title: Blue

text: In 1824 the Societé pour l'Encouragement d'Industrie in France offered a prize for the invention of an artificial ultramarine which could rival the natural colour made from lapis lazuli. The prize was won in 1826 by a chemist named Jean Baptiste Guimet, but he refused to reveal the formula of his colour. In 1828, another scientist, Christian Gmelin then a professor of chemistry in Tübingen, found the process and published his formula. This was the beginning of new industry to manufacture artificial ultramarine, which eventually almost completely replaced the natural product.


title: Blue

text: In 1878 German chemists synthesized indigo. This product rapidly replaced natural indigo, wiping out vast farms growing indigo. It is now the blue of blue jeans. As the pace of organic chemistry accelerated, a succession of synthetic blue dyes were discovered including Indanthrone blue, which had even greater resistance to fading during washing or in the sun, and copper phthalocyanine.


title: Blue

text: Blue dyes are organic compounds, both synthetic and natural. Woad and true indigo were once used but since the early 1900s, all indigo is synthetic. Produced on an industrial scale, indigo is the blue of blue jeans.


title: Blue

text: For food, the triarylmethane dye Brilliant blue FCF is used for candies. The search continues for stable, natural blue dyes suitable for the food industry.


title: Blue

text: Blue pigments were once produced from minerals, especially lapis lazuli and its close relative ultramarine. These minerals were crushed, ground into powder, and then mixed with a quick-drying binding agent, such as egg yolk (tempera painting); or with a slow-drying oil, such as linseed oil, for oil painting. Two inorganic but synthetic blue pigments are cerulean blue (primarily cobalt(II) stanate: ) and Prussian blue (milori blue: primarily ). The chromophore in blue glass and glazes is cobalt(II). Diverse cobalt(II) salts such as cobalt carbonate or cobalt(II) aluminate are mixed with the silica prior to firing. The cobalt occupies sites otherwise filled with silicon.


title: Blue

text: Methyl blue is the dominant blue pigment in inks used in pens. Blueprinting involves the production of Prussian blue in situ.


title: Blue

text: Certain metal ions characteristically form blue solutions or blue salts. Of some practical importance, cobalt is used to make the deep blue glazes and glasses. It substitutes for silicon or aluminum ions in these materials. Cobalt is the blue chromophore in stained glass windows, such as those in Gothic cathedrals and in Chinese porcelain beginning in the T'ang Dynasty. Copper(II) (Cu) also produces many blue compounds, including the commercial algicide copper(II) sulfate (CuSO5HO). Similarly, vanadyl salts and solutions are often blue, e.g. vanadyl sulfate.


title: Blue

text: When sunlight passes through the atmosphere, the blue wavelengths are scattered more widely by the oxygen and nitrogen molecules, and more blue comes to our eyes. This effect is called Rayleigh scattering, after Lord Rayleigh and confirmed by Albert Einstein in 1911.


title: Blue

text: The sea is seen as blue for largely the same reason: the water absorbs the longer wavelengths of red and reflects and scatters the blue, which comes to the eye of the viewer. The deeper the observer goes, the darker the blue becomes. In the open sea, only about one per cent of light penetrates to a depth of 200 metres. (See underwater and euphotic depth)


title: Blue

text: The colour of the sea is also affected by the colour of the sky, reflected by particles in the water; and by algae and plant life in the water, which can make it look green; or by sediment, which can make it look brown.


title: Blue

text: The farther away an object is, the more blue it often appears to the eye. For example, mountains in the distance often appear blue. This is the effect of atmospheric perspective; the farther an object is away from the viewer, the less contrast there is between the object and its background colour, which is usually blue. In a painting where different parts of the composition are blue, green and red, the blue will appear to be more distant, and the red closer to the viewer. The cooler a colour is, the more distant it seems. Blue light is scattered more than other wavelengths by the gases in the atmosphere, hence our "blue planet".


title: Blue

text: Some of the most desirable gems are blue, including sapphire and tanzanite. Compounds of copper(II) are characteristically blue and so are many copper-containing minerals.


title: Blue

text: Azurite (, with a deep blue colour, was once employed in medieval years, but it is unstable pigment, losing its colour especially under dry conditions. Lapis lazuli, mined in Afghanistan for more than three thousand years, was used for jewelry and ornaments, and later was crushed and powdered and used as a pigment. The more it was ground, the lighter the blue colour became. Natural ultramarine, made was the finest available blue pigment in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It was extremely expensive, and in Italian Renaissance art, it was often reserved for the robes of the Virgin Mary.


title: Blue

text: Intense efforts have focused on blue flowers and the possibility that natural blue colourants could be used as food dyes. Commonly, blue colours in plants are anthocyanins: "the largest group of water-soluble pigments found widespread in the plant kingdom." In the few plants that exploit structural colouration, brilliant colours are produced by structures within cells. The most brilliant blue colouration known in any living tissue is found in the marble berries of "Pollia condensata", where a spiral structure of cellulose fibrils scattering blue light. The fruit of quandong (Santalum acuminatum) can appear blue owing to the same effect.


title: Blue

text: Blue-pigmented animals are relatively rare. Examples of which include butterflies of the genus "Nessaea", where blue is created by pterobilin. Other blue pigments of animal origin include phorcabilin, used by other butterflies in "Graphium" and "Papilio" (specifically "P. phorcas" and "P. weiskei"), and sarpedobilin, which is used by "Graphium sarpedon". Blue-pigmented organelles, known as "cyanosomes", exist in the chromatophores of at least two fish species, the mandarin fish and the picturesque dragonet. More commonly, blueness in animals is a structural colouration; an optical interference effect induced by organized nanometer-sized scales or fibres. Examples include the plumage of several birds like the blue jay and indigo bunting, the scales of butterflies like the morpho butterfly, collagen fibres in the skin of some species of monkey and opossum, and the iridophore cells in some fish and frogs.


title: Blue

text: Blue eyes do not actually contain any blue pigment. Eye colour is determined by two factors: the pigmentation of the eye's iris and the scattering of light by the turbid medium in the stroma of the iris. In humans, the pigmentation of the iris varies from light brown to black. The appearance of blue, green, and hazel eyes results from the Tyndall scattering of light in the stroma, an optical effect similar to what accounts for the blueness of the sky. The irises of the eyes of people with blue eyes contain less dark melanin than those of people with brown eyes, which means that they absorb less short-wavelength blue light, which is instead reflected out to the viewer. Eye colour also varies depending on the lighting conditions, especially for lighter-coloured eyes.


title: Blue

text: Blue eyes are most common in Ireland, the Baltic Sea area and Northern Europe, and are also found in Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe. Blue eyes are also found in parts of Western Asia, most notably in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. In Estonia, 99% of people have blue eyes. In Denmark in 1978, only 8% of the population had brown eyes, though through immigration, today that number is about 11%. In Germany, about 75% have blue eyes.


title: Blue

text: In the United States, as of 2006, one out of every six people, or 16.6% of the total population, and 22.3% of the white population, have blue eyes, compared with about half of Americans born in 1900, and a third of Americans born in 1950. Blue eyes are becoming less common among American children. In the US, boys are 3–5 per cent more likely to have blue eyes than girls.


title: Blue

text: As early as the 7th millennium BC, lapis lazuli was mined in the Sar-i Sang mines, in Shortugai, and in other mines in Badakhshan province in northeast Afghanistan.


title: Blue

text: Lapis lazuli artifacts, dated to 7570 BC, have been found at Bhirrana, which is the oldest site of Indus Valley civilisation. Lapis was highly valued by the Indus Valley Civilisation (7570–1900 BC). Lapis beads have been found at Neolithic burials in Mehrgarh, the Caucasus, and as far away as Mauritania. It was used in the funeral mask of Tutankhamun (1341–1323 BC).


title: Blue

text: A term for Blue was relatively rare in many forms of ancient art and decoration, and even in ancient literature. The Ancient Greek poets described the sea as green, brown or "the colour of wine". The colour was not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Reds, blacks, browns, and ochres are found in cave paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period, but not blue. Blue was also not used for dyeing fabric until long after red, ochre, pink, and purple. This is probably due to the perennial difficulty of making blue dyes and pigments. On the other hand, the rarity of blue pigment made it even more valuable.


title: Blue

text: The earliest known blue dyes were made from plants – woad in Europe, indigo in Asia and Africa, while blue pigments were made from minerals, usually either lapis lazuli or azurite, and required more. Blue glazes posed still another challenge since the early blue dyes and pigments were not thermally robust. In ca. 2500 BC, the blue glaze Egyptian blue was introduced for ceramics, as well as many other objects. The Greeks imported indigo dye from India, calling it indikon, and they painted with Egyptian blue. Blue was not one of the four primary colours for Greek painting described by Pliny the Elder (red, yellow, black, and white). For the Romans, blue was the colour of mourning, as well as the colour of barbarians. The Celts and Germans reportedly dyed their faces blue to frighten their enemies, and tinted their hair blue when they grew old. The Romans made extensive use of indigo and Egyptian blue pigment, as evidenced, in part, by frescos in Pompeii.


title: Blue

text: The Romans had many words for varieties of blue, including , , , , , , , and , but two words, both of foreign origin, became the most enduring; , from the Germanic word "blau", which eventually became "bleu" or blue; and , from the Arabic word , which became azure.


title: Blue

text: Blue was widely used in the decoration of churches in the Byzantine Empire. By contrast, in the Islamic world, blue was of secondary to green, believed to be the favourite colour of the Prophet Mohammed. At certain times in Moorish Spain and other parts of the Islamic world, blue was the colour worn by Christians and Jews, because only Muslims were allowed to wear white and green.


title: Blue

text: In the art and life of Europe during the early Middle Ages, blue played a minor role. This changed dramatically between 1130 and 1140 in Paris, when the Abbe Suger rebuilt the Saint Denis Basilica. Suger considered that light was the visible manifestation of the Holy Spirit. He installed stained glass windows coloured with cobalt, which, combined with the light from the red glass, filled the church with a bluish violet light. The church became the marvel of the Christian world, and the colour became known as the . In the years that followed even more elegant blue stained glass windows were installed in other churches, including at Chartres Cathedral and Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.


title: Blue

text: In the 12th century the Roman Catholic Church dictated that painters in Italy (and the rest of Europe consequently) to paint the Virgin Mary with blue, which became associated with holiness, humility and virtue. In medieval paintings, blue was used to attract the attention of the viewer to the Virgin Mary. Paintings of the mythical King Arthur began to show him dressed in blue. The coat of arms of the kings of France became an azure or light blue shield, sprinkled with golden fleur-de-lis or lilies. Blue had come from obscurity to become the royal colour.


title: Blue

text: Blue came into wider use beginning in the Renaissance, when artists began to paint the world with perspective, depth, shadows, and light from a single source. In Renaissance paintings, artists tried to create harmonies between blue and red, lightening the blue with lead white paint and adding shadows and highlights. Raphael was a master of this technique, carefully balancing the reds and the blues so no one colour dominated the picture.


title: Blue

text: Ultramarine was the most prestigious blue of the Renaissance, being more expensive than gold. Wealthy art patrons commissioned works with the most expensive blues possible. In 1616 Richard Sackville commissioned a portrait of himself by Isaac Oliver with three different blues, including ultramarine pigment for his stockings.


title: Blue

text: An industry for the manufacture of fine blue and white pottery began in the 14th century in Jingdezhen, China, using white Chinese porcelain decorated with patterns of cobalt blue, imported from Persia. It was first made for the family of the Emperor of China, then was exported around the world, with designs for export adapted to European subjects and tastes. The Chinese blue style was also adapted by Dutch craftsmen in [Delft and English craftsmen in Staffordshire in the 17th-18th centuries. in the 18th century, blue and white porcelains were produced by Josiah Wedgwood and other British craftsmen.


title: Blue

text: The early 19th century saw the ancestor of the modern blue business suit, created by Beau Brummel (1776-1840), who set fashion at the London Court. It also saw the invention of blue jeans, a highly popular form of workers's costume, invented in 1853 by Jacob W. Davis who used metal rivets to strengthen blue denim work clothing in the California gold fields. The invention was funded by San Francisco entrepreneur Levi Strauss, and spread around the world.


title: Blue

text: Recognizing the emotional power of blue, many artists made it the central element of paintings in the 19th and 20th centuries. They included Pablo Picasso, Pavel Kuznetsov and the Blue Rose art group, and Kandinsky and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) school. Henri Matisse expressed deep emotions with blue:, "A certain blue penetrates your soul." In the second half of the 20th century, painters of the abstract expressionist movement use blues to inspire ideas and emotions. Painter Mark Rothko observed that colour was "only an instrument;" his interest was "in expressing human emotions tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on."


title: Blue

text: In the 17th century. The Prince-Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick William I of Prussia, chose Prussian blue as the new colour of Prussian military uniforms, because it was made with Woad, a local crop, rather than Indigo, which was produced by the colonies of Brandenburg's rival, England. It was worn by the German army until World War I, with the exception of the soldiers of Bavaria, who wore sky-blue.


title: Blue

text: In 1748, the Royal Navy adopted a dark shade of blue for the uniform of officers. It was first known as marine blue, now known as navy blue. The militia organized by George Washington selected blue and buff, the colours of the British Whig Party. Blue continued to be the colour of the field uniform of the US Army until 1902, and is still the colour of the dress uniform.


title: Blue

text: In the 19th century, police in the United Kingdom, including the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police also adopted a navy blue uniform. Similar traditions were embraced in France and Austria. It was also adopted at about the same time for the uniforms of the officers of the New York City Police Department.


title: Blue

text: In sports, blue is widely represented in uniforms in part because the majority of national teams wear the colours of their national flag. For example, the World Cup-winning France are known as "Les Bleus" (the Blues). Similarly, Argentina, Italy, and Uruguay wear blue shirts. The Asian Football Confederation and the Oceania Football Confederation use blue text on their logos. Blue is well represented in baseball (Blue Jays, basketball, and American football, and Ice hockey. The Indian national cricket team wears blue uniform during One day international matches, as such the team is also referred to as "Men in Blue".


title: Blue

text: Unlike red or green, blue was not strongly associated with any particular country, religion or political movement. As the colour of harmony, it was chosen as the colour for the flags of the United Nations, the European Union, and NATO.


title: Blue

text: In politics, blue is sometimes used as the colour of conservative parties, contrasting with the red of more leftist parties. It is the colour of the British Conservative party. However, in the United States, the colours are reversed. To avoid associations of the Democrats with socialism or the far left, States which voted Democratic in four consecutive presidential elections are termed "blue states", while those which voted for Republicans are termed "red states". States which voted for different parties in two of the last four presidential elections are called "Swing States", and are usually coloured purple, a mix of red and blue, or sometimes pink or light blue.


title: Tila Tequila

text: Nguyễn Thị Thiên Thanh (born October 24, 1981), better known by her stage names Tila Tequila, Tila Nguyen, Miss Tila and Tornado Thien, is an American television and social media personality. She first gained recognition for her active presence on social networking websites. After becoming the most popular person on Myspace, Tequila was offered the opportunity to star in her own reality television series. Her bisexuality-themed dating show, "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila" (2007), aired for two seasons and became MTV's second highest-rated series premiere of that year.


title: Tila Tequila

text: Born in Singapore and raised in Houston, Texas, Tequila moved to Los Angeles in 2001 to pursue her modeling career. After being featured in numerous men's magazines (including "Playboy", "Stuff" and "Maxim"), she made her reality television debut on the VH1 show "Surviving Nugent" (2003). Besides her career in modeling and television, Tequila also pursued her career as a recording artist. She was the lead singer of the bands Beyond Betty Jean and Jealousy, before launching a solo career. Her debut single "I Love U" was released in 2007 to mixed reviews. Despite having strong online sales, the song failed to enter any charts. Tequila followed with several independently released singles, including "Stripper Friends" and "Paralyze". In 2010, she released her second EP, "Welcome to the Dark Side". Her book, "Hooking Up With Tila Tequila: A Guide to Love, Fame, Happiness, Success, and Being the Life of the Party", was published in 2008.


title: Tila Tequila

text: After expressing her support of Adolf Hitler, and making antisemitic and white nationalist comments, she was expelled from "Celebrity Big Brother".


title: Tila Tequila

text: Nguyen was born in Singapore, where her family were Vietnamese boat people, who arrived from Vietnam after the Vietnam War. Nguyen has an older brother, Daniel, and older sister, Terri. When she was one year old, the family relocated to a neighborhood in Houston, Texas and were eventually admitted to a gated community run by a strict Buddhist temple. The family left the community when Nguyen was eight.


title: Tila Tequila

text: Nguyen was nicknamed "Tila Tequila" by friends due to her apparent allergy to alcohol. In her memoir, she would later explain that she felt "confused" and "lost" by various personal family and environmental issues. She turned to writing poetry in an attempt to release powerful emotions. At age 16, Nguyen ran away to Queens, New York City, for several months. While still 16, she experienced a drive-by shooting in Houston. She reports having become pregnant and suffering a miscarriage the following year.


title: Tila Tequila

text: Nguyen graduated from Alief Hastings High School in 2000. She has cited her violent adolescence in Texas as her reason for becoming a model and moving to California in 2001. In a March 2003 interview, she revealed that she has taken some college classes but does not have a degree, stating, "I didn't want to go to college for an actual degree because there's nothing out there I like besides doing something that involves the entertainment industry."


title: Tila Tequila

text: Nguyen's career began at the age of 19 when she was discovered at the Sharpstown Mall by a "Playboy" scout and was offered a chance to model nude for the magazine. She did a test shoot, then eventually moved to Southern California and was featured as "Playboy"s Cybergirl of the Week on April 22, 2002, and soon thereafter she became the first Asian Cyber Girl of the Month. A few more pictorials for the magazine followed.


title: Tila Tequila

text: At age 20, Nguyen acted on her interest in rock music and started looking for bands willing to let her join. She eventually assembled a band called Beyond Betty Jean, for which she was singer and songwriter. Beyond Betty Jean eventually broke up and Nguyen started working in recording studios to sharpen her vocal skills and wrote music. Later, she became the lead singer of a band called Jealousy, which released a few songs online before breaking up. In 2003, Nguyen was a contestant on VH1's "Surviving Nugent", a reality TV show where participants performed compromising tasks and stunts for rock star Ted Nugent.


title: Tila Tequila

text: Nguyen gained further popularity through the import racing scene. She has been featured on the cover of "Import Tuner" magazine, at car shows such as Hot Import Nights, and in the video game "Street Racing Syndicate". Nguyen joined Myspace in the fall of 2003 after getting booted off of Friendster multiple times. "Time" magazine, in a 2006 profile of Nguyen noted her impact on the platform stating "Pre-Tila, your MySpace friends were mostly people you actually knew. Post-Tila, the biggest game on the site became Who Has the Most Friends, period, whoever they might be," also calling her, the "Queen" of the site.


title: Tila Tequila

text: During the first season of Fuse TV's dance show, "Pants-Off Dance-Off", on which a group of contestants strip to music videos, Nguyen was the most frequent host. In April 2006, during the taping of an interview with MTV's "Total Request Live" VJs, will.i.am announced that Nguyen had been signed to the Will.I.Am music group, a record label under A&M Records. Despite this major-label signing, Nguyen independently released her first single "I Love U" through iTunes on February 27, 2007, justifying the independent release through her desire to become famous by herself. She also shot a music video for the song. In March 2007, Washington-based record label The Saturday Team released an EP called "Sex", by Tila Tequila. On July 27, 2007, Italian website MusicBlob reported that The Saturday Team and distributor Icon Music Entertainment Services sued Nguyen over breaching her contract related to the album. However, Nguyen claimed in a MySpace bulletin that the EP was not authorized for release by her, and was removed from most retailers. The Saturday Team won a legal case, making "Sex" available for digital purchase. Nguyen made an appearance as one of the 12 strangers in the first game on April 6, 2007, episode of NBC's game show "Identity". On March 4, 2007, she made a cameo appearance on the show "The War At Home". She also appeared as a Hooters Girl in the 2007 film "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry".


title: Tila Tequila

text: In May 2007, Nguyen began filming for a reality show which first aired on MTV on October 9, 2007, as "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila". The program was a bisexual-themed dating show where 16 straight men and 16 lesbian women competed for Nguyen's affections, the twist being that the contestants were not aware of her bisexuality until the end of the first episode. The ten-episode series was produced by SallyAnn Salsano and MTV. The show led to a heated online debate between Nguyen and conservative Christians after an article appeared on "The Christian Post" on September 13, 2007. After seeing the article, Nguyen wrote an impassioned response in her blog on September 28, 2007, criticizing churches for "bashing" the gay community while thanking God for saving her life. The show premiered for a second season in April 2008 and became a popular gossip subject in Asian media, such as "AsianWeek". The season finale premiered July 8, 2008, the winner being Kristy Morgan, who declined her "shot at love".


title: Tila Tequila

text: On October 9, 2007, Nguyen released her second official single, "Stripper Friends". A video premiered via Yahoo! Music on February 26, 2008, and was released to iTunes on March 4, 2008. The single failed to chart. In April 2008, the single "Paralyze" and its accompanying music video were released via Yahoo! Music and iTunes. The "I Love U Remixes" EP was released to digital music retailers on April 7, 2009. On December 2, 2008, Nguyen released a self-help book, "Hooking Up with Tila Tequila: A Guide to Love, Fame, Happiness, Success, and Being the Life of the Party" ().


title: Tila Tequila

text: By 2010, Tequila decided to reinvent her image and changed her stage name to Miss Tila. Her first single released under the new moniker was "I Fucked the DJ", along with an edited version entitled "I Love My DJ". Released under her newly established label Little Miss Trendsetter, the single received negative reviews and failed to be successful in charts. In May, she launched her celebrity gossip blog, MissTilaOMG.com, and the EP, "Welcome to the Darkside", which marked a musical departure from her previous material. Influenced by classical music and artists such as Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, "Welcome to the Darkside" received more positive reviews. However, it did not manage to gain commercial success.


title: Tila Tequila

text: Tequila began a tour supporting the new EP and at one of her tour stops in August 2010, she appeared at the Gathering of the Juggalos, a music festival founded by hip hop duo Insane Clown Posse. She was repeatedly pelted with rocks and bottles among other objects, and she vowed to take legal action against the organizers and promoters for the event.


title: Tila Tequila

text: During this time, a sex tape featuring a lesbian threesome in which she performed was leaked. Tequila tried to buy back the tape before its release, but couldn't come to terms with Vivid Entertainment. She later starred in a sex tape that won a 2015 AVN Award for "Best Celebrity Sex Tape".


title: Tila Tequila

text: In May 2015, it was announced that Nguyen was working on new music. In June, she posted a snippet of the song "Drunk Dialing" on her Instagram and wrote it would be released in the Summer. In August, she became one of the contestants on the sixteenth season of Channel 5 reality series "Celebrity Big Brother". However, she was ejected from the house after just one day, due to many viewer complaints of her controversial statements made in 2013, when she posted anti-Semitic comments and praised Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler on Facebook. Tequila posted a snippet of "Drunk Dialing" again in September and confirmed it would be released by the end of October along with a music video. In November, Tequila and her management confirmed the single would be released on December 4. Tequila also announced her own line of e-liquids for vaporizers in collaboration with Blaze Vapors.


title: Tila Tequila

text: In July 2001, Nguyen started the website TilasHotSpot.com, which later began redirecting to MissTila.com. Originally the site featured information, quotes, blog, and pictorials requiring adult verification and a monthly fee. Later, the site was revamped to feature all-ages content and information to promote her career, business ventures, personal information, and a premium membership section including videos, non-nude picture galleries, blogs, and chat sessions. In 2008 the site was transformed into a social network.


title: Tila Tequila

text: During 2005, Nguyen launched TilaFashion.com, a site featuring her custom line of clothing for men and women. In 2006, Nguyen created another website, TilaZone.com which features content to use on Myspace and other social networking websites including layouts, widgets, and clipart.


title: Tila Tequila

text: In December 2009, Nguyen partnered with Joe Francis to launch the now-defunct dating website TilasHotSpotDating.com, aimed at people ages 18 and up. The site included a free membership with basic access, and paid membership for other areas of the site. Nguyen took in webcam chats on the site.


title: Tila Tequila

text: In 2010, Nguyen launched a celebrity blog site, MissTilaOMG.com, which was transformed into her personal blog in 2012.


title: Tila Tequila

text: Nguyen was featured on the cover of the April 2006 issue of "Stuff" magazine; in the interview, she claimed that her nickname "Tila Tequila" came about when she experimented with alcohol at the age of 13. She appeared on the August 2006 "Maxim" UK cover, was named #88 in their Hot 100 List, and also appeared in the December 2007 issue. She was ranked #100 on the Maxim Hot 100 list in 2008.


title: Tila Tequila

text: Nguyen has been featured on the front page of magazines such as "Penthouse", "King", "Blender", and most recently "Steppin' Out".


title: Tila Tequila

text: In December 2013, Nguyen posted an article on her website titled "Why I Sympathize with Hitler: Part I". She also posted pro-Hitler and antisemitic comments on her Facebook page, as well as photos of herself as a scantily clad Nazi posing in front of a photo of the Auschwitz concentration camp. These actions angered her Facebook followers, and resulted in Facebook closing her account and removing the material in question.


title: Tila Tequila

text: In August 2015, Tequila became a contestant in the sixteenth series of British television reality show "Celebrity Big Brother", but was asked to leave the program on its second day when producers became aware of her comments and photos. She subsequently apologized for her earlier comments, blaming them on depression and drug addiction.


title: Tila Tequila

text: On May 6, 2016, Nguyen tweeted that Jewish-American political commentator Ben Shapiro should "be gassed and sent back to Israel" and later posted that "There are only two things in this world, for which I would gladly sacrifice my own life; the destruction of all Jews and preservation of the white race" and "You know what will help Asians earn respect? An Asian version of Adolf Hitler… I want that person to be me; I want to save the world from this Zionist disease!".


title: Tila Tequila

text: In June 2016, Tila Tequila accused Sarah Silverman and the Jews of killing Jesus before saying the comedian was next on a "celebrity sacrifice" list.


title: Tila Tequila

text: On November 19, 2016, she attended an alt-right National Policy Institute meeting celebrating the election of Donald Trump, organized by white supremacist Richard B. Spencer, and posted photos on social media of herself doing a Nazi salute. One was posted to Twitter with the text "Seig heil!" [sic] and a raised hand. On November 22, 2016, her account was suspended by Twitter. Consequently, she joined Gab.


title: Tila Tequila

text: On March 7, 2012, it was reported that Tequila had agreed to check into rehab after having reportedly "almost died" from an attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. The incident caused her to be hospitalized from a brain aneurysm. Tequila completed her rehab treatment on April 5, 2012.


title: Tila Tequila

text: Tequila has expressed her belief that the earth is not a sphere but is flat. In 2018, she began using another stage name, Tornado Thien.


title: Tila Tequila

text: By the end of 2007, Tequila was linked to the winner of her dating show "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila", Bobby Banhart. In January 2008, she revealed that she and Banhart had ended their relationship. Shortly afterwards, Banhart posted a message on his Myspace stating he had never dated Tequila and that she "never called him after the last show and no one would give him her number." Tequila later came out as a lesbian rather than a bisexual and stated that she wanted to pick the show's runner-up Dani Campbell but the producers made her pick Banhart.


title: Tila Tequila

text: In March 2018, Tequila uploaded a video to YouTube, saying that she was neither lesbian nor bisexual and that she only pretended to be in order to create ratings for "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila" and had a boyfriend while filming the show. Additionally, she associated homosexuality with the Devil and referred to former contestants of the show as "degenerate" and "disgusting".


title: Tila Tequila

text: On December 9, 2009, Tequila stated she was engaged to heiress Casey Johnson, daughter of businessman Woody Johnson, and was photographed with a diamond ring. Johnson died on January 4, 2010, of complications resulting from diabetes.


title: Tila Tequila

text: Tequila began dating musician Thomas Paxton Whitaker (born 1971) in 2013, which ended due to Whitaker's financial problems. On April 18, 2014, Tequila confirmed her pregnancy on her Facebook page. Tequila gave birth to her first daughter on November 16, 2014.


title: Tila Tequila

text: On September 6, 2009, Tequila was allegedly choked and restrained by former boyfriend Shawne Merriman, who was later arrested. San Diego district attorney Bonnie Dumanis decided not to charge Merriman after her office spent three days reviewing reports from the San Diego County Sheriff's Department. On November 17, 2009, Tequila sued Merriman for $1.5 million. Several weeks later, Merriman countersued, alleging intentional interference with contract, unfair competition, and trademark infringement. She declined to respond to his more recent actions and a default judgment was entered in his favor for $2 million. However, the default judgment was later set aside in January 2010. In February 2010, both sides jointly moved the court to dismiss the claim, and the court dismissed the case on the same day.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Francisco "Pancho" Villa (, ; ; born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, 5 June 1878 – 20 July 1923) was a general in the Mexican Revolution. He was a key figure in the revolutionary movement that forced out President Porfirio Díaz and brought Francisco I. Madero to power in 1911. When Madero was ousted by a coup led by General Victoriano Huerta in February 1913, he led anti-Huerta forces in the Constitutionalist Army 1913–14. The commander of the coalition was civilian governor of Coahuila Venustiano Carranza. After the defeat and exile of Huerta in July 1914, Villa broke with Carranza. Villa dominated the meeting of revolutionary generals that excluded Carranza and helped create a coalition government. Emiliano Zapata and Villa became formal allies in this period, but it was only in principle. Like Zapata, Villa was strongly in favor of land reform, but his plans were not implemented when he had power. At the height of his power and popularity in late 1914 and early 1915, the U.S. considered recognizing him as Mexico's legitimate authority. Civil war broke out when Carranza challenged Villa. Villa was decisively defeated by Constitutionalist General Álvaro Obregón in summer 1915, and the U.S. aided Carranza directly against Villa in the Second Battle of Agua Prieta in November 1915. Much of Villa's army left after Villa's defeat on the battlefield and for his lack of resources to buy arms and pay soldiers' salaries. Angered at the U.S. aid to Carranza, Villa conducted a raid on the border town of Columbus, New Mexico to goad the U.S. to invade Mexico in 1916–17. Despite a major contingent of soldiers and the latest military technology, the U.S. failed to capture Villa. When President Carranza was ousted from power in 1920, Villa negotiated an amnesty with interim President Adolfo de la Huerta and was given a landed estate, on the condition he retire from politics. He was assassinated in 1923. Although his faction did not prevail in the Revolution, he is one of its most charismatic and prominent figures.


title: Pancho Villa

text: In life, Villa helped fashion his own image as an internationally known revolutionary hero, starring as himself in Hollywood films and giving interviews to foreign journalists, most notably John Reed. After his death he was excluded from the pantheon of revolutionary heroes until the Sonoran generals Obregón and Calles, whom he battled during the Revolution, were gone from the political stage. Villa's exclusion from the official narrative of the Revolution might have contributed to his continued posthumous popular acclaim. He was celebrated during the Revolution and long afterward by "corridos", films about his life, and novels by prominent writers. In 1976, his remains were reburied in the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City in a huge public ceremony.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa told a number of conflicting stories about his early life. According to most sources, he was born on 5 June 1878, and named José Doroteo Arango Arámbula at birth. As a child, he received some education from a local church-run school, but was not proficient in more than basic literacy. His father was a sharecropper named Agustín Arango, and his mother was Micaela Arámbula. He grew up at the "Rancho de la Coyotada", one of the largest haciendas in the state of Durango. The family's residence now houses the Casa de Pancho Villa historic museum in San Juan del Rio. Doroteo later claimed to be the son of the bandit Agustín Villa, but according to at least one scholar, "the identity of his real father is still unknown." He was the oldest of five children. He quit school to help his mother after his father died, and worked as a sharecropper, muleskinner ("arriero"), butcher, bricklayer, and foreman for a U.S. railway company.


title: Pancho Villa

text: According to his dictated remembrances, published as "Memorias de Pancho Villa," at the age of 16 he moved to Chihuahua, but soon returned to Durango to track down and kill an hacienda owner named Agustín López Negrete who had raped his sister, afterward stealing a horse and fleeing to the Sierra Madre Occidental region of Durango, where he roamed the hills as a thief. Eventually, he became a member of a bandit band where he went by the name "Arango".


title: Pancho Villa

text: In 1902, the rurales, the crack rural police force of President Porfirio Díaz, arrested Pancho for stealing mules and for assault. Because of his connections with the powerful Pablo Valenzuela, who allegedly had been a recipient of goods stolen by Villa/Arango, he was spared the death sentence sometimes imposed on captured bandits. Pancho Villa was forcibly inducted into the Federal Army, a practice often adopted under the Diaz regime to deal with troublemakers. Several months later, he deserted and fled to the neighboring state of Chihuahua. where He tried to work as a butcher in Hidalgo del Parro but was forced out of business by the Terrarzus-Creel monolopy. In 1903, after killing an army officer and stealing his horse, he no longer was known as Arango but Francisco "Pancho" Villa after his paternal grandfather, Jesús Villa. However, others claim he appropriated the name from a bandit from Coahuila. He was known to his friends as "La Cucaracha" or ("the cockroach").


title: Pancho Villa

text: Until 1910, Villa is said to have alternated episodes of thievery with more legitimate pursuits. At one point he was employed as a miner, but that stint did not have a major impact on him. Villa's outlook on banditry changed after he met Abraham González, the local representative for presidential candidate Francisco Madero, a rich hacendado turned politician from the northern state of Coahuila, who opposed the continued rule of Díaz and convinced Villa that through his banditry he could fight for the people and hurt the hacienda owners.


title: Pancho Villa

text: At the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, for Villa and men like him operating as bandits, the turmoil provided expanded horizons, "a change of title, not of occupation" in one assessment. Villa joined in the armed rebellion that Francisco Madero called for in 1910 to oust incumbent President Porfirio Díaz in the Plan de San Luis Potosí. In Chihuahua, the leader of the anti-re-electionists, Abraham González, reached out to Villa to join the movement. Villa captured a large hacienda, then a train of Federal Army soldiers, and the town of San Andrés. He went on to beat the Federal Army in Naica, Camargo, and Pilar de Conchos, but lost at Tecolote. Villa met in person with Madero in March 1911, as the struggle to oust Díaz was ongoing. Although Madero had created a broad movement against Díaz, he was not sufficiently radical for anarcho-syndicalists of the Mexican Liberal Party, who challenged his leadership. Madero ordered Villa to deal with the threat, which he did, disarming and arresting them. Madero rewarded Villa by promoting him to colonel in the revolutionary forces.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Much of the fighting was in the north of Mexico, near the border with the United States. Fearful of U.S. intervention, Madero ordered his officers to call off the siege of the strategic border city of Ciudad Juárez. Villa and Pascual Orozco attacked instead, capturing the city after two days of fighting, thus winning the first Battle of Ciudad Juárez in 1911.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Facing a series of defeats in many places, Díaz resigned on 25 May 1911, afterward going into exile. However, Madero signed the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez with the Díaz regime, under which the same power structure, including the recently defeated Federal Army, was retained.


title: Pancho Villa

text: The rebel forces, including Villa, were demobilized, and Madero called on the men of action to return to civilian life. Orozco and Villa demanded that hacienda land seized during the violence bringing Madero to power be distributed to revolutionary soldiers. Madero refused, saying that the government would buy the properties from their owners and then distribute them to the revolutionaries at some future date. According to a story recounted by Villa, he told Madero at a banquet in Ciudad Juárez after the victory in 1911, "You, sir [Madero], have destroyed the revolution... It's simple: this bunch of dandies have made a fool of you, and this will eventually cost us our necks, yours included." This proved to be the case for Madero, who was murdered during a military coup in February 1913 in a period known as the Ten Tragic Days ("Decena Trágica").


title: Pancho Villa

text: Once elected president in November 1911, Madero proved a disastrous politician, dismissing his revolutionary supporters and relying on the existing power structure. Villa strongly disapproved of Madero's decision to name Venustiano Carranza (who previously had been a staunch supporter of Diaz until Diaz refused to appoint him as Governor of Coahuila in 1909) as his Minister of War. Madero's "refusal personally to accommodate Orozco was a major political blunder." Orozco rebelled in March 1912, both for Madero's continuing failure to enact land reform and because he felt insufficiently rewarded for his role in bringing the new president to power. At the request of Madero's chief political ally in the state, Chihuahua Governor Abraham González, Villa returned to military service under Madero to fight the rebellion led by his former comrade Orozco. Although Orozco appealed with him to join his rebellion, Villa again gave Madero key military victories. With 400 cavalrymen, he captured Parral from the Orozquistas and then joined forces in the strategic city of Torreón with the Federal Army under the command of General Victoriano Huerta.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Huerta initially welcomed the successful Villa, and sought to bring him under his control by naming Villa an honorary brigadier general in the Federal Army, but Villa was not flattered or controlled easily. Huerta then sought to discredit and eliminate Villa by accusing him of stealing a fine horse and calling him a bandit. Villa struck Huerta, who then ordered Villa's execution for insubordination and theft. As he was about to be executed by firing squad, he made appeal to Generals Emilio Madero and Raul Madero, brothers of President Madero. Their intervention delayed the execution until the president could be contacted by telegraph, and he ordered Huerta to spare Villa's life but imprison him.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa first was imprisoned in Belem Prison, in Mexico City. While in prison he was tutored in reading and writing by Gildardo Magaña, a follower of Emiliano Zapata, revolutionary leader in Morelos. Magaña also informed him of Zapata's Plan de Ayala, which repudiated Madero and called for land reform in Mexico. Villa was transferred to the Santiago Tlatelolco Prison on 7 June 1912. There he received further tutelage in civics and history from imprisoned Federal Army general Bernardo Reyes. Villa escaped on Christmas Day 1912, crossing into the United States near Nogales, Arizona on 2 January 1913. Arriving in El Paso, Texas, he attempted to convey a message to Madero via Abraham González about the upcoming coup d'état, to no avail; Madero was murdered in February 1913, and Huerta became president. Villa was in the U.S. when the coup occurred. With just seven men, some mules, and scant supplies, he returned into Mexico in April 1913 to fight Madero's usurper and his own would-be executioner, President Victoriano Huerta.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Huerta immediately moved to consolidate power. He had Abraham González, governor of Chihuahua, Madero's ally and Villa's mentor, murdered in March 1913. (Villa later recovered González's remains and gave his friend and mentor a proper funeral in Chihuahua.)


title: Pancho Villa

text: The governor of Coahuila, Venustiano Carranza, who had been appointed by Madero, also refused to recognize Huerta's authority. He proclaimed the Plan of Guadalupe to oust Huerta as an unconstitutional usurper. Considering Carranza the lesser of two evils, Villa joined him to overthrow his old enemy, Huerta, but he also made him the butt of jokes and pranks. Carranza's political plan gained the support of politicians and generals, including Pablo González, Álvaro Obregón, and Villa. The movement collectively was called the "Ejército Constitucionalista de México" (Constitutionalist Army of Mexico). The "Constitucionalista" adjective was added to stress the point that Huerta legally had not obtained power through lawful avenues laid out by Mexico's Constitution of 1857. Until Huerta's ouster, Villa joined with the revolutionary forces in the north under "First Chief" Carranza and his Plan of Guadalupe.


title: Pancho Villa

text: The period 1913–1914 was the time of Villa's greatest international fame and military and political success. Through this time Villa focused on accessing funding from wealthy hacendados and raised money using methods such as forced assessments on hostile hacienda owners and train robberies. In one notable escapade, after robbing a train he held 122 bars of silver and a Wells Fargo employee hostage, forcing Wells Fargo to help him sell the bars for cash. A rapid, hard-fought series of victories at Ciudad Juárez, Tierra Blanca, Chihuahua, and Ojinaga followed.


title: Pancho Villa

text: The well-known American journalist and fiction writer Ambrose Bierce, then in his seventies, accompanied Villa's army during this period and witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca. Villa considered Tierra Blanca, fought from 23 to 24 November 1913, his most spectacular victory, although General Talamantes died in the fighting. Bierce vanished on or after December 1913. His disappearance has never been solved. Oral accounts of his execution by firing squad were never verified. U.S. Army Chief of Staff Hugh L. Scott charged Villa's American agent, Sommerfeld, with finding out what happened, but the only result of the inquiry was the finding that Bierce most likely survived after Ojinaga and died in Durango.


title: Pancho Villa

text: John Reed, who graduated from Harvard in 1910 and became a leftist journalist, wrote magazine articles that were highly important in shaping Villa's epic image for Americans. Reed spent four months embedded with Villa's army and published vivid word portraits of Villa, his fighting men, and the women soldaderas, who were a vital part of the fighting force. Reed's articles were collected as "Insurgent Mexico" and published in 1914 for an American readership. Reed includes stories of Villa confiscating cattle, corn, and bullion and redistributing them to the poor. President Woodrow Wilson knew some version of Villa's reputation, saying he was "a sort of Robin Hood [who] had spent an eventful life robbing the rich in order to give to the poor. He had even at some point kept a butcher's shop for the purpose of distributing to the poor the proceeds of his innumerable cattle raids."


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa was a brilliant tactician on the battlefield, which translated to political support. In 1913, local military commanders elected him provisional governor of the state of Chihuahua against the wishes of First Chief Carranza, who wished to name Manuel Chao instead. As Governor of Chihuahua, Villa recruited more experienced generals, including Toribio Ortega, Porfirio Talamantes, and Calixto Contreras, to his military staff and achieved more success than ever. Villa's secretary, Pérez Rul, divided his army into two groups, one led by Ortega, Contreras, and Orestes Pereira and the other led by Talamantes and Contreras' former deputy, Severianco Ceniceros.


title: Pancho Villa

text: As governor of Chihuahua, Villa raised more money for a drive to the south against Huerta's Federal Army by various methods. He printed his own currency and decreed that it could be traded and accepted at par with gold Mexican pesos. He forced the wealthy to give loans to fund the revolutionary war machinery. He confiscated gold from several banks, and in the case of the Banco Minero he held a member of the bank's owning family, the wealthy Terrazas clan, as a hostage until the location of the bank's hidden gold reserves was revealed. He also appropriated land owned by the "hacendados" (owners of the "haciendas") and redistributed the money generated by the "haciendas" to fund military efforts and the pensions of citizens who had lost family members in the revolution. Villa also decreed that after the completion of the revolution the land would be redistributed, away from the hands of the oligarchy, to revolutionary veterans, former owners of the land from before the "hacendados" took the land, and the state itself in equal parts. These motions accompanied with gifts and cost reductions for poorer sections of the state represented large changes from previous revolutionary governments, and led to large support for Villa in significant portions of Chihuahua's population. After four weeks as the governor Villa retired from the position at the suggestion of Carranza, leaving Manuel Chao as governor.


title: Pancho Villa

text: With so many sources of money, Villa expanded and modernized his forces, purchasing draft animals, cavalry horses, arms, ammunition, mobile hospital facilities (railroad cars and horse ambulances staffed with Mexican and foreign volunteer doctors, known as "Servicio sanitario"), and other supplies, and rebuilt the railroad south of Chihuahua City. He also recruited fighters from Chihuahua and Durango and created a large army known as the "Division del Norte (Division of the North)", the most powerful and feared military unit in all of Mexico. The rebuilt railroad transported Villa's troops and artillery south, where he defeated the Federal Army forces in a series of battles at Gómez Palacio, Torreón, and eventually at the heart of Huerta's regime in Zacatecas.


title: Pancho Villa

text: After Villa captured the strategic prize of Torreón, Carranza ordered Villa to break off action south of Torreón and instead to divert to attack Saltillo. He threatened to cut off Villa's coal supply, immobilizing his supply trains, if he did not comply. This was seen widely as an attempt by Carranza to divert Villa from a direct assault on Mexico City in order to allow Carranza's forces under Obregón, driving in from the west via Guadalajara, to take the capital first. This was an expensive and disruptive diversion for the "División del Norte". Villa's enlisted men were not unpaid volunteers but paid soldiers, earning the then enormous sum of one peso per day. Each day of delay cost thousands of pesos.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Disgusted but having no practical alternative, Villa complied with Carranza's order and captured the less important city of Saltillo, and proceeded to give control of the land to Carranza in the hope of ending the hostility between the two. Carranza refused to reach any compromise with Villa, and ordered that 5000 members of the "División del Norte" be sent to Zacatecas to assist in its capture. A Constitutionalist general had recently staged an attack that had failed due to the superior artillery of the federal forces. Villa believed that sending troops to assist would only lead to the same result unless he was to lead the attack himself. Carranza declined to rescind the order as he did not want Villa to receive the credit as the victor of Zacatecas. Upon receiving Carranza's refusal Villa resigned from his post, which further led to the majority of revolutionary generals rallying behind Villa. Felipe Ángeles and the rest of Villa's staff officers argued for Villa to withdraw his resignation, and proceed to attack Zacatecas, a strategic railroad station heavily defended by Federal troops and considered nearly impregnable. Zacatecas was the source of much of Mexico's silver, and thus a supply of funds for whoever held it. Villa accepted his staff's advice and cancelled his resignation, and the "División del Norte" defied Carranza and attacked Zacatecas. Fighting up steep slopes, the "División del Norte" defeated a force of 12,000 Federals in the "Toma de Zacatecas" (Taking of Zacatecas), the single bloodiest battle of the Revolution, with Federal casualties numbering approximately 7,000 dead and 5,000 wounded, and unknown numbers of civilian casualties.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa's victory at Zacatecas in June 1914 broke the back of the Huerta regime. Huerta left the country on 14 July 1914. The Federal Army collapsed, ceasing to exist as an institution. As Villa moved towards the capital his progress was halted due to a lack of coal to fuel the railroad engines, and critically, an embargo placed by the U.S. government on importation to Mexico. Before this Villa had strong relationships with the Wilson administration, due in part to Carranza's distinctly anti-American rhetoric with which Villa publicly disagreed. Although nothing had changed for Villa historian Friedrich Katz writes that the exact motives of the U.S. government are hotly contested, it is likely that it was attempting to establish some type of control over Mexico by not allowing any one faction to become powerful enough to not need U.S. assistance.


title: Pancho Villa

text: The break between Villa and Carranza had been anticipated. The Pact of Torreón, an agreement between the Division of the Northeast and Villa's Division of the North, was a stopgap to keep the Constitutionalists united prior to the defeat of the Federal Army. The pact was ostensibly an updating of Carranza's narrow Plan of Guadalupe, adding radical language about land distribution and sanctions for the Roman Catholic Church for its support of Huerta. Neither Villa nor Carranza took the provisions of the pact seriously, one which was for Carranza to renew the flow of ammunition to Villa and supply coal so his troops could be transported by train. The truce between Villa and Carranza held long enough for the final defeat and dissolution of the Federal Army. In August 1914, Carranza and his revolutionary army entered Mexico City ahead of Villa.


title: Pancho Villa

text: The unity of fighting against Huerta was no longer the underpinnings of the Constitutionalists under Carranza's leadership. Carranza was a wealthy estate owner and governor of Coahuila, and he considered Villa little more than a bandit, despite his military successes. Villa viewed Carranza as a soft civilian, while Villa's Division of the North was the largest and most successful revolutionary army. In August and September Obregón traveled to meet with and persuade Villa not to fracture the Constitutionalist movement. In their August meeting, the two agreed that Carranza should now take the title of interim president of Mexico, now that Huerta had been ousted. Despite the generals' joint petition, Carranza did not want to do that, since it would have meant being ineligible to run in the expected la presidential election. The two also agreed that there should be immediate action on land reform. They also agreed that the military needed to be separated from politics. By the time of Obregón's second meeting with Villa in September, Obregón had given up on coming to an agreement with him, but he hoped to lure soldiers of the Division of the North away from Villa, sensing that some disapproved of Villa's violent tendencies. During the visit, Villa became incensed at Obregón and called for a firing squad to execute him immediately. Obregón soothed him and Villa dismissed the squad. Villa allowed Obregón to leave by train to Mexico City, but then Villa attempted to stop the train and bring Obregón back to Chihuahua. The telegram was not received or was ignored, and Obregón arrived safely in the capital. Even though Obregón had his differences with Carranza, his two visits with Villa convinced him to remain loyal for the moment to the civilian First Chief. Obregón saw Villa "as a bandit who would not keep his promises." Villa broke with Carranza in September 1914 and issued a manifesto.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Once Huerta was ousted, the power struggle between factions of the revolution came into the open. The revolutionary caudillos convened the Convention of Aguascalientes, attempting to sort out power in the political sphere rather than on the battlefield. This meeting set out a path towards democracy. None of the armed revolutionaries were allowed to be nominated for government positions, and Eulalio Gutiérrez was chosen as interim president. Emiliano Zapata, a military general from southern Mexico also sent a number of delegates to the convention, however these delegates did not participate until they were convinced the convention aimed for true reform, and an alliance was made between Zapata's forces and Villa's. Zapata was sympathetic to Villa's hostile views of Carranza and told Villa he feared Carranza's intentions were those of a dictator and not of a democratic president. Fearing that Carranza was intending to impose a dictatorship, Villa and Zapata broke with him. Carranza opposed the agreements of the convention, which rejected his leadership as "first chief" of the revolution. The Army of the convention was constituted with the alliance of Villa and Zapata, and a civil war of the winners ensued. Although both Villa and Zapata were defeated in their attempt to advance an alternative state power, their social demands were copied (in their way) by their adversaries (Obregón and Carranza).


title: Pancho Villa

text: Carranza and Alvaro Obregón retreated to Veracruz, leaving Villa and Zapata to occupy Mexico City. Although Villa had a more formidable army and had demonstrated his brilliance in battle against the now-defunct Federal Army, Carranza's general Obregón was a better tactician. With Obregón's help, Carranza was able to use the Mexican press to portray Villa as a sociopathic bandit and undermine his standing with the U.S. In late 1914, Villa was dealt an additional blow with the death from typhus of Toribio Ortega, one of his top generals.


title: Pancho Villa

text: While Convention forces occupied Mexico City, Carranza maintained control over two key Mexican states, Veracruz and Tamaulipas, where Mexico's two largest ports were located. Carranza was able to collect more revenue than Villa. In 1915, Villa was forced to abandon the capital after a number of incidents involving his troops, which helped pave the way for the return of Carranza and his followers.


title: Pancho Villa

text: To combat Villa, Carranza sent his ablest general Obregón north, who defeated Villa in a series of battles. Meeting at the Battle of Celaya in the Bajío, Villa and Obregón first fought from 6 to 15 April 1915, and Villa's army was defeated badly, suffering 4,000 killed and 6,000 captured. Obregón engaged Villa again at the Battle of Trinidad, which was fought between 29 April and 5 June 1915, where Villa suffered another huge loss. In October 1915, Villa crossed into Sonora, the main stronghold of Obregón and Carranza's armies, where he hoped to crush Carranza's regime. However, Carranza had reinforced Sonora, and Villa again was defeated badly. Rodolfo Fierro, a loyal officer and cruel hatchet man, was killed while Villa's army was crossing into Sonora.


title: Pancho Villa

text: After losing the Battle of Agua Prieta in Sonora, an overwhelming number of Villa's men in the "Division del Norte" were killed and 1,500 of the army's surviving members soon turned on him, accepting an amnesty offer from Carranza. "Villa's army [was] reduced to the condition to which it had reduced Huerta's in 1914. The celebrated Division of the North thus was eliminated as a capital military force."


title: Pancho Villa

text: In November 1915, Carranza's forces captured and executed Contreras, Pereyra, and son. Severianco Ceniceros also accepted amnesty from Carranza and turned on Villa as well. Although Villa's secretary Perez Rul also broke with Villa, he refused to become a supporter of Carranza.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Only 200 men in Villa's army remained loyal to him, and he was forced to retreat back into the mountains of Chihuahua. However, Villa and his men were determined to keep fighting Carranza's forces. Villa's position further was weakened by the United States' refusal to sell him weapons. By the end of 1915, Villa was on the run and the United States government recognized Carranza.


title: Pancho Villa

text: The period after Villa's defeat by Obregón has many dark episodes. His fighting force had shrunk significantly, no longer an army. Villa's opponents believed him finished as a factor in the Revolution. He decided to split his remaining forces into independent bands under his authority, ban soldaderas, and take to the hills as guerrillas. This strategy was effective and one that Villa knew well from his bandit days. He had loyal followers from western Chihuahua and northern Durango. A pattern of towns being under government control and the countryside under guerrilla control reasserted itself. Civilian populations during warfare are often the victims of violence. In Namiquipa, Villa sought to punish civilians who had formed a home guard, but when they learned Villa's men were approaching the village men took to the hills, leaving their families behind. Villa rounded up the wives and allowed his soldiers to rape them. The story of the rapes in Namiquipa was spread throughout Chihuahua.


title: Pancho Villa

text: After years of public and documented support for Villa's fight, the United States refused to allow more arms to be supplied to his army, and allowed Carranza's troops to be relocated over U.S. railroads in the Second Battle of Aguaprieta. Woodrow Wilson believed that supporting Carranza was the best way to expedite establishment of a stable Mexican government. Villa was further enraged by Obregón's use of searchlights, powered by U.S. generated electricity, to help repel a "Villista" night attack on the border town of Agua Prieta, Sonora on 1 November 1915. In January 1916, a group of "Villistas" attacked a train on the Mexico North Western Railway, near Santa Isabel, Chihuahua, and killed a number of U.S. nationals employed by the American Smelting and Refining Company. The passengers included eighteen Americans, 15 of whom worked for American Smelting. There was only one survivor, who gave the details to the press. Villa admitted to ordering the attack, but denied that he had authorized the shedding of blood of U.S. citizens.


title: Pancho Villa

text: After meeting with a Mexican mayor named Juan Muñoz, Villa recruited more men into his guerrilla militia and had 400 men under his command. Villa then met with his lieutenants Martin Lopez, Pablo Lopez, Francisco Beltran, and Candelario Cervantes, and commissioned an additional 100 men to the command of Joaquin Alvarez, Bernabe Cifuentes, and Ernesto Rios. Pablo Lopez and Cervantes were later killed in the early part of 1916. Villa and his 500 guerrillas then started planning an attack on U.S. soil.


title: Pancho Villa

text: On 9 March 1916, General Villa ordered nearly 100 Mexican members of his revolutionary group to make a cross-border attack against Columbus, New Mexico. While some believed the raid was conducted because of the U.S. government's official recognition of the Carranza regime and for the loss of lives in battle due to defective cartridges purchased from the U.S., it was accepted from a military standpoint that Villa carried out the raid because he needed more military equipment and supplies in order to continue his fight against Carranza. They attacked a detachment of the 13th Cavalry Regiment (United States), burned the town, and seized 100 horses and mules and other military supplies. Eighteen Americans and about 80 Villistas were killed.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Other attacks in U.S. territory allegedly were carried out by Villa, but none of these attacks were confirmed to have been carried out by Villistas. These were:


title: Pancho Villa

text: In response to Villa's raid on Columbus, President Wilson sent 5,000 U.S. Army soldiers under the command of General Frederick Funston, who oversaw John Pershing as he pursued Villa through Mexico. Employing aircraft and trucks for the first time in U.S. Army history, Pershing's force fruitlessly pursued Villa until February 1917. Villa eluded them, but some of his senior commanders, including Colonel Candelario Cervantes, General Francisco Beltrán, Beltrán's son, Villa's second-in-command Julio Cárdenas, and a total of 190 of his men were killed during the expedition.


title: Pancho Villa

text: The Carranza government and the Mexican population were against U.S. troops violating Mexican territories. There were several demonstrations of opposition to the Punitive Expedition. During the expedition, Carranza's forces captured one of Villa's top generals, Pablo López, and executed him on 5 June 1916.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Before the Villa-Carranza irregular forces had left to the mountains in 1915, there is no credible evidence that Villa cooperated with or accepted any help from the German government or agents. Villa was supplied arms from the U.S., employed international mercenaries and doctors including Americans, was portrayed as a hero in the U.S. media, made business arrangements with Hollywood, and did not object to the 1914 U.S. naval occupation of Veracruz. Villa's observation was that the occupation merely hurt Huerta. Villa opposed the armed participation of the United States in Mexico, but he did not act against the Veracruz occupation in order to maintain the connections in the U.S. that were necessary to buy American cartridges and other supplies. The German consul in Torreón made entreaties to Villa, offering him arms and money to occupy the port and oil fields of Tampico to enable German ships to dock there, but Villa rejected the offer.


title: Pancho Villa

text: German agents tried to interfere in the Mexican Revolution but were unsuccessful. They attempted to plot with Victoriano Huerta to assist him to retake the country and, in the infamous Zimmermann Telegram to the Mexican government, proposed an alliance with the government of Venustiano Carranza.


title: Pancho Villa

text: There were documented contacts between Villa and the Germans after Villa's split with the Constitutionalists. This was principally in the person of Felix A. Sommerfeld (noted in Katz's book), who allegedly funneled $340,000 of German money to the Western Cartridge Company in 1915, to purchase ammunition. Sommerfeld had been Villa's representative in the United States since 1914 and had close contact with the German naval attaché in Washington Karl Boy-Ed, as well as other German agents in the United States including Franz von Rintelen and Horst von der Goltz. In May 1914, Sommerfeld formally entered the employ of Boy-Ed and the German secret service in the United States. However, Villa's actions were hardly that of a German ; rather, it appeared that Villa resorted to German assistance only after other sources of money and arms were cut off.


title: Pancho Villa

text: At the time of Villa's 1916 attack on Columbus, New Mexico, Villa's military power had been marginalized. He was repulsed at Columbus by a small cavalry detachment, albeit after doing a lot of damage. His theater of operations was limited mainly to western Chihuahua. He was persona non grata with Mexico's ruling Carranza constitutionalists and was the subject of an embargo by the U.S., so communication or further shipments of arms between the Germans and Villa would have been difficult.


title: Pancho Villa

text: A plausible explanation for contacts between Villa and the Germans, after 1915, is that they were a futile extension of increasingly desperate German diplomatic efforts and "Villista" dreams of victory as progress of their respective wars bogged down. Villa effectively did not have anything useful to offer in exchange for German help at that point. When assessing claims of Villa conspiring with Germans, portrayal of Villa as a German sympathizer served the propaganda needs of both Carranza and Wilson and has to be taken into account.


title: Pancho Villa

text: The use of Mauser rifles and carbines by Villa's forces does not necessarily indicate a German connection. These weapons were used widely by all parties in the Mexican Revolution, Mauser longarms being enormously popular. They were standard issue in the Mexican Army, which had begun adopting 7 mm Mauser system arms as early as 1895.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Following his unsuccessful military campaign at Celaya and the 1916 incursion into New Mexico, prompting the unsuccessful U.S. military intervention in Mexico to capture him, Villa ceased to be a national leader and became a guerrilla leader in Chihuahua. While Villa still remained active, Carranza shifted his focus to dealing with the more dangerous threat posed by Zapata in the south. Villa's last major military action was a raid against Ciudad Juárez in 1919. Following the raid, Villa suffered yet another major blow after Felipe Angeles, who had returned to Mexico in 1918 after living in exile for three years as a dairy farmer in Texas, left Villa and his small remaining militia. Angeles later was captured by Carranza's forces and was executed on 26 November 1919.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa continued fighting, and conducted a small siege in Ascención, Durango, after his failed raid in Ciudad Juárez. The siege failed, and Villa's new second-in-command, his longtime lieutenant Martín López, was killed during the fighting. At this point Villa agreed that he would cease fighting if it were made worth his while.


title: Pancho Villa

text: On 21 May 1920, a break for Villa came when Carranza, along with his top advisers and supporters, was assassinated by supporters of Álvaro Obregón. With his nemesis dead, Villa was now ready to negotiate a peace settlement and retire. On 22 July 1920, Villa finally was able to send a telegram to Mexican interim President Adolfo de la Huerta, which stated that he recognized De la Huerta's presidency and requested amnesty. Six days later, De la Huerta met with Villa and negotiated a peace settlement.


title: Pancho Villa

text: In exchange for his retirement from hostilities, Villa was granted a 25,000 acre hacienda in Canutillo, just outside Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua, by the national government. This was in addition to the Quinta Luz estate that he owned with his wife, María Luz Corral de Villa, in Chihuahua, Chihuahua. The last remaining 200 guerrillas and veterans of Villa's militia who were still loyal to him would reside with him in his new hacienda as well, and the Mexican government also granted them a pension that totalled 500,000 gold pesos. The 50 guerrillas who still remained in Villa's small cavalry would be allowed to serve as Villa's personal bodyguards.


title: Pancho Villa

text: As Villa's biographer Friedrich Katz has noted, "During his lifetime, Villa had never bothered with conventional arrangements in his family life," and he contracted several marriages without seeking annulment or divorce. On 29 May 1911, Villa married María Luz Corral, who has been described as "the most articulate of his many wives." Villa met her when she was living with her widowed mother in San Andrés, where Villa for a time had his headquarters. Anti-reelectionists threatened the locals for monetary contributions to their cause, which the two women could not afford. The widow Corral did not want to seem a counter-revolutionary and went to Villa, who allowed her to make a token contribution to the cause. Villa sought Luz Corral as his wife, but her mother was opposed; however, the two were married by a priest "in a great ceremony, attended by his military chiefs and a representative of the governor." A photo of Corral with Villa, dated 1914, has been published in a collection of photos from the Revolution. It shows a sturdy woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a floor-length embellished skirt and a white blouse, with a rebozo beside a smiling Villa. After Villa's death, Luz Corral's marriage to Villa was challenged in court twice, and both times it was upheld as valid. Together, Villa and Luz Corral had one child, a daughter, who died within a few years after birth.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa had long-term relationships with several women. Austreberta Rentería was Villa's "official wife" at his hacienda of Canutillo, and Villa had two sons with her, Francisco and Hipólito. Others were Soledad Seañez, Manuela Casas (with whom Villa had a son), and Juana Torres, whom he wed in 1913 and with whom he had a daughter.


title: Pancho Villa

text: At the time of Villa's assassination in 1923, Luz Corral was banished from Canutillo. However, she was recognized by Mexican courts as Villa's legal wife and therefore heir to Villa's estate. President Obregón intervened in the dispute between competing claims to Villa's estate in Luz Corral's favor, perhaps because she had saved his life when Villa threatened to execute him in 1914.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Rentería and Seañez eventually were granted small government pensions decades after Villa's death. Corral inherited Villa's estate and played a key role in maintaining his public memory. All three women were often present at ceremonies at Villa's grave in Parral. When Villa's remains were transferred in 1976 to the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, Corral refused to attend the huge ceremony. She died at the age of 89 on 6 July 1981.


title: Pancho Villa

text: An alleged son of Pancho Villa, the lieutenant colonel Octavio Villa Coss, reportedly was killed by Juan Nepomuceno Guerra, a legendary drug lord from the Gulf Cartel, in 1960.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa's last living son, Ernesto Nava, died in Castro Valley, California, at the age of 94 on 31 December 2009. Nava appeared yearly in festival events in his hometown of Durango, Mexico, enjoying celebrity status until he became too weak to attend.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa is often depicted as a "womanizer" in pop culture, but his history also includes rapes and femicides, the gang rape in Namiquipa, a small town in the mountains between the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. The story of the rape of Namiquipa spread throughout Chihuahua.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Some historians have contended that crimes that he did not commit have been attributed to him, in addition his enemies always told false stories to increase his status as an "evil person" since there were cases of bandits who were not part of the revolution and committed crimes which were later attributed to Villa.


title: Pancho Villa

text: On 20 July 1923, Villa was assassinated in an ambush while visiting Parral, most likely on the orders of political enemies Plutarco Elías Calles and President Alvaro Obregón. He frequently made trips from his ranch to Parral for banking and other errands, where he generally felt secure. Villa usually was accompanied by his large entourage of armed "Dorados", or bodyguards, but for some unknown reason on that day he had gone into the town without most of them, taking with him only three bodyguards and two other ranch employees. He went to pick up a consignment of gold from the local bank with which to pay his Canutillo ranch staff. While driving back through the city in his black 1919 Dodge touring car, Villa passed by a school, and a pumpkinseed vendor ran toward his car and shouted "Viva Villa!", a signal to a group of seven riflemen who then appeared in the middle of the road and fired more than 40 rounds into the automobile. In the fusillade, nine dumdum bullets, normally used for hunting big game, hit Villa in the head and upper chest, killing him instantly.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Claro Huertado (a bodyguard), Rafael Madreno (Villa's main personal bodyguard), Danie Tamayo (his personal secretary), and Colonel Miguel Trillo (who also served as his chauffeur) were killed. One of Villa's bodyguards, Ramon Contreras, was wounded badly but managed to kill at least one of the assassins before he escaped; Contreras was the only survivor. Villa is reported to have died saying "Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something," but there is no contemporary evidence that he survived his shooting even momentarily. Historian and biographer Friedrich Katz wrote in 1998 that Villa died instantly. "Time" also reported in 1951 that both Villa and his aide (Tamayo) were killed instantly.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Telegraph service was interrupted to Villa's hacienda of Canutillo, probably so that Obregón's officials could secure the estate and "to prevent a possible Villista uprising triggered by his assassination."


title: Pancho Villa

text: The next day, Villa's funeral was held and thousands of his grieving supporters in Parral followed his casket to his burial site while Villa's men and his closest friends remained at the Canutillo hacienda armed and ready for an attack by the government troops. The six surviving assassins hid out in the desert and were soon captured, but only two of them served a few months in jail, and the rest were commissioned into the military.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa was likely assassinated because he was talking publicly about re-entering politics as the 1924 elections neared. Obregón could not run again for the presidency, so there was political uncertainty about the presidential succession. Obregón favored fellow Sonoran general Plutarco Elías Calles for the presidency. If Villa did re-enter politics it would complicate the political situation for Obregón and the Sonoran generals. Assassinating Villa benefited the plans of Obregón, who chose someone who in no way matched his power and charisma, and Calles, who ardently wanted to be president at any cost. It has never been proven who was responsible for the assassination, but according to Villa's biographer Friedrich Katz, Jesús Salas Barraza took responsibility to shield Obregón and Calles. Most historians attribute Villa's death to a well-planned conspiracy most likely initiated by Plutarco Elías Calles and his associate, General Joaquín Amaro with at least tacit approval of Obregón.


title: Pancho Villa

text: At the time, a state legislator from Durango, Jesús Salas Barraza, whom Villa once whipped during a quarrel over a woman, claimed sole responsibility for the plot. Barraza admitted that he told his friend, who worked as a dealer for General Motors, that he would kill Villa if he were paid 50,000 pesos. The friend was not wealthy and did not have 50,000 pesos on hand, so he collected money from enemies of Villa and managed to collect a total of 100,000 pesos for Barraza and his other co-conspirators. Barraza also admitted that he and his co-conspirators watched Villa's daily car rides and paid the pumpkinseed vendor at the scene of Villa's assassination to shout "Viva Villa!" either once if Villa was sitting in the front part of the car or twice if he was sitting in the back.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Obregón gave in to the people's demands and had Barraza detained. Initially sentenced to 20 years in prison, Barraza's sentence was commuted to three months by the governor of Chihuahua, and Salas Barraza eventually became a colonel in the Mexican Army. In a letter to the governor of Durango, Jesús Castro, Salas Barraza agreed to be the "fall guy," and the same arrangement is mentioned in letters exchanged between Castro and Amaro. Others involved in the conspiracy were Félix Lara, the commander of federal troops in Parral who was paid 50,000 pesos by Calles to remove his soldiers and policemen from the town on the day of the assassination, and Melitón Lozoya, the former owner of Villa's hacienda from whom Villa was demanding payback funds he had embezzled. It was Lozoya who planned the details of the assassination and found the men who carried it out. It was reported that before Salas Barraza died of a stroke in his Mexico City home in 1951, his last words were "I'm not a murderer. I rid humanity of a monster."


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa was buried the day after his assassination in the city cemetery of Parral, Chihuahua, rather than in Chihuahua city, where he had built a mausoleum. Villa's skull was stolen from his grave in 1926. According to local folklore, an American treasure hunter, Emil Holmdahl, beheaded him to sell his skull to an eccentric millionaire who collected the heads of historic figures. The skull is rumored to be in the possession of Yale University's Skull and Bones Society. His remains were reburied in the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City in 1976. The Francisco Villa Museum is a museum dedicated to Villa located at the site of his assassination in Parral.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa's purported death mask was hidden at the Radford School in El Paso, Texas until the 1980s, when it was sent to the Historical Museum of the Mexican Revolution in Chihuahua. Other museums have ceramic and bronze representations that do not match this mask.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa has relatively few sites in Mexico named for him. In Mexico City, there is a Metro División del Norte station, in an oblique honoring of Villa via the name of his revolutionary army.


title: Pancho Villa

text: According to Pancho Villa's major biographer, Friedrich Katz, the revolutionary was perceived as a destroyer, but in Katz's assessment, there were positive aspects to that. Villa played a decisive role not just in the destruction of Huerta's regime, but also the entire old regime. During Villa's brief time as governor of Chihuahua, he carried out a significant land reform. In his confiscation of landed estates and expulsion of their owners, he weakened that class. In the 1930s President Lázaro Cárdenas finished the dismantling of the old landed system. Villa's raid on Columbus, New Mexico destroyed the burgeoning cooperation between the Carranza government and the United States, and goaded the U.S. into invading northern Mexico. Banks in the U.S. ceased lending to the Carranza government, blocking its ability to suppress peasant rebellions in Morelos, San Luis Potosí, and Villa's. Katz credits Villa's time as governor as highly effective and economically beneficial to the general populace. "In some ways, it might be called the first welfare state in Mexico."


title: Pancho Villa

text: With his remains now buried in the Monument to the Revolution, Villa was also honored with adding his name to the wall of Mexican heroes in the Chamber of Deputies. In both cases of official recognition there was considerable controversy. The fact that Villa's image and legacy were not quickly appropriated and manipulated by the ruling party the way Zapata's was kept Villa's memory and myth in the hearts of the people. "Popular tastes wanted Villa to be thrilling, not respectable. They were enamored of Villa the daring Robin Hood, the satyr and monster, the unpredictable deviant, the grimy "guerrillero" and outlaw with uncanny power over men."


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa is not universally acclaimed. Historian Alan Knight wrote a massive, two-volume history of the Mexican Revolution, but in a thousand pages of text, Knight has only scattered references to Villa. He emphasizes Villa's bandit past, for whom the Revolution provided a change of title, not of occupation.


title: Pancho Villa

text: Of the major figures of the Revolution, Villa and Zapata are best known to the general public, as defenders of the dispossessed. In contrast, those who came to hold political power, Madero, Carranza, and Obregón are unfamiliar to most outside Mexico. It took decades for Villa to receive official recognition as a hero of the Revolution. As with the others entombed in the Monument to the Revolution, his remains rest near some whom he fought fiercely in life, including Venustiano Carranza. One scholar notes, "In death as in life, Carranza would be eclipsed by Francisco Villa."


title: Pancho Villa

text: Villa's string of victories since the beginning of the Mexican Revolution was instrumental in bringing the downfall of Porfirio Díaz, the victory of Francisco Madero, and the ouster of Victoriano Huerta. He remains a heroic figure for many Mexicans. His military actions included:


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: Jean-Luc Godard ( , ; ; 3 December 193013 September 2022) was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer, and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. His most acclaimed films include "Breathless" (1960), "Vivre sa vie" (1962), "Contempt" (1963), "Band of Outsiders" (1964), "Alphaville" (1965), "Pierrot le Fou" (1965), "Masculin Féminin" (1966), "Weekend" (1967), and "Goodbye to Language" (2014).


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: During his early career as a film critic for the influential magazine "Cahiers du Cinéma", Godard criticised mainstream French cinema's "Tradition of Quality", which de-emphasised innovation and experimentation. In response, he and like-minded critics began to make their own films, challenging the conventions of traditional Hollywood in addition to French cinema. Godard first received global acclaim for his 1960 feature "Breathless", helping to establish the New Wave movement. His work makes use of frequent homages and references to film history, and often expressed his political views; he was an avid reader of existentialism and Marxist philosophy, and in 1969 formed the Dziga Vertov Group with other radical filmmakers to promote political works. After the New Wave, his politics were less radical and his later films are about human conflict and artistic representation "from a humanist rather than Marxist perspective."


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: Godard was married three times, to actresses Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky, both of whom starred in several of his films, and later to his longtime partner Anne-Marie Miéville. His collaborations with Karina—which included such critically acclaimed films as "Vivre sa vie" (1962), "Bande à part" (1964), and "Pierrot le Fou" (1965)—were called "arguably the most influential body of work in the history of cinema" by "Filmmaker" magazine. In a 2002 "Sight & Sound" poll, Godard ranked third in the critics' top ten directors of all time. He is said to have "generated one of the largest bodies of critical analysis of any filmmaker since the mid-twentieth century." His work has been central to narrative theory and has "challenged both commercial narrative cinema norms and film criticism's vocabulary." In 2010, Godard was awarded an Academy Honorary Award.


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: Jean-Luc Godard was born on 3 December 1930 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, the son of Odile ("née" Monod) and Paul Godard, a Swiss physician. His wealthy parents came from Protestant families of Franco–Swiss descent, and his mother was the daughter of Julien Monod, a founder of the Banque Paribas. She was the great-granddaughter of theologian Adolphe Monod. Other relatives on his mother's side include composer Jacques-Louis Monod, naturalist Théodore Monod, pastor Frédéric Monod, and former Prime Minister and later President of Peru Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. Four years after Jean-Luc's birth, his father moved the family to Switzerland. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Godard was in France, and returned to Switzerland with difficulty. He spent most of the war in Switzerland, although his family made clandestine trips to his grandfather's estate on the French side of Lake Geneva. Godard attended school in Nyon, Switzerland.


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: Not a frequent cinema-goer, he attributed his introduction to cinema to a reading of André Malraux's essay "Outline of a Psychology of Cinema", and his reading of "La Revue du cinéma", which was relaunched in 1946. In 1946, he went to study at the Lycée Buffon in Paris and, through family connections, mixed with members of its cultural elite. He lodged with the writer Jean Schlumberger. Having failed his baccalauréat exam in 1948 he returned to Switzerland. He studied in Lausanne and lived with his parents, whose marriage was breaking up. He spent time in Geneva also with a group that included another film fanatic, Roland Tolmatchoff, and the extreme rightist philosopher Jean Parvulesco. His elder sister Rachel encouraged him to paint, which he did, in an abstract style. After time spent at a boarding school in Thonon to prepare for the retest, which he passed, he returned to Paris in 1949. He registered for a certificate in anthropology at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), but did not attend class.


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: In Paris, in the Latin Quarter just prior to 1950, "ciné-clubs" (film societies) were gaining prominence. Godard began attending these clubs—the Cinémathèque Française, Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (CCQL), Work and Culture ciné club, and others—which became his regular haunts. The Cinémathèque was founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936; Work and Culture was a workers' education group for which André Bazin had organised wartime film screenings and discussions and which had become a model for the film clubs that had risen throughout France after the Liberation; CCQL, founded in about 1947 or 1948, was animated and intellectually led by Maurice Schérer. At these clubs he met fellow film enthusiasts including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut. Godard was part of a generation for whom cinema took on a special importance. He said: "In the 1950s cinema was as important as bread—but it isn't the case anymore. We thought cinema would assert itself as an instrument of knowledge, a microscope... a telescope... At the Cinémathèque I discovered a world which nobody had spoken to me about. They'd told us about Goethe, but not Dreyer. ... We watched silent films in the era of talkies. We dreamed about film. We were like Christians in the catacombs."


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: His foray into films began in the field of criticism. Along with Maurice Schérer (writing under the to-be-famous pseudonym Éric Rohmer) and Jacques Rivette, he founded the short-lived film journal "", which saw the publication of five issues in 1950. When Bazin co-founded the influential critical magazine "Cahiers du Cinéma" in 1951, Godard was the first of the younger critics from the CCQL/Cinémathèque group to be published. The January 1952 issue featured his review of an American melodrama directed by Rudolph Maté, "No Sad Songs for Me". His "Defence and Illustration of Classical Découpage" published in September 1952, in which he attacks an earlier article by Bazin and defends the use of the shot–reverse shot technique, is one of his earliest important contributions to cinema criticism. Praising Otto Preminger and "the greatest American artist—Howard Hawks", Godard raises their harsh melodramas above the more "formalistic and overtly artful films of Welles, De Sica, and Wyler which Bazin endorsed". At this point Godard's activities did not include making films. Rather, he watched films, and wrote about them, and helped others make films, notably Rohmer, with whom he worked on "Présentation ou Charlotte et son steak".


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: Having left Paris in the fall of 1952, Godard returned to Switzerland and went to live with his mother in Lausanne. He became friendly with his mother's lover, Jean-Pierre Laubscher, who was a labourer on the Grande Dixence Dam. Through Laubscher he secured work himself as a construction worker at the Plaz Fleuri work site at the dam. He saw the possibility of making a documentary film about the dam; when his initial contract ended, in order to prolong his time at the dam, he moved to the post of telephone switchboard operator. Whilst on duty, in April 1954, he put through a call to Laubscher which relayed the fact that Odile Monod, Godard's mother, had died in a scooter accident. Thanks to Swiss friends who lent him a 35 mm movie camera, he was able to shoot on 35mm film. He rewrote the commentary that Laubscher had written, and gave his film a rhyming title "Opération béton" ("Operation Concrete"). The company that administered the dam bought the film and used it for publicity purposes.


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: As he continued to work for "Cahiers", he made "Une femme coquette" (1955), a 10-minute short, in Geneva; and in January 1956 he returned to Paris. A plan for a feature film of Goethe's "Elective Affinities" proved too ambitious and came to nothing. Truffaut enlisted his help to work on an idea he had for a film based on the true-crime story of a petty criminal, Michel Portail, who had shot a motorcycle policeman and whose girlfriend had turned him in to the police, but Truffaut failed to interest any producers. Another project with Truffaut, a comedy about a country girl arriving in Paris, was also abandoned. He worked with Rohmer on a planned series of short films centering on the lives of two young women, Charlotte and Véronique; and in the autumn of 1957, Pierre Braunberger produced the first film in the series, "All the Boys Are Called Patrick", directed by Godard from Rohmer's script. "A Story of Water" (1958) was created largely out of unused footage shot by Truffaut. In 1958, Godard, with a cast that included Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anne Colette, made his last short before gaining international prominence as a filmmaker, "Charlotte et son Jules", a homage to Jean Cocteau. The film was shot in Godard's hotel room on the rue de Rennes and apparently reflected something of the 'romantic austerity' of Godard's own life at this time. His Swiss friend Roland Tolmatchoff noted: "In Paris he had a big Bogart poster on the wall and nothing else." In December 1958, Godard reported from the Festival of Short Films in Tours and praised the work of, and became friends with, Jacques Demy, Jacques Rozier, and Agnès Varda—he already knew Alain Resnais whose entry he praised—but Godard now wanted to make a feature film. He travelled to the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and asked Truffaut to let him use the story on which they had collaborated in 1956, about car thief Michel Portail. He sought money from producer Georges de Beauregard, whom he had met previously whilst working briefly in the publicity department of Twentieth Century Fox's Paris office, and who was also at the Festival. Beauregard could offer his expertise, but was in debt from two productions based on Pierre Loti stories; hence, financing came instead from a film distributor, René Pignières.


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: Godard's most celebrated period as a director spans roughly from his first feature, "Breathless" (1960), through to "Week End" (1967). His work during this period focused on relatively conventional films that often refer to different aspects of film history. Although Godard's work during this time is considered groundbreaking in its own right, the period stands in contrast to that which immediately followed it, during which Godard ideologically denounced much of cinema's history as bourgeois and therefore without merit.


title: Jean-Luc Godard

text: Godard's "Breathless" ("À bout de souffle", 1960), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, distinctly expressed the French New Wave's style, and incorporated quotations from several elements of popular culture—specifically American film noir. The film employed various techniques such as the innovative use of jump cuts (which were traditionally considered amateurish), character asides, and breaking the eyeline match in continuity editing. Another unique aspect of "Breathless" was the spontaneous writing of the script on the day of shooting—a technique that the actors found unsettling—which contribute to the spontaneous, documentary-like ambience of the film.