during those times. Eichinger chose not to include mention of the Holocaust because it was not the topic of the film. He also thought it was "impossible" to show the "misery" and "desperation" of the concentration camps cinematically.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: During production, Hirschbiegel believed that Hitler would often charm people using his personality, only to manipulate and betray them. Many of the people in the film, including Traudl Junge, are shown to be enthusiastic in interacting with Hitler instead of feeling threatened or anxious by his presence and authority. The production team sought to give Hitler a three-dimensional personality, with Hirschbiegel telling NBC: "We know from all accounts that he was a very charming mana man who managed to seduce a whole people into barbarism." He said Hitler was "like a shell", attracting people with self-pity, but inside the shell was only "an enormous will for destruction".


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: The film explores the suicides and deaths of the Nazi Party as opposed to the people who choose life. Hitler's provision of cyanide pills to those in the bunker and the Goebbels' murder of their children are shown as selfish deeds while people such as Schenck, who choose to help the injured and escape death, are shown as rational and generous. In the DVD commentary, Hirschbiegel said that the events in the film were "derived from the accounts, from descriptions of people" in the bunker. The film also includes an introduction and closing with the real Junge in an interview from "Im toten Winkel", where she admits feeling guilt for "not recognizing this monster in time".


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: "Downfall" premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on September 14, 2004. After first failing to find a distributor, the film was eventually released on September 16 in Germany by Constantin Film. It premiered in the U.S. in Manhattan on February 18, 2005, under Newmarket Films. On its broadcast in the UK, Channel4 marketed it with the strapline: "It's a happy ending. He dies."


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: "Downfall" sold nearly half a million tickets in Germany for its opening weekend and attracted 4.5 million viewers in the first three months. The final North American gross was $5,509,040, while $86,671,870 was made with its foreign gross. The film made $93.6million altogether.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: "Downfall" was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 77th Academy Awards. It won the 2005 BBC Four World Cinema competition. The film was also ranked number 48 in "Empire" magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 90% based on 141 reviews from critics, with a weighted average of 8.00/10. The website's consensus reads, ""Downfall" is an illuminating, thoughtful and detailed account of Hitler's last days." On Metacritic, the film was awarded the "Must-See" badge, holding a weighted average of 82 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Reviews for the film were often very positive, despite debate surrounding the film from critics and audiences upon its release . Ganz's portrayal of Hitler was singled out for praise; David Denby for "The New Yorker" said that Ganz "made the dictator into a plausible human being". Addressing other critics like Denby, "Chicago Sun-Times" critic Roger Ebert said the film did not provide an adequate portrayal of Hitler's actions, because he felt no film could, and that no response would be sufficient. Ebert said Hitler was, in reality, "the focus for a spontaneous uprising by many of the German people, fueled by racism, xenophobia, grandiosity and fear".


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: , history professor and former Luftwaffe helper, praised the film and said that he had not seen a film that was "so insistent and tormentingly alive". Graml said that Hitler's portrayal was presented correctly by showing Hitler's will "to destroy, and his way of denying reality". Julia Radke of the German website praised the film's acting and called it well crafted and a solid "Kammerspielfilm", though it could lose viewer interest due to a lack of concentration on the narrative perspective. German author said that the film "could have been stupider" and called it a "chamber play that could not be staged undramatically". Jessen also said that it was not as spectacular as the pre-media coverage could have led one to believe, and it did not arouse the "morbid fascination" the magazine "Der Spiegel" was looking for.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Hitler biographer Sir Ian Kershaw wrote in "The Guardian" that the film had enormous emotive power, calling it a triumph and "a marvellous historical drama". Kershaw also said that he found it hard to imagine anyone would find Hitler to be a sympathetic figure in his final days. Wim Wenders, in a review for the German newspaper "Die Zeit", said the film was absent of a strong point of view for Hitler which made him harmless, and compared "Downfall" to "", stating that in "Resident Evil" the viewer would know which character was evil.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: "Downfall" was the subject of dispute by critics and audiences in Germany before and after its release, with many concerned regarding Hitler's portrayal in the film as a human being with emotions in spite of his actions and ideologies. The portrayal sparked debate in Germany due to publicity from commentators, film magazines, and newspapers, leading the German tabloid "Bild" to ask the question, "Are we allowed to show the monster as a human being?"


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: It was criticized for its scenes involving the members of the Nazi party, with author Giles MacDonogh criticizing the portrayals as being sympathetic towards SS officers Wilhelm Mohnke and Ernst-Günther Schenck, the former of whom was accused of murdering a group of British prisoners of war in the Wormhoudt massacre. But at a discussion in London, Hirschbiegel said in response that he did not find the allegations against Schenck convincing. The film was also seen as controversial because it was made by Germans instead of British or American filmmakers. Russian press visited the set, making the producers uneasy and occasionally defensive. Yana Bezhanskay, director of Globus Film, Constantin's Russian partner, raised her voice to Russian journalists and said: "This is an antifascist film and nowhere in it do you see Hitler praised."


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Cristina Nord from "Die Tageszeitung" criticized the portrayal, and said that though it was important to make films about perpetrators, "seeing Hitler cry" had not informed her on the last days of the Third Reich. Some have supported the film: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, director of "", felt the time was right to "paint a realistic portrait" of Hitler. Eichinger replied to the response from the film by stating that the "terrifying thing" about Hitler was that he was human and "not an elephant or a monster from Mars". Ganz said that he was proud of the film; though he said people had accused him of "humanizing" Hitler.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: "Downfall" is well known for its rise in popularity due to many "Hitler Rants" internet parody videos which use several scenes in the film: where Hitler becomes angry after hearing that Steiner's attack never happened, due to a lack of forces; when Hitler hears Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring's telegram; when Hitler phones "General der Flieger" Karl Koller about Berlin's April 20 bombings; when Hitler is having dinner and discovers "Reichsführer-SS" Heinrich Himmler secretly made a surrender offer to the Western Allies; where Hitler orders Otto Günsche to find "SS-Gruppenführer" Hermann Fegelein; and when Hitler discusses a counterattack against advancing Soviet forces with his generals. In the videos the original German audio is retained, but new subtitles are added so that Hitler and his subordinates seem to be reacting to an issue or setback in present-day politics, sports, entertainment, popular culture, or everyday life. In addition, some users combine footage from the film with other sources, dub the German dialogue over video games and/or footage from other films and TV series, or edit images of the characters onto pre-existing or animated footage, often for greater comic effect.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: Hirschbiegel spoke positively about these parodies in a 2010 interview with "New York" magazine, saying that many of them were funny and a fitting extension of the film's purpose. Nevertheless, Constantin Film asked video sites to remove them. The producers initiated a removal of parody videos from YouTube in 2010. This prompted more posting of parody videos of Hitler complaining that the parodies were being taken down, and a resurgence of the videos on the site. Constantin Film later stopped the takedowns of these videos, instead opting to monetise them by placing ads on them.


title: Downfall (2004 film)

text: The film was released on DVD in 2005 by Columbia-TriStar Home Entertainment (now Sony Pictures Home Entertainment). Shout! Factory released a collector's edition Blu-ray in March 2018, with a "making-of" featurette, cast and crew interviews, and audio commentary from director Oliver Hirschbiegel.


title: Literature

text: Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include oral literature, much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment, and can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role.


title: Literature

text: Literature, as an art form, can also include works in various non-fiction genres, such as biography, diaries, memoir, letters, and the essay. Within its broad definition, literature includes non-fictional books, articles or other printed information on a particular subject.


title: Literature

text: Etymologically, the term derives from Latin "literatura/litteratura" "learning, a writing, grammar," originally "writing formed with letters," from "litera/littera" "letter". In spite of this, the term has also been applied to spoken or sung texts. Developments in print technology have allowed an ever-growing distribution and proliferation of written works, which now includes electronic literature.


title: Literature

text: Literature is classified according to whether it is poetry, prose or drama, and such works are often further categorized according to historical period, adherence to certain aesthetic features, or genre.


title: Literature

text: Definitions of literature have varied over time. In Western Europe, prior to the 18th century, literature denoted all books and writing literature can be seen as returning to older, more inclusive notions, so that cultural studies, for instance, include, in addition to canonical works, popular and minority genres. The word is also used in reference non-written works: to "oral literature" and "the literature of preliterate culture".


title: Literature

text: A value judgment definition of literature considers it as consisting solely of high quality writing that forms part of the "belles-lettres" ("fine writing") tradition. An example of this in the (1910–11) "Encyclopædia Britannica" that classified literature as "the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing".


title: Literature

text: The use of the term "literature" here is a little problematic because of its origins in the Latin "littera", “letter,” essentially writing. Alternatives such as "oral forms" and "oral genres" have been suggested but the word literature is widely used.


title: Literature

text: Oral literature is an ancient human tradition found in "all corners of the world". Modern archaeology has been unveiling evidence of the human efforts to preserve and transmit arts and knowledge that depended completely or partially on an oral tradition, across various cultures:


title: Literature

text: The earliest poetry is believed to have been recited or sung, employed as a way of remembering history, genealogy, and law.


title: Literature

text: In Asia, the transmission of folklore, mythologies as well as scriptures in ancient India, in different Indian religions, was by oral tradition, preserved with precision with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques.


title: Literature

text: The early Buddhist texts are also generally believed to be of oral tradition, with the first by comparing inconsistencies in the transmitted versions of literature from various oral societies such as the Greek, Serbia and other cultures, then noting that the Vedic literature is too consistent and vast to have been composed and transmitted orally across generations, without being written down. According to Goody, the Vedic texts likely involved both a written and oral tradition, calling it a "parallel products of a literate society".


title: Literature

text: Australian Aboriginal culture has thrived on oral traditions and oral histories passed down through thousands of years.


title: Literature

text: In a study published in February 2020, new evidence showed that both Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanoes erupted between 34,000 and 40,000 years ago. Significantly, this is a "minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria", and also could be interpreted as evidence for the oral histories of the Gunditjmara people, an Aboriginal Australian people of south-western Victoria, which tell of volcanic eruptions being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence. An axe found underneath volcanic ash in 1947 had already proven that humans inhabited the region before the eruption of Tower Hill.


title: Literature

text: All ancient Greek literature was to some degree oral in nature, and the earliest literature was completely so. Homer's epic poetry, states Michael Gagarin, was largely composed, performed and transmitted orally. As folklores and legends were performed in front of distant audiences, the singers would substitute the names in the stories with local characters or rulers to give the stories a local flavor and thus connect with the audience, but making the historicity embedded in the oral tradition as unreliable. The lack of surviving texts about the Greek and Roman religious traditions have led scholars to presume that these were ritualistic and transmitted as oral traditions, but some scholars disagree that the complex rituals in the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were an exclusive product of an oral tradition.


title: Literature

text: Writing systems are not known to have existed among Native North Americans before contact with Europeans. Oral storytelling traditions flourished in a context without the use of writing to record and preserve history, scientific knowledge, and social practices. While some stories were told for amusement and leisure, most functioned as practical lessons from tribal experience applied to immediate moral, social, psychological, and environmental issues. Stories fuse fictional, supernatural, or otherwise exaggerated characters and circumstances with real emotions and morals as a means of teaching. Plots often reflect real life situations and may be aimed at particular people known by the story's audience. In this way, social pressure could be exerted without directly causing embarrassment or social exclusion. For example, rather than yelling, Inuit parents might deter their children from wandering too close to the water's edge by telling a story about a sea monster with a pouch for children within its reach.


title: Literature

text: Oratory or the art of public speaking "was for long considered a literary art". From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in Western education in training orators, lawyers, counselors, historians, statesmen, and poets.


title: Literature

text: Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form. Though in both ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, writing may have already emerged because of the need to record historical and environmental events. Subsequent innovations included more uniform, predictable, legal systems, sacred texts, and the origins of modern practices of scientific inquiry and knowledge-consolidation, all largely reliant on portable and easily reproducible forms of writing.


title: Literature

text: Ancient Egyptian literature, along with Sumerian literature, are considered the world's oldest literatures. The primary genres of the literature of ancient Egypt—didactic texts, hymns and prayers, and tales—were written almost entirely in verse; By the Old Kingdom (26th century BC to 22nd century BC), literary works included funerary texts, epistles and letters, hymns and poems, and commemorative autobiographical texts recounting the careers of prominent administrative officials. It was not until the early Middle Kingdom (21st century BC to 17th century BC) that a narrative Egyptian literature was created.


title: Literature

text: Many works of early periods, even in narrative form, had a covert moral or didactic purpose, such as the Sanskrit "Panchatantra".200 BC – 300 AD, based on older oral tradition. Drama and satire also developed as urban culture provided a larger public audience, and later readership, for literary production. Lyric poetry (as opposed to epic poetry) was often the speciality of courts and aristocratic circles, particularly in East Asia where songs were collected by the Chinese aristocracy as poems, the most notable being the "Shijing" or "Book of Songs" (1046–c.600 BC), .


title: Literature

text: In ancient China, early literature was primarily focused on philosophy, historiography, military science, agriculture, and poetry. China, the origin of modern paper making and woodblock printing, produced the world's first print cultures. Much of Chinese literature originates with the Hundred Schools of Thought period that occurred during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (769‒269 BC). The most important of these include the Classics of Confucianism, of Daoism, of Mohism, of Legalism, as well as works of military science (e.g. Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", c.5th century BC)) and Chinese history (e.g. Sima Qian's "Records of the Grand Historian", c.94 BC). Ancient Chinese literature had a heavy emphasis on historiography, with often very detailed court records. An exemplary piece of narrative history of ancient China was the "Zuo Zhuan", which was compiled no later than 389 BC, and attributed to the blind 5th-century BC historian Zuo Qiuming.


title: Literature

text: In ancient India, literature originated from stories that were originally orally transmitted. Early genres included drama, fables, sutras and epic poetry. Sanskrit literature begins with the Vedas, dating back to 1500–1000 BC, and continues with the Sanskrit Epics of Iron Age India. The Vedas are among the oldest sacred texts. The Samhitas (vedic collections) date to roughly 1500–1000 BC, and the "circum-Vedic" texts, as well as the redaction of the Samhitas, date to c. 1000‒500 BC, resulting in a Vedic period, spanning the mid-2nd to mid 1st millennium BC, or the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The period between approximately the 6th to 1st centuries BC saw the composition and redaction of the two most influential Indian epics, the "Mahabharata" and the "Ramayana", with subsequent redaction progressing down to the 4th century AD. Other major literary works are Ramcharitmanas & Krishnacharitmanas.


title: Literature

text: The earliest known Greek writings are Mycenaean (c.1600–1100 BC), written in the Linear B syllabary on clay tablets. These documents contain prosaic records largely concerned with trade (lists, inventories, receipts, etc.); no real literature has been discovered. Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the original decipherers of Linear B, state that literature almost certainly existed in Mycenaean Greece, but it was either not written down or, if it was, it was on parchment or wooden tablets, which did not survive the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces in the twelfth century BC.


title: Literature

text: Homer's epic poems, the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey", are central works of ancient Greek literature. It is generally accepted that the poems were composed at some point around the late eighth or early seventh century BC. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary. Most researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally. From antiquity until the present day, the influence of Homeric epic on Western civilization has been great, inspiring many of its most famous works of literature, music, art and film. The Homeric epics were the greatest influence on ancient Greek culture and education; to Plato, Homer was simply the one who "has taught Greece" – "ten Hellada pepaideuken". Hesiod's Works and Days (c.700 BC) and Theogony are some of the earliest, and most influential, of ancient Greek literature. Classical Greek genres included philosophy, poetry, historiography, comedies and dramas. Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) authored philosophical texts that are the foundation of Western philosophy, Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BC) and Pindar were influential lyric poets, and Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) and Thucydides were early Greek historians. Although drama was popular in ancient Greece, of the hundreds of tragedies written and performed during the classical age, only a limited number of plays by three authors still exist: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The plays of Aristophanes (c. 446 – c. 386 BC) provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, the earliest form of Greek Comedy, and are in fact used to define the genre.


title: Literature

text: The Hebrew religious text, the Torah, is widely seen as a product of the Persian period (539–333 BC, probably 450–350 BC). This consensus echoes a traditional Jewish view which gives Ezra, the leader of the Jewish community on its return from Babylon, a pivotal role in its promulgation. This represents a major source of Christianity's Bible, which has had a major influence on Western literature.


title: Literature

text: The beginning of Roman literature dates to 240 BC, when a Roman audience saw a Latin version of a Greek play. Literature in Latin would flourish for the next six centuries, and includes essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings.


title: Literature

text: The Qur'an (610 AD to 632 AD), the main holy book of Islam, had a significant influence on the Arab language, and marked the beginning of Islamic literature. Muslims believe it was transcribed in the Arabic dialect of the Quraysh, the tribe of Muhammad. As Islam spread, the Quran had the effect of unifying and standardizing Arabic.


title: Literature

text: Theological works in Latin were the dominant form of literature in Europe typically found in libraries during the Middle Ages. Western Vernacular literature includes the Poetic Edda and the sagas, or heroic epics, of Iceland, the Anglo-Saxon "Beowulf", and the German "Song of Hildebrandt". A later form of medieval fiction was the romance, an adventurous and sometimes magical narrative with strong popular appeal.


title: Literature

text: Controversial, religious, political and instructional literature proliferated during the European Renaissance as a result of the Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press around 1440, while the Medieval romance developed into the novel,


title: Literature

text: Publishing became possible with the invention of writing but became more practical with the invention of printing. Prior to printing, distributed works were copied manually, by scribes.


title: Literature

text: The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng made movable type of earthenware c. 1045. Then c.1450, Johannes Gutenberg independently invented movable type in Europe. This invention gradually made books less expensive to produce and more widely available.


title: Literature

text: Early printed books, single sheets, and images created before 1501 in Europe are known as incunables or "incunabula". "A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330."


title: Literature

text: Eventually, printing enabled other forms of publishing besides books. The history of modern newspaper publishing started in Germany in 1609, with publishing of magazines following in 1663.


title: Literature

text: In England in the late 1820s, growing political and social awareness, "particularly among the utilitarians and Benthamites, promoted the possibility of including courses in English literary study in the newly formed London University". This further developed into the idea of the study of literature being "the ideal carrier for the propagation of the humanist cultural myth of a well educated, culturally harmonious nation".


title: Literature

text: The widespread education of women was not common until the nineteenth century, and because of this literature until recently was mostly male dominated.


title: Literature

text: There were few English-language women poets whose names are remembered until the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century some names that stand out are Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson (see American poetry). But while generally women are absent from the European cannon of Romantic literature, there is one notable exception, the French novelist and memoirist Amantine Dupin (1804 – 1876) best known by her pen name George Sand. One of the more popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era. Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) is the first major English woman novelist, while Aphra Behn is an early female dramatist.


title: Literature

text: Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded between 1901 and 2020 to 117 individuals: 101 men and 16 women. Selma Lagerlöf (1858 – 1940) was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in The Swedish Academy in 1914.


title: Literature

text: Feminist scholars have since the twentieth century sought expand the literary canon to include more women writers.


title: Literature

text: A separate genre of children's literature only began to emerge in the eighteenth century, with the development of the concept of childhood. The earliest of these books were educational books, books on conduct, and simple ABCs—often decorated with animals, plants, and anthropomorphic letters.


title: Literature

text: A fundamental question of literary theory is "what is literature?" – although many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language.


title: Literature

text: Literary fiction is a term used to describe fiction that explores any facet of the human condition, and may involve social commentary. It is often regarded as having more artistic merit than genre fiction, especially the most commercially oriented types, but this has been contested in recent years, with the serious study of genre fiction within universities.


title: Literature

text: The following, by the award-winning British author William Boyd on the short story, might be applied to all prose fiction:


title: Literature

text: [short stories] seem to answer something very deep in our nature as if, for the duration of its telling, something special has been created, some essence of our experience extrapolated, some temporary sense has been made of our common, turbulent journey towards the grave and oblivion.


title: Literature

text: The very best in literature is annually recognized by the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is awarded to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction" (original Swedish: "den som inom litteraturen har producerat det mest framstående verket i en idealisk riktning").


title: Literature

text: Some researchers suggest that literary fiction can play a role in an individual's psychological development. Psychologists have also been using literature as a therapeutic tool. Psychologist Hogan argues for the value of the time and emotion that a person devotes to understanding a character's situation in literature; that it can unite a large community by provoking universal emotions, as well as allowing readers access to different cultures, and new emotional experiences. One study, for example, suggested that the presence of familiar cultural values in literary texts played an important impact on the performance of minority students.


title: Literature

text: Psychologist Maslow's ideas help literary critics understand how characters in literature reflect their personal culture and the history. The theory suggests that literature helps an individual's struggle for self-fulfillment.


title: Literature

text: Religion has had a major influence on literature, through works like the Vedas, the Torah, the Bible,


title: Literature

text: The King James Version of the Bible has been called "the most influential version of the most influential book in the world, in what is now its most influential language", "the most important book in English religion and culture", and "the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world" - principally because of its literary style and widespread distribution. Prominent atheist figures such as the late Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have praised the King James Version as being "a giant step in the maturing of English literature" and "a great work of literature", respectively, with Dawkins then adding, "A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian".


title: Literature

text: Societies in which preaching has great importance, and those in which religious structures and authorities have a near-monopoly of reading and writing and/or a censorship role, may impart a religious gloss to much of the literature those societies produce or retain - as for example in the European Middle Ages. The traditions of close study of religious texts has furthered the development of techniques and theories in literary studies.


title: Literature

text: Poetry has traditionally been distinguished from prose by its greater use of the aesthetic qualities of language, including musical devices such as assonance, alliteration, rhyme, and rhythm, and by being set in lines and verses rather than paragraphs, and more recently its use of other typographical elements. This distinction is complicated by various hybrid forms such as sound poetry, concrete poetry and prose poem, and more generally by the fact that prose possesses rhythm. Abram Lipsky refers to it as an "open secret" that "prose is not distinguished from poetry by lack of rhythm".


title: Literature

text: Prior to the 19th century, poetry was commonly understood to be something set in metrical lines: "any kind of subject consisting of or Verses". Possibly as a result of Aristotle's influence (his "Poetics"), "poetry" before the 19th century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art. As a form it may pre-date literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral tradition; hence it constitutes the earliest example of literature.


title: Literature

text: As noted above, prose generally makes far less use of the aesthetic qualities of language than poetry. However, developments in modern literature, including free verse and prose poetry have tended to blur the differences, and American poet T.S. Eliot suggested that while: "the distinction between verse and prose is clear, the distinction between poetry and prose is obscure". There are verse novels, a type of narrative poetry in which a novel-length narrative is told through the medium of poetry rather than prose. "Eugene Onegin" (1831) by Alexander Pushkin is the most famous example.


title: Literature

text: On the historical development of prose, Richard Graff notes that "[In the case of ancient Greece] recent scholarship has emphasized the fact that formal prose was a comparatively late development, an "invention" properly associated with the classical period".


title: Literature

text: Latin was a major influence on the development of prose in many European countries. Especially important was the great Roman orator Cicero. It was the "lingua franca" among literate Europeans until quite recent times, and the great works of Descartes (1596 – 1650), Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), and Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) were published in Latin. Among the last important books written primarily in Latin prose were the works of Swedenborg (d. 1772), Linnaeus (d. 1778), Euler (d. 1783), Gauss (d. 1855), and Isaac Newton (d. 1727).


title: Literature

text: A novel is a long fictional prose narrative. In English, the term emerged from the Romance languages in the late 15th century, with the meaning of "news"; it came to indicate something new, without a distinction between fact or fiction. The romance is a closely related long prose narrative. Walter Scott defined it as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents", whereas in the novel "the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society". Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is "le roman", "der Roman", "il romanzo"", indicates the proximity of the forms.


title: Literature

text: Although there are many historical prototypes, so-called "novels before the novel", the modern novel form emerges late in cultural history—roughly during the eighteenth century. Initially subject to much criticism, the novel has acquired a dominant position amongst literary forms, both popularly and critically.


title: Literature

text: The publisher Melville House classifies the novella as "too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story". Publishers and literary award societies typically consider a novella to be between 17,000 and 40,000 words.


title: Literature

text: A dilemma in defining the "short story" as a literary form is how to, or whether one should, distinguish it from any short narrative and its contested origin, that include the Bible, and Edgar Allan Poe.


title: Literature

text: Electronic literature is a literary genre consisting of works created exclusively on and for digital devices.


title: Literature

text: Common literary examples of nonfiction include, the essay; travel literature and nature writing; biography, autobiography and memoir; journalism; letters; journals; history, philosophy, economics; scientific, and technical writings.


title: Literature

text: Nonfiction can fall within the broad category of literature as "any collection of written work", but some works fall within the narrower definition "by virtue of the excellence of their writing, their originality and their general aesthetic and artistic merits".


title: Literature

text: Drama is literature intended for performance. The form is combined with music and dance in opera and musical theatre (see libretto). A play is a written dramatic work by a playwright that is intended for performance in a theatre; it comprises chiefly dialogue between characters. A closet drama, by contrast, is written to be read rather than to be performed; the meaning of which can be realized fully on the page. Nearly all drama took verse form until comparatively recently.


title: Literature

text: The earliest form of which there exists substantial knowledge is Greek drama. This developed as a performance associated with religious and civic festivals, typically enacting or developing upon well-known historical, or mythological themes,


title: Literature

text: In the twentieth century scripts written for non-stage media have been added to this form, including radio, television and film.


title: Literature

text: The law and literature movement focuses on the interdisciplinary connection between law and literature.


title: Literature

text: Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.


title: Literature

text: Literary works have been protected by copyright law from unauthorized reproduction since at least 1710. Literary works are defined by copyright law to mean "any work, other than a dramatic or musical work, which is written, spoken or sung, and accordingly includes (a) a table or compilation (other than a database), (b) a computer program, (c) preparatory design material for a computer program, and (d) a database."


title: Literature

text: Literary works are all works of literature; that is all works expressed in print or writing (other than dramatic or musical works).


title: Literature

text: The copyright law of the United States has a long and complicated history, dating back to colonial times. It was established as federal law with the Copyright Act of 1790. This act was updated many times, including a major revision in 1976.


title: Literature

text: The copyright law of the European Union is the copyright law applicable within the European Union. Copyright law is largely harmonized in the Union, although country to country differences exist. The body of law was implemented in the EU through a number of directives, which the member states need to enact into their national law. The main copyright directives are the Copyright Term Directive, the Information Society Directive and the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Copyright in the Union is furthermore dependent on international conventions to which the European Union is a member (such as the TRIPS Agreement and conventions to which all Member States are parties (such as the Berne Convention)).


title: Literature

text: Japan was a party to the original Berne convention in 1899, so its copyright law is in sync with most international regulations. The convention protected copyrighted works for 50 years after the author's death (or 50 years after publication for unknown authors and corporations). However, in 2004 Japan extended the copyright term to 70 years for cinematographic works. At the end of 2018, as a result of the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, the 70 year term was applied to all works. This new term is not applied retroactively; works that had entered the public domain between 1999 and 2018 by expiration would remain in the public domain.


title: Literature

text: Censorship of literature is employed by states, religious organizations, educational institutions, etc., to control what can be portrayed, spoken, performed, or written. Generally such bodies attempt to ban works for political reasons, or because they deal with other controversial matters such as race, or sex.


title: Literature

text: A notorious example of censorship is James Joyce's novel Ulysses, which has been described by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov as a "divine work of art" and the greatest masterpiece of 20th century prose. It was banned in the United States from 1921 until 1933 on the grounds of obscenity. Nowadays it is a central literary text in English literature courses, throughout the world.


title: Literature

text: There are numerous awards recognizing achievement and contribution in literature. Given the diversity of the field, awards are typically limited in scope, usually on: form, genre, language, nationality and output (e.g. for first-time writers or debut novels).


title: Literature

text: The Nobel Prize in Literature was one of the six Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895, and is awarded to an author on the basis of their body of work, rather than to, or for, a particular work itself. Other literary prizes for which all nationalities are eligible include: the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Man Booker International Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Hugo Award, Guardian First Book Award and the Franz Kafka Prize.


title: The Babadook

text: The Babadook is a 2014 Australian supernatural horror film written and directed by Jennifer Kent in her directorial debut, and produced by Kristina Ceyton and Kristian Moliere. The film stars Essie Davis, Noah Wiseman, Daniel Henshall, Hayley McElhinney, Barbara West, and Ben Winspear. It is based on Kent's 2005 short film "Monster", which follows a single mother who must confront her son's fear of a monster in their home.


title: The Babadook

text: Kent began developing the screenplay in 2009, intending to explore parenting and fear of madness in the film's story. Financing was secured through Australian government grants and partly through crowdfunding. Filming took place in Adelaide, where Kent drew from experiences as a production assistant on Lars von Trier's "Dogville". During filming, the crew worked to ensure six-year-old Wiseman was protected from the challenging subject matter of the film. The titular monster and special effects were created with stop motion and handmade practical effects, and the score was composed by Jed Kurzel.


title: The Babadook

text: The film premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on 17 January, and was given a limited release in Australian art house cinemas beginning on 22 May 2014, initially failing to become a commercial success in its native country. However, "The Babadook" generated wider attention internationally, grossing $10 million worldwide against a $2 million budget. The film received critical acclaim and was the best-reviewed horror film of 2014, with critics commending its scares, creature design, story and exploration of grief. It won three of its six nominations at the AACTA Awards, including Best Film. It maintained a following in subsequent years, partly due to becoming an internet meme.


title: The Babadook

text: Amelia Vanek is a troubled and exhausted widow living in Adelaide, who has brought up her six-year-old son Samuel alone. Her late husband, Oskar, was killed in a car accident that occurred as he drove Amelia to the hospital during labour. Sam begins displaying erratic behaviour: he becomes an insomniac and is preoccupied with an imaginary monster, which he has built weapons to fight. Amelia is forced to pick up her son from school after Sam brings one of the weapons there. One night, Sam asks his mother to read a pop-up storybook called "Mister Babadook". It describes the titular monster, the Babadook, a tall pale-faced humanoid in a top hat with taloned fingers which torments its victims after they become aware of its existence. Amelia is disturbed by the book and its mysterious appearance, while Sam becomes convinced that the Babadook is real. Sam's persistence about the Babadook leads Amelia to often have sleepless nights as she tries to comfort him.


title: The Babadook

text: Soon after, strange events occur: doors open and close mysteriously by themselves, strange sounds are heard and Amelia finds glass shards in her food. She attributes the events to Sam's behaviour, but he blames the Babadook. Amelia rips up the book and disposes of it. At her birthday party, Sam's cousin Ruby bullies Sam for not having a father, in response to which he pushes her out of her tree house; as a result she breaks her nose. Amelia's sister Claire admits she cannot bear Sam, to which Amelia takes great offence. On the drive home, Sam has another vision of the Babadook and suffers a seizure, so Amelia gets some sedatives from a paediatrician.


title: The Babadook

text: The following morning, Amelia finds the "Mister Babadook" book reassembled on the front door step. New words taunt her by saying that the Babadook will become stronger if she continues to deny its existence, containing pop-ups of her killing their dog Bugsy, Sam, and then herself. Terrified, Amelia burns the book and runs to the police station after a disturbing phone call. However, Amelia has no proof of the stalking, and when she then sees the Babadook's suit hung up behind the front desk, she leaves. That night, Amelia tries to fall asleep and watches the Babadook open her bedroom door, crawl up the ceiling and attack her. She then turns on all the lights in the house and falls asleep with Sam downstairs. After the attack, Amelia starts to become more isolated and shut-in, becoming impatient, shouting at Samuel for 'disobeying' her constantly, and having frequent visions of the Babadook once again. Her mental state slowly decays and she exhibits erratic and violent behaviour, including cutting the phone line with a knife and then waving the same knife aggressively at Sam without realizing it. This devolves into disturbing hallucinations, in which Amelia violently murders Sam.


title: The Babadook

text: Shortly after these visions, Amelia sees an apparition of Oskar, who offers to return to her if she "brings the boy" to him. Realizing that he is a creation of the Babadook, Amelia flees and is stalked through the house by the Babadook until it finally possesses her. Under its influence she breaks Bugsy's neck and attempts to kill Sam. Eventually luring her into the basement, Sam knocks her out. Tied up, Amelia awakens with Sam, terrified, nearby. When she tries to strangle him, he lovingly caresses her face, causing her to regurgitate an inky black substance, which seemingly expels the Babadook. When Sam reminds Amelia that "you can't get rid of the Babadook," an unseen force drags him into Amelia's bedroom. After saving Sam, Amelia is forced by the Babadook to re-watch a vision of her husband's death. Furious, she confronts the Babadook, making the beast retreat into the basement, and she locks the door behind it.


title: The Babadook

text: After this ordeal, Amelia and Sam manage to recover. Amelia is attentive and caring toward him, encouraging him with building his weapons and being impressed at Sam's magic tricks. They gather earthworms in a bowl, and Amelia takes them to the basement, where the Babadook resides. She places the bowl on the floor for the Babadook to eat. However, as the beast tries to attack her, Amelia calms it down, and it retreats to the corner, taking the earthworms with it. Amelia returns to the yard to celebrate Sam's birthday.


title: The Babadook

text: Kent studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), where she learned acting alongside Davis, and graduated in 1991. She then worked primarily as an actor in the film industry for over two decades. Kent eventually lost her passion for acting by the end of the 1990s and sent a written proposal to Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, asking if she could assist on the film set of von Trier's 2003 drama film, "Dogville", to learn from the director. Kent's proposal was accepted and she considers the experience her film school, citing the importance of stubbornness as the key lesson she learned.


title: The Babadook

text: Prior to "Babadook", Kent's first feature film, she had completed a short film, titled "Monster", and an episode of the television series "Two Twisted". Kent explained in May 2014 that the origins of "Babadook" can be found in "Monster", which she calls "baby "Babadook"".


title: The Babadook

text: The writing of the screenplay began in around 2009 and Kent has stated that she sought to tell a story about facing up to the darkness within ourselves, the "fear of going mad" and an exploration of parenting from a "real perspective". In regard to parenting, Kent further explained in October 2014: "Now, I'm not saying we all want to go and kill our kids, but a lot of women struggle. And it is a very taboo subject, to say that motherhood is anything but a perfect experience for women." In terms of the characters, Kent said: "It was really important for me that they were loving, and loveable people. I don’t mean likeable – I mean that we really felt for them". In total, Kent completed five drafts of the script.


title: The Babadook

text: Kent drew from her experience on the set of "Dogville" for the assembling of her production team, as she observed that von Trier was surrounded by a well-known "family of people". Therefore, Kent sought her own "family of collaborators to work with for the long term." Unable to find all of the suitable people within the Australian film industry, Kent hired Polish director of photography (DOP) Radek Ladczuk, for whom "Babadook" was his first-ever English language film, and American illustrator Alexander Juhasz. In terms of film influences, Kent cited 1960s, '70s and '80s horror—including "The Thing" (1982), "Halloween" (1978), "Les Yeux Sans Visage" (1960), "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974), "Carnival of Souls" (1962) and "The Shining" (1980)—as well as "Vampyr" (1932), "Nosferatu" (1922) and "Let The Right One In" (2008).


title: The Babadook

text: Although the process was challenging and she was forced to reduce their total budget, producer Kristina Ceyton managed to secure funding of around A$2.5 million from government bodies Screen Australia and the SAFC; however, they still required an additional budget for the construction of the film sets. To attain the funds for the sets, Kent and Causeway Films producer Kristina Ceyton launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in June 2012, with a target of US$30,000. Their funding goal was reached on 27 September 2012 through pledges from 259 backers raising $30,071. Kent said that the crowdfunding closed a crucial gap in which to cover design and special effects expenses to build a "special visual world".


title: The Babadook

text: Casting the child lead for the film involved casting director Nikki Barrett viewing around 500 audition tapes of young boys, before selecting smaller groups and individuals for in-person improvisation. Six-year old Noah Wiseman was selected as a standout, with Kent saying he had a certain innocence about him that older boys did not have, possibly as he is the son of a child psychologist.


title: The Babadook

text: The film was primarily shot in Adelaide, South Australia, with most of the interior shots filmed on a sound stage in the city; as funding was from the South Australian state government, this was a requirement that Kent needed to meet. However, Kent explained to the "Den of Geek" website that she is not patriotic and didn't want the film to be "particularly Australian".


title: The Babadook

text: To contribute to the universality of the film's appearance, a Victorian terrace-style house was specifically built for the film, as there are very few houses designed in such a style in Adelaide. A script reading was not done since Noah Wiseman was only six years old at the time, and Kent focused instead on bonding, playing games and lots of time spent with the actors so they could become more familiar with one another. Pre-production occurred in Adelaide and lasted three weeks and, during this time, Kent conveyed a "kiddie" version of the narrative to Wiseman, in which young Samuel is the hero. Kent took Wiseman to Adelaide Zoo to explain the story, and said Wiseman was aware it was a scary film and that he "knew how important his role was".


title: The Babadook

text: Kent originally wanted to film solely in black-and-white, as she wanted to create a "heightened feel" that is still believable. She was also influenced by pre-1950s B-grade horror films, as they were "very theatrical", in addition to being "visually beautiful and terrifying". Kent later lost interest in the black-and-white idea and worked closely with production designer Alex Holmes and Radek to create a "very cool", "very claustrophobic" interior environment with "meticulously designed" sets. The film's final colour scheme was achieved without the use of gels on the camera lenses or any alterations during the post-filming stage. Kent cited filmmakers David Lynch and Roman Polanski as key influences during the filming stage.


title: The Babadook

text: Kent described the filming process as "stressful" because of Wiseman's age. Kent explained "So I really had to be focused. We needed double the time we had." Wiseman's mother was on set and a "very protective, loving environment" was created. Kent explained after the release of the film that Wiseman was protected throughout the entire project: "During the reverse shots where Amelia was abusing Sam verbally, we had Essie [Davis] yell at an adult stand-in on his knees. I didn't want to destroy a childhood to make this film—that wouldn't be fair." Kent's friendship with Davis was a boon during filming and Kent praised her former classmate in the media: "To her credit, she's [Davis] very receptive, likes to be directed and is a joy to work with."


title: The Babadook

text: In terms of the Babadook monster and the scary effects of the film, Kent was adamant from the outset of production that a low-fi and handmade approach would be used. She cites the influence of Georges Méliès, Jean Epstein's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Häxan". Kent used stop-motion effects for the monster and a large amount of smoothing was completed in post-production. Kent explained to the "Empire" publication: "There's been some criticism of the lo-fi approach of the effects, and that makes me laugh because it was always intentional. I wanted the film to be all in camera." She has also said that The Man in the Beaver Hat from the 1927 lost film "London After Midnight" was an inspiration for the design of the Babadook.


title: The Babadook

text: The soundtrack was composed by Jed Kurzel. The score was officially released for the first time by Waxwork Records in 2017 on "black with red haze” vinyl. The record sleeve features a recreation of the pop-up book from the film.


title: The Babadook

text: The film's global premiere was in January 2014 at the Sundance Film Festival. The film then received a limited theatrical release in Australia in May 2014, following a screening in April 2014 at the Stanley Film Festival.


title: The Babadook

text: In Singapore, the film was released on 25 September 2014. The film opened in the United Kingdom for general release on 17 October 2014, and in the United States on 28 November 2014. In 2020, amid cinema closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, "The Babadook" was one of the films made available for free for screenings by independent cinemas by IFC Films.


title: The Babadook

text: The film, alongside the short film "Monster", was first released on DVD and Blu-ray in Australia by Umbrella Entertainment on 31 October 2014. The U.S. Blu-ray and DVD was released on 14 April 2015 by IFC Midnight and Scream Factory, and the special edition was also available on that date. The special edition features Kent's short film, "Monster", and behind the scenes feature "Creating the Book" by Juhasz. The UK Blu-ray Disc features the short documentary films "Illustrating Evil: Creating the Book", "There's No Place Like Home: Creating the House" and "Special Effects: The Stabbing Scene".


title: The Babadook

text: "The Babadook" opened in Australia on 22 May 2014 in just 13 cinemas on a limited release, eventually grossing a total of only $258,000. The film fared much better internationally than it did in its native country. In North America, "The Babadook" opened on a limited release basis in three theaters and grossed US$30,007, with an average of $10,002 per theater. The film ranked in the 42nd position at the box office, and, as of 1 February 2015, has grossed $964,413 in the U.S. and $9.9 million elsewhere in the world. To date, the film's worldwide box office takings are $10.3 million which compares favourably with the estimated production budget of $2 million. It generated $633,000 in the United Kingdom in its opening weekend (surpassing its entire Australian run), and made over $1.09m in France and $335,000 in Thailand. In France, it opened at number 11 in the local box office, which producer Kristian Moliere credited to Wild Bunch's promoting, and contrasted this with Australian promoters that declined to book the film slots in multiplexes. Its success overseas re-generated interest in Australia ahead of DVD releases and television screenings.


title: The Babadook

text: On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 98% based on 243 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The site's critical consensus states: ""The Babadook" relies on real horror rather than cheap jump scares—and boasts a heartfelt, genuinely moving story to boot." It was ranked the best reviewed horror film and third best-reviewed film of 2014 on the site. As of 2022, Rotten Tomatoes ranks "The Babadook" the 13th best horror film of all time. Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 86 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".


title: The Babadook

text: Glenn Kenny, writing for "RogerEbert.com", called the film "the finest and most genuinely provocative horror movie to emerge in this still very-new century." Dan Schindel from "Movie Mezzanine" said that ""The Babadook" is the best genre creature creation since the big black wolf-dog aliens from "Attack the Block"." In "The Guardian", Peter Bradshaw described the film as a "Freudian thriller", giving it 4 out of 5 stars and praised the performances, themes and Kent's direction. Bradshaw said that "Kent exerts a masterly control over this tense situation and the sound design is terrifically good: creating a haunted, insidiously whispery intimacy that never relies on sudden volume hikes for the scares." In "Variety", Scott Foundas commended the production design and direction, saying that the film "manages to deliver real, seat-grabbing jolts while also touching on more serious themes of loss, grief and other demons that can not be so easily vanquished".


title: The Babadook

text: On 30 November 2014, William Friedkin, director of "The Exorcist" (1973) stated on his Twitter profile, ""Psycho", "Alien", "Diabolique", and now "THE BABADOOK"." Friedkin also added, "I've never seen a more terrifying film. It will scare the hell out of you as it did me." Prominent British film critic Mark Kermode named "The Babadook" his favourite film of 2014 and in 2018 listed it his eighth favourite film of the decade. In 2022, Samuel Murrian declared it the "best horror movie so far this century" in "Parade".


title: The Babadook

text: In subsequent years, "The Babadook" has been listed as a modern cult film. In "The Guardian", Luke Buckmaster listed it as one of the best Australian films of the 2010s. Film scholar Amanda Howell argues that part of the film's critical success can be attributed to many film critics having discussed the film within the context of art-horror rather than purely as a horror film. Howell discussed the film as part of an international cycle of contemporary art-horror films alongside "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006)," Let the Right One In" (2008) and" Antichrist" (2009) that negotiate and blur the boundaries between art and horror.


title: The Babadook

text: In October 2016, a Tumblr user joked that the Babadook is openly gay; in December 2016, another Tumblr user posted a viral screenshot showing the movie classified by Netflix as an LGBT film. Despite the absence of overt references to LGBT culture in the film, fans and journalists generated interpretations of queer subtext in the film (dubbed "Babadiscourse") that were often tongue-in-cheek, but occasionally more serious, highlighting the character's dramatic persona, grotesque costume, and chaotic effect within a traditional family structure. In June 2017, "The Babadook" trended on Twitter and was displayed as a symbol during that year's Pride Month. The social media response became so strong that theatres in Los Angeles took the opportunity to hold screenings of the film for charity. Michael Bronski said to the "Los Angeles Times": "In this moment, who better than the Babadook to represent not only queer desire, but queer antagonism, queer in-your-faceness, queer queerness?", and drew comparisons to historic connections between queerness and horror fiction such as "Frankenstein" and "Dracula".


title: The Babadook

text: Jennifer Kent said that she "loved" the meme, saying that "I think it's crazy and [the meme] just kept him alive. I thought ah, you bastard. He doesn't want to die so he's finding ways to become relevant."


title: The Babadook

text: Writing for "The Daily Beast", Tim Teeman contends that grief is the "real monster" in "The Babadook", and that the film is "about the aftermath of death; how its remnants destroy long after the dead body has been buried or burned". Teeman writes that he was "gripped" by the "metaphorical imperative" of Kent's film, with the Babadook monster representing "the shape of grief: all-enveloping, shape-shifting, black". Teeman states that the film's ending "underscored the thrum of grief and loss at the movie's heart", and concludes that it informs the audience that grief has its place and the best that humans can do is "marshal it".


title: The Babadook

text: "Collider" also proposed that the monster "seems to symbolize Amelia and Sam’s shared grief/trauma over losing Oskar" and that Amelia's efforts to suppress this lead to it becoming stronger. The writers suggest that "healing from serious traumas in real life does not happen overnight, but takes a lot of mental and emotional processing. "The Babadook" warns of the dangers of trying to ignore or 'stuff' our traumas below the surface: this is the most dangerous place to put them because that’s where we lose control of them and they gain control over us."


title: The Babadook

text: Samuel displays some autistic traits and parents of autistic children have identified with themes in the film, including the social isolation and sleep deprivation that commonly overwhelm them.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: Ocean's Twelve is a 2004 American heist comedy film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by George Nolfi. The second installment in the "Ocean's" film trilogy franchise and the sequel to "Ocean's Eleven" (2001), the film features an ensemble cast including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Andy García, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Julia Roberts, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Vincent Cassel, Eddie Jemison, Carl Reiner, and Elliott Gould.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: "Ocean's Twelve" was released theatrically in the United States on December 10, 2004, by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film received mixed reviews from critics and grossed $362.9 million worldwide, becoming the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2004. It was followed by "Ocean's Thirteen" (2007), with Soderbergh and most of the cast again returning.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: Terry Benedict locates all eleven members of Danny Ocean's crew, demanding they return the $160 million they stole from his casinos plus $38 million in interest. He gives Danny's crew a two-week deadline to return the allotted sum. Short by half the amount, the group schemes to stage a heist in Amsterdam to avoid problems with U.S. authorities. They are tipped off by an informant named Matsui about the location of the first stock certificate ever issued. After a complex series of schemes, they find the document has already been stolen by the "Night Fox", another master thief. Europol detective Isabel Lahiri is called in to investigate the theft and realizes that she gave Rusty the idea of how to solve a complication of the heist with a description of a similar burglary during their earlier relationship. Surprising the group at their accommodations, she warns them they cannot beat the Night Fox or his mentor, the mysterious master thief known as "LeMarc", both of whom excel in practicing the "long con", and steals Rusty's phone. She has been hunting both for years.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: Danny and his crew discover that the Night Fox is François Toulour, a wealthy French baron and gentleman thief who has a villa on Lake Como. Danny goes to the villa and steals Toulour's paintings. He confronts Toulour, who reveals that he had exposed their identities to Benedict (breaking the code of silence among thieves) and hired Matsui to inform the crew about the stock certificate in order to arrange the meeting with Danny. Toulour is upset that LeMarc suggested Danny may be a better thief than him and challenges Danny to steal the Imperial Coronation Fabergé Egg. If Danny and his crew win, Toulour will pay off the debt to Benedict.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: The crew begin to plan an elaborate heist to swap the egg for a holographic recreation, but Toulour gives the camera recordings from his villa to Lahiri, who deduces that they want to steal the egg through an intercepted phone call to Rusty. She then captures all of the crew except Linus, Tarr, Turk, and Saul. Linus comes up with a second plan involving Danny's wife, Tess, posing as a pregnant Julia Roberts in order to get close to the egg and swap it. They are foiled by Lahiri and a coincidentally present Bruce Willis, and the rest of the group members are captured. Lahiri is told that they are to be extradited to the U.S., while Linus is chosen first to be interrogated by the FBI agent assigned to collect them. It turns out that she is his mother, who organizes the release of the whole gang. She points out to Lahiri that she will face consequences for forging a signature on a Europol form to obtain the necessary arrest warrants for Ocean's gang.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: Sometime later, Danny and Tess return to Toulour's villa, where Toulour reveals his glee at their failure. He explains that he stole the egg at night using his agility and dancing skills to evade the museum's heavy security. Toulour's celebration is short-lived when Danny reveals that his group stole the real egg while it was in transit to the museum, and Toulour realizes they were tipped off by LeMarc. A flashback reveals that Danny and Rusty had met LeMarc earlier when he revealed his confidence trick intended to humiliate Toulour and, at the same time, restore to himself the Fabergé egg that he had stolen years ago but returned following his wife's wishes. Toulour is forced to admit that Danny won the bet and gives him the money for the debt to Benedict.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: The crew pay back Benedict and promise not to perform any more heists in his casinos, as Toulour is seen in the background spying on Benedict. Rusty takes Lahiri to a safe house that he claims has been lent to him by LeMarc. There, she is reunited with her father, who is revealed to be the man she has been pursuing for years: LeMarc.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: The film was shot in 2004 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, St. Petersburg, Florida and in Las Vegas at the Bellagio Hotel. Filming also took place in Chicago, Amsterdam, Paris, Monte Carlo, Lake Como (at George Clooney's Villa in Laglio), Rome and Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily. The production spent three weeks in the Netherlands; scenes were filmed in the KattenKabinet, the Hotel Pulitzer, Haarlem railway station, and The Hague City Hall. In Paris, scenes were shot at the Sorbonne, the Australian Embassy, and the Gare du Nord. Afterwards, filming moved to Italy. The Monte Carlo Casino and the Villa Erba (on Lake Como) also served as filming locations.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of based on reviews, and an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, "While some have found the latest star-studded heist flick to be a fun, glossy star vehicle, others declare it's lazy, self-satisfied and illogical." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 58 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: The film was criticized for its slow start, its complex plot and a final twist that negated much of the preceding action. "The Washington Post"s Stephen Hunter said that "it all ends on one of those infuriatingly sloppy notes where, having dramatized narrative events WXYZ for us, which we have taken on good faith, it suddenly and arbitrarily delivers narrative events STUV, which completely invalidate events WXYZ." "Newsweek" said that "while it looks like the cast is having a blast and a half, the studied hipness can get so pleased with itself it borders on the smug." Claudia Puig with "USA Today" remarked, "At the rate things are going, all of Hollywood will put in about a day's work on "Ocean's Seventeen"." "Ocean's Twelve" was rated by "Entertainment Weekly" as one of "The 25 Worst Sequels Ever Made".


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: In a positive review for the "Chicago Sun-Times", Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and applauded its cleverness: "The movie takes inventory of its characters with the same droll wit it does everything else ... The movie is all about behavior, dialogue, star power and wiseass in-jokes. I really sort of liked it." Steven Soderbergh has stated that it is his favorite of the then-three "Ocean's" films.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: The original soundtrack to "Ocean's Twelve" was released by Warner Bros. Records on December 7, 2004. David Holmes returned to compose the music for the film and won a BMI award.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: Holmes' songs "Amsterdam" and "I Love Art...Really!" were released as singles and do not appear on the commercial soundtrack LP. "The Real Story" is different in the film, which uses "Rito a Los Angeles" by Peppino de Luca, featuring part of the main riff of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida". The album also lacks "Thé à la Menthe" performed by La Caution, used during the Night Fox "laser-dance" sequence, "Margaret" by Giuseppe De Luca, which plays as the group are escorted from the police station, and "El Capitalismo Foraneo" by Gotan Project, which plays as Lahiri cracks Matsui.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: "Ascension to Virginity" was taken from the soundtrack of 1968 movie "Candy", where it likewise appeared in the epilogue.


title: Ocean's Twelve

text: A sequel, titled "Ocean's Thirteen" was released in 2007, also directed by Steven Soderbergh. It is the third installment in the Ocean's franchise, and the final film in the Ocean's Trilogy. All the male cast members reprised their roles, with Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin joining the cast, but neither Julia Roberts nor Catherine Zeta-Jones returned.


title: Black people

text: Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is most commonly used for people of sub-Saharan African ancestry and the indigenous peoples of Oceania, though it has been applied in many contexts to other groups, and is no indicator of any close ancestral relationship whatsoever. Indigenous African societies do not use the term "black" as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures. The term "black" may or may not be capitalized. The "AP Stylebook" changed its guide to capitalize the "b" in "black" in 2020. The "ASA Style Guide" says that the "b" should not be capitalized. Some perceive the term "black" as a derogatory, outdated, reductive or otherwise unrepresentative label, and as a result neither use nor define it, especially in African countries with little to no history of colonial racial segregation.


title: Black people

text: Contemporary anthropologists and other scientists, while recognizing the reality of biological variation between different human populations, regard the concept of a unified, distinguishable "Black race" as socially constructed. Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified "black", and these social constructs have changed over time. In a number of countries, societal variables affect classification as much as skin color, and the social criteria for "blackness" vary. In the United Kingdom, "black" was historically equivalent with "person of color", a general term for non-European peoples. In other regions such as Australasia, settlers applied the term "black" or it was used by local populations with different histories and ancestral backgrounds.


title: Black people

text: Numerous communities of dark-skinned peoples are present in North Africa, some dating from prehistoric communities. Others descend from migrants via the historical trans-Saharan trade or, after the Arab invasions of North Africa in the 7th century, from slaves from the trans-Saharan slave trade in North Africa.


title: Black people

text: In the 18th century, the Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail "the Warrior King" (1672–1727) raised a corps of 150,000 black soldiers, called his Black Guard.


title: Black people

text: According to Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's University of the State of Bahia, in the 21st century Afro-multiracials in the Arab world, including Arabs in North Africa, self-identify in ways that resemble multi-racials in Latin America. He claims that darker-toned Arabs, much like darker-toned Latin Americans, consider themselves white because they have some distant white ancestry.


title: Black people

text: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had a mother who was a dark-skinned Nubian Sudanese (Sudanese Arab) woman and a father who was a lighter-skinned Egyptian. In response to an advertisement for an acting position, as a young man he said, "I am not white but I am not exactly black either. My blackness is tending to reddish".


title: Black people

text: Due to the patriarchal nature of Arab society, Arab men, including during the slave trade in North Africa, enslaved more African women than men. The female slaves were often put to work in domestic service and agriculture. The men interpreted the Quran to permit sexual relations between a male master and his enslaved females outside of marriage (see Ma malakat aymanukum and sex), leading to many mixed-race children. When an enslaved woman became pregnant with her Arab master's child, she was considered as "umm walad" or "mother of a child", a status that granted her privileged rights. The child was given rights of inheritance to the father's property, so mixed-race children could share in any wealth of the father. Because the society was patrilineal, the children inherited their fathers' social status at birth and were born free.


title: Black people

text: Some mixed-race children succeeded their respective fathers as rulers, such as Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, who ruled Morocco from 1578 to 1608. He was not technically considered as a mixed-race child of a slave; his mother was Fulani and a concubine of his father.


title: Black people

text: In early 1991, non-Arabs of the Zaghawa people of Sudan attested that they were victims of an intensifying Arab apartheid campaign, segregating Arabs and non-Arabs (specifically, people of Nilotic ancestry). Sudanese Arabs, who controlled the government, were widely referred to as practicing apartheid against Sudan's non-Arab citizens. The government was accused of "deftly manipulat(ing) Arab solidarity" to carry out policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.


title: Black people

text: Sudanese Arabs are also black people in that they are culturally and linguistically Arabized indigenous peoples of Sudan of mostly Nilo-Saharans, Nubian, and Cushitic ancestry; their skin tone and appearance resembles that of other black people.


title: Black people

text: American University economist George Ayittey accused the Arab government of Sudan of practicing acts of racism against black citizens. According to Ayittey, "In Sudan... the Arabs monopolized power and excluded blacks – Arab apartheid." Many African commentators joined Ayittey in accusing Sudan of practicing Arab apartheid.


title: Black people

text: In the Sahara, the native Tuareg Berber populations kept "negro" slaves. Most of these captives were of Nilotic extraction, and were either purchased by the Tuareg nobles from slave markets in the Western Sudan or taken during raids. Their origin is denoted via the Ahaggar Berber word "Ibenheren" (sing. "Ébenher"), which alludes to slaves that only spoke a Nilo-Saharan language. These slaves were also sometimes known by the borrowed Songhay term "Bella".


title: Black people

text: Similarly, the Sahrawi indigenous peoples of the Western Sahara observed a class system consisting of high castes and low castes. Outside of these traditional tribal boundaries were "Negro" slaves, who were drawn from the surrounding areas.


title: Black people

text: In Ethiopia and Somalia, the slave classes mainly consisted of captured peoples from the Sudanese-Ethiopian and Kenyan-Somali international borders or other surrounding areas of Nilotic and Bantu peoples who were collectively known as "Shanqella" and "Adone" (both analogues to "negro" in an English-speaking context). Some of these slaves were captured during territorial conflicts in the Horn of Africa and then sold off to slave merchants. The earliest representation of this tradition dates from a seventh or eighth century BC inscription belonging to the Kingdom of Damat.


title: Black people

text: These captives and others of analogous morphology were distinguished as "tsalim barya" (dark-skinned slave) in contrast with the Afroasiatic-speaking nobles or "saba qayh" ("red men") or light-skinned slave; while on the other hand, western racial category standards do not differentiate between "saba qayh" ("red men"—light-skinned) or "saba tiqur" ("black men"—dark-skinned) Horn Africans (of either Afroasiatic-speaking, Nilotic-speaking or Bantu origin) thus considering all of them as "black people" (and in some case "negro") according to Western society's notion of race.


title: Black people

text: In South Africa, the period of colonization resulted in many unions and marriages between European and Africans (Bantu peoples of South Africa and Khoisans) from various tribes, resulting in mixed-race children. As the European colonialists acquired control of territory, they generally pushed the mixed-race and African populations into second-class status. During the first half of the 20th century, the white-dominated government classified the population according to four main racial groups: "Black", "White", "Asian" (mostly Indian), and "Coloured". The Coloured group included people of mixed Bantu, Khoisan, and European ancestry (with some Malay ancestry, especially in the Western Cape). The Coloured definition occupied an intermediary political position between the Black and White definitions in South Africa. It imposed a system of legal racial segregation, a complex of laws known as apartheid.


title: Black people

text: The apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria in the Population Registration Act of 1945 to determine who belonged in which group. Minor officials administered tests to enforce the classifications. When it was unclear from a person's physical appearance whether the individual should be considered Coloured or Black, the "pencil test" was used. A pencil was inserted into a person's hair to determine if the hair was kinky enough to hold the pencil, rather than having it pass through, as it would with smoother hair. If so, the person was classified as Black. Such classifications sometimes divided families.


title: Black people

text: Sandra Laing is a South African woman who was classified as Coloured by authorities during the apartheid era, due to her skin colour and hair texture, although her parents could prove at least three generations of European ancestors. At age 10, she was expelled from her all-white school. The officials' decisions based on her anomalous appearance disrupted her family and adult life. She was the subject of the 2008 biographical dramatic film "Skin", which won numerous awards. During the apartheid era, those classed as "Coloured" were oppressed and discriminated against. But, they had limited rights and overall had slightly better socioeconomic conditions than those classed as "Black". The government required that Blacks and Coloureds live in areas separate from Whites, creating large townships located away from the cities as areas for Blacks.


title: Black people

text: In the post-apartheid era, the Constitution of South Africa has declared the country to be a "Non-racial democracy". In an effort to redress past injustices, the ANC government has introduced laws in support of affirmative action policies for Blacks; under these they define "Black" people to include "Africans", "Coloureds" and "Asians". Some affirmative action policies favor "Africans" over "Coloureds" in terms of qualifying for certain benefits. Some South Africans categorized as "African Black" say that "Coloureds" did not suffer as much as they did during apartheid. "Coloured" South Africans are known to discuss their dilemma by saying, "we were not white enough under apartheid, and we are not black enough under the ANC (African National Congress)".


title: Black people

text: In 2008, the High Court in South Africa ruled that Chinese South Africans who were residents during the apartheid era (and their descendants) are to be reclassified as "Black people," solely for the purposes of accessing affirmative action benefits, because they were also "disadvantaged" by racial discrimination. Chinese people who arrived in the country after the end of apartheid do not qualify for such benefits.


title: Black people

text: Other than by appearance, "Coloureds" can usually be distinguished from "Blacks" by language. Most speak Afrikaans or English as a first language, as opposed to Bantu languages such as Zulu or Xhosa. They also tend to have more European-sounding names than Bantu names.


title: Black people

text: Historians estimate that between the advent of Islam in 650 CE and the abolition of slavery in the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-20th century, 10 to 18 million black Africans (known as the Zanj) were enslaved by east African slave traders and transported to the Arabian Peninsula and neighboring countries. This number far exceeded the number of slaves who were taken to the Americas. Several factors affected the visibility of descendants of this diaspora in 21st-century Arab societies: The traders shipped more female slaves than males, as there was a demand for them to serve as concubines in harems in the Arabian Peninsula and neighboring countries. Male slaves were castrated in order to serve as harem guards. The death toll of black African slaves from forced labor was high. The mixed-race children of female slaves and Arab owners were assimilated into the Arab owners' families under the patrilineal kinship system. As a result, few distinctive Afro-Arab communities have survived in the Arabian Peninsula and neighboring countries.


title: Black people

text: Distinctive and self-identified black communities have been reported in countries such as Iraq, with a reported 1.2 million black people (Afro-Iraqis), and they attest to a history of discrimination. These descendants of the Zanj have sought minority status from the government, which would reserve some seats in Parliament for representatives of their population. According to Alamin M. Mazrui et al., generally in the Arabian Peninsula and neighboring countries, most of these communities identify as both black and Arab.


title: Black people

text: Afro-Iranians are people of black African ancestry residing in Iran. During the Qajar dynasty, many wealthy households imported black African women and children as slaves to perform domestic work. This slave labor was drawn exclusively from the Zanj, who were Bantu-speaking peoples that lived along the African Great Lakes, in an area roughly comprising modern-day Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi.


title: Black people

text: About 150,000 East African and black people live in Israel, amounting to just over 2% of the nation's population. The vast majority of these, some 120,000, are Beta Israel, most of whom are recent immigrants who came during the 1980s and 1990s from Ethiopia. In addition, Israel is home to more than 5,000 members of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem movement that are ancestry of African Americans who emigrated to Israel in the 20th century, and who reside mainly in a distinct neighborhood in the Negev town of Dimona. Unknown numbers of black converts to Judaism reside in Israel, most of them converts from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.


title: Black people

text: Additionally, there are around 60,000 non-Jewish African immigrants in Israel, some of whom have sought asylum. Most of the migrants are from communities in Sudan and Eritrea, particularly the Niger-Congo-speaking Nuba groups of the southern Nuba Mountains; some are illegal immigrants.


title: Black people

text: Beginning several centuries ago, during the period of the Ottoman Empire, tens of thousands of Zanj captives were brought by slave traders to plantations and agricultural areas situated between Antalya and Istanbul, which gave rise to the Afro-Turk population in present-day Turkey. Some of their ancestry remained "in situ", and many migrated to larger cities and towns. Other black slaves were transported to Crete, from where they or their descendants later reached the İzmir area through the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, or indirectly from Ayvalık in pursuit of work.