title: Performance art

text: In the mid-1970s, behind the Iron Curtain, in major Eastern Europe cities such as Budapest, Kraków, Belgrade, Zagreb, Novi Sad and others, scenic arts of a more experimental content flourished. Against political and social control, different artists who made performance of political content arose. Orshi Drozdik's performance series, titled "Individual Mythology" 1975–77 and the "NudeModel" 1976–77. All her actions were critical of the patriarchal discourse in art and the forced emancipation programme and constructed by the equally patriarchal state. Drozdik showed a pioneer and feminist point of view on both, becoming one of the precursors of this type of critical art in Eastern Europe. In the 1970s, performance art, due to its fugacity, had a solid presence in the Eastern European avant-garde, specially in Poland and Yugoslavia, where dozens of artists who explored the body conceptually and critically emerged.


title: Performance art

text: In the mid-1976s, Ulay and Marina Abramović founded the collective The Other in the city of Amsterdam. When Abramović and Ulay started their collaboration. The main concepts they explored were the ego and artistic identity. This was the start of a decade of collaborative work. Both artists were interested in the tradition of their cultural heritage and the individual's desire for rituals. In consecuense, they formed a collective named "The Other". They dressed and behaved as one, and created a relation of absolute confidence. They created a series of works in which their bodies created additional spaces for the audience's interaction. In "Relation in Space" they ran around the room, two bodies like two planets, meshing masculine and feminine energies into a third component they called "that self". "Relation in Movement" (1976) had the couple driving their car inside the museum, doing 365 spins. A black liquid dripped out of the car, forming a sculpture, and each round represented a year. After this, they created "Breathing In/Breathing Out", where both of them united their lips and inspired the air expired by the other one until they used up all oxygen. Exactly 17 minutes after the start of the performance, both of them fell unconscious, due to their lungs filling with carbon dioxide. This piece explored the idea of the ability of a person to absorb the life out of another one, changing them and destroying them. In 1988, after some years of a tense relationship, Abramović and Ulay decided to make a spiritual travel that would put an end to the collective. They walked along the Great Wall of China, starting on opposite ends and finding each other halfway. Abramović conceived this walk on a dream, and it gave her what she saw as an appropriate and romantic ending to the relationship full of mysticism, energy and attraction. Ulay started on the Gobi dessert and Abramovic in the Yellow sea. Each one of them walked 2500 kilometres, found each other in the middle and said goodbye.


title: Performance art

text: In 1973, Laurie Anderson interpreted "Duets on Ice" in the streets of New York. Marina Abramović, in the performance "Rhythm 10", included conceptually the violation of a body. Thirty years later, the topic of rape, shame and sex exploitation would be reimagined in the works of contemporary artists such as "Clifford Owens", "Gillian Walsh", "Pat Oleszko" and "Rebecca Patek," amongst others. New artists with radical acts consolidated themselves as the main precursors of performance, like Chris Burden, with the 1971 work "Shoot", where an assistant shot him in the arm from a five-meter distance, and Vito Acconci the same year with "Seedbed". The work "Eye Body" (1963) by Carolee Schneemann en 1963, had already been considered a prototype of performance art. In 1975, Schneemann recurred to innovative solo acts such as "Interior Scroll", that showed the feminine body as an artistic media.


title: Performance art

text: One of the main artists was Gina Pane, French artist of Italian origins. She studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in París from 1960 until 1965 and was a member of the performance art movement in the 1970 in France, called "Art Corporel". Parallel to her art, Pane taught in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Mans from 1975 until 1990 and directed an "atelier" dedicated to performance art in the Pompidou Centre from 1978 to 1979. One of her best known works is "The Conditioning " (1973), in which she was lied into a metal bed spring over an area of lit candles. "The Conditioning " was created as an homage to Marina Abramović, part of her "Seven Easy Pieces"(2005) in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2005. Great part of her works are protagonized by self-inflicted pain, separating her from most of other woman artists in the 1970s. Through the violence of cutting her skin with razors or extinguishing fires with her bare hands and feet, Pane has the intention of inciting a "real experience" in the visitor, who would feel moved for its discomfort. The impactful nature of these first performance art pieces or actions, as she preferred to call them, many times eclipsed her prolific photographic and sculptural work. Nonetheless, the body was the main concern in Panes's work, either literally or conceptually.


title: Performance art

text: Until the 1980s, performance art has demystified virtuosism, this being one of its key characteristics. Nonetheless, from the 1980s on it started to adopt some technical brilliancy. In reference to the work "Presence and Resistance" by Philip Auslander, the dance critic Sally Banes writes, "... by the end of the 1980s, performance art had become so widely known that it no longer needed to be defined; mass culture, especially television, had come to supply both structure and subject matter for much performance art; and several performance artists, including Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian, Willem Dafoe, and Ann Magnuson, had indeed become crossover artists in mainstream entertainment." In this decade the parameters and technicalities built to purify and perfect performance art were defined.


title: Performance art

text: Despite the fact that many performances are held within the circle of a small art-world group, Roselee Goldberg notes in "Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present" that "performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium, especially in the 1980s, stems from an apparent desire of that public to gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its distinct community, and to be surprised by the unexpected, always unorthodox presentations that the artists devise." In this decade, publications and compilations about performance art and its best known artists emerged.


title: Performance art

text: In the 1980s, the political context played an important role in the artistic development and especially in performance, as almost every one of the works created with a critical and political discourse were in this discipline. Until the decline of the European Eastern bloc during the late 1980s, performance art had actively been rejected by most communist governments. With the exception of Poland and Yugoslavia, performance art was more or less banned in countries where any independent public event was feared. In the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Latvia it happened in apartments, at seemingly spontaneous gatherings in artist studios, in church-controlled settings, or was covered as another activity, like a photo-shoot. Isolated from the western conceptual context, in different settings it could be like a playful protest or a bitter comment, using subversive metaphors to express dissent with the political situation. Amongst the most remarkable performance art works of political content in this time were those of Tehching Hsieh between July 1983 and July 1984, "Art/Life: One Year Performance" (Rope Piece).


title: Performance art

text: In 1982 the terms "poetry" and "performance" were first used together. Performance poetry appeared to distinguish text-based vocal performances from performance art, especially the work of escenic and musical performance artists, such as Laurie Anderson, who worked with music at that time. Performance poets relied more on the rhetorical and philosophical expression in their poetics than performance artists, who arose from the visual art genres of painting and sculpture. Many artists since John Cage fuse performance with a poetical base.


title: Performance art

text: Since 1973 the Feminist Studio Workshop in the Woman's Building of Los Ángeles had an impact in the wave of feminist acts, but until 1980 they did not completely fuse. The conjunction between feminism and performance art progressed through the last decade. In the first two decades of performance art development, works that had not been conceived as feminist are seen as such now.


title: Performance art

text: Still, not until 1980 did artists self-define themselves as feminists. Artist groups in which women influenced by the 1968 student movement as well as the feminist movement stood out. This connection has been treated in contemporary art history research. Some of the women whose innovative input in representations and shows was the most relevant were Pina Bausch and the Guerrilla Girls who emerged in 1985 in New York City, anonymous feminist and anti-racist art collective. They chose that name because they used guerrilla tactics in their activism to denounce discrimination against women in art through political and performance art. Their first performance was placing posters and making public appearances in museums and galleries in New York, to critique the fact that some groups of people were discriminated against for their gender or race. All of this was done anonymously; in all of these appearances they covered their faces with gorilla masks (this was due to the similar pronunciation of the words "gorilla" and "guerrilla"). They used as nicknames the names of female artists who had died. From the 1970s until the 1980s, amongst the works that challenged the system and their usual strategies of representation, the main ones feature women's bodies, such as Ana Mendieta's works in New York City where her body is outraged and abused, or the artistic representations by Louise Bourgeois with a rather minimalist discourse that emerge in the late seventies and eighties. Special mention to the works created with feminine and feminist corporeity such as Lynda Benglis and her phallic performative actions, who reconstructed the feminine image to turn it into more than a fetish. Through feminist performance art the body becomes a space for developing these new discourses and meanings. Artist Eleanor Antin, creator in the 1970s and 1980s, worked on the topics of gender, race and class. Cindy Sherman, in her first works in the seventies and already in her artistic maturity in the eighties, continues her critical line of overturning the imposed self, through her use of the body as an object of privilege.


title: Performance art

text: Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and artist. She is one of the most representative post-war artists and exhibited more than the work of three decades of her work in the MoMA. Even though she appears in most of her performative photographies, she doesn't consider them slef-portraits. Sherman uses herself as a vehicle to represent a great array of topics of the contemporary world, such as the part women play in our society and the way they are represented in the media as well as the nature of art creation. In 2020 she was awarded with the "Wolf prize in arts".


title: Performance art

text: Judy Chicago is an artist and pioneer of feminist art and performance art in the United States. Chicago is known for her big collaborative art installation pieces on images of birth and creation, that examine women's part in history and culture. In the 1970s, Chicago has founded the first feminist art programme in the United States. Chicago's work incorporates a variety of artistic skills such as sewing, in contrast with skills that required a lot of workforce, like welding and pyrotechnics. Chicago's best known work is "The Dinner Party", that was permanently installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn Museum. "The Dinner Party" celebrated the achievements of women throughout history and is widely considered as the first epic feminist artwork. Other remarkable projects include "International Honor Quilt", "The Birth Project," "Powerplay," and "The Holocaust Project."


title: Performance art

text: In this decade performance art spread until reaching Latin America through the workshops and programmes that universities and academic institutions offered. It mainly developed in Mexico, Colombia -with artists such as "Maria Teresa Hincapié"—, in Brasil and in Argentina.


title: Performance art

text: Ana Mendieta was a conceptual and performance artist born in Cuba and raised in the United States. She's mostly known for her artworks and performance art pieces in land art. Mendieta's work was known mostly in the feminist art critic environment. Years after her death, specially since the Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective in 2004 and the retrospective in the Haywart Gallery in London in 2013 she is considered a pioneer of performance art and other practices related to body art and land art, sculpture and photography. She described her own work as "earth-body art".


title: Performance art

text: Tania Bruguera is a Cuban artist specialized in performance art and political art. Her work mainly consists of her interpretation of political and social topics.


title: Performance art

text: She has developed concepts such as "conduct art" to define her artistic practices with a focus on the limits of language and the body confronted to the reaction and behavior of the spectators. She also came up with "useful art", that is ought to transform certain political and legal aspects of society. Brugera's work revolves around power and control topics, and a great portion of her work questions the current state of her home country, Cuba. In 2002 she created the Cátedra Arte de Conducta in La Habana.


title: Performance art

text: Regina José Galindo is a Guatemalan artist specialized in performance art. Her work is characterized by its explicit political and critical content, using her own body as a tool of confrontation and social transformation. Her artistic career has been marked by the Guatemalan Civil War that took place from 1960 to 1996, which triggered a genocide of more than 200 thousand people, many of them indigenous, farmers, women and children. With her work, Galindo denounces violence, sexism (one of her the main topics is femicide), the western beauty standards, the repression of the estates and the abuse of power, especially in the context of her country, even though her language transgresses borders. Since her beginnings she only used her body as media, which she occasionally takes to extreme situations (like in "Himenoplasty" (2004) where she goes through a hymen reconstruction, a work that won the Golden Lyon in the Venice Biennale), to later have volunteers or hired people to interact with her, so that she loses control over the action.


title: Performance art

text: The 1990s was a period of absence for classic European performance, so performance artists kept a low profile. Nevertheless, Eastern Europe experienced a peak. On the other hand, Latin American performance continued to boom, as well as feminist performance art. There also was a peak of this discipline in Asian countries, whose motivation emerged from the Butō dance in the 1950s, but in this period they professionalized and new Chinese artists arose, earning great recognition. There was also a general professionalization in the increase of exhibitions dedicated to performance art, at the opening of the Venice Art Biennial to performance art, where various artists of this discipline have won the Leone d'Oro, including Anne Imhof, Regina José Galindo or Santiago Sierra.


title: Performance art

text: While the Soviet Bloc dissolved, some forbidden performance art pieces began to spread. Young artists from the former Eastern Bloc, including Russia, devoted themselves to performance art. Scenic arts emerged around the same time in Cuba, the Caribbean and China. "In these contexts, performance art became a new critical voice with a social strength similar to that of Western Europe, the United States and South America in the sixties and early seventies. It must be emphasized that the rise of performance art in the 1990s in Eastern Europe, China, South Africa, Cuba and other places must not be considered secondary or an imitation of the West".


title: Performance art

text: In the Western World, in the 1990s, performance art joined the mainstream culture. Diverse performance artworks, live, photographed or through documentation started to become part of galleries and museums that began to understand performance art as an art discipline. Nevertheless, it was not until the next decade that a major institutionalization happened, when every museum started to incorporate performance art pieces into their collections and dedicating great exhibitions and retrospectives, museums such as the la Tate Modern in London, the MoMA in New York City or the Pompidou Centre in Paris. From the 1990s on, many more performance artists were invited to important biennials like the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennial and the Lyon Biennial.


title: Performance art

text: In the late 1990s, Chinese contemporary art and performance art received great recognition internationally, as 19 Chinese artists were invited to the Venice Biennial. Performance art in China and its history had been growing since the 1970s due to the interest between art, process and tradition in Chinese culture, but it gained recognition from the 1990s on. In China, performance art is part of the fine arts education programme, and is becoming more and more popular. In the early 1990s, Chinese performance art was already acclaimed in the international art scene.


title: Performance art

text: In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, a number of artists incorporated technologies such as the World Wide Web, digital video, webcams, and streaming media, into performance artworks. Artists such as Coco Fusco, Shu Lea Cheang, and Prema Murthy produced performance art that drew attention to the role of gender, race, colonialism, and the body in relation to the Internet. Other artists, such as Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, and Yes Men, used digital technologies associated with hacktivism and interventionism to raise political issues concerning new forms of capitalism and consumerism.


title: Performance art

text: In the second half of the decade, computer-aided forms of performance art began to take place. Many of these works led to the development of algorithmic art, generative art, and robotic art, in which the computer itself, or a computer-controlled robot, becomes the performer.


title: Performance art

text: Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary Cuban-American artist, writer and curator who lives and works in the United States. Her artistic career began in 1988. In her work, she explores topics such as identity, race, power and gender through performance. She also makes videos, interactive installations and critical writing.


title: Performance art

text: During the 2000s and 2000s, artists such as Pussy Riot, Tania Bruguera, and Petr Pavlensky have been judged for diverse artistic actions.


title: Performance art

text: On February 21, 2012, as a part of their protest against the re-election of Vladímir Putin, various women of the artistic collective Pussy Riot entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour of Moscow of the Russian Orthodox Church. They made the sign of the cross, bowed before the shrine, and started to interpret a performance compound by a song and a dance under the motto "Virgin Mary, put Putin Away". On March 3, they were detained. On March 3, 2012, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot members, were arrested by the Russian authorities and accused of vandalism. At first, they both denied being members of the group and started a hunger strike for being incarcerated and taken apart from their children until the trials began in April. On March 16 another woman, Yekaterina Samutsévitch, who had been previously interrogated as a witness, was arrested and accused as well. On July 5, formal charges against the group and a 2800-page accusation were filed. That same day they were notified that they had until July 9 to prepare their defense. In reply, they announced a hunger strike, pleading that two days was an inappropriate time frame to prepare their defense. On July 21, the court extended their preventive prison to last six more months. The three detained members were recognized as political prisoners by the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners. Amnesty International considers them to be prisoners of conscience for "the severity of the response of the Russian authorities".


title: Performance art

text: Since 2012, artist Abel Azcona has been prosecuted for some of his works. The demand that gained the most repercussion was the one carried out by the Archbishopric of Pamplona and Tudela, in representation of the Catholic Church. The Church demanded Azcona for desecration and blasphemy crimes, hate crime and attack against the religious freedom and feelings for his work "Amen or The Pederasty". In 2016, Azcona was denounced for extolling terrorism for his exhibition "Natura Morta", in which the artist recreated situations of violence, historical memory, terrorism or war conflicts through performance and hyperrealistic sculptures and installations.


title: Performance art

text: In December 2014 Tania Bruguera was detained in La Habana to prevent her from carrying out new reivindicative works. Her performance art pieces have earned her harsh critiques, and she has been accused of promoting resistance and public disturbances. In December 2015 and January 2016, Bruguera was detained for organizing a public performance in the plaza de la Revolución of La Habana. She was detained along with other Cuban artists, activists and reporters who took part in the campaign "Yo También Exijo", which was created after the declarations of Raúl Castro and Barack Obama in favor of restoring their diplomatic relationship. During the performance "El Susurro de Tatlin #6" she set microphones and talkers in the Plaza de la Revolución so the Cubans could express their feelings regarding the new political climate. The event had great repercussion in international media, including a presentation of "El Susurro de Tatlin #6" in Times Square, and an action in which various artists and intellectuals expressed themselves in favour of the liberation of Bruguera by sending an open letter to Raúl Castro signed by thousands of people around the world asking for the return of her passport and claiming criminal injustice, as she only gave a microphone to the people so they could give their opinion.


title: Performance art

text: In November 2015 and October 2017 Petr Pavlensky was arrested for carrying out a radical performance art piece in which he set on fire the entry of the Lubyanka Building, headquarters of the Federal Security Service of Russia, and a branch office of the Bank of France. On both occasions he sprayed the main entrance with gasoline; in the second performance he sprayed the inside as well, and ignited it with a lighter. The doors of the building were partially burnt. Both times Pavlenski was arrested without resistance and accused of debauchery. A few hours after the actions, several political and artistic reivindicative videos appeared on the internet.


title: Performance art

text: Since the 2000s, big museums, institutions and collections have supported performance art. Since January 2003, Tate Modern in London has had a curated programme of live art and performance. With exhibitions by artists such as Tania Bruguera or Anne Imhof. In 2012 The Tanks at Tate Modern were opened: the first dedicated spaces for performance, film and installation in a major modern and contemporary art museum.


title: Performance art

text: The Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective and performance recreation of Marina Abramović's work, the biggest exhibition of performance art in MoMA's history, from March 14 to 31, 2010. The exhibition consisted of more than twenty pieces by the artist, most of them from the years 1960–1980. Many of them were re-activated by other young artists of multiple nationalities selected for the show. In parallel to the exhibition, Abramovic performed "The Artist is Present", a 726-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. The work is an updated reproduction of one of the pieces from 1970, shown in the exhibition, where Abramovic stayed for full days next to Ulay, who was his sentimental companion. The performance attracted celebrities such as Björk, Orlando Bloom and James Franco who participated and received media coverage.


title: Performance art

text: Against the background of the institutionalisation of performance, the Bruxelles-based initiative A Performance Affair and the London-based format Performance Exchange inquire about the collectability of performance works. With The Non-fungible Body?, the Austrian museum and culture centre OÖLKG/OK reflects upon recent developments in institutionalizing performance through a discursive festival format that was presented for the first time in June 2022.


title: Performance art

text: In 2014 the performance art piece "Carry That Weight" is created, also known as "the mattress performance". The artist behind this piece is Emma Sulkowicz who, during her end of degree thesis in visual arts in the Columbia University in the city of New York City. In September 2014, Sulkowicz's piece began, as she started carrying her own mattress around the Columbia University campus. This work was created by the artist with the goal of denouncing her rape in that same mattress years before, in her own dormitory, which she reported and was not heard by the university or the justice, so she decided to carry the mattress with her for the entire semester, without leaving it at any moment, until her graduation ceremony in May 2015. The piece generated great controversy, but was supported by a bunch of her companions and activists who joined Sulkowicz multiple times when carrying the mattress, making the work an international revindication. Art critic Jerry Saltz considered the artwork to be one of the most important of the year 2014.


title: Performance art

text: In 2019 the collective performance art piece "A Rapist in Your Path" was created by a feminist group from Valparaíso, Chile named Lastesis, which consisted of a demonstration against the women's rights violations in the context of the 2019-2020 Chilean protests. It was first performed in front of the Second Police Station of the Carabineros de Chile in Valparaíso on November 18, 2019. A second performance done by 2000 Chilean women on November 25, 2019, as a part of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, was filmed and became viral on social media. Its reach became global after feminist movements in dozens of countries adopted and translated the performance for their own protests and demands for the cessation and punishment of femicide and sexual violence, amongst others.


title: This Boy's Life

text: This Boy's Life is a 1993 American biographical coming-of-age drama film based on the memoir of the same name by author Tobias Wolff. It was directed by Michael Caton-Jones and stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Tobias "Toby" Wolff, Robert De Niro as Toby's stepfather Dwight Hansen, and Ellen Barkin as Toby's mother, Caroline. The movie marked the first time Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro ever collaborated. The film also features Chris Cooper, Carla Gugino, Eliza Dushku and Tobey Maguire's first credited appearance in a feature-length movie.


title: This Boy's Life

text: It was the first collaboration on-screen between Maguire and DiCaprio, who both later worked in "Don's Plum" and "The Great Gatsby"., and also the first collaboration on-screen between DiCaprio and De Niro, who both later worked in "Marvin's Room", short film "The Audition", and the upcoming film "Killers of the Flower Moon".


title: This Boy's Life

text: In the 1950s, nomadic and flaky Caroline Wolff wants to settle down and find a decent man to provide a better home for herself and her son, Tobias "Toby" Wolff. She moves to Seattle, Washington and meets Dwight Hansen, a man who seemingly meets her goals. However, Dwight's true personality is soon revealed as being emotionally, verbally, and physically abusive to Toby while Caroline is away for a few weeks.


title: This Boy's Life

text: The marriage proceeds, and Caroline and Toby move into Dwight's home in Concrete, a small town near the north Cascades Mountains. Dwight's domineering personality is soon apparent, but Caroline remains with him, enduring several years of a dysfunctional relationship. During this time, Toby befriends a classmate named Arthur Gayle, a misfit at school and ambiguously gay. Toby wants to leave Concrete and live with his older brother, Gregory, (who lives on the East Coast with their father). Arthur wants to leave because he knows he will never fit in and that there is more to life than living in Concrete. Toby plans to apply for scholarships at East Coast prep schools by submitting falsified school records. Meanwhile, Arthur and Toby's friendship becomes strained when Arthur accuses Toby of behaving more like Dwight. Arthur helps Toby to falsify his grade records. After numerous rejections, Toby is accepted by The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania near Philadelphia with a full scholarship.


title: This Boy's Life

text: Later, Caroline defends Toby from Dwight during a physically violent argument; they both leave Dwight and the town of Concrete.


title: This Boy's Life

text: Largely filmed in the state of Washington, the town of Concrete, Washington (where Tobias Wolff's teen years were spent with his mother and stepfather, Dwight), was transformed to its 1950s appearance for a realistic feel. Many of the town's citizens were used as extras, and all external scenes in Concrete (and some internal scenes, as well) were shot in and around the town, including the former elementary school buildings and the still-active Concrete High School building. Parts of the film were also shot in the La Sal Mountains in Utah.


title: This Boy's Life

text: The film was released in limited release on April 9, 1993, and earned $74,425 that weekend; upon its wide release on April 23, the film opened at #10 at the box office and grossed $1,519,678. The film would end with a domestic gross of $4,104,962.


title: This Boy's Life

text: The film received mostly positive reviews; review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 76% 'Fresh' rating from 37 critics, with an average rating of 6.4/10. The site's consensus states: "A harrowing, moving drama about a young boy, his single mother, and his abusive stepfather, "This Boy's Life" benefits from its terrific cast, and features a breakout performance from a young Leonardo DiCaprio." On Metacritic, where they give a 'normalized' score, the film has a 60/100.


title: This Boy's Life

text: The soundtrack of "This Boy's Life" used many songs from the 1950s and early 1960s. The main titles (filmed in Professor Valley, Utah) feature Frank Sinatra's version of "Let's Get Away from It All" from his 1958 album "Come Fly with Me". Toby and his mother sing "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair" from the popular post-war musical "South Pacific". However, most of the music reflects Toby's fondness for rock and roll and doo wop, including songs by Eddie Cochran, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and Link Wray. Carter Burwell composed the film's pensive score, which featured New York guitarist Frederic Hand.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Torres Strait Islanders () are the Indigenous Melanesian people of the Torres Strait Islands, which are part of the state of Queensland, Australia. Ethnically distinct from the Aboriginal people of the rest of Australia, they are often grouped with them as Indigenous Australians. Today there are many more Torres Strait Islander people living in mainland Australia (nearly 28,000) than on the Islands (about 4,500).


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: There are five distinct peoples within broader designation of Torres Strait Islander people, based partly on geographical and cultural divisions. There are two main Indigenous language groups, Kalaw Lagaw Ya and Meriam Mir. Torres Strait Creole is also widely spoken, as a language of trade and commerce. The core of Island culture is Papuo-Austronesian and the people traditionally a seafaring nation. There is a strong artistic culture, particularly in sculpture, printmaking and mask-making.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: In June 1875 a measles epidemic killed about 25% of the population, with some islands suffering losses of up to 80% of their people, as the islanders had no natural immunity to European diseases.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Of the 133 islands, only 38 are inhabited. The islands are culturally unique, with much to distinguish them from neighbouring Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands. Today the society is multicultural, having attracted Asian and Pacific Island traders to the beche-de-mer, mother-of-pearl and trochus-shell industries over the years.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: The 2016 Australian census counted 4,514 people living on the islands, of whom 91.8% were Torres Strait Islander or Aboriginal Australian people. (64% of the population identified as Torres Strait Islander; 8.3% as Aboriginal Australian; 6.5% as Papua New Guinean; 3.6% as other Australian and 2.6% as "Maritime South-East Asian", etc.). In 2006 the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) had reported 6,800 Torres Strait Islanders living in the Torres Strait area.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: People identifying themselves as of Torres Strait Islander descent in the whole of Australia in the 2016 census numbered 32,345, while those with both Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal ancestry numbered a further 26,767 (compared with 29,515 and 17,811 respectively in 2006).


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Five communities of Torres Strait Islanders and Aboriginal Australians live on the coast of mainland Queensland, mainly at Bamaga, Seisia, Injinoo, Umagico and New Mapoon in the Northern Peninsula area of Cape York.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Until the late 20th century, Torres Strait Islanders had been administered by a system of elected councils, a system based partly on traditional pre-Christian local government and partly on the introduced mission management system.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Today, the Torres Strait Regional Authority, an Australian government body established in 1994 and consisting of 20 elected representatives, oversees the islands, with its primary function being to strengthen the economic, social and cultural development of the peoples of the Torres Strait area.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Further to the TSRA, there are several Queensland LGAs which administer areas occupied by Torres Strait Islander communities:


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Torres Strait Islander people are of predominantly Melanesian descent, distinct from Aboriginal Australians on the mainland and some other Australian islands, and share some genetic and cultural traits with the people of New Guinea.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: The five-pointed star on the national flag represents the five cultural groups; another source says that it originally represented the five groups of islands, but today (as of 2001) it represents the five major political divisions.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Pre-colonial Island people were not a homogeneous group and until then did not regard themselves as a single people. They have links with the people of Papua New Guinea, several islands being much closer to PNG than Australia, as well as the northern tip of Cape York on the Australian continent.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Sources are generally agreed that there are five distinct geographical and/or cultural divisions, but descriptions and naming of the groups differ widely.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: The Western-central Torres Strait Language, or Kalaw Lagaw Ya, is spoken on the southwestern, western, northern and central islands; a further dialect, Kala Kawa Ya (Top Western and Western) may be distinguished. It is a member of the Pama-Nyungan family of languages of Australia.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Meriam Mir is spoken on the eastern islands. It is one of the four Eastern Trans-Fly languages, the other three being spoken in Papua New Guinea.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Archaeological, linguistic and folk history evidence suggests that the core of Island culture is Papuo-Austronesian. The people have long been agriculturalists (evidenced, for example, by tobacco plantations on Aureed Island) as well as engaging in hunting and gathering. Dugong, turtles, crayfish, crabs, shellfish, reef fish and wild fruits and vegetables were traditionally hunted and collected and remain an important part of their subsistence lifestyle. Traditional foods play an important role in ceremonies and celebrations even when they do not live on the islands. Dugong and turtle hunting as well as fishing are seen as a way of continuing the Islander tradition of being closely associated with the sea. The islands have long history of trade and interactions with explorers from other parts of the globe, both east and west, which has influenced their lifestyle and culture.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: The Indigenous people of the Torres Strait have a distinct culture which has slight variants on the different islands where they live. Cultural practices share similarities with Australian Aboriginal and Papuan culture. Historically, they have an oral tradition, with stories handed down and communicated through song, dance and ceremonial performance. As a seafaring people, sea, sky and land feature strongly in their stories and art.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Post-colonisation history has seen new cultural influences on the people, most notably the place of Christianity. After the "Coming of Light" (see below), artefacts previously important to their ceremonies lost their relevance, instead replaced by crucifixes and other symbols of Christianity. In some cases the missionaries prohibited the use of traditional sacred objects, and eventually production ceased. Missionaries, anthropologists and museums "collected" a huge amount of material: all of the pieces collected by missionary Samuel McFarlane, were in London and then split between three European museums and a number of mainland Australian museums.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: In 1898–9, British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon collected about 2000 objects, convinced that hundreds of art objects collected had to be saved from destruction by the zealous Christian missionaries intent on obliterating the religious traditions and ceremonies of the native islanders. Film footage of ceremonial dances was also collected. The collection at Cambridge University is known as the Haddon Collection and is the most comprehensive collection of Torres Strait Islander artefacts in the world.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: During the first half of the 20th century, Torres Strait Islander culture was largely restricted to dance and song, weaving and producing a few items for particular festive occasions. In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers trying to salvage what was left of traditional knowledge from surviving elders influenced the revival of interest in the old ways of life. An Australian historian, Margaret Lawrie, employed by the Queensland State Library, spent much time travelling the Islands, speaking to local people and recording their stories, which have since influenced visual art on the Islands.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Mythology and culture, deeply influenced by the ocean and the natural life around the islands, have always informed traditional artforms. Featured strongly are turtles, fish, dugongs, sharks, seabirds and saltwater crocodiles, which are considered totemic beings.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Torres Strait Islander people are the only culture in the world to make turtleshell masks, known as "krar" (turtleshell) in the Western Islands and "le-op" (human face) in the Eastern Islands.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Elaborate headdresses or dhari (also spelt "dari"), as featured on the Torres Strait Islander Flag, are created for the purposes of ceremonial dances.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: The Islands have a long tradition of woodcarving, creating masks and drums, and carving decorative features on these and other items for ceremonial use. From the 1970s, young artists were beginning their studies at around the same time that a significant re-connection to traditional myths and legends was happening. Margaret Lawrie's publications, "Myths and Legends of the Torres Strait" (1970) and "Tales from the Torres Strait" (1972), reviving stories which had all but been forgotten, influenced the artists greatly. While some of these stories had been written down by Haddon after his 1898 expedition to the Torres Strait, many had subsequently fallen out of use or been forgotten.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: In the 1990s a group of younger artists, including the award-winning Dennis Nona (b.1973), started translating these skills into the more portable forms of printmaking, linocut and etching, as well as larger scale bronze sculptures. Other outstanding artists include Billy Missi (1970-2012), known for his decorated black and white linocuts of the local vegetation and eco-systems, and Alick Tipoti (b.1975). These and other Torres Strait artists have greatly expanded the forms of Indigenous art within Australia, bringing superb Melanesian carving skills as well as new stories and subject matter. The College of Technical and Further Education on Thursday Island was a starting point for young Islanders to pursue studies in art. Many went on to further art studies, especially in printmaking, initially in Cairns, Queensland and later at the Australian National University in what is now the School of Art and Design. Other artists such as Laurie Nona, Brian Robinson, David Bosun, Glen Mackie, Joemen Nona, Daniel O'Shane and Tommy Pau are known for their printmaking work.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: An exhibition of Alick Tipoti's work, titled "Zugubal", was mounted at the Cairns Regional Gallery in July 2015.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: For Torres Strait Islander people, singing and dancing is their "literature" – "the most important aspect of Torres Strait lifestyle. The Torres Strait Islanders preserve and present their oral history through songs and dances;...the dances act as illustrative material and, of course, the dancer himself is the storyteller” (Ephraim Bani, 1979). There are many songs about the weather; others about the myths and legends; life in the sea and totemic gods; and about important events. "The dancing and its movements express the songs and acts as the illustrative material".


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Dance is also major form of creative and competitive expression. "Dance machines" (hand held mechanical moving objects), clappers and headdresses (dhari/dari) enhance the dance performances. Dance artefacts used in the ceremonial performances relate to Islander traditions and clan identity, and each island group has its own performances.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Artist Ken Thaiday Snr is renowned for his elaborately sculptured dari, often with moving parts and incorporating the hammerhead shark, a powerful totem.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Christine Anu is an ARIA Award-winning singer-songwriter of Torres Strait Islander heritage, who first became popular with her cover version of the song "My Island Home" (first performed by the Warumpi Band).


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: The people still have their own traditional belief systems. Stories of the Tagai, their spiritual belief system, represent Torres Strait Islanders as sea people, with a connection to the stars, as well as a system of order in which everything has its place in the world. They follow the instructions of the Tagai.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Some Torres Strait Islander people share beliefs similar to the Aboriginal peoples' Dreaming and "Everywhen" concepts, passed down in oral history.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: One of the stories passed down in oral history tells of four brothers ("bala") named Malo, Sagai, Kulka and Siu, who paddled their way up to the central and eastern islands from Cape York ("Kay Daol Dai", meaning "big land"), and each established his own tribal following. Sagai landed at Iama Island(known as Yam), and after a time assumed a god-like status. The crocodile was his totem. Kulka settled on Aureed Island, and attained a similar status, as god of hunting. His totem was the fish known as "gai gai" (Trevally). Siu settled on Masig, becoming god of dancing, with the tiger shark ("baidam") as his totem. The eldest brother, Malo, went on to Mer and became responsible for setting out a set of rules for living, a combination of religion and law, which were presented by Eddie Mabo in the famous Mabo native title case in 1992.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: The cult of Kulka was in evidence on Aureed Island with the finding of a "skull house" by the rescuers of survivors two years after the wreck of "Charles Eaton", in 1836.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: From the 1870s, Christianity spread throughout the islands, and it remains strong today among Torres Strait Islander people everywhere. Christianity was first brought to the islands by the London Missionary Society (LMS) mission led by Rev. Samuel Macfarlane and Rev. Archibald Wright Murray, who arrived on Erub (Darnley Island) on 1 July 1871 on the schooner "Surprise", a schooner chartered by the LMS. They sailed to the Torres Strait after the French Government had demanded the removal of the missionaries from the Loyalty Islands and New Caledonia in 1869. Eight teachers and their wives from Loyalty Islands arrived with the missionaries on the boat from Lifu.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: Clan elder and warrior, Dabad, greeted them on their arrival. Ready to defend his land and people, Dabad walked to the water's edge when McFarlane dropped to his knees and presented the Bible to Dabad. Dabad accepted the gift, interpreted as the "Light", introducing Christianity to the Torres Strait Islands. The people of the Torres Strait Islands adopted the Christian rituals and ceremonies and continued to uphold their connection to the land, sea and sky, practising their traditional customs, and cultural identity referred to as "Ailan Kastom".


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: The Islanders refer to this event as "The Coming of the Light", also known as Zulai Wan, or Bi Akarida, and all Island communities celebrate the occasion annually on 1 July.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: However the coming of Christianity did not spell the end of the people's traditional beliefs; their culture informed their understanding of the new religion, as the Christian God was welcomed and the new religion was integrated into every aspect of their everyday lives.


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: In the 2016 Census, a total of 20,658 Torres Strait Islander people (out of a total of 32,345) and 15,586 of both Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal identity (out of 26,767) reported adherence to some form of Christianity. (Across the whole of Australia, the Indigenous and non-Indigenous population were broadly similar with 54% (vs 55%) reporting a Christian affiliation, while less than 2% reported traditional beliefs as their religion, and 36% reported no religion.)


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: A traditional cultural practice, known as "kupai omasker", allows adoption of a child by a relative or community member for a range of reasons. The reasons differ depending on which of the many Torres Islander cultures the person belongs to, with one example being "where a family requires an heir to carry on the important role of looking after land or being the caretaker of land". Other reasons might relate to "the care and responsibility of relationships between generations".


title: Torres Strait Islanders

text: There had been a problem in Queensland law, where such adoptions are not legally recognised by the state's "Succession Act 1981", with one issue being that adopted children are not able to take on the surname of their adoptive parents. On 17 July 2020 the Queensland Government introduced a bill in parliament to legally recognise the practice. The bill was passed as the "Meriba Omasker Kaziw Kazipa Act 2020" ("For Our Children's Children") on 8 September 2020.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Girl with a Pearl Earring is a 2003 drama film directed by Peter Webber from a screenplay by Olivia Hetreed, based on the 1999 novel of the same name by Tracy Chevalier. Scarlett Johansson stars as Griet, a young 17th-century servant in the household of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (played by Colin Firth) at the time he painted "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (1665) in the city of Delft in Holland. Other cast members include Tom Wilkinson, Cillian Murphy, Essie Davis, and Judy Parfitt.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Hetreed read the novel before its publication, and her husband's production company convinced Chevalier to sell the film rights. Initially, the production was to feature Kate Hudson as Griet with Mike Newell directing. Hudson withdrew shortly before filming began, however, and the film was placed in hiatus until the hire of Webber, who re-initiated the casting process.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: In his feature film debut, Webber sought to avoid employing traditional characteristics of the period film drama. In a 2003 interview with IGN, he said, "What I was scared of is ending up with something that was like "Masterpiece Theatre", [that] very polite Sunday evening BBC kind of thing, and I [was] determined to make something quite different from that...". Cinematographer Eduardo Serra used distinctive lighting and colour schemes similar to Vermeer's paintings.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Released on 12 December 2003 in North America and on 16 January 2004 in the United Kingdom, "Girl with a Pearl Earring" earned a worldwide gross of $31.4 million. It garnered a mostly positive critical reception, with critics generally applauding the film's visuals, musical score, and performances while questioning elements of its story. The film was subsequently nominated for ten British Academy Film Awards, three Academy Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Griet is a shy girl living in the Dutch Republic in 1665. Her father, a Delftware painter, has recently gone blind, rendering him unable to work and leaving his family in a precarious financial situation. Griet is sent to Delft to work as a maid in the household of famed painter Johannes Vermeer and his wife, Catharina. On the way there, she stops momentarily at a crossroads.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Griet works diligently and almost wordlessly in the lowest position of a harsh hierarchy. She does her best to adjust, in spite of the unkind treatment from Vermeer's spoiled adolescent daughter, Cornelia. While Griet is on a routine shopping run, a butcher's son, Pieter, is drawn to her. She is slow to return his affections as their relationship develops. As Griet cleans Vermeer's studio, which Catharina never enters, the painter begins to converse with her and encourages her appreciation of painting, light, and color. He gives her lessons in mixing paints and other tasks while keeping these secret from Catharina, to avoid angering her. In contrast, Vermeer's pragmatic mother-in-law, Maria Thins, sees Griet as useful to Vermeer's career.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Vermeer's rich patron, Van Ruijven, visits the household and notices Griet. He asks if Vermeer will give up Griet so she can work in the patron's house, where Van Ruijven ruined the former girl-maid. Vermeer refuses, but agrees to paint a portrait of Griet for Van Ruijven. As he secretly works on the painting, Catharina notices something is amiss. Her growing disdain for the maid becomes apparent, spurred on by Van Ruijven's deliberate suggestions of an improper relationship between Vermeer and Griet. A conflicted Griet deals with her growing fascination with Vermeer and his talent while fending off Van Ruijven, who attempts to rape her in the courtyard. Later, when Catharina is out for the day, her mother hands Griet her daughter's pearl earrings and asks Vermeer to finish the painting.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: At the final painting session, Vermeer pierces Griet's left earlobe so she can wear one of the earrings for the portrait. Tensions heighten when she reacts in pain and Vermeer caresses her face. She runs to Pieter for consolation and distraction from her thoughts of Vermeer. The two make love in a barn. Pieter proposes marriage, but Griet unexpectedly leaves. She returns the earrings to Catharina's mother.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Catharina flies into a rage upon discovering Griet wore her earrings and storms into the studio, accusing her mother of complicity. She demands Vermeer show her the commissioned portrait. Offended by the intimate nature of the painting, Catharina dismisses it as "obscene" and tearfully asks why Vermeer wouldn't paint her. When Vermeer responds that she doesn't understand, she tries but fails to destroy the painting. She banishes Griet from the house. Vermeer does not object. Griet returns to her parents' home and stands once again at crossroads. Van Ruijven sits looking smugly at the finished painting. Later, she receives a visit at her parents' home from Vermeer's cook, Tanneke, who brings a gift: the blue headscarf Griet wore in the painting, wrapped around Catharina's pearl earrings.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: In the final shot, the camera zooms out from the earring to reveal the full real-life painting, "Girl with a Pearl Earring.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: The production of "Girl with a Pearl Earring" began in 1999, when screenwriter Olivia Hetreed gained access to Tracy Chevalier's novel "Girl with a Pearl Earring" shortly before its publication in August. The novel had not yet become a best-seller, but several groups were beginning to show interest. Hetreed loved the character of Griet and "her determination to be free in a world where that was almost impossible for a girl from her background". Anand Tucker and Hetreed's husband Andy Paterson – both producers with the small British studio Archer Street Films – approached the novel's author, Tracy Chevalier, for a film adaptation. Chevalier agreed, believing that a British studio would help resist Hollywood's urge "to sex up the film". She stipulated that their adaptation avoid having the main characters consummate their relationship. Paterson and Tucker promised to "replicate the 'emotional truth' of the story", and Chevalier did not seek to retain control during the film's creative process, though she briefly considered adapting it herself.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Hetreed worked closely with Tucker and Webber to adapt the book, explaining that "working with them on drafts helped me to concentrate on what the film would be, rather than how beautifully I could make a line work". Her first draft was closest to the source material and it slowly "developed its own character" through rewrites. She avoided using a voiceover, which was present in the novel, "partly because it would make it very literary". Instead, she focused on conveying Griet's thoughts visually – for example, in her adaptation Griet and Vermeer inspect the camera obscura together under his cloak amidst sexual tension; whereas, in the novel Griet views it alone immediately after him and enjoys the lasting warmth and scent he leaves.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: The novel maximises the few known facts of Vermeer's life, which Hetreed described as "little pillars sticking up out of the dust of history". To learn more about the artist, the screenwriter researched Dutch society in the 17th-century, talked to artist friends about painting, and interviewed a Victoria & Albert Museum art historian who had restored the original artwork. Hetreed stayed in close contact with Chevalier, and the two became so close near the end of the production that they presented a Master class together on screenwriting.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Originally, the American actress Kate Hudson was cast as Griet, having successfully pursued the role from the film's producers. In September 2001, however, Hudson pulled out four weeks before filming began, officially due to "creative differences". Hudson's decision scuppered the production and led to the loss of financial support from the production company Intermedia. It also resulted in the withdrawal of Mike Newell as director and Ralph Fiennes as Vermeer; Fiennes left the project to work on his 2002 film "Maid in Manhattan". Due to this incident, "The Guardian" reported that it "now seems unlikely that the film will ever be made".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Production started again later that year when the producers hired the relatively unknown British television director Peter Webber to head the project, despite his not having directed a feature film before. Tucker and Paterson already knew Webber from several earlier projects; the director discovered the project by accident after visiting their office, where he noticed a poster of Vermeer's work and began discussing it. Webber read the script and described it as being "about creativity and the link between art and money and power and sex in some strange unholy mixture". Characterising it as a "coming of age" story with a "fascinating dark undertow", Webber deliberately did not read the book prior to filming, as he was concerned about being influenced by it, opting instead to rely on the script and the period.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: The casting of Griet was Webber's first major step, and led to interviews with 150 girls before Webber chose the 17-year-old actress Scarlett Johansson. He felt that she "just stood out. She had something distinctive about her." Johansson seemed very modern to Webber, but he believed this was a positive attribute, realising "that what would work was to take this intelligent, zippy girl and repress all that". The actress finished filming "Lost in Translation" immediately before arriving on set in Luxembourg, and consequently prepared little for the role. She considered the script "beautifully written" and the character "very touching", but did not read the book because she thought it would be better to approach the story with a "clean slate."


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: After the hiring of Johansson, other major casting decisions quickly followed, beginning with the addition of English actor Colin Firth as Vermeer. Firth and Webber, both of a similar age and background, spent significant time discussing Vermeer's personality and lifestyle in the period leading up to the beginning of filming. While researching the role, Firth realised that Vermeer was "incredibly elusive as an artist". As a result, unlike Webber and Johansson, Firth chose to read the book to gain a better grasp of a man of whom little information existed on his private life. Firth sought to "invent" the character and discover his motivations, and ultimately identified with the artist for having a private space in the midst of a bustling family. Firth also studied painting techniques and visited museums carrying Vermeer works.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: After Firth, Webber's next casting decision was Tom Wilkinson as the patron Pieter van Ruijven, who was hired in late 2002. He was soon joined by Judy Parfitt as Vermeer's domineering mother-in-law, and Essie Davis, who portrayed Vermeer's wife Catharina. The Australian daughter of an artist, Davis did not believe her character was the film's "bad guy", as "[Catharina] has a certain role to play for you to want Griet and Vermeer to be involved". Cillian Murphy, known for his recent role in "28 Days Later", was hired as Pieter, Griet's butcher love interest. Murphy, taking on his first period film role, was interested in serving as a foil to Firth's Vermeer, and representing the "ordinary" world that Griet seeks to avoid upon her meeting the artist. Other cast members included Joanna Scanlan as the maid Tanneke, as well as the young actresses Alakina Mann and Anna Popplewell as Vermeer's daughters, Cornelia and Maertge, respectively.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: During preproduction, Webber and cinematographer Eduardo Serra studied the period's artwork and discussed the different moods they wanted to create for each scene. The director was a lover of the Stanley Kubrick period drama "Barry Lyndon", but knew that "Girl With a Pearl Earring" would be different; unlike the former film's "elaborate and expensive set pieces", Webber's production was to be "about the intimate relationships within a single household". He was not seeking to create a historically accurate biographical film of Vermeer; Webber sought to direct a period film that avoided being "overly slavish" to characteristics of the genre, desiring instead to "bring the film to life" and have viewers "be able almost to smell the meat in the market". Webber employed little dialogue and drew inspiration from the "quiet, tense, mysterious, transcendent world" of Vermeer's paintings. The director also made a conscious effort to slow the pace of the film, hoping that by "slowing things down [we could] create these moments in between the dialogue that were full of emotion. And the more silent the film became, the closer it seemed to be to the condition of those Vermeer paintings and the closer it seemed to capture some kind of truth."


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: The film was budgeted at £10 million. While it is set in Delft, the film was primarily shot in Amsterdam, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Chevalier later remarked that Webber and Serra "needed absolute control of the space and light they worked with – something they could never achieve by shutting down a busy Delft street for an hour or two". Only a few exterior shots were filmed in Delft.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Webber hired Ben van Os as his production designer because "he wasn't intimidated by the period obligations. He was much more interested in story and character." For inspiration in constructing the film's sets, Webber and van Os studied the works of Vermeer and other artists of the period, such as Gerard ter Borch. Set designer Todd van Hulzen said the goal was to "reflect that quiet, sober, almost moralizing ethos that you see in Dutch paintings". They built Vermeer's house on one of Luxembourg's largest film soundstages, a three-story set where they designed rooms that were meant to convey a lack of privacy. According to van Os, the film was about "being observed", so they intended Griet to always feel that she was being watched. In addition, they built two other interior sets to represent the homes of Griet and van Ruijven – Griet's home possessed Calvinistic characteristics while van Ruijven's contained mounted animals to reflect his "predatory nature". The Mauritshuis museum made a high resolution photograph of the actual painting, which was then shot on a rostrum camera to be used in the film.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: According to Webber, Serra "was obsessed with reproducing the amazing use of light by the artists of that period, and most particularly Vermeer's use of it". To reflect the "magical luminosity" of Vermeer's artwork, Serra employed diffused lighting and different film stock when filming scenes in the artist's studio. Webber and Serra did not want to be too reliant on Vermeer's aesthetic, however; they wanted audiences to come away focusing their praise on its story, not its visuals.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: In desiring to avoid stereotypes of the costume drama, Webber costumed his actors in simple outfits he termed "period Prada", rather than use the ruffles and baggy costumes common for the era. The intent was to "take the real clothes from the period and reduce them to their essence". Costume designer Dien van Straalen explored London and Holland markets in search for period fabrics, including curtains and slipcovers. For Griet, van Straalen employed "pale colors for Scarlett Johansson to give her the drab look of a poor servant girl." Firth was also outfitted simply, as Vermeer was not rich. Van Straalen created more elaborate costumes for Wilkinson, as van Ruijven was to her "a peacock strutting around with his money".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Make-up and hair designer Jenny Shircore desired that Griet appear without make-up, so Johansson was given very little; rather, Shircore focused on maintaining the actress' skin as "milky, thick and creamy", and bleached her eyebrows. They gave Davis as Catharina a "very simple Dutch hairstyle", which they learned from studying drawings and prints of the period.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: The musical score for "Girl with a Pearl Earring" was written by the French composer Alexandre Desplat. Webber decided to hire Desplat after hearing a score he had composed for a Jacques Audiard film. Webber explained, "He had a sense of restraint and a sense of lyricism that I liked. I remember the first time I saw the cue where Griet opens the shutters. He was really describing what the light was doing, articulating that in a musical sphere." Desplat was then known primarily for scoring films in his native language.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: The score employs strings, piano, and woodwinds, with a central theme featuring a variety of instrumental forms. Desplat created a melody that recurs throughout the film, stating in a later interview that "it evolves and it's much more flowing with a very gentle theme that's haunting". The score, his career breakthrough, gained him international attention and garnered him further film projects. The soundtrack was released in 2004; it earned a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, helping increase Desplat's name recognition in Hollywood.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Desplat's work also garnered positive reviews. "The New York Times" described it as a " gorgeous score ...[which] brushes in a haunted gloom that gives the picture life where none seems to exist", whilst "Boston.com" said it "burbles with elegant baroque minimalism". "Empire" magazine called his score "a supremely elegant work" that "creates a captivating atmosphere of cautious emotion and wonderment, the true highlight being 'Colours in the Clouds', so simply majestic that it really captures the heart of the story".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: In the interest of shortening the adaptation, approximately one-third of the story was eventually edited out; entire subplots and characters were removed. Before becoming a screenwriter Hetreed worked as an editor, and credits this experience for knowing "about structure and what you need to say and what you can leave out. I am a big enthusiast for leaving things out." She focused the story on the relationship between Griet and Vermeer, deciding what other storylines were "distracting and had to be jettisoned. Before editing, there was great stuff there, but Peter was fantastically ruthless". Changes from the novel did not bother Chevalier, who felt that as a result the film gained "a focused, driven plot and a sumptuous visual feast".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: According to Webber, "Girl with a Pearl Earring" is "more than just a quaint little film about art" but is concerned with themes of money, sex, repression, obsession, power, and the human heart. Laura M. Sager Eidt, in her book "Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film", asserts that the film deviates significantly from the source material and emphasises a "socio-political dimension that is subtler in the novel". "Girl with a Pearl Earring", Sager Eidt says, "shifts its focus from a young girl's evolving consciousness to the class and power relations in the story".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: In "Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking Since the 1990s", Andrew Higson notes that the film overcomes the novel's "subjective narration" device by having the camera stay fixed on Griet for much of the film. But, Higson says, "no effort is made to actually render her point of view as the point of view of the film or the spectator".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Vermeer channels Griet's sexual awakening into his painting, with the piercing of her ear and his directives to her posing being inherently sexual. In the opinion of psychologist Rosemary Rizq, the pearl Griet dons is a metaphor, something which normally would convey wealth and status. But, when worn by Griet, the pearl is also a directive to the audience to look at the "psychological potential within" her erotic, unconsummated bond with Vermeer, unclear up to that point if it is real or not.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: The film incorporates seven of Vermeer's paintings into its story. Thomas Leitch, in "Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ", writes that while Chevalier's Griet describes ten Vermeer paintings (without naming them), Webber's film avoids "show[ing] an external world that looks like a series of Vermeer paintings", as this would have been a trivialisation of the artist's achievements. Leitch adds the director "compromises by showing far fewer actual Vermeer paintings than Chevalier's Griet describes but lingering longer over the visual particulars of the studio in which he creates them".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: "Girl With a Pearl Earring"s world premiere occurred at the Telluride Film Festival on 31 August 2003. In North America it was distributed by Lions Gate Entertainment. The film was limited in release to seven cinemas on 12 December 2003, landing in 32nd place for the week with $89,472. Lions Gate slowly increased its release to a peak of 402 cinemas by 6 February 2004. Its total domestic gross was $11,670,971.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: The film was released in the United Kingdom on 16 January 2004 by Pathé Films. In its opening week, the film finished in tenth place with a total of £384,498 from 106 cinemas. In the UK and Ireland, the film finished in 14th place for the year with a total box office gross of £3.84 million. It had a worldwide gross of $31,466,789.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: In the US, the "Girl With a Pearl Earring" DVD was released on 4 May 2004 by Lions Gate. The Region 2 DVD's release on 31 May 2004 included audio commentaries from Webber, Paterson, Hetreed, and Chevalier; a featurette on "The Art of Filmmaking"; and eight deleted scenes.


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Critical reception of "Girl With a Pearl Earring" was mostly positive, with reviewers positively emphasizing the film's visuals, musical score, and performances while questioning elements of its story. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes calculated a 73% approval rating based on 179 reviews, with an average score of 6.90/10. The website reported the critical consensus as "visually arresting, but the story could be told with a bit more energy". Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 72 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Historian Alex von Tunzelmann, writing for "The Guardian", praised the film for its "sumptuous design and incredible Vermeerish appearance" but felt that "it's a bit too much like watching paint dry". In "The Observer", Philip French referred to the film as "quiet, intelligent and well-acted" and believed that "most people will be impressed by, and carry away in their mind's eye, the film's appearance ... [Serra, van Os, and van Strallen] have given the movie a self-conscious beauty".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: The BBC's review, written by Susan Hodgetts, described the film as "a superior British costume drama that expertly mixes art history with romantic fiction", which would appeal to "anyone who likes serious, intelligent drama and gentle erotic tension". Hodgetts said that both Firth and Johansson gave "excellent" performances and did "a grand job of expressing feelings and emotions without the use of much dialogue, and the picture is the better for it". Elvis Mitchell of "The New York Times" called the film an "earnest, obvious melodrama with no soul, filled with the longing silences that come after a sigh". Mitchell did however laud its cinematography, production design, and musical score, as did the "Film Journal International"s Erica Abeel. Despite praising its visuals, Abeel criticized "Girl with a Pearl Earring" for being "a chick flick dressed up in Old Master clothes" and for failing "to render Griet's growing artistic sensibility dramatically credible". She cited its melodramatic villains as another failing, but concluded that it was "to Johansson's credit that she alone pulls something plausible out of her character".


title: Girl with a Pearl Earring (film)

text: Sandra Hall of "The Sydney Morning Herald" praised Webber's ability to "build individual moments [such as] the crackle of a bed-sheet which has grown an ice overcoat after being hung out to dry in the wintry air", but opined that he failed to "invest these elegant reproductions of the art of the period with the emotional charge you've been set up to expect". Griet and Vermeer's relationship, Hall wrote, lacked "the sense of two people breathing easily in one another's company". Owen Gleiberman, writing for "Entertainment Weekly", remarked that "Girl with a Pearl Earring" "brings off something that few dramas about artists do. It gets you to see the world through new – which is to say, old – eyes". Gleiberman added that while Johansson is silent for most of the film, "the interplay on her face of fear, ignorance, curiosity, and sex is intensely dramatic". In "Sight & Sound", David Jays wrote that "Johansson's marvellous performance builds on the complex innocence of her screen presence ("Ghost World", "Lost in Translation")". Jays concluded his review by praising Webber and Serra's ability to "deftly deploy daylight, candle and shadow, denying our desire to see clearly just as Vermeer refuses to explicate the situations in his paintings. The film's scenarios may be unsurprising, but Webber's solemn evocation of art in a grey world gives his story an apt, unspoken gravity."


title: Night Witches

text: "Night Witches" (; , ) was a World War II German nickname for the all-female military aviators of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, known later as the 46th "Taman" Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, of the Soviet Air Forces. Though women were officially barred from combat at the time, Major Marina Raskova used her position and personal contacts with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to obtain permission to form female combat units. "Combat facilitated and ushered in a reluctant acceptance of women in military, based more upon practicality and necessity than for equality". On October 8, 1941, an order was issued to deploy three women's air-force units, including the 588th Regiment. The regiment, formed by Raskova and led by Major Yevdokiya Bershanskaya, was composed primarily of female volunteers in their late teens and early twenties.


title: Night Witches

text: An attack technique of the night bombers involved idling the engine near the target and gliding to the bomb-release point with only wind noise left to reveal their presence. German soldiers likened the sound to broomsticks and hence named the pilots "Night Witches". Due to the weight of the bombs and the low altitude of flight, the pilots did not carry parachutes until 1944.


title: Night Witches

text: When the regiment was deployed on the front line in June 1942, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment became part of the 4th Air Army of the Southern Front. In February 1943 the regiment was honored with the Guards designation and reorganized as the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment in the 325th Night Bomber Aviation Division, 4th Air Army, 2nd Belorussian Front; in October 1943 it became the 46th "Taman" Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, "Taman" referring to the unit's involvement in the Novorossiysk-Taman operations on the Taman Peninsula during 1943.


title: Night Witches

text: In October 1941, Major Marina Raskova was granted authority to select candidates for the 122nd Composite Air Group, an all-female aviation regiment. Raskova had already established several world records in long-distance non-stop flights and was referred to as the "Russian Amelia Earhart" for her achievements. When the Germans invaded in 1941, young women began writing Raskova letters, asking how they could best serve their country using their flight skills. Raskova used her personal connection with Stalin to obtain approval to establish the regiment.


title: Night Witches

text: Stalin was quick to approve of the initiative, as he had a general interest in the women's "tremendous international propaganda value."


title: Night Witches

text: The regiment flew harassment and precision bombing missions against the German military from 1942 until the end of the Second World War (1945). At its largest, it had 40 two-person crews. The regiment flew over 23,000 sorties, dropping over 3,000 tons of bombs and 26,000 incendiary shells. It was the most highly decorated female unit in the Soviet Air Force, with many pilots having flown over 800 missions by the end of the war, and twenty-three having been awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union title. Thirty-two of its members died during the war.


title: Night Witches

text: The regiment flew in wood-and-canvas Polikarpov U-2 biplanes, a 1928 design intended for use as training aircraft (hence its original designation prefix of "U-") and for crop dusting, which also had a special U-2LNB version for the sort of night harassment attack missions flown by the 588th. The plane could only carry of bombs, so eight or more missions per night were often necessary. Although the aircraft was obsolete and slow, the pilots took advantage of its exceptional maneuverability; it also had a maximum speed that was lower than the stalling speed of both the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, which made it very difficult for German pilots to shoot down, with the exception of fighter ace Josef Kociok, who grounded the regiment for an entire night by shooting down three or four of their planes on the night of 31 July 1 August 1943.


title: Night Witches

text: Initially, this all-female aviation regiment was not welcomed into the military with open arms. Many of their male counterparts saw them as inferior and treated them with lack of respect. The women of the regiment were also given hand-me-downs of uniforms and over-sized shoes by the men, as well as rudimentary tools (such as rulers, flashlights and pencils) that lacked the "luxury" that the male soldiers received with their tools (for example, radar, guns and radios).


title: Night Witches

text: Members of the regiment were deployed from the Engels Military Aviation School to the Southern Front as part of the 218th Division of the 4th Air Army on 23 May 1942, where they arrived on 27 May.


title: Night Witches

text: Throughout the course of the war the regiment accumulated approximately 23,672 sorties in combat, including in the following battles:


title: Night Witches

text: In total the regiment collectively accumulated 28,676 flight hours, dropped over 3,000 tons of bombs and over 26,000 incendiary shells, damaging or completely destroying 17 river crossings, nine railways, two railway stations, 26 warehouses, 12 fuel depots, 176 armored cars, 86 firing points, and 11 searchlights. In addition to bombings, the unit performed 155 supply drops of food and ammunition to Soviet forces.


title: Night Witches

text: In total, 261 people served in the regiment, of whom 32 died of various causes during the war including plane crashes, combat deaths and tuberculosis. Twenty-eight aircraft were written off.


title: Night Witches

text: Senior Engineer Sofiya Ozerkova destroyed her party card to avoid being seized after she was shot down and had to escape and evade from the German Army. Following her return to the Regiment she was sentenced to death by a military tribunal in 1942 because she could not produce the card. She was later acquitted after her sentence was suspended and she was reinstated to her position. Mechanics Raisa Kharitonova and Tamara Frolova were sentenced to ten years of imprisonment for dismantling a flare (used by navigators to illuminate bombing targets) and using the small silk parachutes to sew undergarments. Both of them were retrained as navigators, but Frolova was killed in action in 1943.


title: Night Witches

text: Twenty-three personnel from the regiment were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, two were awarded Hero of the Russian Federation, and one was awarded Hero of Kazakhstan.


title: Night Witches

text: In 1917, Russia was the first country to declare legal equality for women, which allowed them to enter military service. Women were inherently equal in both rights and responsibilities as a Russian citizen as social equality was a fundamental part of the Communist ideology. However, ideology was not always exhibited in practice which is seen time and time again especially through times of war whether it be prior, during, or after. In the case of after World War II, women in Russia were treated as though they always have been, especially before the 1917 law was passed. Many can see this passing as a way to get more nationalistic views for Russia, along with soldiers to fight for their country, rather than for the actual equality and treatment of women. A common dilemma for these women grew out of the social pressures of deciding to place more importance on the family instead of an aviation or military career. Irina Rakobolskaya, pilot with the 588th Regiment, rationalized the difficult reality and challenges she faced to pursue both a family and piloting career when she stated, “I think that during the war, when the fate of our country was being decided, the bringing in of women into aviation was justified. But in peacetime a woman can only fly for sport...otherwise how can one combine a career with a family and with maternal happiness?”


title: Night Witches

text: On 8 October 1941, Order number 0099 specified the creation of three women's regiments—all personnel from technicians to pilots would be entirely composed of women. The other two regiments were the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment, which used Yak-1 fighters, and the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment, which used twin engine Pe-2 dive bombers. Later the unit received the Guards designation and reorganized as the 125th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment. Although all three regiments had been planned to have women exclusively, none remained all-female. The 586th and 588th Regiments employed male mechanics, the 586th because no women had received training to work on the Yakovlev fighter planes before the war. The 586th's woman commander, Major Tamara Aleksandrovna Kazarinova, was replaced by a man, Major Aleksandr Vasilievich Gridnev, in October 1942. The 587th Regiment was originally under the command of Marina Raskova, but after her death in 1943, a male commanding officer, Major Valentin Markov, replaced her. The 587th's Petlyakov Pe-2 dive bombers also required a tall person to operate the top rear machine gun, but not enough women recruited were tall enough, requiring some men to join the aircrews as radio operator and tail gunner. The 588th Regiment's staff driver and searchlight operatives were also male.


title: Accession of Serbia to the European Union

text: The accession of Serbia to the European Union (EU) has been on the current agenda for the future enlargement of the EU since 2012, when it became a candidate for accession. Serbia officially applied for European Union membership on 22 December 2009. Accession negotiations are currently ongoing. Serbia is expected to complete its negotiations by the end of 2024, allowing it to join the Union by 2025.


text: It is one of seven current EU candidate countries, together with Albania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Turkey and Ukraine.


text: Negotiations with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (later the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro) intensified following the election defeat and ousting of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, and the EU officially declared the Balkan states potential candidates for membership following the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Thessaloniki on 21 June 2003.


text: On 7 November 2007, Serbia initiated a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with the European Union. The SSA came into force on 1 September 2013.


text: The European Commission recommended making Serbia an official candidate on 12 October 2011. The Council also made the recommendation on 28 February 2012.


text: Serbia received full candidate status on 1 March 2012. In December 2013, the Council of the European Union approved opening negotiations for Serbia's accession.


text: Until 2020, Serbia had been receiving €2.9bn of developmental aid from the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance, a funding mechanism for EU candidate countries.


text: Serbia refused to join Western sanctions against Russia following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In response, the European Parliament passed a resolution which stated in part it "strongly regrets Serbia’s non-alignment with EU sanctions against Russia, which damages its EU accession process."


text: The biggest obstacle between Serbia's accession to the EU is its strained relationship with Kosovo, which declared its independence on 17 February 2008.


text: The Serbian government has declared that the status of Kosovo should not be tied with the EU negotiations. In September 2012, the EU Enlargement Commissioner, Štefan Füle, denied that the European Union would insist on Serbia's recognition of Kosovo before it can join the organisation.


text: On 19 April 2013, the governments of Kosovo and Serbia completed the Brussels Agreement, which was hailed as a major step towards normalising relations and enabled the start of EU accession talks with Serbia.


text: In November 2013, Kosovo's Minister of Foreign Affairs Enver Hoxhaj suggested that the EU should approve the accession of Kosovo and Serbia simultaneously due to concerns that if Serbia was admitted first they could veto Kosovo's membership. However, Serbia's accession negotiations were not halted.


text: In March 2021, the European Parliament adopted a report on Serbia, which, amongst other things, emphasized that the normalization of relationships between Serbia and Kosovo is “a priority and a requirement for EU accession”.


text: The results of opinion polling vary drastically depending on the question asked. An August 2017 poll recorded that 51.2% were in favour of joining the EU, 36.3% were against and 12.5% undecided. However, the same poll also asked: "if recognizing the independence of Kosovo were a condition of joining the EU, do you think that condition should be accepted?", to which 12.1% answered yes, 70.6% no and 17.3% were undecided.


text: On 1 January 2008, the Visa Facilitation and Readmission Agreement between Serbia and the EU came into effect. On 19 December 2009, Visa requirements were lifted for Serbs travelling to Schengen countries.


title: Gil-galad

text: Gil-galad is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, the last High King of the Noldor, one of the main divisions of Elves. He is mentioned in "The Lord of the Rings", where the hobbit Sam Gamgee recites a fragment of a poem about him, and "The Silmarillion". In the Last Alliance of Elves and Men, Gil-galad and Elendil laid siege to the Dark Lord Sauron's fortress of Barad-dûr, and fought him hand-to-hand for the One Ring. Both Gil-galad and Elendil were killed, and Elendil's son Isildur took the Ring for himself. Gil-galad briefly appears at the opening of Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy, and features in several video games based on Tolkien's Middle-earth.


title: Gil-galad

text: Gil-galad was an Elf of a royal house of Beleriand; beyond that, accounts of his birth vary. According to "The Silmarillion", he was born into the house of Finwë as a son of Fingon sometime in the First Age, and as a child, he was sent away during the Siege of Angband for safekeeping with Cirdan the shipwright in the Falas. Alternatively, he was a son of Orodreth, who became a son of Angrod, son of Finarfin: Tolkien made these changes to allow Turgon, Fingon's brother, to inherit the crown before Gil-galad (leaving Fingon childless). Christopher Tolkien rejected these changes for "The Silmarillion", a decision he later regretted.


title: Gil-galad

text: He became the High King of the Noldor-in-Exile in Beleriand after the fall of Gondolin and the death of the previous High King, Turgon. After the War of Wrath and the end of the First Age, Gil-galad founded a realm in the coastal region of Lindon along the shores of Belegaer, the Great Sea. At its height, his realm extended eastward as far as the Misty Mountains. King Tar-Aldarion of Númenor presented Gil-galad with the gift of some seeds of the Mallorn tree; he in turn gave some to Galadriel, who grew them in the guarded land of Lothlórien. Gil-galad did not take a wife and had no children. He was the first of the Eldar to mistrust a stranger who called himself Annatar, and forbade him from entering Lindon. His mistrust was well founded, for Annatar was in fact Sauron. About the year 1600 of the Second Age, Sauron secretly forged the One Ring. Celebrimbor, the creator of the Three Rings, gave two of them, Narya and Vilya, to Gil-galad for safe-keeping once he knew Sauron's intention to take them. Gil-galad passed Narya to Cirdan the shipwright, who stated that this was only to keep it secret; Cirdan never used it. Gil-galad chose to give Vilya, and control of Eriador, to Elrond. War broke out between the Elves and Sauron; Gil-galad asked the Númenóreans for help, and their king Tar-Minastir brought a great force, enabling Gil-galad to defeat Sauron's army.


title: Gil-galad

text: After the Downfall of Númenor there was peace in Middle-earth. At the end of the Second Age, Sauron reappeared with a newly formed army and made war against the kingdom of Gondor, near his old home of Mordor. Gil-galad formed the Last Alliance of Elves and Men with the High King of Men, Elendil. The armies of Elves and Men entered Mordor and laid siege to Sauron's fortress of Barad-dûr. At the end of the siege, Sauron finally came forth and fought hand-to-hand against Gil-galad and Elendil on the slopes of Mount Doom, losing the One Ring but killing them both. A record left by Isildur in Minas Tirith implies that Sauron himself killed Gil-galad with the heat of his bare hands. Recalling the encounter at the Council of Elrond at Rivendell before the Fellowship took the One Ring south, Elrond said that only he and Círdan stood by Gil-galad in that fight.


title: Gil-galad

text: In "The Fellowship of the Ring", on the way to Weathertop, Aragorn mentions Gil-galad, prompting the hobbit Sam Gamgee to recite a fragment, three stanzas, of "Gil-galad was an Elven-king":


title: Gil-galad

text: Sam's companions are impressed, and ask for more; Sam admits that is all that he learnt from Bilbo. Aragorn says the fragment is a translation from "an ancient tongue" and suggests that the hobbits may hear the rest in Rivendell. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey comments that the longer poem does not exist, and that Sam's fragment seems to have been composed while Tolkien was writing the chapter. He notes that it has the form of a ballad, each stanza being a quatrain in eulogy mode with end-rhymes in the rhyming pattern AABB/CCDD.


title: Gil-galad

text: Gil-galad's spear was named Aeglos or Aiglos, meaning "snow-point" or "snow-thorn" or more commonly "icicle" ("aeg": sharp, pointed; "los": snow) because when orcs saw his spear, they would recognize it by its reputation to bring a cold death to them. Elrond said that at the battle of Dagorlad, "we had the mastery: for the Spear of Gil-galad and the Sword of Elendil, Aiglos and Narsil, none could withstand." It has been suggested that Tolkien might have based the spear on the god Odin's irresistible spear Gungnir in Norse mythology.


title: Gil-galad

text: Tolkien created two sketches of heraldic devices for Gil-galad. They were drawn on an envelope posted to him in 1960, along with a device containing a star or Silmaril for Eärendil. The Tolkien scholars Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull note that matching the description in the poem, "The countless stars of heaven's field / Were mirrored in his silver shield", the lozenge-shaped devices both contain stars, with an elongated star in each corner. Margaret Purdy, in "Mythlore", writes that Gil-galad's shield, like all elvish heraldry personal not inherited, seems to incorporate his stars, though the field is blue not silver.


title: Gil-galad

text: His names in Tolkien's invented languages of Quenya and Sindarin were Artanáro and Rodnor, respectively.


title: Gil-galad

text: Tolkien considered several different parentages for Gil-galad in different draft texts, including making him the son of Orodreth. In the second version of "The Fall of Númenor", he is called a descendant of Fëanor, who made the Silmarils. Then Tolkien treated him as a son of Finrod Felagund. Christopher Tolkien, editing the published version of "The Silmarillion", made Gil-galad the son of Fingon, a decision he later regretted, saying he should have left the parentage obscure.


title: Gil-galad

text: Renee Vink, of the Dutch Tolkien Society, suggests that the only good reason for making him son of Fingon is the correspondence of the colours, blue and silver, of Gil-galad's heraldic device and Fingolfin's banner, noting that the publication of "The Silmarillion", based on a limited "grasp of the material", created a "virtually unshakeable" tradition for this parentage. She argues that Orodreth has a better claim to paternity, for several reasons: the crown of the Noldor in exile (in Middle-earth) then comes to a descendant of Finarfin, king of the Noldor in Aman; a descendent of Finarfin would fight Sauron to avenge Finarfin's son Finrod; and as brother to Finduilas, he (alone of the Noldor's Kings) would fight with a spear, the weapon that killed his sister.


title: Gil-galad

text: The scholar of literature Lawrence Krikorian, in "Mallorn", writes that Elrond's account of being Gil-galad's herald in the Second Age, thousands of years earlier, as recalled first-person observation helps to make the narrative function as history rather than allegory, lending an impression of depth.


title: Gil-galad

text: In the 1981 BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of "The Lord of the Rings", the "Lay of Gil-galad" was set to music by Stephen Oliver.


title: Gil-galad

text: In the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy by Peter Jackson, Gil-galad is portrayed by actor Mark Ferguson, who appears very briefly in "" during the opening prologue sequence. Gil-galad is mentioned in the behind-the-scenes documentaries included with the Special Extended Edition DVD of "The Fellowship of the Ring" and is listed in the credits. In an interview with Ferguson and Craig Parker (Haldir), Ferguson stated that it had been planned for his death to be depicted onscreen as in the book, but it was considered too violent.


title: Gil-galad

text: In the Amazon Prime Video "" TV series, which focuses on events in the Second Age, Gil-Galad is played by Benjamin Walker.


title: Gil-galad

text: The 2004 video game "" featured Mark Ferguson as Gil-galad. Others are the 2007 "The Lord of the Rings Online"; the 2011 ""; and the 2012 "Lego The Lord of the Rings" which has Gil-galad near Mount Doom.


title: Digital object identifier

text: A digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle used to uniquely identify various objects, standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). DOIs are an implementation of the Handle System; they also fit within the URI system (Uniform Resource Identifier). They are widely used to identify academic, professional, and government information, such as journal articles, research reports, data sets, and official publications. DOIs have also been used to identify other types of information resources, such as commercial videos.


title: Digital object identifier

text: A DOI aims to resolve to its target, the information object to which the DOI refers. This is achieved by binding the DOI to metadata about the object, such as a URL where the object is located. Thus, by being actionable and interoperable, a DOI differs from ISBNs or ISRCs which are identifiers only. The DOI system uses the indecs Content Model for representing metadata.