title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: While they were working to secure the film rights, Pressman and Summer were also contemplating the lead role. Summer said they considered Charles Bronson, Sylvester Stallone, comedian and ex-rugby player Jethro and William Smith—all of whom had played tough figures, but in 1976, the two producers watched a rough cut of the bodybuilding film, "Pumping Iron", and agreed that Arnold Schwarzenegger was perfect for the role of Conan due to his huge, muscular frame. According to Schwarzenegger, Pressman's "low-key" approach and "great inner strength" convinced him to join the project. Paul Sammon, writer for "Cinefantastique", said that the former champion bodybuilder was practically the "living incarnation of one of Frazetta's paperback illustrations". Schwarzenegger was paid $250,000 and placed on retainer; the terms of the contract restricted him from starring in other sword-and-sorcery films. Schwarzenegger said "Conan" was his biggest opportunity to establish himself in the entertainment industry.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Thanks to Pressman's firm belief in him, Schwarzenegger retained the role of Conan even after the project was effectively sold to De Laurentiis. Milius wanted a more athletic look on his lead actor, so Schwarzenegger undertook an 18-month training regimen before shooting began. Besides running and lifting weights, his routines included rope climbing, horseback riding, and swimming. He slimmed down from . Aside from Conan, two other substantial roles were also played by novice actors. Subotai was Gerry Lopez, a champion surfer, whose only major acting experience was playing himself in Milius's "Big Wednesday". Schwarzenegger stayed at Lopez's home for over a month before the start of filming so they could rehearse their roles and build a rapport. Sandahl Bergman, a dancer who had had bit parts in several theater productions and films, played Valeria. She was recommended to Milius by Bob Fosse, who had directed her in "All That Jazz" (1979), and was accepted after reading for the part.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Milius said the actors were chosen because their appearances and personae fitted their roles. He wanted actors who would not have any preconceived notions to project into their roles. Although Milius had reservations when he witnessed the first few takes of the novices at work, he put faith in them improving their skills on the job and altered the script to fit their abilities. Schwarzenegger had studied for weeks in 1980 under Robert Easton, a voice coach for several Hollywood stars, to improve his speech. His first line in the film was a paraphrasing of Mongol emperor Genghis Khan's speech about the good things in life, and the actor delivered it with a heavy Austrian accent; critics later described what they heard as "to crush your enemies—see dem [them] driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of dair vimen [their women]". Subsequently, Schwarzenegger underwent intensive speech training with Milius. Each of his later longer speeches was rehearsed at least 40 times. Lopez's lines were also an issue; although Milius was satisfied with Lopez's work, the surfer's lines were redubbed by the stage actor Sab Shimono for the final cut. A source close to the production said this was done because Lopez failed to "[maintain] a certain quality to his voice."


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Sean Connery and John Huston were considered for the other roles. James Earl Jones and Max von Sydow were, according to Milius, hired with the hope that they would inspire Schwarzenegger, Bergman, and Lopez. Jones was an award-winning veteran of numerous theater and cinema productions. Von Sydow was a Swedish actor of international renown. The role of Thulsa Doom was offered to Jones while he was considering applying for the role of Grendel in an upcoming feature based on John Gardner's eponymous novel; after learning it was an animation, Jones read "Conan"s script and accepted the part of Doom. When filming started, Jones was also starring in a Broadway play—Athol Fugard's "A Lesson to Aloes". He and the film crew coordinated their schedules to allow him to join the play's remaining performances. Jones took an interest in Schwarzenegger's acting, often giving him pointers on how to deliver his lines.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The Japanese-American actor Mako Iwamatsu, known professionally as "Mako", was brought onto the project by Milius for his experience; he had played roles in many plays and films and had been nominated for Academy Awards and a Tony. In "Conan", Mako played the Wizard of the Mounds and voiced the film's opening speech. William Smith, although passed over for the lead role, was hired to play the barbarian's father. Doom's two lieutenants, Thorgrim and Rexor, respectively, were played by Sven-Ole Thorsen, a Danish bodybuilder and karate master, and Ben Davidson, a former American-football player with the Oakland Raiders. Cassandra Gava played the witch. Milius hired more than 1,500 extras in Spain. Professional actors from the European film industry were also hired: Valérie Quennessen was chosen to play Osric's daughter, Jorge Sanz acted as the nine-year-old version of Conan, and Nadiuska played his mother.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The drafting of a story for a "Conan" film started in 1976; Summer conceived a script with the help of Roy Thomas, a comic-book writer and Conan expert who had been writing the character's adventures for years for Marvel Comics. Summer and Thomas's tale, in which Conan would be employed by a "dodgy priest to kill an evil wizard", was largely based on Howard's "Rogues in the House". Their script was abandoned when Oliver Stone joined the project. Stone was, at this time, going through a period of addiction to cocaine and depressants. His screenplay was written under the influence of the drugs and the result was what Milius called a "total drug fever dream", albeit an inspired one. According to Schwarzenegger, Stone completed a draft by early 1978. Taking inspiration from Howard's "Black Colossus" and "A Witch Shall be Born", Stone proposed a story, four hours long, in which the hero champions the defense of a princess's kingdom. Instead of taking place in the distant past, Stone's story was set in a post-apocalyptic future where Conan leads an army in a massive battle against a horde of 10,000 mutants.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: When Milius was appointed as director, he took over the task of writing the screenplay. Although listed as a co-writer, Stone said Milius did not incorporate any of his suggestions into the final story. Milius discarded the latter half of Stone's story. He retained several scenes from the first half, such as Conan's crucifixion ordeal, which was taken straight out of "A Witch Shall be Born", and the climbing of the Tower of Serpents, which was derived from "The Tower of the Elephant". One of Milius's original changes was to extend Stone's brief exposition of Conan's youth—the raid on the Cimmerian village—into his teens with the barbarian's enslavement at the Wheel of Pain and training as a gladiator. Milius also added ideas gleaned from other films. The Japanese supernatural tale of "Hoichi the Earless", as portrayed in Masaki Kobayashi's "Kwaidan" (1965), inspired the painting of symbols on Conan's body and the swarm of ghosts during the barbarian's resurrection, and Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" (1954) influenced Milius's vision of Conan's final battle against Doom's men. Milius also included scenes from post-Howard stories about Conan; the barbarian's discovery of a tomb during his initial wanderings and acquisition of a sword within were based on de Camp and Carter's "The Thing in the Crypt". According to Derek Elley, "Variety"'s resident film critic, Milius's script, with its original ideas and references to the pulp stories, was faithful to Howard's ideals of Conan.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Milius felt, "all the basic emotions [in the script] are always accessible to audiences. All of the things that Conan does we all feel ourselves. He just acts on them with more intensity than we do. He is a character who relies on the animal. And I always believe that the animal instincts are often the worst part of them. All you do when you evolve is corrupt yourself sooner or later."


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Filming started at England's Shepperton Studios in October 1980, with Schwarzenegger, made up to look like Conan as a king in his old age, reading an excerpt from "The Nemedian Chronicles", which Howard had penned to introduce his Conan stories. This footage was initially intended to be a trailer, but Milius decided to use it as the opening sequence of the film, instead. According to Cobb, Laurentiis and Universal Pictures were concerned about Schwarzenegger's accent, so Milius compromised by moving the sequence to the end. Schwarzenegger trained with voice coach Robert Easton and with Milius in order to eliminate his accent, but their efforts proved to be unsuccessful, so the planned narration which was intended to begin with this scene was not included in the final film.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The initial location for principal photography was former Yugoslavia, but because of concerns over the country's stability after the death of its head of state, Josip Broz Tito, and the fact that the Yugoslavian film industry proved ill-equipped for large-scale film production, the producers elected to move the project to Spain, which was cheaper and where resources were more easily available. It took several months to relocate; the crew and equipment arrived in September, and filming started on January 7, 1981. The producers allocated $11 million for production in Spain, of which about $3 million were spent on building 49 sets. The construction workforce numbered from 50 to 200; artists from England, Italy, and Spain were also recruited.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: A large warehouse outside Madrid served as the production's headquarters, and it also housed most of the interior sets for the Tower of Serpents and Doom's temple; a smaller warehouse was leased for other interior sets. The remaining interiors for the Tower of Serpents were constructed in an abandoned hangar at Torrejón Air Base. A full-scale, version of the tower was built in the hangar; this model was used to film Conan and his companions' climb up the structure.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The crew filmed several exterior scenes in the countryside near Madrid; the Cimmerian village was built in a forest near the Valsaín ski resort, south of Segovia. About one million pesetas ($12,084) worth of marble shavings were scattered on the ground to simulate snow. The Wheel of Pain scene took place in the province of Ávila. Conan's encounter with the witch and Subotai was shot among the Ciudad Encantada rock formations in the province of Cuenca. Most outdoor scenes were shot in the province of Almería, which offered a semiarid climate, diverse terrain (deserts, beaches, mountains), and Roman and Moorish structures that could be adapted for many settings.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Conan's crucifixion was filmed in March 1981 among the sand dunes on the southeastern coast of Almería. The Tree of Woe was layers of plaster and Styrofoam applied onto a skeleton of wood and steel. It was mounted on a turntable, allowing it to be rotated to ensure the angle of the shadows remained consistent throughout three days of filming. Schwarzenegger sat on a bicycle seat mounted in the tree while fake nails were affixed to his wrists and feet. The scene in which Valeria and Subotai fought off ghosts to save Conan and the final battle with Doom's forces were filmed in the salt marshes of Almerimar. "Stonehenge-like ruins" were erected and sand piled into mounds that reached . The changes to the landscape attracted protests from environmentalists and the producers promised to restore the site after filming was completed.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The Temple of Set was built in the mountains, about west of the city of Almería. The structure was long and high. It was the most expensive of the sets, costing $350,000, and built out of various woods, lacquers, and tons of concrete. Its stairway had 120 steps. Milius and his crew also filmed at historical sites and on sets from previous films. Scenes of a bazaar were filmed at the Moorish Alcazaba of Almería, which was dressed to give it a fictional Hyborian look. Shadizar was realized at a pre-existing film set in the Almerían desert; the fort used for the filming of "El Condor" (1970) refurbished as an ancient city.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: It was expensive to build large sets, and Milius did not want to rely on optical effects and matte paintings (painted landscapes). The crew instead adopted miniature effect techniques (playing on perspective) to achieve the illusion of size and grandeur for several scenes. Scale models of structures were constructed by Emilio Ruiz and positioned in front of the cameras so that they appeared as full-sized structures on film; using this technique, the Shadizar set was extended to appear more than double its size. Ruiz built eight major miniature models, including a palace and a representation of the entire city of Shadizar that spanned .


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Cobb's direction for the sets was to "undo history", "to invent [their] own fantasy history", and yet maintain a "realistic, historical look". Eschewing the Greco-Roman imagery used heavily in the sword-and-sandal films of the 1960s, he realized a world that was an amalgamation of Dark Age cultures, such as the Mongols and the Vikings. Several scenarios paid homage to Frazetta's paintings of Conan, such as the "half-naked slave girl chained to a pillar, with a snarling leopard at her feet", at the snake cult's orgy. David Huckvale, a lecturer at the Open University and broadcaster for BBC Radio, said the designs of the Tree of Woe and the costumes appeared very similar to those used in Richard Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung" operas at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876. Principal photography was completed in the middle of May 1981. The film crews burned down the Cimmerian village and the Temple of Set after completing filming on each set.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Several action scenes in "Conan" were filmed with a "minijib" (a remote-controlled electronic camera mounted on a motorized lightweight crane) that Nick Allder, the special effects supervisor, had devised when he worked on "Dragonslayer" (1981). The stunts were co-ordinated by Terry Leonard, who had worked on many films, including Milius's previous projects and Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981). Leonard said that Schwarzenegger, Bergman, and Lopez performed most of their own stunts, including the fights.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The three actors were given martial arts training ahead of filming. From August 1980, they were tutored by Kiyoshi Yamazaki, a karate black belt and master swordsman, who drilled them in sword-fighting styles that were meant to make them look proficient in using their weapons. They practiced each move in a fight at least 15 times before filming. Yamazaki advised Leonard on the choreography of the sword fights and had a cameo role as one of Conan's instructors.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Tim Huchthausen, the prop maker, worked with swordsmith Jody Samson to create the sturdy weapons Milius thought necessary. Particular attention was paid to two swords wielded by Conan: his father's sword ("Master's sword") and the blade he finds in a tomb ("Atlantean sword"). Both weapons were realized from Cobb's drawings. Their blades were hand ground from carbon steel and heat treated and left unsharpened. The hilts and pommels were sculpted and cast through the lost-wax process; inscriptions were added to the blades by electrical discharge machining. Samson and Huchthausen made four Master's and four Atlantean swords, at a cost of $10,000 per weapon. Copies of the Atlantean sword were struck and given to members of the production.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Samson and Huchthausen agreed the weapons were heavy and unbalanced, thus unsuitable for actual combat; Lighter versions made of aluminum, fiberglass, and steel were struck in Madrid; these copies were used in the fight scenes. According to Schwarzenegger, the heavy swords were used in close-up shots. The other weapons used in the film were not as elaborate; Valeria's talwar was ground out from an aluminum sheet.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The copious amounts of blood spilled in the fight scenes came from bags of fake blood strapped to the performers' bodies. Animal blood gathered from slaughterhouses was poured onto the floor to simulate puddles of human blood. Most of the times trick swords made from fiberglass were used when the scene called for a killing blow. Designed by Allder, these swords could also retract their blades, and several sprayed blood from their tips. Although the swords were intended to be safer alternatives to metal weapons, they could still be dangerous: in one of the fights, Bergman sparred with an extra who failed to follow the choreography and sliced open her finger.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Accidents also happened in stunts that did not involve weapons. A stuntman smashed his face into a camera while riding a horse at full gallop, and Schwarzenegger was attacked by one of the trained dogs. The use of live animals also raised concerns about cruelty; the American Humane Association placed the film on its "unacceptable list". The transgressions listed by the association included the kicking of a dog, the striking of a camel, and the tripping of horses.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Carlo De Marchis, the special make-up effects supervisor, and Colin Arthur, former Studio Head of Madame Tussaud's, were responsible for the human dummies and fake body parts used in the film. The dummies inflated crowd numbers and stood in as dead bodies, while the body parts were used in scenes showing the aftermath of fights and the cult's cannibalistic feast. In Thulsa Doom's beheading scene, Schwarzenegger hacked at a dummy and pulled a concealed chain to detach its head. The decapitation of Conan's mother was more complex: a Plexiglas shield between Jones and Nadiuska stopped his sword as he swung at her and an artificial head then dropped into the camera's view. A more elaborate head was used for the close-up shots; this prop spurted blood and the movements of its eyes, mouth, and tongue were controlled by cables hidden beneath the snow.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Allder created a $20,000 mechanical snake for the fight scene in the Tower of Serpents. The snake's body had a diameter of , and its head was long and wide. Its skeleton was made from duralumin (an alloy used in aircraft frames) and its skin was vulcanized foam rubber. Controlled by steel cables and hydraulics, the snake could exert a force between 3.5 and 9.0 tons. Another two snakes of the same dimensions were made, one for stationary shots and one for decapitation by Schwarzenegger. The immense size of the mechanical snake meant that it did not fully fit onto the set, so only the front of it could be shown in the film. To create the scene at the Tree of Woe, the crew tethered live vultures to the branches, and created a mechanical bird for Schwarzenegger to bite. The dummy bird's feathers and wings were from a dead vulture, and its control mechanisms were routed inside the false tree.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: According to Sammon, "one of the greatest special effects in the film [was] Thulsa Doom's onscreen transformation into a giant snake". It involved footage of fake body parts, live and dummy snakes, miniatures, and other camera tricks combined into a flowing sequence with lap dissolve. After Jones was filmed in position, he was replaced by a hollow framework with a rubber mask that was pushed from behind by a snake head-shaped puppet to give the illusion of Doom's facial bones changing. The head was then replaced with a mechanical snake; as it moved outwards, a crew member pressed a foot pedal to collapse the framework. For the final part of the sequence, a real snake was filmed on a miniature set.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Few optical effects were used in "Conan the Barbarian". Milius professed ambivalence to fantasy elements, preferring a story that showcases accomplishments realized through one's own efforts without reliance on the supernatural. He also said that he followed the advice of Cobb and other production members on the matters of special effects. Peter Kuran's Visual Concepts Engineering (VCE) effects company was engaged in October 1981 to handle postproduction optical effects for "Conan". VCE had previously worked on films such as "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Dragonslayer". Among their tasks for "Conan" were adding glint and sparkle to the Eye of the Serpent and Valeria's Valkyrie armor. Not all of VCE's work made it to the final print; the flames of Valeria's funeral pyre were originally enhanced by the company, but were later restored to the original version.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: For the scene in which Valeria and Subotai had to fend off ghosts to save Conan's life, the "boiling clouds" were created by George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, while VCE was given the task of creating the ghosts. Their first attempt filming strips of film emulsion suspended in a vat of a viscous solution—elicited complaints from the producers, who thought the resulting spirits looked too much like those in a scene from "Raiders of the Lost Ark", so VCE turned to animation to complete the task. First, they drew muscular warriors in ghostly forms onto cels and printed the images onto film with an Oxberry animation stand and contact printer. The Oxberry was fitted with a used lens that introduced lens flares to the prints; VCE's intention with using the old lens was to make the resultant images of the ghosts seem as if they were of real-life objects filmed with a camera. The final composite was produced by passing the reels of film for the effects and the live-action sequences through a two-headed optical printer and capturing the results with a camera.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Milius recruited his friend, Basil Poledouris, to produce the score for "Conan"; they had had a successful collaboration on "Big Wednesday". The film industry's usual practice was to contract a composer to start work after the main scenes had been filmed, but Milius hired Poledouris before principal photography had started. The composer was given the opportunity to compose the film's music based on the initial storyboards and to modify it throughout filming before recording the score near the end of production. Poledouris made extensive use of Musync, a music and tempo editing hardware and software system invented by Robert Randles (subsequently nominated for an Oscar for Scientific Achievement), to modify the tempo of his compositions and synchronize them with the action in the film. The system helped make his job easier and faster; it could automatically adjust tempos when the user changed the positioning of beats. In the montage where Conan grows up, for example, Poledouris had Randles prepare, over the phone, a long accelerando that landed on precise moments in the picture along the way. Poledouris would otherwise have had to conduct the orchestra and adjust his compositions on the fly. "Conan" is the first film to list Musync in its credits.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Milius and Poledouris exchanged ideas throughout production, working out themes and "emotional tones" for each scene. According to Poledouris, Milius envisioned "Conan" as an opera with little or no dialogue; Poledouris composed enough musical pieces for most of the film (around two hours' worth). This was his first large-scale orchestral score, and a characteristic of his work here was that he frequently slowed down the tempo of the last two bars (segments of beats) before switching to the next piece of music. Poledouris said the score uses a lot of fifths as its most primitive interval; thirds and sixths are introduced as the story progresses. The composer visited the film sets several times during filming to see the imagery his music would accompany. After principal photography was completed, Milius sent him two copies of the edited film: one without music, and the other with its scenes set to works by Richard Wagner, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Prokofiev, to illustrate the emotional overtones he wanted.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Poledouris said he started working on the score by developing the melodic line—a pattern of musical ideas supported by rhythms. The first draft was a poem sung to the strumming of a guitar, composed as if Poledouris was a bard for the barbarian. This draft became the "Riddle of Steel", a composition played with "massive brass, strings, and percussion", which also serves as Conan's personal theme. The music is first played when Conan's father explains the riddle to him. Laurence E. MacDonald, Professor of Music at Mott Community College, said the theme stirs up the appropriate emotions when it is repeated during Conan's vow to avenge his parents. The film's main musical theme, the "Anvil of Crom", which opens the film with "the brassy sound of 24 French horns in a dramatic intonation of the melody, while pounding drums add an incessantly driven rhythmic propulsion" is played again in several later scenes.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Poledouris completed the music that accompanies the attack on Conan's village at the beginning of the film in October 1981. Milius initially wanted a chorus based on Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" to herald the appearance of Doom and his warriors in this sequence. After learning that "Excalibur" (1981) had used Orff's work, he changed his mind and asked his composer for an original creation. Poledouris's theme for Doom consists of "energetic choral passages", chanted by the villain's followers to salute their leader and their actions in his name. The lyrics were composed in English and roughly translated into Latin; Poledouris was "more concerned about the way the Latin words sounded than with the sense they actually made." He set these words to a melody adapted from the 13th-century Gregorian hymn, "Dies irae", which was chosen to "communicate the tragic aspects of the cruelty wrought by Thulsa Doom."


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The film's music mostly conveys a sense of power, energy, and brutality, yet tender moments occur. The sounds of oboes and string instruments accompany Conan and Valeria's intimate scenes, imbuing them with a sense of lush romance and an emotional intensity. According to MacDonald, Poledouris deviated from the practice of scoring love scenes with tunes reminiscent of Romantic period pieces; instead, Poledouris made Conan and Valeria's melancholic love theme unique through his use of "minor-key harmony". David Morgan, a film journalist, heard Eastern influences in the "lilting romantic melodies". Page Cook, audio critic for "Films in Review", describes "Conan the Barbarian"s score as "a large canvas daubed with a colorful yet highly sensitive brush. There is innate intelligence behind Poledouris's scheme, and the pinnacles reached are often eloquent with haunting intensity."


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: From late November 1981, Poledouris spent three weeks recording his score in Rome. He engaged a 90-instrument orchestra and a 24-member choir from the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, and conducted them personally. The pieces of music were orchestrated by Greig McRitchie, Poledouris's frequent collaborator. The chorus and orchestra were recorded separately. The 24 tracks of sound effects, music, and dialog were downmixed into a single-channel, making "Conan the Barbarian" the last film released by a major studio with a mono soundtrack. According to Poledouris, Raffaella De Laurentiis balked at the cost ($30,000) of a stereo soundtrack and was worried over the lack of theaters equipped with stereo sound systems.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: In 1980, the producers began advertising to publicize the film. Teaser posters were put up in theaters across the United States. The posters reused Frazetta's artwork that was commissioned for the cover of "Conan the Adventurer" (1966). Laurentiis wanted "Conan the Barbarian" to start playing in cinemas at Christmas, 1981, but Universal executives requested further editing after they previewed a preliminary version of the film in August. A Hollywood insider said the executives were concerned about the film's portrayal of violence. The premiere was delayed until the following year so changes could be made. Many scenes were excised from Thulsa Doom's attack on Conan's village, including the close-up shots on the severed head of Conan's mother; the late notice of the changes forced Poledouris quickly to adjust his score before recording music for the sequence. Other scenes of violence that were cut included Subotai's slaying of a monster at the top of the Tower of Serpents and Conan chopping off a pickpocket's arm in a bazaar. Milius intended to show a 140-minute story; the final release ran 129 minutes (trimmed to 126 minutes in the United States). According to Cobb, the total production expenses approached $20 million by the time the film was released.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The United States' public was offered a sneak preview on February 19, 1982, in Houston, Texas. In the following month, previews were held in 30 cities across the country. In Washington, D.C., the mass of moviegoers formed long lines that spanned streets, causing traffic jams. Tickets were quickly sold out in Denver, and 1,000 people had to be turned away in Houston. The majority of those in the lines was male; a moviegoer in Los Angeles said, "The audience was mostly white, clean-cut, and high-school or college age. It was not the punk or heavy-leather crowd, but an awful lot of them had bulging muscles." On March 16, "Conan the Barbarian" had its worldwide premiere at "Fotogramas de Plata", an annual cinema awards ceremony in Madrid, and began its general release in Spain and France a month later. Twentieth Century Fox handled the foreign distribution of the film. Universal originally scheduled "Conan"s official release in the United States for the weekend before Memorial Day—the start of the film industry's summer season when schools close for a month-long holiday. To avoid competition with other big-budget, high-profile films, the studio advanced the release of "Conan the Barbarian" and on May 14, 1982, the film officially opened in 1,400 theaters across North America.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: "Conan the Barbarian" has been released in several different versions on home video. In addition to the 126-minute theatrical print, Universal distributed the film in 115-minute and 123-minute cuts on VHS in the 1980s. A slightly extended version was created for the film's special edition DVD release in 2000; it features five minutes of additional footage for a 131-minute running time. This same version was later released on blu-ray in 2011 with a remixed soundtrack, the version on Amazon Prime however, is the 126 minute US theatrical cut.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The media's reactions toward "Conan" were polarized. Aspects of the film heavily criticized by one side were regarded in a positive light by the other; Professor Kenneth von Gunden wrote, "for every positive review the film garnered, it received two negative ones." The opinions of Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" and Richard Schickel of "Time" illustrate their colleagues' divided views. Ebert called "Conan the Barbarian" "a perfect fantasy for the alienated preadolescent", whereas Schickel said, ""Conan" is a sort of psychopathic "Star Wars", stupid and stupefying." Although reviews were mixed at the time of the film's release, modern genre critics review the film more positively. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 65% based on 40 reviews, with an average rating of 6.6/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Though "Conan" may take itself too seriously for some, this adventure film about a former slave seeking vengeance is full of quotable Schwarzenegger lines and gritty action." On Metacritic, the film received a score of 43 based on 10 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: At the time "Conan" was released, the media were inclined to condemn Hollywood's portrayals of violence; typical action films showed the hero attaining his goals by killing all who stood in his way. "Conan" was particularly condemned for its violent scenes, which "Newsweek"s Jack Kroll called "cheerless and styleless". In one of his articles for the "San Francisco Chronicle", Stu Schreiberg counted 50 people killed in various scenes. Other film critics differed over the film's portrayal of violence. David Denby wrote in his review for "New York" magazine that the action scenes were one of the film's few positive features; however, exciting as the scenes were, those such as the decapitation of Conan's mother seemed inane. On the other hand, Vincent Canby, Carlos Clarens, and Pascal Mérigeau were unanimous in their opinion that the film's depicted violence failed to meet their expectations: the film's pacing and Howard's stories suggested more gory material. According to Paul Sammon, Milius's cuts to assuage concerns over the violence made the scenes "cartoon-like".


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Comparison with the source material also produced varying reactions among the critics. Danny Peary and Schickel expected a film based on pulp stories and comic books to be light-hearted or corny, and Milius's introduction of Nietzschean themes and ideology did not sit well with them. Others were not impressed with Milius's handling of his ideas; James Wolcott called it heavy-handed and Kroll said the material lacked substance in its implementation. The themes of individualism and paganism, however, resonated with many in the audience; the concept of a warrior who relies only on his own prowess and will to conquer the obstacles in his way found favor with young males. Wolcott wrote in "Texas Monthly" that these themes appeal to "98-pound weaklings who want to kick sand into bullies' faces and win the panting adoration of a well-oiled beach bunny". Kroll's opinion was that the audience loved the violence and carnage but were cynical about the "philosophical bombast." While popular with audiences, the theatrical treatment of the barbarian was rejected by certain hardcore fans and scholars of Howard's stories. A particular point of contention was the film's version of Conan's origin, which is at odds with Howard's hints about the character's youth. Their point of view is supported by Kerry Brougher, but Derek Elley, Clarens, and Sammon said Milius was faithful to the ideology behind Howard's work.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance was frequently mentioned in the critiques. Clarens, Peary, Gunden and Nigel Andrews were among those who gave positive assessments of the former bodybuilder's acting: to them, he was physically convincing as the barbarian in his body movements and appearance. Andrews added that Schwarzenegger exuded a certain charm—with his accent mangling his dialog—that made the film appealing to his fans. "Fanfare"'s Royal S. Brown disagreed and was grateful that the actor's dialog amounted to "2 pages of typescript." Schickel summed up Schwarzenegger's acting as "flat", while Knoll was more verbose, characterizing the actor's portrayal as "a dull clod with a sharp sword, a human collage of pectorals and latissimi who's got less style and wit than Lassie." While Sandahl Bergman earned acclaim for injecting grace and dynamism into the film, the film's more experienced thespians were not spared criticisms. Gunden said von Sydow showed little dedication to his role, and Clarens judged Jones's portrayal of Thulsa Doom to be worse than camp. However, Ebert praised Jones's performance, saying he brought "power and conviction to a role that seems inspired in equal parts by Hitler, Jim Jones, and Goldfinger." Brougher faulted none of the actors for their performances, laying the blame on Milius's script, instead.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: According to Rentrak Theatrical, a firm of media analysts, "Conan" debuted at the top spot at the US box office, taking $9,479,373 over the opening weekend. Rentrak's data on "Conan" covered 8 weeks after the film's release; during that period, "Conan" grossed $38,513,085 at the box office in the United States. Universal Pictures received $22.5 million after deducting the amounts due to the cinema owners. This sum—the rental—was more than the money Universal had invested in making the film, thus qualifying "Conan" as a commercial success; any further income from the film was pure profit for the studio. Marian Christy, interviewer for the "Boston Globe", mentioned that the film was a box-office success in Europe and Japan, as well. Worldwide, "Conan the Barbarian" grossed between $68.9 million and $79.1 million in ticket sales.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: David A. Cook, Professor of Film Studies at Emory University, said that "Conan"s North American performance fell short of the amount returned by blockbusters; the rentals of such films from their release in the continent were supposed to be least $50 million. "Conan"s rental was the 13th-highest for 1982 and when combined with those for "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" (the most successful film in that year with a rental of $187 million), "On Golden Pond", and "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"—all distributed by Universal Pictures—constituted 30% of the year's total film rental. According to Arthur D. Murphy, a film-industry analyst, it was the first time that a single distributor captured such a substantial share of the film market.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The videocassette version of the film was released on October 2, 1982. Sales and rental figures of the videocassette were high; from its launch, the title was listed in "Billboard"s Videocassette Top 40 (Sales and Rental categories) for 23 weeks. According to Sammon, sales of the film through frequent home video releases increased the film's gross earnings to more than $300 million by 2007. "Conan the Barbarian" was novelized by Lin Carter and the de Camps (L. Sprague and his wife, Catherine). It was also adapted by Marvel in comic form; scripted by Michael Fleisher and drawn by John Buscema, the comic was one of the rarest paperbacks published by the company.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: "Conan the Barbarian" did not receive any film awards, but the Hollywood Foreign Press Association noted Bergman's performance as Valeria and awarded her a Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year—Actress. Poledouris's score was judged by "Films in Review"s Page Cook as the second best sound track of the films released in 1982. The film was nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Actor for Arnold Schwarzenegger.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: The central theme in "Conan the Barbarian" is the Riddle of Steel. At the start of the film, Conan's father tells his son to learn the secret of steel and to trust only it. Initially believing in the power of steel, Thulsa Doom raids Conan's village to steal the Master's sword. Subsequently, the story centers on Conan's quest to recover the weapon in which his father has told him to trust. Weaponry fetish is a device long established in literature; Carl James Grindley, an assistant professor of English, said ancient works such as Homer's "Iliad", the Old English poem "Beowulf", and the 14th-century tale of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" pay detailed attention to the arsenal of their heroes. Grindley further said that "Conan the Barbarian", like most other contemporary action films, uses weapons as convenient plot devices rather than as symbols that mark the qualities of the hero. James Whitlark, an associate professor of English, said the Riddle of Steel makes the film's emphasis on the swords ironic; it gives the illusion that the weapons have powers of their own, but later reveals them to be useless and dependent on the strength of their wielders. In the later part of the film, Doom mocks steel, proclaiming the power of flesh to be stronger. When Conan recovers his father's sword, it is after he has broken it in the hands of Doom's lieutenant during their duel. According to Grindley, that moment—Conan's breaking of his father's sword—"[fulfills] a snickering spectrum of Oedipal conjecture" and asserts Homer's view that "the sword does not make the hero, but the hero makes the sword." The film, as Whitlark says, "offers a fantasy of "human" power raised beyond mortal limits." Passman and other authors agree, stating the film suggests that human will and determination are in a Nietzschean sense stronger than physical might.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Another established literary trope found in the plot of "Conan the Barbarian" is the concept of death, followed by a journey into the underworld, and rebirth. Donald E. Palumbo, the Language and Humanities Chair at Lorain County Community College, noted that like most other sword-and-sorcery films, "Conan" used the motif of underground journeys to reinforce the themes of death and rebirth. According to him, the first scene to involve all three is after Conan's liberation: his flight from wild dogs sends him tumbling into a tomb where he finds a sword that lets him cut off his chains and stand with newfound power. In the later parts of the film, Conan experiences two underground journeys where death abounds: in the bowels of the Tower of Serpents where he has to fight a giant snake and in the depths of the Temple of Set where the cultists feast on human flesh while Doom transforms himself into a large serpent. Whereas Valeria dies and comes back from the dead (albeit briefly), Conan's ordeal from his crucifixion was symbolic. Although the barbarian's crucifixion might evoke Christian imagery, associations of the film with the religion are roundly rejected. Milius stated his film is full of pagan ideas, a sentiment supported by film critics such as Elley and Jack Kroll. George Aichele, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at Adrian College, suggested the filmmaker's intent with the crucifixion scene was pure marketing: to tease the audience with religious connotations. He suggested, however, that Conan's story can be viewed as an analogy of Christ's life and vice versa. Nigel Andrews, a film critic, saw any connections to Christianity related more to the making of the film. The crucifixion is also reminiscent of Odin being nailed to Yggdrasil or the Titan Prometheus chained to the mountainside of the Caucasus.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Milius's concept of "Conan the Barbarian" as an opera was picked up by the critics; Elley and Huckvale saw connections to Wagner's operas. According to Huckvale, the film's opening sequence closely mirrors a sword forging scene in "Siegfried". Conan's adventures and ordeals seem to be inspired by the trials of the opera's titular hero: witnessing his parents' deaths, growing up as a slave, and slaying a giant serpent—dragon. Furthermore, Schwarzenegger's appearance in the role of Conan evoked images of Siegfried, the role model of the "Aryan blonde beast", in the lecturer's mind. The notion of racial superiority, symbolized by this Aryan hero, was a criticism given by J. Hoberman and James Wolcott; they highlighted the film's Nietzschean epigraph and labeled its protagonist as Nietzsche's übermensch. Ebert was disturbed by the depiction of a "Nordic superman confronting a black", in which the "muscular blond" slices off the black man's head and "contemptuously [throws it] down the flight of stairs". His sentiment was shared by Adam Roberts, an Arthurian scholar, who also said "Conan" was an exemplar of the sword-and-sorcery films of the early 1980s that were permeated in various degrees with fascist ideology. According to Roberts, the films were following the ideas and aesthetics laid down in Leni Riefenstahl's directorial efforts for Nazi Germany. Roberts cautioned that any political readings into these sword-and-sorcery films with regards to fascism is subjective. Film critic Richard Dyer said that such associations with "Conan" were inaccurate and influenced by misconceptions of Nietzschean philosophies, and scholars of philosophy said that the film industry has often misinterpreted the ideas behind the übermensch.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: "Conan" is also seen as a product of its time: The themes of the film reflect the political climate of the United States in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was the country's president and the ideals of individualism were promoted during his two terms in office. He emphasized the moral worth of the individual in his speeches, encouraging his fellow Americans to make the country successful and to stand up against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Dr. Dave Saunders, a film writer and lecturer at South Essex College of Further and Higher Education, linked facets of "Conan the Barbarian" to aspects of Reaganism—the conservative ideology that surrounded the president's policies. Saunders likened Conan's quest against Doom to the Americans' crusades, his choice of weaponry—swords—to Reagan's and Milius's fondness of resisting the Soviets with only spirit and simple weapons, and Doom's base of operations to the Kremlin. Conan, in Saunder's interpretation, is portrayed as the American hero who draws strength from his trials and tribulations to slay the evil oppressors—the Soviets—and crush their un-American ways. Douglas Kellner and his fellow academic Michael Ryan proposed another enemy for the American individual: an overly domineering federal government. The film's association with individualism was not confined to the United States; Jeffrey Richards, a cultural historian, noticed the film's popularity among the youths of the United Kingdom. Robin Wood, a film critic, suggests that in most cases, there is only a thin veneer between individualism and fascism; he also said that "Conan" is the only film in that era to dispense with the disguise, openly celebrating its fascist ideals in a manner that would delight Riefenstahl.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Sexual politics were also examined in thematic studies of the film. The feminist movement experienced a backlash during the opening years of the 1980s and action films then were helping to promote the notions of masculinity. Women in these films were portrayed as whores, handmaidens, or warriors and clad in flesh-revealing outfits. "Conan" gave its male audience a manly hero that overcame all odds and adversity, delivering them a fantasy that offered escape from the invasion of radical "bitter feminist women" in their lives. Renato Casaro's promotional artwork for the film's release in the United States presents a sexualized portrayal of the two main characters, Conan and Valeria. Scantily clad in costumes cut in the styles of underwear, they wear long boots and sport their hair loose. While Conan strides forth in the picture with his sword held high, Valeria "squats in an impossible pose with her leather body-suit [in the shape of a teddy] forming a dark shape between her thighs". According to Schubart, critics did not accept Valeria as a strong female figure, but viewed her as a "sexual spectacle"; to them, she was the traditional male warrior buddy in a sexy female body.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Whereas most comic book and pulp adaptations were box office failures in the 1980s, "Conan the Barbarian" was one of the few that made a profit. According to Sammon, it became the standard against which sword-and-sorcery films were measured until the debut of Peter Jackson's "" in 2001; several contemporary films of the same genre were judged by critics to be clones of "Conan", such as "The Beastmaster" (1982). "Conan"s success inspired low-budget copycats, such as "Ator, the Fighting Eagle" (1982) and "Deathstalker" (1983). Its sequel, "Conan the Destroyer", was produced and released in 1984; only a few of those involved in the first film, such as Schwarzenegger, Mako, and Poledouris, returned. Later big- and small-screen adaptations of Robert E. Howard's stories were considered by Sammon to be inferior to the film that started the trend. A spinoff from "Conan" was a 20-minute live-action show, , that ran from 1983 to 1993 at Universal Studios Hollywood. Produced at a cost of $5 million, the show featured action scenes executed to music composed by Poledouris. The show's highlights were pyrotechnics, lasers, and an animatronic dragon that breathed fire.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Several of those involved in the film reaped short-term benefits. Sandahl Bergman's Golden Globe for her role as Valeria marks her greatest achievement in the film industry; her later roles failed to gain her further recognition. Dino De Laurentiis had produced a string of box office failures since the success of "King Kong" in 1976; it appeared "Conan the Barbarian" might be a turning point in his fortunes. The sequel was also profitable, but many of De Laurentiis's later big-budget projects did not recoup their production costs and he was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1988. For John Milius, "Conan the Barbarian" is his "biggest directorial success" to date; his subsequent endeavors failed to equal its success and popularity.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Pressman did not receive any money from "Conan"s box office takings, but he sold the film rights for the Conan franchise to De Laurentiis for $4.5 million and 10 percent of the gross of any sequel to "Conan the Barbarian". The sale more than paid off his company's debts incurred from producing "Old Boyfriends", saving him from financial ruin; Pressman said this deal "made [him] more money by selling out, by not making a movie, than [he] ever have made by making one." He also arranged for Mattel to obtain the rights to produce a range of toys for the film. Although the toy company abandoned the license after its executives decided "Conan" was "too violent" for children, Pressman convinced them to let him produce a film based on their new Masters of the Universe toy line. The eponymous film cost $20 million to produce and grossed $17 million at the United States box office in 1987.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: Those who benefited most from the project were Basil Poledouris and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Poledouris's reputation in the film industry increased with the critical acclaim his score received; MacDonald noted Poledouris's work on "Conan" as "one of the most spectacular film music achievements of the decade", and Page Cook named it as the only reason to watch the film and as the second best film sound track (after "E.T."s) for 1982. After hearing "Conan"s music, Paul Verhoeven engaged Poledouris to score his films, "Flesh and Blood" (1985), "RoboCop" (1987) and "Starship Troopers" (1997). The music in Verhoeven's "Total Recall" (1990) also bore the influence of "Conan"s score; its composer, Jerry Goldsmith, used Poledouris's work as the model for his compositions.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: "Conan" brought Schwarzenegger worldwide recognition as an action star and established the model for most of his film roles: "icy, brawny, and inexpressive—yet somehow endearing." The image of him as the barbarian was an enduring one; when he campaigned for George H. W. Bush to be president, he was introduced as "Conan the Republican"—a moniker that stuck with him throughout his political career and was often repeated by the media during his term as Governor of California. Schwarzenegger was aware of the benefits the film had brought to him, acknowledging the role of Conan as "God's gift to [his] career." He embraced the image: when he was Governor of California, he displayed his copy of the Atlantean sword in his office, occasionally flourishing the weapon at visitors and letting them play with it. More than once, he spiced up his speeches with Conan's "crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women".


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: "Conan the Destroyer" was released in 1984, with Schwarzenegger and Mako reprising their roles. A planned third entry in the trilogy, "Conan the Conqueror", was previewed at the end of "Destroyer". The film had been planned for a 1987 release, with the intended director being either Guy Hamilton or John Guillermin. Arnold Schwarzenegger was committed to the film "Predator", and De Laurentiis's contract with the star had expired after his obligation to "Red Sonja" and "Raw Deal", and he was not keen to negotiate a new one. The third "Conan" film fell into development hell, and a derivation of the script eventually was adapted into "Kull the Conqueror", released in 1997.


title: Conan the Barbarian (1982 film)

text: In October 2012, Universal Pictures announced plans for Schwarzenegger to return to the role of Conan for the film "The Legend of Conan". The planned story was a direct sequel to the original film, "bypassing" "Conan the Destroyer" and the 2011 film starring Jason Momoa. In the years following the announcement, Will Beall, Andrea Berloff, and producer Chris Morgan worked on the script, and Schwarzenegger expressed enthusiasm for the project, affirming plans to star in the film. However, in April 2017, Morgan stated that Universal had dropped the project, but that there remains a possibility of a television series.


title: Amélie

text: Amélie (also known as Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain; ; ) is a 2001 French-language romantic comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Written by Jeunet with Guillaume Laurant, the film is a whimsical depiction of contemporary Parisian life, set in Montmartre. It tells the story of a shy waitress, played by Audrey Tautou, who decides to change the lives of those around her for the better while dealing with her own isolation. The film features an ensemble cast of supporting roles, including Mathieu Kassovitz, Rufus, Lorella Cravotta, Serge Merlin, Jamel Debbouze, Claire Maurier, Clotilde Mollet, Isabelle Nanty, Dominique Pinon, Artus de Penguern, Yolande Moreau, Urbain Cancelier, and Maurice Bénichou.


title: Amélie

text: The film was theatrically released in France on 25 April 2001 by UGC-Fox Distribution and in Germany on 16 August 2001 by Prokino Filmverleih. The film received critical acclaim, with praise for Tautou's performance, the cinematography, production design, and writing. "Amélie" won Best Film at the European Film Awards, four César Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, and two British Academy Film Awards including Best Original Screenplay. It was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay. The film was a commercial success, grossing $174.2 million worldwide against a budget of $10 million, and is one of the biggest international successes for a French film.


title: Amélie

text: Amélie Poulain is born in June 1974 and brought up by eccentric parents who – incorrectly believing that she has a heart defect – decide to home-school her. To cope with her loneliness, Amélie develops an active imagination and a mischievous personality. When Amélie is six, her mother, Amandine, is killed when a suicidal Canadian tourist jumps from the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris and lands on her. As a result, her father Raphaël withdraws more and more from society. Amélie leaves home at the age of 18 and becomes a waitress at the Café des 2 Moulins in Montmartre, which is staffed and frequented by a collection of eccentrics. She is single and lets her imagination roam freely, finding contentment in simple pleasures like dipping her hand into grain sacks, cracking crème brûlée with a spoon, and skipping stones along the Canal Saint-Martin.


title: Amélie

text: On 31 August 1997, startled by the news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Amélie drops a plastic perfume-stopper, which dislodges a wall tile and accidentally reveals an old metal box which contains childhood memorabilia hidden by a boy who lived in her apartment decades earlier. Amélie resolves to track down the boy and return the box to him. She promises herself that if it makes him happy, she will devote her life to bringing happiness to others.


title: Amélie

text: After asking the apartment's concierge and several old tenants about the boy's identity, Amélie meets her reclusive neighbour, Raymond Dufayel, an artist with brittle bone disease who replicates Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1881 painting "Luncheon of the Boating Party" every year. He recalls the boy's name as "Bretodeau". Amélie finds the man, Dominique Bretodeau, and surreptitiously gives him the box. Moved to tears by the discovery and the memories it holds, Bretodeau resolves to reconcile with his estranged daughter and the grandson he has never met. Amélie happily embarks on her new mission.


title: Amélie

text: Amélie secretly executes complex schemes that positively affect the lives of those around her. She escorts a blind man to the Métro station while giving him a rich description of the street scenes he passes. She persuades her father to follow his dream of touring the world by stealing his garden gnome and having a flight attendant friend mail pictures of it posing with landmarks from all over the world. She starts a romance between her hypochondriacal co-worker Georgette and Joseph, a patron of the cafe. She convinces Madeleine Wallace, the concierge of her block of flats, that the husband who abandoned her had sent her a final conciliatory love letter just before his accidental death years before. She plays practical jokes on Collignon, the nasty greengrocer. Mentally exhausted, Collignon no longer abuses his meek but good-natured assistant Lucien. A delighted Lucien takes charge at the grocery stand.


title: Amélie

text: Mr. Dufayel, having observed Amélie, begins a conversation with her about his painting. Although he has copied the same Renoir painting 20 times, he has never quite captured the look of the girl drinking a glass of water. They discuss the meaning of this character, and over several conversations, Amélie begins projecting her loneliness onto the image. Dufayel recognizes this and uses the girl in the painting to push Amélie to examine her attraction to a quirky young man, Nino Quincampoix, who collects the discarded photographs of strangers from passport photo booths. When Amélie bumps into Nino a second time, she realizes she is falling in love with him. He accidentally drops a photo album in the street. Amélie retrieves it.


title: Amélie

text: Amélie plays a cat-and-mouse game with Nino around Paris before returning his treasured album anonymously. After arranging a meeting at the 2 Moulins, Amélie panics and tries to deny her identity. Her co-worker, Gina, concerned for Amélie's well-being, screens Nino for her; Joseph's comment about this misleads Amélie to believe she has lost Nino to Gina. It takes Dufayel's insight to give her the courage to pursue Nino, resulting in a romantic night together and the beginning of a relationship. The film ends as Amélie experiences a moment of happiness she has found for herself.


title: Amélie

text: In his DVD commentary, Jeunet explains that he originally wrote the role of Amélie for the English actress Emily Watson. In that first draft, Amélie's father was an Englishman living in London. However, Watson's French was not strong, and when she became unavailable to shoot the film, owing to a conflict with the filming of "Gosford Park", Jeunet rewrote the screenplay for a French actress. Audrey Tautou was the first actress he auditioned having seen her on the poster for the 1999 film "Venus Beauty Institute".


title: Amélie

text: Filming took place from March 2 to July 7, 2000 mainly in Paris. The Café des 2 Moulins (15 Rue Lepic, Montmartre, Paris) where Amélie works is a real place.


title: Amélie

text: The filmmakers made use of computer-generated imagery (including computer animation), and a digital intermediate. The studio scenes were filmed in the MMC Studios Coloneum in Cologne (Germany). The film shares many of the themes in its plot with the second half of the 1994 film "Chungking Express".


title: Amélie

text: The film was released in France, Belgium, and French-speaking western Switzerland in April 2001, with subsequent screenings at various film festivals followed by releases around the world. It received limited releases in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australasia later in 2001.


title: Amélie

text: Cannes Film Festival selector Gilles Jacob described "Amélie" as "uninteresting", and therefore it was not screened at the festival, although the version he viewed was an early cut without music. The absence of "Amélie" at the festival caused something of a controversy because of the warm welcome by the French media and audience in contrast with the reaction of the selector. David Martin-Jones, in an article in "Senses of Cinema", stated that the film "[wears] its national [French] identity on its sleeve" and that this attracted both audiences of mainstream movies and those of arthouse ones.


title: Amélie

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an 89% approval rating based on 186 reviews, with an average rating of 8.10/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The feel-good "Amélie" is a lively, fanciful charmer, showcasing Audrey Tautou as its delightful heroine." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 69 out of 100 based on 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Amélie

text: Alan Morrison from "Empire" Online gave "Amélie" five stars and called it "one of the year's best, with crossover potential along the lines of "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "Il Postino". Given its quirky heart, it might well surpass them all". Paul Tatara of CNN praised "Amélie"s playful nature. In his review, he wrote, "Its whimsical, free-ranging nature is often enchanting; the first hour, in particular, is brimming with amiable, sardonic laughs".


title: Amélie

text: The film was attacked by critic Serge Kaganski of "Les Inrockuptibles" for an unrealistic and picturesque vision of a bygone French society with few ethnic minorities. Jeunet dismissed the criticism by pointing out that the photo collection contains pictures of people from numerous ethnic backgrounds, and that Jamel Debbouze, who plays Lucien, is of Moroccan descent.


title: Amélie

text: The film opened on 432 screens in France and grossed 43.2 million French Franc ($6.2 million) in its opening week, placing it at number one. It stayed in the top 10 for 22 weeks. It was the highest-grossing film in France for the year with a gross of $41 million.


title: Amélie

text: The film was selected by "The New York Times" as one of "The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made". The film placed No. 2 in "Empire" magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema". "Paste" magazine ranked it second on its list of the 50 Best Movies of the Decade (2000–2009). In August 2016, "BBC Magazine" conducted a poll on the 21st century's 100 greatest films so far, with "Amélie" ranking at number 87.


title: Amélie

text: "Entertainment Weekly" named the film poster one of the best on its list of the top 25 film posters in the past 25 years. It also named Amélie setting up a wild goose chase for her beloved Nino all through Paris as No. 9 on its list of top 25 Romantic Gestures. In 2010, an online public poll by the "American Cinematographer" – the house journal of the American Society of Cinematographers – named "Amélie" the best shot film of the decade.


title: Amélie

text: "Amelie" is rated 37 among the 50 Greatest Romantic Comedies of All Time by "Rolling Stone" magazine.


title: Amélie

text: On 23 August 2013, composer Dan Messe, one of the founders and members of the band Hem, confirmed speculation that he would be writing the score for a musical adaptation of "Amélie", collaborating with Craig Lucas and Nathan Tysen. Messe also confirmed he would be composing all original music for the show and not using the Yann Tiersen score. The musical adaptation premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in August 2015. It opened on Broadway in March 2017 and closed in May 2017. The production started its pre-Broadway engagement at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in December 2016, with Phillipa Soo in the title role. A London production opened in 2020, with Australian, German, Dutch, and Finnish productions set to open or resume pending the cessation of restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Amélie

text: Jeunet has distanced himself from the musical due to his distaste for the artform, saying he only sold the rights to raise funds for children's charity "".


title: Amélie

text: The film has no overall worldwide distributor, but Blu-ray Discs have been released in Canada and Australia. The first release occurred in Canada in September 2008 by TVA Films. This version did not contain any English subtitles and received criticisms regarding picture quality. In November 2009, an Australian release occurred. This time the version contained English subtitles and features no region coding. Momentum Pictures released a Blu-ray in the UK on 17 October 2011. The film is also available in HD on iTunes and other digital download services.


title: Amélie

text: In the United Kingdom, it was 2013's tenth best-selling foreign-language film on physical home video formats, and the year's third best-selling French film (below "The Intouchables" and "Rust and Bone").


title: Amélie

text: For the 2007 television show "Pushing Daisies", a "quirky fairy tale", American Broadcasting Company (ABC) sought an "Amélie" feel, with the same chords of "whimsy and spirit and magic". "Pushing Daisies" creator Bryan Fuller said "Amélie" is his favorite film. "All the things I love are represented in that movie", he said. "It's a movie that will make me cry based on kindness as opposed to sadness". "The New York Times" review of "Pushing Daisies" reported "the "Amélie" influence on "Pushing Daisies" is everywhere".


title: Amélie

text: A species of frog was named "Cochranella amelie". The scientist who named it said: "This new species of glass frog is for Amélie, protagonist of the extraordinary movie "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain"; a film where little details play an important role in the achievement of "joie de vivre"; like the important role that glass frogs and all amphibians and reptiles play in the health of our planet". The species was described in the scientific journal "Zootaxa" in an article entitled "An enigmatic new species of Glassfrog (Amphibia: Anura: Centrolenidae) from the Amazonian Andean slopes of Ecuador".


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels such as "Far from the Madding Crowd" (1874), "The Mayor of Casterbridge" (1886), "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" (1891), and "Jude the Obscure" (1895). During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. Two of his novels, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" and "Far from the Madding Crowd", were listed in the top 50 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in Higher Bockhampton (then Upper Bockhampton), a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford to the east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, where his father Thomas (1811–1892) worked as a stonemason and local builder, and married his mother Jemima (née Hand; 1813–1904) in Beaminster, towards the end of 1839. Jemima was well-read, and she educated Thomas until he went to his first school at Bockhampton at the age of eight. For several years he attended Mr. Last's Academy for Young Gentlemen in Dorchester, where he learned Latin and demonstrated academic potential. Because Hardy's family lacked the means for a university education, his formal education ended at the age of sixteen, when he became apprenticed to James Hicks, a local architect.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862; there he enrolled as a student at King's College London. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. He joined Arthur Blomfield's practice as assistant architect in April 1862 and worked with Blomfield on All Saints' parish church in Windsor, Berkshire, in 1862–64. A reredos, possibly designed by Hardy, was discovered behind panelling at All Saints' in August 2016. In the mid-1860s, Hardy was in charge of the excavation of part of the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church prior to its destruction when the Midland Railway was extended to a new terminus at St Pancras.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy never felt at home in London, because he was acutely conscious of class divisions and his social inferiority. During this time he became interested in social reform and the works of John Stuart Mill. He was introduced by his Dorset friend Horace Moule to the works of Charles Fourier and Auguste Comte. Mill's essay "On Liberty" was one of Hardy's cures for despair, and in 1924 he declared that "my pages show harmony of view with" Mill. He was also attracted to Matthew Arnold's and Leslie Stephen's ideal of the urbane liberal freethinker.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: After five years, concerned about his health, he returned to Dorset, settling in Weymouth, and decided to dedicate himself to writing.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Gifford, whom he married in Kensington in late 1874. renting St David's Villa, Southborough (now Surbiton) for a year. In 1885 Thomas and his wife moved into Max Gate in Dorchester, a house designed by Hardy and built by his brother. Although they later became estranged, Emma's subsequent death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him and after her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places linked with their courtship; his "Poems 1912–13" reflect upon her death. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. He remained preoccupied with his first wife's death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry. In his later years, he kept a Wire Fox Terrier named Wessex, who was notoriously ill-tempered. Wessex's grave stone can be found on the Max Gate grounds. In 1910, Hardy had been appointed a Member of the Order of Merit and was also for the first time nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was nominated again for the prize 11 years later.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy's interest in the theatre dated from the 1860s. He corresponded with various would-be adapters over the years, including Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886 and Jack Grein and Charles Jarvis in the same decade. Neither adaptation came to fruition, but Hardy showed he was potentially enthusiastic about such a project. One play that was performed, however, caused him a certain amount of pain. His experience of the controversy and lukewarm critical reception that had surrounded his and Comyns Carr's adaptation of "Far From the Madding Crowd" in 1882 left him wary of the damage that adaptations could do to his literary reputation. So it is notable that, in 1908, he so readily and enthusiastically became involved with a local amateur group, at the time known as the Dorchester Dramatic and Debating Society, but that would become the Hardy Players. His reservations about adaptations of his novels meant he was initially at some pains to disguise his involvement in the play. However, the international success of the play, "The Trumpet Major", led to a long and successful collaboration between Hardy and the Players over the remaining years of his life. Indeed, his play "The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall at Tintagel in Lyonnesse" (1923) was written to be performed by the Hardy Players.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: In 1914, Hardy was one of fifty-three leading British authors—including H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—who signed their names to the “Authors' Declaration”, justifying Britain’s involvement in the First World War. This manifesto declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime, and that Britain “could not without dishonour have refused to take part in the present war.” Hardy was horrified by the destruction caused by the war, pondering that "I do not think a world in which such fiendishness is possible to be worth the saving" and "better to let western 'civilization' perish, and let the black and yellow races have a chance." He wrote to John Galsworthy that "the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world."


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy became ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died at Max Gate just after 9 pm on 11 January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed; the cause of death was cited, on his death certificate, as "cardiac syncope", with "old age" given as a contributory factor. His funeral was on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, and it proved a controversial occasion because Hardy had wished for his body to be interred at Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma. His family and friends concurred; however, his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted that he be placed in the abbey's famous Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets' Corner. Hardy's estate at death was valued at £95,418 ().


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Shortly after Hardy's death, the executors of his estate burnt his letters and notebooks, but twelve notebooks survived, one of them containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s, and research into these has provided insight into how Hardy used them in his works. In the year of his death Mrs Hardy published "The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1841–1891", compiled largely from contemporary notes, letters, diaries, and biographical memoranda, as well as from oral information in conversations extending over many years.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy's work was admired by many younger writers, including D. H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, and Virginia Woolf. In his autobiography "Good-Bye to All That" (1929), Robert Graves recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s and how Hardy received him and his new wife warmly, and was encouraging about his work.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy's birthplace in Bockhampton and his house Max Gate, both in Dorchester, are owned by the National Trust.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy's first novel, "The Poor Man and the Lady", finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher. He then showed it to his mentor and friend, the Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith, who felt that "The Poor Man and the Lady" would be too politically controversial and might damage Hardy's ability to publish in the future. So Hardy followed his advice and he did not try further to publish it. He subsequently destroyed the manuscript, but used some of the ideas in his later work. In his recollections in "Life and Work", Hardy described the book as "socialistic, not to say revolutionary; yet not argumentatively so."


title: Thomas Hardy

text: After he abandoned his first novel, Hardy wrote two new ones that he hoped would have more commercial appeal, "Desperate Remedies" (1871) and "Under the Greenwood Tree" (1872), both of which were published anonymously; it was while working on the latter that he met Emma Gifford, who would become his wife. In 1873 "A Pair of Blue Eyes", a novel drawing on Hardy's courtship of Emma, was published under his own name. A plot device popularised by Charles Dickens, the term "cliffhanger" is considered to have originated with the serialised version of "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (published in "Tinsley's Magazine" between September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the protagonists, is left literally hanging off a cliff. Elements of Hardy's fiction reflect the influence of the commercially successful sensation fiction of the 1860s, particularly the legal complications in novels such as "Desperate Remedies" (1871), "Far from the Madding Crowd" (1874) and "Two on a Tower" (1882).


title: Thomas Hardy

text: In "Far from the Madding Crowd", Hardy first introduced the idea of calling the region in the west of England, where his novels are set, Wessex. Wessex had been the name of an early Saxon kingdom, in approximately the same part of England. "Far from the Madding Crowd" was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Over the next 25 years, Hardy produced 10 more novels.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Subsequently, the Hardys moved from London to Yeovil, and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote "The Return of the Native" (1878). In 1880, Hardy published his only historical novel, "The Trumpet-Major". A further move to Wimborne saw Hardy write "Two on a Tower", published in 1882, a romance story set in the world of astronomy. Then in 1885, they moved for the last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother. There he wrote "The Mayor of Casterbridge" (1886), "The Woodlanders" (1887), and "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" (1891), the last of which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman", and initially it was refused publication. Its subtitle, "A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented", was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle classes.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: "Jude the Obscure", published in 1895, met with an even stronger negative response from the Victorian public because of its controversial treatment of sex, religion and marriage. Its apparent attack on the institution of marriage caused strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy was concerned that "Jude the Obscure" would be read as autobiographical. Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags, and Walsham How, the Bishop of Wakefield, is reputed to have burnt his copy. In his postscript of 1912, Hardy humorously referred to this incident as part of the career of the book: "After these [hostile] verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop – probably in his despair at not being able to burn me". Despite this, Hardy had become a celebrity by the 1900s, but some argue that he gave up writing novels because of the criticism of both "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "Jude the Obscure". "The Well-Beloved", first serialised in 1892, was published in 1897.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England, and criticises those beliefs, especially those relating to marriage, education and religion, that limited people's lives and caused unhappiness. Such unhappiness, and the suffering it brings, is seen by poet Philip Larkin as central in Hardy's works:


title: Thomas Hardy

text: In "Two on a Tower", for example, Hardy takes a stand against these rules of society with a story of love that crosses the boundaries of class. The reader is forced to reconsider the conventions set up by society for the relationships between men and women. Nineteenth-century society had conventions, which were enforced. In this novel Swithin St Cleeve's idealism pits him against such contemporary social constraints.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Fate or chance is another important theme. Hardy's characters often encounter crossroads on a journey, a junction that offers alternative physical destinations but which is also symbolic of a point of opportunity and transition, further suggesting that fate is at work. "Far from the Madding Crowd" is an example of a novel in which chance has a major role: "Had Bathsheba not sent the valentine, had Fanny not missed her wedding, for example, the story would have taken an entirely different path." Indeed, Hardy's main characters often seem to be held in fate's overwhelming grip.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: In 1898, Hardy published his first volume of poetry, "Wessex Poems", a collection of poems written over 30 years. While some suggest that Hardy gave up writing novels following the harsh criticism of "Jude the Obscure" in 1896, the poet C. H. Sisson calls this "hypothesis" "superficial and absurd". In the twentieth century Hardy published only poetry.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Thomas Hardy wrote in a great variety of poetic forms, including lyrics, ballads, satire, dramatic monologues, and dialogue, as well as a three-volume epic closet drama "The Dynasts" (1904–08), and though in some ways a very traditional poet, because he was influenced by folksong and ballads, he "was never conventional," and "persistently experiment[ed] with different, often invented, stanza forms and metres, and made use of "rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction".


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy wrote a number of significant war poems that relate to both the Boer Wars and World War I, including "Drummer Hodge", "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'", and "The Man He Killed"; his work had a profound influence on other war poets such as Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon. Hardy in these poems often used the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers and their colloquial speech. A theme in the "Wessex Poems" is the long shadow that the Napoleonic Wars cast over the 19th century, as seen, for example, in "The Sergeant's Song" and "Leipzig". The Napoleonic War is the subject of "The Dynasts".


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Some of Hardy's more famous poems are from "Poems of 1912–13", part of "Satires of Circumstance" (1914), written following the death of his wife Emma in 1912. They had been estranged for 20 years, and these lyric poems express deeply felt "regret and remorse". Poems like "After a Journey", "The Voice", and others from this collection "are by general consent regarded as the peak of his poetic achievement". In a recent biography on Hardy, Claire Tomalin argues that Hardy became a truly great English poet after the death of his first wife Emma, beginning with these elegies, which she describes as among "the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry."


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Many of Hardy's poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and life, and "the perversity of fate", but the best of them present these themes with "a carefully controlled elegiac feeling". Irony is an important element in a number of Hardy's poems, including "The Man He Killed" and "Are You Digging on My Grave". A few of Hardy's poems, such as "The Blinded Bird", a melancholy polemic against the sport of , reflect his firm stance against animal cruelty, exhibited in his antivivisectionist views and his membership in The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: A number of notable English composers, including Gerald Finzi, Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Gustav Holst, set poems by Hardy to music. Holst also wrote the orchestral tone poem "Egdon Heath: A Homage to Thomas Hardy" in 1927.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Although his poems were initially not as well received as his novels had been, Hardy is now recognised as one of the great poets of the 20th century, and his verse had a profound influence on later writers, including Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin. Larkin included 27 poems by Hardy compared with only nine by T. S. Eliot in his edition of the "Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse" in 1973. There were fewer poems by W. B. Yeats.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy's family was Anglican, but not especially devout. He was baptised at the age of five weeks and attended church, where his father and uncle contributed to music. He did not attend the local Church of England school, instead being sent to Mr Last's school, three miles away. As a young adult, he befriended Henry R. Bastow (a Plymouth Brethren man), who also worked as a pupil architect, and who was preparing for adult baptism in the Baptist Church. Hardy flirted with conversion, but decided against it. Bastow went to Australia and maintained a long correspondence with Hardy, but eventually Hardy tired of these exchanges and the correspondence ceased. This concluded Hardy's links with the Baptists.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: The irony and struggles of life, coupled with his naturally curious mind, led him to question the traditional Christian view of God:


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Scholars have debated Hardy's religious leanings for years, often unable to reach a consensus. Once, when asked in correspondence by a clergyman, Dr. A. B. Grosart, about the question of reconciling the horrors of human and animal life with "the absolute goodness and non-limitation of God", Hardy replied,


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy frequently conceived of, and wrote about, supernatural forces, particularly those that control the universe through indifference or caprice, a force he called The Immanent Will. He also showed in his writing some degree of fascination with ghosts and spirits. Even so, he retained a strong emotional attachment to the Christian liturgy and church rituals, particularly as manifested in rural communities, that had been such a formative influence in his early years, and Biblical references can be found woven throughout many of Hardy's novels.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy's friends during his apprenticeship to John Hicks included Horace Moule (one of the eight sons of Henry Moule), and the poet William Barnes, both ministers of religion. Moule remained a close friend of Hardy's for the rest of his life, and introduced him to new scientific findings that cast doubt on literal interpretations of the Bible, such as those of Gideon Mantell. Moule gave Hardy a copy of Mantell's book "The Wonders of Geology" (1848) in 1858, and Adelene Buckland has suggested that there are "compelling similarities" between the "cliffhanger" section from "A Pair of Blue Eyes" and Mantell's geological descriptions. It has also been suggested that the character of Henry Knight in "A Pair of Blue Eyes" was based on Horace Moule.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Throughout his life, Hardy sought a rationale for believing in an afterlife or a timeless existence, turning first to spiritualists, such as Henri Bergson, and then to Albert Einstein and J. M. E. McTaggart, considering their philosophy on time and space in relation to immortality.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Sites associated with Hardy's own life and which inspired the settings of his novels continue to attract literary tourists and casual visitors. For locations in Hardy's novels see: Thomas Hardy's Wessex, and the Thomas Hardy's Wessex research site, which includes maps.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy corresponded with and visited Lady Catherine Milnes Gaskell at Wenlock Abbey and many of Lady Catherine's books are inspired by Hardy, who was very fond of her.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: D. H. Lawrence's "Study of Thomas Hardy" (1914, first published 1936) indicates the importance of Hardy for him, even though this work is a platform for Lawrence's own developing philosophy rather than a more standard literary study. The influence of Hardy's treatment of character, and Lawrence's own response to the central metaphysic behind many of Hardy's novels, helped significantly in the development of "The Rainbow" (1915) and "Women in Love" (1920).


title: Thomas Hardy

text: "Wood and Stone" (1915), the first novel by John Cowper Powys, who was a contemporary of Lawrence, was "Dedicated with devoted admiration to the greatest poet and novelist of our age Thomas Hardy". Powys's later novel "Maiden Castle" (1936) is set in Dorchester, Hardy's Casterbridge, and was intended by Powys to be a "rival" to Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge". "Maiden Castle" is the last of Powys's so-called Wessex novels, "Wolf Solent" (1929), "A Glastonbury Romance" (1932), and "Weymouth Sands" (1934), which are set in Somerset and Dorset.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy was clearly the starting point for the character of the novelist Edward Driffield in W. Somerset Maugham's novel "Cakes and Ale" (1930). Thomas Hardy's works also feature prominently in the American playwright Christopher Durang's "The Marriage of Bette and Boo" (1985), in which a graduate thesis analysing "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is interspersed with analysis of Matt's family's neuroses.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: The symphonic poems "Mai-Dun" by John Ireland (1921) and "Egdon Heath" by Gustav Holst (1927) evoke the landscape of Hardy's novels.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy has been a significant influence on Nigel Blackwell, frontman of the post-punk British rock band Half Man Half Biscuit, who has often incorporated phrases (some obscure) by or about Hardy into his song lyrics.


title: Thomas Hardy

text: Hardy also produced minor tales; one story, "The Spectre of the Real" (1894) was written in collaboration with Florence Henniker. An additional short-story collection, beyond the ones mentioned above, is "A Changed Man and Other Tales" (1913). His works have been collected as the 24-volume Wessex Edition (1912–13) and the 37-volume Mellstock Edition (1919–20). His largely self-written biography appears under his second wife's name in two volumes from 1928 to 1930, as "The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–91" and "The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928", now published in a critical one-volume edition as "The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy", edited by Michael Millgate (1984).


title: Termite

text: Termites are small insects that live in colonies and have distinct castes (eusocial) and feed on wood or other dead plant matter. Termites comprise the infraorder Isoptera, or alternatively the epifamily Termitoidae, within the order Blattodea (along with cockroaches). Termites were once classified in a separate order from cockroaches, but recent phylogenetic studies indicate that they evolved from cockroaches, as they are deeply nested within the group, and the sister group to wood eating cockroaches of the genus "Cryptocercus". Previous estimates suggested the divergence took place during the Jurassic or Triassic. More recent estimates suggest that they have an origin during the Late Jurassic, with the first fossil records in the Early Cretaceous. About 3,106 species are currently described, with a few hundred more left to be described. Although these insects are often called "white ants", they are not ants, and are not closely related to ants.


title: Termite

text: Like ants and some bees and wasps from the separate order Hymenoptera, termites divide as "workers" and "soldiers" that are usually sterile. All colonies have fertile males called "kings" and one or more fertile females called "queens". Termites mostly feed on dead plant material and cellulose, generally in the form of wood, leaf litter, soil, or animal dung. Termites are major detritivores, particularly in the subtropical and tropical regions, and their recycling of wood and plant matter is of considerable ecological importance.


title: Termite

text: Termites are among the most successful groups of insects on Earth, colonising most landmasses except Antarctica. Their colonies range in size from a few hundred individuals to enormous societies with several million individuals. Termite queens have the longest known lifespan of any insect, with some queens reportedly living up to 30 to 50 years. Unlike ants, which undergo a complete metamorphosis, each individual termite goes through an incomplete metamorphosis that proceeds through egg, nymph, and adult stages. Colonies are described as superorganisms because the termites form part of a self-regulating entity: the colony itself.


title: Termite

text: Termites have several effects on humans. They are a delicacy in the diet of some human cultures and are used in many traditional medicines. Several hundred species are economically significant as pests that can cause serious damage to buildings, crops, or plantation forests. Some species, such as the West Indian drywood termite ("Cryptotermes brevis"), are regarded as invasive species.


title: Termite

text: The infraorder name Isoptera is derived from the Greek words "iso" (equal) and "ptera" (winged), which refers to the nearly equal size of the fore and hind wings. "Termite" derives from the Latin and Late Latin word "termes" ("woodworm, white ant"), altered by the influence of Latin "terere" ("to rub, wear, erode") from the earlier word "tarmes". A termite nest is also known as a "termitary" or "termitarium" (plural "termitaria" or "termitariums"). In earlier English, termites were known as "wood ants" or "white ants". The modern term was first used in 1781.


title: Termite

text: Termites were formerly placed in the order Isoptera. As early as 1934 suggestions were made that they were closely related to wood-eating cockroaches (genus "Cryptocercus", the woodroach) based on the similarity of their symbiotic gut flagellates. In the 1960s additional evidence supporting that hypothesis emerged when F. A. McKittrick noted similar morphological characteristics between some termites and "Cryptocercus" nymphs. In 2008 DNA analysis from 16S rRNA sequences supported the position of termites being nested within the evolutionary tree containing the order Blattodea, which included the cockroaches. The cockroach genus "Cryptocercus" shares the strongest phylogenetical similarity with termites and is considered to be a sister-group to termites. Termites and "Cryptocercus" share similar morphological and social features: for example, most cockroaches do not exhibit social characteristics, but "Cryptocercus" takes care of its young and exhibits other social behaviour such as trophallaxis and allogrooming. Termites are thought to be the descendants of the genus "Cryptocercus". Some researchers have suggested a more conservative measure of retaining the termites as the Termitoidae, an epifamily within the cockroach order, which preserves the classification of termites at family level and below. Termites have long been accepted to be closely related to cockroaches and mantids, and they are classified in the same superorder (Dictyoptera).


title: Termite

text: The oldest unambiguous termite fossils date to the early Cretaceous, but given the diversity of Cretaceous termites and early fossil records showing mutualism between microorganisms and these insects, they possibly originated earlier in the Jurassic or Triassic. Possible evidence of a Jurassic origin is the assumption that the extinct "Fruitafossor" consumed termites, judging from its morphological similarity to modern termite-eating mammals. The oldest termite nest discovered is believed to be from the Upper Cretaceous in West Texas, where the oldest known faecal pellets were also discovered. Claims that termites emerged earlier have faced controversy. For example, F. M. Weesner indicated that the Mastotermitidae termites may go back to the Late Permian, 251 million years ago, and fossil wings that have a close resemblance to the wings of "Mastotermes" of the Mastotermitidae, the most primitive living termite, have been discovered in the Permian layers in Kansas. It is even possible that the first termites emerged during the Carboniferous. The folded wings of the fossil wood roach "Pycnoblattina", arranged in a convex pattern between segments 1a and 2a, resemble those seen in "Mastotermes", the only living insect with the same pattern. Krishna "et al.", though, consider that all of the Paleozoic and Triassic insects tentatively classified as termites are in fact unrelated to termites and should be excluded from the Isoptera. Other studies suggest that the origin of termites is more recent, having diverged from "Cryptocercus" sometime during the Early Cretaceous. The primitive giant northern termite ("Mastotermes darwiniensis") exhibits numerous cockroach-like characteristics that are not shared with other termites, such as laying its eggs in rafts and having anal lobes on the wings. It has been proposed that the Isoptera and Cryptocercidae be grouped in the clade "Xylophagodea". Termites are sometimes called "white ants" but the only resemblance to the ants is due to their sociality which is due to convergent evolution with termites being the first social insects to evolve a caste system more than 100 million years ago. Termite genomes are generally relatively large compared to those of other insects; the first fully sequenced termite genome, of "Zootermopsis nevadensis", which was published in the journal Nature Communications, consists of roughly 500Mb, while two subsequently published genomes, "Macrotermes natalensis" and "Cryptotermes secundus", are considerably larger at around 1.3Gb.