title: Rus' people

text: Evidence for strong bloodline connections between the Kievan Rus and Scandinavia existed and a strong alliance between Vikings and early Kievan rulers is indicated in early texts of Scandinavian and East Slavic history. Several thousand Swedish Vikings died for the defence of Kievan Rus against the Pechenegs.


title: Rus' people

text: In Scandinavian sources, the area is called "Austr" (the "East"), "Garðaríki" (the "realm of cities"), or simply "Garðar" (the "cities"), and "Svíþjóð hin mikla" ("Great Sweden"). The last name appears in the 12th century geographical work "Leiðarvísir ok Borgaskipan" by the Icelandic abbot Nicolaus (d. 1161) and in "Ynglinga saga" by Snorri Sturluson, which indicates that the Icelanders considered Kievan Rus to have been founded by the Swedes. The name "Great Sweden" is introduced as a non-Icelandic name with the phrase "which we call Garðaríki" ("sú er vér köllum Garðaríki"), and it is possible that it is a folk etymological interpretation of "Scythia magna". However, if this is the case, it can still be influenced by the tradition that Kievan Rus was of Swedish origin, which recalls "Magna Graecia" as a name for the Greek colonies in Italy.


title: Rus' people

text: When the Norse sagas were put to text in the 13th century, the Norse colonisation of Eastern Europe, however, was a distant past, and little of historical value can be extracted. The oldest traditions were recorded in the "Legendary sagas" and there Garðaríki appears as a Norse kingdom where the rulers have Norse names, but where also dwelt the Dwarves Dvalin and Durin. There is, however, more reliable information from the 11th and the 12th centuries, but at that time most of the Scandinavian population had already assimilated, and the term "Rus" referred to a largely Slavic-speaking population. Still, Eastern Europe is presented as the traditional Swedish sphere of interest. The sagas preserve Old Norse names of several important Rus settlements, including (Novgorod), and (Kyiv); Fjodor Uspenskij argues that the use of the element in these names, as well as in the names and (Constantinople), shows the influence of Old East Slavic (city), as usually means farmstead in Old Norse. He further argues that the city names can be used to show that the Rus were also competent in Old East Slavic. At this time the Rus borrowed some 15 Old East Slavic words, such as the word for marketplace, "tǔrgǔ", as "torg", many of which spread to the other Old Norse-speaking regions as well.


title: Rus' people

text: The most contemporary sources are the Varangian runestones, but just like the sagas, the vast majority of them arrive relatively late. The earliest runestone that tells of eastwards voyages is the Kälvesten runestone from the 9th century in Östergötland, but it does not specify where the expedition had gone. It was Harald Bluetooth's construction of the Jelling stones in the late 10th century that started the runestone fashion that resulted in the raising of thousands of runestones in Sweden during the 11th century; at that time the Swedes arrived as mercenaries and traders rather than settlers. In the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries runic memorials had consisted of runes on wooden poles that were erected in the ground, something which explains the lack of runic inscriptions from this period both in Scandinavia and in eastern Europe as wood is perishable. This tradition was described by Ibn Fadlan who met Scandinavians on the shores of the Volga.


title: Rus' people

text: The Fagerlöt runestone gives a hint of the Old Norse spoken in Kievan Rus, as "folksgrimʀ" may have been the title that the commander had in the retinue of Yaroslav I the Wise in Novgorod. The suffix - is a virtually unique word for "leader" which is otherwise only attested in the Swedish medieval poem "Stolt Herr Alf", but in the later form "grim". It is not attested as a noun in the sense "leader" in West Norse sources. In Old Norse, the basic meaning of the adjective is "heartless, strict and wicked", and so is comparable in semantics to Old Norse which meant both "wrath", "king" and "warrior".


title: Rus' people

text: Other runestones explicitly mentioning warriors serving the ruler of Kievan Rus are one of the Skåäng runestones, the Smula runestone and most famously, the Turinge runestone which immortalizes the dead commander with a poem:


title: Rus' people

text: The Veda runestone is of note as it indicates that the riches that were acquired in Eastern Europe had led to the new procedure of legally buying clan land, and the Swedish chieftain Jarlabanke used his clan's acquired wealth to erect the monument Jarlabanke Runestones after himself while alive and where he bragged that he owned the whole hundred.


title: Rus' people

text: The earliest Slavonic-language narrative account of Rus history is the "Primary Chronicle", compiled and adapted from a wide range of sources in Kiev at the start of the 13th century. It has therefore been influential in modern history-writing, but it was also compiled much later than the time it describes, and historians agree it primarily reflects the political and religious politics of the time of Mstislav I of Kiev.


title: Rus' people

text: However, the chronicle does include the texts of a series of Rus–Byzantine Treaties from 911, 945, and 971. The Rus–Byzantine Treaties give a valuable insight into the names of the Rus. Of the fourteen Rus signatories to the Rus–Byzantine Treaty in 907, all had Norse names. By the Rusʹ–Byzantine Treaty (945) in 945, some signatories of the Rus had Slavic names while the vast majority had Norse names.


title: Rus' people

text: The Chronicle presents the following origin myth for the arrival of Rus in the region of Novgorod: the Rus/Varangians 'imposed tribute upon the Chuds, the Slavs, the Merians, the Ves', and the Krivichians' (a variety of Slavic and Finnic peoples).


title: Rus' people

text: From among Rurik's entourage it also introduces two Swedish merchants Askold and Dir (in the chronicle they are called "boyars", probably because of their noble class). The names Askold () and Dir () are Swedish; the chronicle says that these two merchants were not from the family of Rurik, but simply belonged to his retinue. Later, the "Primary Chronicle" claims, they conquered Kiev and created the state of Kievan Rusʹ (which may have been preceded by the Rusʹ Khaganate).


title: Rus' people

text: Arabic-language sources for the Rus people are relatively numerous, with over 30 relevant passages in roughly contemporaneous sources. It can be difficult to be sure that when Arabic sources talk about "Rus" they mean the same thing as modern scholars. Sometimes it seems to be a general term for Scandinavians: when Al-Yaqūbi recorded "Rūs" attacking Seville in 844, he was almost certainly talking about Vikings based in Frankia. At other times, it might denote people other than or alongside Scandinavians: thus the "Mujmal al-Tawarikh" calls the Khazars and Rus 'brothers'; later, Muhammad al-Idrisi, Al-Qazwini, and Ibn Khaldun all identified the Rus as a sub-group of the Turks. These uncertainties have fed into debates about the origins of the Rus.


title: Rus' people

text: Arabic sources for the Rus had been collected, edited and translated for Western scholars by the mid-20th century. However, relatively little use was made of the Arabic sources in studies of the Rus before the 21st century. This is partly because they mostly concern the region between the Black and the Caspian Seas, and from there north along the lower Volga and the Don. This made them less relevant than the Primary Chronicle to understanding European state formation further west. Imperialist ideologies, in Russia and more widely, discouraged research emphasising an ancient or distinctive history for Inner Eurasian peoples. Arabic sources portray Rus people fairly clearly as a raiding and trading diaspora, or as mercenaries, under the Volga Bulghars or the Khazars, rather than taking a role in state formation.


title: Rus' people

text: The most extensive Arabic account of the Rus is by the Muslim diplomat and traveller Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who visited Volga Bulgaria in 922, and described people under the label "Rūs"/"Rūsiyyah" at length, beginning thus:


title: Rus' people

text: Apart from Ibn Fadlan's account, scholars draw heavily on the evidence of the Persian traveler Ibn Rustah who, it is postulated, visited Novgorod (or Tmutarakan, according to George Vernadsky) and described how the Rus exploited the Slavs.


title: Rus' people

text: When the Varangians first appeared in Constantinople (the Paphlagonian expedition of the Rusʹ in the 820s and the Siege of Constantinople in 860), the Byzantines seem to have perceived these people they called the "Rhos" () as a different people from the Slavs. At least no source says they are part of the Slavic race. Characteristically, Pseudo-Simeon and Theophanes Continuatus refer to the Rhos as "dromitai" (Δρομῖται), a word related to the Greek word meaning "a run", suggesting the mobility of their movement by waterways.


title: Rus' people

text: In his treatise "De Administrando Imperio", Constantine VII describes the Rhos as the neighbours of Pechenegs who buy from the latter cows, horses, and sheep "because none of these animals may be found in Rhosia". His description represents the Rus as a warlike northern tribe. Constantine also enumerates the names of the Dnieper cataracts in both rhosisti ('ῥωσιστί', the language of the Rus) and sklavisti ('σκλαβιστί', the language of the Slavs). The Rus names are usually etymologised as Old Norse. An argument used to support this view is that the name "Aeifor" in reference to the fourth cataract is also attested on the Pilgårds runestone from the 10th c. on Gotland. However, some researches indicate that at least several of the Rus names can be Slavic and, as for the Dnieper cataract "Aeifar" / "Aeifor", its name doesn't have an acceptable and convincing Scandinavian etymology.


title: Rus' people

text: The first Western European source to mention the Rus are the Annals of St. Bertin (Annales Bertiniani). These relate that Emperor Louis the Pious' court at Ingelheim, in 839, was visited by a delegation from the Byzantine emperor. In this delegation there were men who called themselves "Rhos" (in the Latin text, "... qui se, id est gentem suam, Rhos vocari dicebant, ..."; translated by Aleksandr Nazarenko as "... who stated that they, i.e. their nation, were called Rhos, ..."). Once Louis enquired the reason of their arrival (in the Latin text, "... Quorum adventus causam imperator diligentius investigans, ..."), he learnt that they were Swedes ("eos gentis esse Sueonum"; verbatim, "their nation is Sveoni"). Fearing that they were spies, he detained them, before letting them proceed after receiving reassurances from Byzantium. Subsequently, in the 10th and 11th centuries, Latin sources routinely confused the Rus with the tribe of Rugians. Olga of Kiev, for instance, was designated as queen of the Rugians ("reginae Rugorum") in the Lotharingian Chronicle compiled by the anonymous continuator of Regino of Prüm. At least after the 6th century, the name of the Rugii referred to Slavic speaking peoples including the Rus. According to the Annals of St. Bertin, the Rus leader had the title "Khagan" ("... quod rex illorum, Chacanus vocabulo, ...").


title: Rus' people

text: Another source comes from Liutprand of Cremona, a 10th-century Lombard bishop whose "Antapodosis", a report from Constantinople to Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, says that Constantinople 'stands in territory surrounded by warlike peoples. On the north it has the ... "Rusii" sometimes called by another name "Nordmanni", and the "Bulgarii" who live too close for harmony'.


title: Rus' people

text: The Scandinavian influence in Kievan Rus was most important during the late 9th c. and during the 10th c. In 976, Vladimir the Great ("Valdamarr gamli") fled from his brother Yaropolk to Sweden, ruled by Erik the Victorious, where he gathered an invasion force that he used to conquer Kievan Rus. Vladimir was initially a pagan who is reported by the "Primary Chronicle" to have worshiped Perun and Veles, and this is probably a Slavic translation of the corresponding Norse gods Thor and Freyr, who beside Odin were the two most important gods to the Swedes. However, in 988, he converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church, whereas the Norse in Scandinavia remained Norse pagans or converted to the Catholic Church. After this, the Norse influence decreased considerably both in character and in size, and in the 11th c. the Norse are mentioned as Varangian mercenaries and employees serving the princely family.


title: Rus' people

text: Melnikova comments that the disappearance of Norse funeral traditions c. 1000, is better explained with Christianization and the introduction of Christian burial rites, a view described with some reservations by archaeologist Przemysław Urbańczyk of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. So the lack of Norse burials from c. 1000 is not a good indicator of assimilation into Slavic culture, and shows instead that the Rus had turned Orthodox Christian. Also the use of material objects is more connected to change in fashion and to change of social status than it is to ethnical change. She also notes that no systematic studies of the various elements that manifest ethnic identity in relation to the Rus has been done to support the theory of rapid assimilation, in spite of the fact that "[t]he most important indications of ethno-cultural self-identification are language and literacy."


title: Rus' people

text: The Rus elite became bilingual c. 950 but it was not until the end of the 11th century that Old East Slavic can be shown to have become their native language. Until the mid-10th century all the attested Rus names were Norse, but this changes with the 944 treaty. In this treaty there are 76 names among whom 12 belong to the ruling family, 11 to emissaries, 27 to other agents, and 26 to merchants. In the princely family, there are three Slavic names "Svjatoslav", son of prince Igor' (Ingvar) and "Volodislav" and "Predslava" (of unknown relation). The other members of the family have Norse names, i.e. Olga ("Helga"), Akun ("Hákon"), Sfanda ("Svanhildr"), Uleb ("Óleifr"), Turd ("Þórðr"), Arfast ("Arnfastr"), and Sfir'ka ("Sverkir"). The emissaries also have Old Norse names except for three who have Finnish names. Olga has a representative by the Finnish name "Iskusevi", whereas Volodislav is represented by the Norse Uleb ("Óleifr"). Among the 27 agents there are some who have Finnish names, but none with Slavic, while among the 26 merchants there are three with Finnish names and two with Slavic.


title: Rus' people

text: At this time, the use of Slavic names is limited to the princely family and merchants. The princely family wants to give at least some of their offspring Slavic names and thus break with the family naming tradition. The warrior class shows no tendencies for Slavic names yet, but in the 960s there is a high ranking commander by the Slavic name "Pretich", according to the "Primary Chronicle", while the other commanders-in-chief have the Norse names Sveneld ("Sveinaldr") and Asmud ("Asmundr"). The reason the princely family felt a need for Slavic names was to accommodate the local Slavic nobility, whereas most warriors came to Kievan Rus from Scandinavia and later went home, and only a part of them chose to stay. The warrior elite felt less pressure to adapt to Slavic traditions and their faithfulness to Norse tradition is shown by the fact that Svenald gave his son the Norse name Ljut ("Ljútr").


title: Rus' people

text: In the 980s, among Sviatoslav's grandchildren, the "Primary Chronicle" informs that Vladimir the Great had twelve sons and one daughter. Only one of them, a son, had a Norse name, Gleb ("Guðleifr"), whereas the other children had Slavic compound names mostly ending with -"slav" ("fame"). After this generation, the ruling dynasty restricted itself to five Norse male names and one female name, of which the most popular ones would be Oleg, Igor and Gleb (was murdered in 1015 and canonized). The name Rurik ("Hrœrekr") reappears in the mid-11th c. but stays restricted in use. Among female names, only Olga stays popular. The Norse names "Hákon", "Óleifr", and "Ivarr" remain in use among the East Slavic nobility, but Norse names become rarer at the end of the 10th c. which may point to increased assimilation of the Rus into the Slavic population.


title: Rus' people

text: Among the Norse names that are not used in the ruling family, there is great variation in how they are spelled in the treaties. All names except for Oleg, Olga and Igor are spelled as closely to Old Norse as was possible in Old East Slavic. There were also variations in how the vowels were presented "Óleifr" was shown as "Oleb" or "Uleb", "Hákon" as "Jakun" and "Akun", "Arnfastr" as "Arfast" and "Fastr" as "Fost". The interdentals /þ/ and /ð/ are rendered as "d", but also rarely as "z" or "t" as in "Turd" from "Þórðr" and in "Vuzlev" from "Guðleifr". The "Fr-" in the beginning of names which was common in Old Norse but rare in Old East Slavic usually appeared as "Pr-" as in "Prasten" from "Freysteinn". There was no standard way of spelling ON names.


title: Rus' people

text: While the "Primary Chronicle" uses the same Slavicized forms throughout, rendering "Helgi" as , "Helga" as Ol'ga, "Ingvarr" as Igor' and "Guðleifr" as Gleb, they are unlikely to represent the form the names had at the end of the 10th c. Foreign sources give forms closer to the Old Norse originals. Byzantine sources from the second half of the 10th c. preserve the nasalization in "Ingvarr", and in the Cambridge document written in Hebrew, Helgi appears as HLGW, with initial H-. The adaptation of "Guðleifr" was still not complete by 1073, as shown in a manuscript where there is a vowel between G- and -l- in Gleb, showing that the name is still pronounced with an initial Gu-. Theses sources reflect authentic Old Norse pronunciation of these names, which shows that the adaptation of these names did not take place in the 10th c. but was finished a century later.


title: Rus' people

text: When the "Primary Chronicle" was written in 1113, the annalist used the already fully adapted Old East Slavic forms and he does not appear to have known that "Gleb" and "Vuzlev" both represented "Guðleifr", but instead kept them distinct. Later in the 12th c., in spite of the renown of the name Igor', the original Norse form "Ingvar" was borrowed again as a separate name, and it appears in the "Hypatian Codex" as the name of (d. 1212), and two princes of Ryazan. One of the latter was named "", mentioned in 1207–1219, which shows that the two names were no longer connected. Consequently, Melnikova, considers that the 12th c. stands in stark contrast to the previous two centuries, showing that the Slavicization of the Rus elite would have been complete after the second half of the 11th c.


title: Rus' people

text: On the other hand, the scholar Omeljan Pritsak considered that Old Norse must have been well known in Kiev and Novgorod, especially during the early decades of the 12th century. The linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson held a contrasting opinion, writing that Bojan, active at the court of Yaroslav the Wise, and some of whose poetry may be preserved in the epic poem "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", or "Slovo", in Old East Slavic, may have heard Scandinavian songs and conversations from visitors as late as 1110 (about the time his own work was done), and that even later, at the court of Mstislav ("Haraldr"), there must have been many opportunities to hear them. He cautions, however, that it cannot be presumed that Old Norse was still habitually spoken in 12th-century princely courts. Further, he says that Bojan's own life and career did not necessarily coincide with the time of the men whose lives he commemorated, and that he may have written of princes of an earlier period known to him only by report. Scholarly consensus holds as well that the author of the national epic, "Slovo", writing in the late 12th century, was not composing in a milieu where there was still a flourishing school of poetry in the Old Norse language.


title: Rus' people

text: There are remains of Old Norse culture as late as the 14th and early 15th c. in the form of runic or rune-like inscriptions and as personal names. The c. 1000 birch-bark letters from Novgorod contain hundreds of names, most of them Slavic or Christian, and according to Melnikova there are seven letters with Old Norse names, but Sitzman identifies as many as 18, including Staraja Russa no. 36.


title: Rus' people

text: The oldest of these letters (no. 526) is from the 1080s, and refers to "Asgut" from a village in the vicinity of Lake Seliger which was on the road between Novgorod and the central parts of Kievan Rus. Another letter (no. 130) is from the second half of the 14th c. and was sent to Novgorod from another part of the Novgorod Republic and mentions the names Vigar' (Vigeirr or Végeirr), Sten ("steinn") of Mikula, Jakun ("Hákon"), and the widow of a second Jakun. The most interesting of the letters (no. 2) mentions a place called "Gugmor-navolok", which may derive from Guðmarr, and two people living in the vicinity called Vozemut (Guðmundr) and Vel'jut (Véljótr). Perhaps a Guðmarr once settled near a portage ("navolok") on the route to Lake Onega and naming traditions were preserved in the settlement until the 14th c. It is unlikely that he was a new settler because there are no traces of 14th c. immigration, nor are there any Scandinavian remains. It is likely that his people adopted the local material culture but kept the family naming traditions.


title: Rus' people

text: Sten, the man from Mikula, could be a visitor from Sweden or Swedish-speaking Finland, but the other letters suggest people who had Norse names but were otherwise part of the local culture. They appear together with people of Slavic names and take part in the same activities, and they lived in scattered villages in the North-East periphery of the Novgorod Republic. The area was visited by Novgorod tribute collectors in the 11th century, and was integrated in the republic through colonization during the 12th and 13th centuries. Since Varangians were part of the administration of Novgorod they likely ventured in the area and sometimes settled there. The use of their naming traditions in the 14th c. show the conservatism of some of the Rus traditions.


title: Rus' people

text: The runic script survived for some time in remote parts of Kievan Rus, as evidenced by two finds. One of them is a weaver's slate spindle-whorl found in Zvenigorod in the South-West part of Kievan Rus. The whorl has the runic inscription si{X}riþ, representing the Norse female name "Sigrið" on the flat top and two crosses and two f runes () on the side. The whorl is dated thanks to being found in a layer from the period 1115–1130, when the settlement grew and became a town. No other Scandinavian finds were made except for two other whorls with runic-like inscriptions from the same time. Another whorl with a runic-like inscription was found in the old Russian fort of Plesnesk not far from Zvenigorod. This was a strategically important location and there are several warrior burials dating to the late 10th c. These graves belonged to warriors of a rank similar to a Kievan grand prince and some of them could have been of Scandinavian descent.


title: Rus' people

text: The inscriptions could be from descendants of the Rus who settled in the area as protection for the western border of Kievan Rus. The inscription shows archaic features and the g rune (X) is from the Elder Futhark, which could be due to copying the inscription from generation to generation. In that case the name "Sigriðr" was inherited for generations in the family. However, the f runes show that this was not the case, because the rune and the cross have similar meaning, although in different religions. Only those who had adhered to Norse paganism and later converted to Christianity would understand their significance, which necessitates a survival of old Norse traditions. It is possible that this community of descendants of late 10th c. Rus who lived in a remote area of Kievan Rus preserved family names, runic lore in archaic forms, ancestral beliefs and some of the Old Norse language, as evidenced by the runes.


title: Rus' people

text: There is another set of inscriptions that look like runes from an old fortification named , on the river route of Western Dvina. It was on the Latvian border and could control the river, although it was located several km away. The fort was used in the 12th and 13th c. and would later turn into a small castle. C. 110 bone fragments with graffiti have been found and they include inscriptions and pictures of warriors and weapons. The runic-like inscriptions are only three to six letters long and some can be interpreted. Some 30 of them are clearly Cyrillic, while 48 are runic. Some of the runic inscriptions are written with mirror-runes (right-to-left) and are illegible, but several can be read as personal names, words and individual runes. The reading of them is uncertain, but they were made by people who knew or remembered runes.


title: Rus' people

text: Consequently, in Kievan Rus there were descendants of the Rus who preserved parts of their heritage during centuries, the countryside being more conservative than towns.


title: Rus' people

text: The Norse influence is considered to have left many traces on the Old East Slavic legal code, the "Russkaja Pravda", and on literary works such as "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", and even on the "Byliny", which are old heroic tales about the early Kievan Rus (Vladimir the Great and others), where one of the words for "hero" is derived from "Viking", i.e. (). Several scholars note that this is "of considerable importance generally, as far as social and cultural background of language is concerned". Although, they also note that parallels may arise from general similarities between Germanic and Slavic societies, they state that these similarities remain a profitable field of comparative studies.


title: Rus' people

text: Russian contains several layers of Germanic loanwords that need to be separated from the North Germanic words that entered Old East Slavic during the Viking Age, Estimations of the number of loan words from Old Norse into Russian vary from author to author ranging from more than 100 words (Forssman) down to as low as 34 (Kiparsky) and 30 (Strumiński), including personal names. According to the most critical and conservative analysis, commonly used ON words include "knut" ("knout"), "seledka" ("herring"), "šelk" ("silk"), and "jaščik" ("box"), whereas "varjag" ("Varangian"), "stjag" ("flag") and "vitjaz" ("hero", from "viking") mostly belong to historical novels. Many belong to a special field and ceased to be commonly used in the 13th c., such as "" (from ON *, i.e. "Birka/birk pound", referring to 164 kg), "varjag", "vitjaz", (from "gulf" meaning "box", "crate" or "shed"), "", "gridi" (from "griði", "grimaðr" meaning a "king's bodyguard"), "lar" (from *"lári", "lárr" meaning "chest", "trunk"), "pud" (from "pund" referring to 16.38 kg), "Rus" (see etymology section above), "skala" ("skál", "scale"), ("thiónn", "Novgorod official" in the 12th c.), "šelk" (*"silki", "silk"), and "jabeda" ("embætti", "office").


title: Rus' people

text: Norse settlers also left many toponyms across North-Western Russia, where the names of settlements or nearby creeks reveal the name of the Norse settler, or where he came from. A man named Asviðr settled in a place today known as "Ašvidovo", Bófastr in "", Dýrbjǫrn in "Djurbenevo", Einarr in "Inarevo", Kynríkr in "Kondrikovo", Rødríkr in "", Ragnheiðr in "", Snæbjǫrn in "", Sveinn in "", Siófastr in "Suchvostovo", Steingrímr in "", and Thorbjǫrn in "Turyborovo". More common Norse names have left several toponyms, such as Ivarr in "" and "Ivorovka", Hákon in "Jakunovo" and "Jakunicha", Oléf in "Ulebovo", "Olebino" and "Olibov", and Bjǫrn, appears in "", "", "Bemniški", "Bernavo", and in "Bernoviči". There is also "Veliž" which is the same place name as "", an old estate near Stockholm, in Sweden. Many place names also contain the word "Varangian", such as "", "Varež(ka)", "Varyzki", "Varjaža", "Verjažino", and "Verjažka". Other names recall the "Kolbangians", such as "Kolbežycze", "Kolbjagi", and "Kolbižicy", and a group called "Burangians" ("Byringar"), in the names "Burjaži", "Buregi", "Burigi", "Burezi", "Burjaki", "Burjaz", etc.


title: Rus' people

text: As for other influences on the Russian language, they are less apparent, and could be due to coincidence. In Old Norse and the modern Scandinavian langues (except for the Jutish dialect of Danish), the definite article is used as an enclitic article after the noun. In Europe, this is otherwise only known from Basque and from the Balkan sprachbund, in languages such as Macedonian and Bulgarian. However, it also appears in dialects in Northern Russia, too far away from Bulgarian to have been influenced by it. As standard Russian has no definite article at all, the appearance of a postpositioned definite article in Northern Russian dialects may be due to influence from Old Norse. As for standard Russian, just like in Old Norse, and in the modern Scandinavian languages, there is a passive construction using an enclitic reflexive pronoun, "-s" in North Germanic and "-s'(a)" in Russian. However, it is not known from written Russian before the 15th c. and a corresponding construction has appeared independently in modern Romance languages, e.g. Italian "vendesi".


title: Rus' people

text: Numerous artefacts of Scandinavian affinity have been found in northern Russia (as well as artefacts of Slavic origin in Sweden). However, exchange between the northern and southern shores of the Baltic had occurred since the Iron Age (albeit limited to immediately coastal areas). Northern Russia and adjacent Finnic lands had become a profitable meeting ground for peoples of diverse origins, especially for the trade of furs, and attracted by the presence of oriental silver from the mid-8th century AD. There is an undeniable presence of goods and people of Scandinavian origin; however, the predominant people remained the local (Baltic and Finnic) peoples.


title: Rus' people

text: In the 21st century, analyses of the rapidly growing range of archaeological evidence further noted that high-status 9th- to 10th-century burials of both men and women in the vicinity of the Upper Volga exhibit material culture largely consistent with that of Scandinavia (though this is less the case away from the river, or further downstream). This has been seen as further demonstrating the Scandinavian character of elites in "Old Rusʹ".


title: Rus' people

text: There is uncertainty as to how small the Scandinavian migration to Rus was, but some recent archaeological work has argued for a substantial number of 'free peasants' settling in the upper Volga region.


title: Rus' people

text: The quantity of archaeological evidence for the regions where the Rus people were active grew steadily through the 20th century, and beyond, and the end of the Cold War made the full range of material increasingly accessible to researchers. Key excavations have included those at Staraja Ladoga, Novgorod, Rurikovo Gorodischche, Gnëzdovo, Shestovitsa, numerous settlements between the Upper Volga and the Oka. Twenty-first century research, therefore, is giving the synthesis of archaeological evidence an increasingly prominent place in understanding the Rus. The distribution of coinage, including the early 9th-century Peterhof Hoard, has provided important ways to trace the flow and quantity of trade in areas where Rus were active, and even, through graffiti on the coins, the languages spoken by traders.


title: Rus' people

text: There is also a great number of Varangian runestones, on which voyages to the east ("Austr") are mentioned.


title: Rus' people

text: In the mythical lays of the Poetic Edda, after her true love Sigurd is killed, Brunhild (Brynhildr in Old Norse) has eight slave girls and five serving maids killed and then stabs herself with her sword so that she can be with him in Valhalla, as told in The Short Lay of Sigurd, similarly to the sacrifices of slave girls that Ibn Fadlan described in his eyewitness accounts of the Rus. Swedish ship burials sometimes contain both males and females. According to the website of "Arkeologerna" (The Archaeologists), part of the National Historical Museums in Sweden, archaeologists have also found in an area outside of Uppsala a boat burial that contained the remains of a man, a horse and a dog, along with personal items including a sword, spear, shield, and an ornate comb. Swedish archeologists believe that during the Viking age Scandinavian human sacrifice was still common and that there were more grave offerings for the deceased in the afterlife than in earlier traditions that sacrificed human beings to the gods exclusively. The inclusion of weapons, horses and slave girls in graves also seems to have been practiced by the Rus.


title: Rus' people

text: Prior to the 18th century, it was the consensus of Russian historians that the Rus arose out of the native Slavic populations of the region. This changed following a 1749 presentation by German historian Gerhardt Friedrich Müller before the Russian Academy of Sciences, built in part on earlier work by Gottlieb-Siegfried Bayer and based on primary sources, particularly the Russian Primary Chronicle. He suggested that the founders of the Rus were ethnically Scandinavian Varangians, what became known as the 'Normanist' view. Though Müller met with immediate nationalistic opprobrium, by the end of the century his views represented the consensus in Russian historiography. The attribution of a Slavic origin to the Rus saw a politically motivated 'anti-Normanist' resurgence in the 20th century within the Soviet Union, and this revisionist view also received nationalistic support in the nation-building post-Soviet states, but the broad consensus of scholars is that the origin of the Rus lies in Scandinavia.


title: Exploitation film

text: An exploitation film is a film that tries to succeed financially by exploiting current trends, niche genres, or lurid content. Exploitation films are generally low-quality "B movies", though some set trends, attract critical attention, become historically important, and even gain a cult following.


title: Exploitation film

text: Exploitation films may feature suggestive or explicit sex, sensational violence, drug use, nudity, gore, destruction, rebellion, mayhem, and the bizarre. Such films were first seen in their modern form in the early 1920s, but they were popularized in the 60s and 70s with the general relaxing of censorship and cinematic taboos in the U.S. and Europe. In 1933 the movie Ecstasy with Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr got movie goers attention to see her nude in the movie. Hildegard Esper and Dwain Esper are husband and wife film directors and producers who made some of the most exploitative movies back in the 1930s such as Narcotic, Maniac, Marihuana, and How to Undress Your Husband.  The Hays Code did not like any of their movies and not even MPPDA.  Back in the 1930s exploitation movies were looked down upon.


title: Exploitation film

text: The Motion Picture Association of America (and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America before it) cooperated with censorship boards and grassroots organizations in the hope of preserving the image of a "clean" Hollywood, but the distributors of exploitation film operated outside of this circuit and often welcomed controversy as a form of free promotion. Their producers used sensational elements to attract audiences lost to television. Since the 1990s, this genre has also received attention in academic circles, where it is sometimes called paracinema.


title: Exploitation film

text: "Exploitation" is loosely defined and arguably has as much to do with the viewer's perception of the film as with the film's actual content. Titillating material and artistic content often coexist, as demonstrated by the fact that art films that failed to pass the Hays Code were often shown in the same grindhouses as exploitation films. Exploitation films share the fearlessness of acclaimed transgressive European directors such as Derek Jarman, Luis Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard in handling "disreputable" content. Many films recognized as classics contain levels of sex, violence, and shock typically associated with exploitation films; examples are Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" has rarely been considered psychopharmacology.   The novel written by Anthony Burgess’s is most well-known and memorable for its Bristish texts about youth and counterculture.  In the Stanley Kubrick movie from 1971, the famous iconic scene when Alex is strapped to a chair his eyes are wide open, he is forced to watch horror of the holocaust and World War II footage.  Author Anthony Burgess defined that moment as the Ludovico treatment. It was a neurological intervention that used behavioral conditioning and psychopharmacology to prevent the subject from committing violent crimes.  "A Clockwork Orange" speaks to the audience of the dominant culture and counterculture.  The novel and movie delve into the neuroscience and cultural effects of War World II, reflecting reactionary politics of fear based on disciplinary neuroscience. "" Tod Browning's "Freaks", and Roman Polanski's "Repulsion". Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou" contains elements of the modern splatter film. It has been suggested that if "Carnival of Souls" had been made in Europe, it would be considered an art film, while if "Eyes Without a Face" had been made in the U.S., it would have been categorized as a low-budget horror film. The audiences of art and exploitation film are both considered to have tastes that reject the mainstream Hollywood offerings.


title: Exploitation film

text: Exploitation films have often exploited news events in the short-term public consciousness that a major film studio may avoid because of the time required to produce a major film. "Child Bride" (1938), for example, tackled the issue of older men marrying young girls in the Ozarks. Other issues, such as drug use in films like "Reefer Madness" (1936), attracted audiences that major film studios would usually avoid in order to keep their respectable, mainstream reputations. With enough incentive, however, major studios might become involved, as Warner Bros. did in their 1969 anti-LSD, anti-counterculture film "The Big Cube". The film "Sex Madness" (1938) portrayed the dangers of venereal disease from premarital sex. "Mom and Dad", a 1945 film about pregnancy and childbirth, was promoted in lurid terms. "She Shoulda Said No!" (1949) combined the themes of drug use and promiscuous sex. In the early days of film, when exploitation films relied on such sensational subjects as these, they had to present a very conservative moral viewpoint to avoid censorship, as movies then were not considered to enjoy First Amendment protection.


title: Exploitation film

text: Several war films were made about the Winter War in Finland, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War before the major studios showed interest. When Orson Welles' radio production of "The War of the Worlds" from "The Mercury Theatre on the Air" for Halloween in 1938 shocked many Americans and made news, Universal Pictures edited their serial "Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars" into a short feature called "Mars Attacks the World" for release in November of that year.


title: Exploitation film

text: Some Poverty Row low-budget B movies often exploit major studio projects. Their rapid production schedule allows them to take advantage of publicity attached to major studio films. For example, Edward L. Alperson produced William Cameron Menzies' film "Invaders from Mars" to beat Paramount Pictures' production of director George Pal's "The War of the Worlds" to the cinemas, and Pal's "The Time Machine" was beaten to the cinemas by Edgar G. Ulmer's film "Beyond the Time Barrier". As a result, many major studios, producers, and stars keep their projects secret.


title: Exploitation film

text: Grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly showed exploitation films. These theatres were popular throughout the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s in New York City and other urban centers, mainly in North America, but began a long decline during the mid 1980s with the advent of home video.


title: Exploitation film

text: As the drive-in movie theater began to decline in the 1960s and 1970s, theater owners began to look for ways to bring in patrons. One solution was to book lower cost exploitation films. Some producers from the 1950s to the 1980s made films directly for the drive-in market, and the commodity product needed for a weekly change led to another theory about the origin of the word: that the producers would "grind"-out films. Many of them were violent action films that some called "drive-in" films.


title: Exploitation film

text: Exploitation films may adopt the subject matter and styling of regular film genres, particularly horror films and documentary films, and their themes are sometimes influenced by other so-called exploitative media, such as pulp magazines. They often blur the distinctions between genres by containing elements of two or more genres at a time. Their subgenres are identifiable by the characteristics they use. For example, Doris Wishman's "Let Me Die A Woman" contains elements of both shock documentary and sexploitation.


title: Exploitation film

text: Although they featured lurid subject matter, exploitation films of the 1930s and 1940s evaded the strict censorship and scrutiny of the era by claiming to be educational. They were generally cautionary tales about the alleged dangers of premarital sexual intercourse and the use of recreational drugs. Examples include "Marihuana" (1936), "Reefer Madness" (1936), "Sex Madness" (1938), "Child Bride" (1938), "Mom and Dad" (1945), and "She Shoulda Said No!" (1949). An exploitation film about homosexuality, "Children of Loneliness" (1937), is now believed lost.


title: Exploitation film

text: In 1953 "The Wild One", starring Marlon Brando, was the first film about a motorcycle gang. A string of low-budget juvenile delinquent films featuring hot-rods and motorcycles followed in the 1950s. The success of American International Pictures' "The Wild Angels" in 1966 ignited a more robust trend that continued into the early 1970s. Other biker films include "Motorpsycho" (1965), "Hells Angels on Wheels" (1967), "The Born Losers" (1967), "Angels from Hell" (1968), "Easy Rider" (1969), "Satan's Sadists" (1969), "Naked Angels" (1969), "The Sidehackers" (1969), "Nam's Angels" (1970), and "C.C. and Company" (1970). "Stone" (1974)", Mad Max" (1979), and "1%" (2017) combine elements of this subgenre with Ozploitation. In the 1960s Roger Corman directed Edgar Allan Poe B horror movies with well-known horror veteran movie actors with Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, and a very young and unknown Jack Nicholson. He turned down directing Easy Rider which was directed by Dennis Hopper.


title: Exploitation film

text: Black exploitation films, or "blaxploitation" films, are made with black actors, ostensibly for black audiences, often in a stereotypically black American urban milieu. A prominent theme was black Americans overcoming hostile authority ("The Man") through cunning and violence. The first examples of this subgenre were "Shaft" and Melvin Van Peebles' "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song". Others are "Black Caesar", "Black Devil Doll", "Blacula", "Black Shampoo", "Boss Nigger", "Coffy", "Coonskin", "Cotton Comes to Harlem", "Dolemite", "Foxy Brown", "Hell Up in Harlem", "The Mack", "Disco Godfather", "Mandingo", "The Spook Who Sat by the Door", "Sugar Hill", "Super Fly", "T.N.T. Jackson", "The Thing with Two Heads", "Truck Turner", "Willie Dynamite" and "Cleopatra Jones".


title: Exploitation film

text: In Blaxploitation horror movies back in the 1970’s, despite the leading stars in those movies being black, some of these movies were either produced, edited, or directed by white filmmakers.  Blackula, a well-known Blaxploitation horror movie, was directed by an African American filmmaker named William Crain.  Blackula was one of the first early successful blaxploitation horror movies.  Ganja and Hess stars Duane Jones who played Ben in Night of the Living Dead.  This movie has political and social commentary. The Vampires are a metaphor for capitalism.


title: Exploitation film

text: Modern homages of this genre include "Jackie Brown", "Pootie Tang", "Undercover Brother", "Black Dynamite", "Proud Mary" and "BlacKkKlansman". The 1973 Bond film "Live and Let Die" uses blaxploitation themes.


title: Exploitation film

text: Cannibal films are graphic movies from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, primarily made by Italian and Spanish moviemakers. They focus on cannibalism by tribes deep in the South American or Asian rainforests. This cannibalism is usually perpetrated against Westerners that the tribes held prisoner. As with mondo films, the main draw of cannibal films was the promise of exotic locales and graphic gore involving living creatures. The best-known film of this genre is the controversial 1980 "Cannibal Holocaust", in which six real animals were killed on screen. Others include "Cannibal Ferox", "Eaten Alive!", "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death", "The Mountain of the Cannibal God", "Last Cannibal World", and the first film of the genre, "The Man From Deep River". Famous directors in this genre include Umberto Lenzi, Ruggero Deodato, Jesús Franco, and Joe D'Amato.


title: Exploitation film

text: "Canuxploitation" is a neologism that was coined in 1999 by the magazine "Broken Pencil", in the article "Canuxploitation! Goin' Down the Road with the Cannibal Girls that Ate Black Christmas. Your Complete Guide to the Canadian B-Movie", to refer to Canadian-made B-movies. Most mainstream critical analysis of this period in Canadian film history, however, refers to it as the "tax-shelter era".


title: Exploitation film

text: The phenomenon emerged in 1974, when the government of Canada introduced new regulations to jumpstart the then-underdeveloped Canadian film industry, increasing the Capital Cost Allowance tax credit from 60 per cent to 100 per cent. While some important and noteworthy films were made under the program, including "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" and "Lies My Father Told Me", and some film directors who cut their teeth in the "tax shelter" era emerged as among Canada's most important and influential filmmakers of the era, including David Cronenberg, William Fruet, Ivan Reitman and Bob Clark, the new regulations also had an entirely unforeseen side effect: a sudden rush of low-budget horror and genre films, intended as pure tax shelters since they were designed not to turn a conventional profit. Many of the films, in fact, were made by American filmmakers whose projects had been rejected by the Hollywood studio system as not commercially viable, giving rise to the Hollywood North phenomenon.


title: Exploitation film

text: Notable examples of the genre include "Cannibal Girls", "Deathdream", "Deranged", "The Corpse Eaters", "Black Christmas", "Shivers", "Death Weekend", "The Clown Murders", "Rituals", "Cathy's Curse", "Deadly Harvest", "Starship Invasions", "Rabid", "I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses", "The Brood", "Funeral Home", "Terror Train", "The Changeling", "Death Ship", "My Bloody Valentine", "Prom Night", "Happy Birthday to Me", "Scanners", "Ghostkeeper", "Visiting Hours", "Highpoint", "Humongous", "Deadly Eyes", "Class of 1984", "Videodrome", "Curtains", "American Nightmare", "Self Defense", "Spasms", and "Def-Con 4".


title: Exploitation film

text: The period officially ended in 1982, when the Capital Cost Allowance was reduced to 50 per cent, although films that had entered production under the program continued to be released for another few years afterward. However, at least one Canadian film blog extends the "Canuxploitation" term to refer to any Canadian horror, thriller or science fiction film made up to the present day.


title: Exploitation film

text: Carsploitation films feature scenes of cars racing and crashing, featuring the sports cars, muscle cars, and car wrecks that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s. They were produced mainly in the United States and Australia. The quintessential film of this genre is "Vanishing Point" (1971). Others include "Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971), "The Cars That Ate Paris" (1974), "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry" (1974), "Gone in 60 Seconds" (1974), "Death Race 2000" (1975), "Race with the Devil" (1975), "Cannonball" (1976), "Mad Max" (1979), "Dead End Drive-In" (1986) and "Black Moon Rising" (1986). Quentin Tarantino directed a tribute to the genre, "Death Proof" (2007).


title: Exploitation film

text: In the 1970s, a revisionist, non-traditional style of samurai film achieved some popularity in Japan. It became known as "chambara", an onomatopoeia describing the clash of swords. Its origins can be traced as far back as Akira Kurosawa, whose films feature moral grayness and exaggerated violence, but the genre is mostly associated with 1970s samurai manga by Kazuo Koike, on whose work many later films would be based. Chambara features few of the stoic, formal sensibilities of earlier "jidaigeki" films – the new "chambara" featured revenge-driven antihero protagonists, nudity, sex scenes, swordplay, and blood.


title: Exploitation film

text: Giallo films are Italian-made slasher films that focus on cruel murders and the subsequent search for the killers. They are named for the Italian word for yellow, "giallo", the background color featured on the covers of the pulp novels by which these movies were inspired. The progenitor of this genre was "The Girl Who Knew Too Much". Other examples of Giallo films include "Four Flies on Grey Velvet", "Deep Red", "The Cat o' Nine Tails", "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage", "The Case of the Scorpion's Tail", "A Lizard in a Woman's Skin", "Black Belly of the Tarantula", "The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh", "Blood and Black Lace', Phenomena, Opera and "Tenebrae". Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and Mario Bava are the best-known directors of this genre.


title: Exploitation film

text: Mockbusters, sometimes called "remakesploitation films", are copycat movies that try to cash in on the advertising of heavily promoted films from major studios. Production company the Asylum, which prefers to call them "tie-ins", is a prominent producer of these films. Such films have often come from Italy, which has been quick to latch on to trends like Westerns, James Bond movies, and zombie films. They have long been a staple of directors such as Jim Wynorski ("The Bare Wench Project", and the "Cliffhanger" imitation "Sub Zero"), who make movies for the direct-to-video market. Such films are beginning to attract attention from major Hollywood studios, who served the Asylum with a cease and desist order to try to prevent them from releasing "The Day the Earth Stopped" to video stores in advance of the release of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" to theaters.


title: Exploitation film

text: The term "mockbuster" was used as early as the 1950s (when "The Monster of Piedras Blancas" was a clear derivative of "Creature From The Black Lagoon"). The term did not become popular until the 1970s, with "Starcrash" and the Turkish "Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam" and "Süpermen dönüyor". The latter two used scenes from "Star Wars" and unauthorized excerpts from John Williams' score.


title: Exploitation film

text: Mondo films, often called shockumentaries, are quasi-documentary films about sensationalized topics like exotic customs from around the world or gruesome death footage. The goal of mondo films, as of shock exploitation, is to shock the audience by dealing with taboo subject matter. The first mondo film is "Mondo Cane" ("A Dog's World"). Others include "Shocking Asia", "Africa Addio" (aka "Africa Blood and Guts" and "Farewell Africa"), "Goodbye Uncle Tom", and "Faces of Death".


title: Exploitation film

text: These "nature-run-amok" films focus on an animal or group of animals, far larger and more aggressive than usual for their species, terrorizing humans while another group of humans tries to fight back. This genre began in the 1950s, when concern over nuclear weapons testing made movies about giant monsters popular. These were typically either giant prehistoric creatures awakened by atomic explosions or ordinary animals mutated by radiation. Among them were "Godzilla", "Them!", and "Tarantula". The trend was revived in the 1970s as awareness of pollution increased and corporate greed and military irresponsibility were blamed for destruction of the environment. "Night of the Lepus", "Frogs", and "Godzilla vs. Hedorah" are examples. After Steven Spielberg's 1975 film "Jaws", a number of very similar films (sometimes regarded as outright rip-offs) were produced in the hope of cashing in on its success. Examples are "Alligator", "Cujo", "Day of the Animals", "Great White", "Grizzly", "Humanoids from the Deep", "Monster Shark", "Orca", "The Pack", "Piranha", "Prophecy", "Razorback", "Blood Feast", "Tentacles", and "Tintorera". Roger Corman was a major producer of these films in both decades. The genre has experienced a revival in recent years, as films like "Mulberry Street" and Larry Fessenden's "The Last Winter" reflected concerns about global warming and overpopulation.


title: Exploitation film

text: The Sci-Fi Channel (now known as SyFy) has produced several films about giant or hybrid mutations whose titles are sensationalized portmanteaus of the two species; examples include "Sharktopus" and "Dinoshark".


title: Exploitation film

text: Nazi exploitation films, also called "Nazisploitation" films, or "il sadiconazista", focus on Nazis torturing prisoners in death camps and brothels during World War II. The tortures are often sexual, and the prisoners, who are often female, are nude. The progenitor of this subgenre was "Love Camp 7" (1969). The archetype of the genre, which established its popularity and its typical themes, was "Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS" (1974), about the buxom, nymphomaniacal dominatrix Ilsa torturing prisoners in a Stalag. Others include "Fräulein Devil" ("Captive Women 4", or "Elsa: Fraulein SS", or "Fraulein Kitty"), "La Bestia in calore" ("SS Hell Camp", or "SS Experiment Part 2", or "The Beast in Heat", or "Horrifying Experiments of the S.S. Last Days"), "Gestapo's Last Orgy", or "Last Orgy of The Third Reich", or "Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler"), "Salon Kitty" and "SS Experiment Camp". Many Nazisploitation films were influenced by art films such as Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" and Liliana Cavani's "" ("The Night Porter") .


title: Exploitation film

text: Nudist films originated in the 1930s as films that skirted the Hays Code restrictions on nudity by purportedly depicting the naturist lifestyle. They existed through the late 1950s, when the New York State Court of Appeals ruled in the case of "Excelsior Pictures vs. New York Board of Regents" that onscreen nudity is not obscene. This opened the door to more open depictions of nudity, starting with Russ Meyer's 1959 "The Immoral Mr. Teas", which has been credited as the first film to place its exploitation elements unapologetically at the forefront instead of pretending to carry a moral or educational message. This development paved the way for the more explicit exploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s and made the nudist genre obsolete—ironically, since the nudist film "Garden of Eden" was the subject of the court case. After this, the nudist genre split into subgenres such as the "nudie-cutie", which featured nudity but no touching, and the "roughie", which included nudity and violent, antisocial behavior.


title: Exploitation film

text: Nudist films were marked by self-contradictory qualities. They presented themselves as educational films, but exploited their subject matter by focusing mainly on the nudist camps' most beautiful female residents, while denying the existence of such exploitation. They depicted a lifestyle unbound by the restrictions of clothing, yet this depiction was restricted by the requirement that genitals should not be shown. Still, there was a subversive element to them, as the nudist camps inherently rejected modern society and its values regarding the human body. These films frequently involve a criticism of the class system, equating body shame with the upper class, and nudism with social equality. One scene in "The Unashamed" makes a point about the artificiality of clothing and its related values through a mocking portrayal of a group of nude artists who paint fully clothed subjects.


title: Exploitation film

text: The term "Ozploitation" refers broadly to Australian horror, erotic or crime films of the 1970s and 1980s. Changes to Australia's film classification system in 1971 led to the production of a number of such low-budget, privately funded films, assisted by tax exemptions and targeting export markets. Often an internationally recognised actor (but of waning notability) would be hired to play a lead role. Laconic characters and desert scenes feature in many Ozploitation films, but the term has been used for a variety of Australian films of the era that relied on shocking or titillating their audiences. A documentary about the genre was "". Such films deal with themes concerning Australian society, particularly in respect of masculinity (especially the ocker male), male attitudes towards women, attitudes towards and treatment of Indigenous Australians, violence, alcohol, and environmental exploitation and destruction. The films typically have rural or outback settings, depicting the Australian landscape and environment as an almost spiritually malign force that alienates white Australians, frustrating their personal ambitions and activities, and their attempts to subdue it.


title: Exploitation film

text: This genre contains films in which a person is raped, left for dead, recovers and then exacts a graphic, gory revenge against the rapists. The most famous example is "I Spit on Your Grave" (also called "Day of the Woman"). It is not unusual for the main character in these films to be a successful, independent city woman, who is attacked by a man from the country. The genre has drawn praise from feminists such as Carol J. Clover, whose 1992 book "Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film" examines the implications of its reversals of cinema's traditional gender roles. This type of film can be seen as an offshoot of the vigilante film, with the victim's transformation into avenger as the key scene. Author Jacinda Read and others believe that rape–revenge should be categorized as a narrative structure rather than a true subgenre, because its plot can be found in films of many different genres, such as thrillers ("Ms. 45"), dramas ("Lipstick"), westerns ("Hannie Caulder"), and art films ("Memento"). One instance of the genre, the original version of "The Last House on the Left", was an uncredited remake of Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring", recast as a horror film featuring extreme violence. "Deliverance", in which the rape is perpetrated on a man, has been credited as the originator of the genre. Clover, who restricts her definition of the genre to movies in which a woman is raped and gains her own revenge, praises rape–revenge exploitation films for the way in which their protagonists fight their abuse directly, rather than preserve the status quo by depending on an unresponsive legal system as in rape–revenge movies from major studios, such as "The Accused".


title: Exploitation film

text: The redsploitation genre concerns Native American characters almost always played by white actors, usually exacting their revenge on their white tormentors. Examples are "Billy Jack", "The Ransom", the "Thunder Warrior" trilogy, "The Manitou", "Prophecy", "Avenged" (aka "Savaged"), "Scalps" and "Clearcut".


title: Exploitation film

text: Sexploitation films resemble softcore pornography and often include scenes involving nude or semi-nude women. They typically have sex scenes that are more graphic sex than mainstream films. The plots of sexploitation films include pulp fiction elements such as killers, slavery, fem-dom, martial-arts, the use of stylistic devices and dialogue associated with screwball comedies, love interests and flirtation akin to romance films, over-the-top direction, cheeky homages, fan-pleasing content and caricatures, and performances that contain sleazy teasing alluding to foreplay or kink. The use of extended scenes and the showing of full frontal nudity are typical genre techniques. Sexploitation films include "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" and "Supervixens" by Russ Meyer, the work of Armando Bó with Isabel Sarli, the "Emmanuelle" series, "Showgirls", and "Caligula". "Caligula" is unusual among exploitation films in that it was made with a large budget and well known actors (Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud, Peter O'Toole, and Helen Mirren).


title: Exploitation film

text: In the 1970’s Lesbian Erotic Sex was questioned on the political social implications of lesbianism about women's sexuality.  To this day it's still a concern of feminist film criticism.  Some critics have pointed out lesbians on screen sex are a clear expression of chauvinism and male power as the images are portrayed for male pleasure.


title: Exploitation film

text: Casting pornstars and hardcore actresses is not uncommon. Sexploitation films may contain sex shows intended to shock or tantalize their audiences.


title: Exploitation film

text: Slasher films focus on a psychopath stalking and violently killing a sequence of victims. Victims are often teenagers or young adults. Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho (1960)" is often credited with creating the basic premise of the genre, though Bob Clark's "Black Christmas" (1974) is usually considered to have started the genre while John Carpenter's "Halloween" (1978) was responsible for cementing the genre in the public eye. "Halloween" is also responsible for establishing additional tropes which would go on to define the genre in years to come. The masked villain, a central group of weak teenagers with one strong hero or heroine, the protagonists being isolated or stranded in precarious locations or situations, and either the protagonists or antagonists (or possibly both) experiencing warped family lives or values were all tropes largely founded in "Halloween".


title: Exploitation film

text: Black Christmas was first Canadian movie to break the American market.   It was the only film being shot in Canada at the time.  It was also their final opportunity to produce their first blockbuster hit. The film was marketed for women and teenage girls.  It’s debatable that MPAA-members became less interested in targeting female audiences compared to previous decades.  The subplot of the character Jess played by Olivia Hussey wanting an abortion may have struck a chord for American women since abortion was a hotbed issue.  Black Christmas was a success in Canada but was not a hit in the USA.  In later years the film became and developed into a cult classic.  Halloween’s success overshadowed Black Christmas.  Halloween is misunderstood as the first slasher movie which is not true.  John Carpenter was inspired by Bob Clark’s Black Christmas..


title: Exploitation film

text: The genre continued into and peaked in the 1980s with well-known films like "Friday the 13th" (1980) and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984). Many 1980s slasher films used the basic format of "Halloween", for example "My Bloody Valentine" (1981), "Prom Night" (1980), "The Funhouse" (1981), "Silent Night, Deadly Night" (1984) and "Sleepaway Camp" (1983), many of which also used elements from the 1974 film, "Black Christmas".


title: Exploitation film

text: A subtype featuring space, science fiction and horror in film. Despite ambitious literary works that depicted space travel as a component of more complex plots set in elaborately constructed civilizations (such as the Frank Herbert’s Dune series and the works of Isaac Asimov), for much of the 20th century space travel has been mostly featured in cheap “B films” that often had in their core a simplistic plot typical of another exploitation subgenre, such as slasher or zombie films. Spacesploration films feature a scientifically inaccurate and inconsistent depiction of space travel and are usually set in traversing spaceships and deserted planets, partially due to the films’ limited resources. Such films include "From the Earth to the Moon", "Robinson Crusoe on Mars", "Planet of the Vampires", "The Black Hole" and "Saturn 3". During one of the peaks of space travel films, the 1979 James Bond film "Moonraker" featured outlandishly unrealistic scenes of space warfare, despite otherwise focusing on real contemporary (i.e. Cold War) intelligence agencies.


title: Exploitation film

text: Spaghetti Westerns are Italian-made westerns that emerged in the mid-1960s. They were more violent and amoral than typical Hollywood westerns. These films also often eschewed the conventions of Hollywood studio Westerns, which were primarily for consumption by conservative, mainstream American audiences.


title: Exploitation film

text: Examples of the genre include "Death Rides a Horse"; "Django"; "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"; "Navajo Joe"; "The Grand Duel"; "The Great Silence"; "For a Few Dollars More"; "The Big Gundown"; "Day of Anger"; "Face to Face"; "Duck, You Sucker!"; "A Fistful of Dollars" and "Once Upon a Time in the West". Quentin Tarantino directed two tributes to the genre, "Django Unchained", and "The Hateful Eight."


title: Exploitation film

text: A splatter film, or gore film, is a horror film that focuses on graphic portrayals of gore and violence. It began as a distinct genre in the 1960s with the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman, whose most famous films include "Blood Feast" (1963), "Two Thousand Maniacs!" (1964), "Color Me Blood Red" (1965), "The Gruesome Twosome" (1967) and "The Wizard of Gore" (1970).


title: Exploitation film

text: The first splatter film to popularize the subgenre was George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), the director's attempt to replicate the atmosphere and gore of EC's horror comics on film. Initially derided by the American press as "appalling", it quickly became a national sensation, playing not just in drive-ins but at midnight showings in indoor theaters across the country. George A. Romero coined the term "splatter cinema" to describe his film "Dawn of the Dead".


title: Exploitation film

text: Later splatter films, such as Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" series, Peter Jackson's "Bad Taste" and "Braindead" (released as "Dead Alive" in North America) featured such excessive and unrealistic gore that they crossed the line from horror to comedy.


title: Exploitation film

text: Women in prison films emerged in the early 1970s and remain a popular subgenre. They usually contain nudity, lesbianism, sexual assault, humiliation, sadism, and rebellion among captive women. Examples are Ted V. Mikel's "10 Violent Women", Roger Corman's "Women in Cages" and "The Big Doll House", "Bamboo House of Dolls", Jesus Franco's "Barbed Wire Dolls", Bruno Mattei's "Women's Prison Massacre", Pete Walker's "House of Whipcord", Tom DeSimone's "Reform School Girls", Jonathan Demme's "Caged Heat" and Katja von Garnier's "Bandits".


title: Exploitation film

text: White Zombie was considered the first movie to use the word Zombie.  It’s not a flesh-eating zombie movie but about mind controlling slaves. The film was inspired from Haitian culture where voodoo is one of the religions.  Revolt of the Zombie from 1936 is a sequel but was not a hit like White Zombie.  In 1936, another Zombie film, The Walking Dead is not about flesh eating but is a crime drama.


title: Exploitation film

text: Producer Val Lewton, fresh off his success with Cat People (1942), filmed his next movie I Walked with a Zombie (1943). It was another Zombie movie not about flesh eating.  The plot concerns a man whose wife is a sleepwalker, and she can’t wake up.  Zombies on Broadway (1945) failed and Get Along Little Zombie was made for laughs and not taken seriously.


title: Exploitation film

text: War World II ended, and the economy had recovered from the depression and the war.  Drive- in movie theaters were popular for families having a fun experience.  Zombie movies were not taken seriously, they were made for teenagers.  Teenage zombie movies were made on a small budget and were made rapidly.  These movies today are looked upon as metaphors for the early stages of the Cold War. People were afraid of being infiltrated and nuked by the Russians.


title: Exploitation film

text: The Creature from the Atom Brain (1955) was directed by Edward L. Cahn and reflects on early influence of atomic bomb anxiety on sci-fi horror flicks.  Because of the booming economy, teenagers had money saved from their allowance or got part time jobs to go to the movies with friends or borrow their parents car to take their girlfriend to the movies.


title: Exploitation film

text: Plan 9 From Outer Space is one of the worst movies ever made.  It was horror icon Bela Lugosi's last movie he died during production of the movie.


title: Exploitation film

text: The 1960’s independent horror movies were beginning to change the horror industry.  It attracted a lot of young teenage audiences at the time.  Teenagers changed but so did Zombie movies.  Classic horror monsters from the past were no longer considered scary.  Zombies' movies became psychedelic, weirder, and goofy.  By the end of the decade Night of the Living Dead was groundbreaking and changing the Zombie Subgenre.


title: Exploitation film

text: In 1968 George Romeros Night of the Living Dead changed was groundbreaking for Zombie movies considered to be the first ever flesh-eating Zombie movie.  Despite the title they are not referred to as Zombies.  Social commentary on racism and Vietnam was going on at the time of the movie's release.  This was appealing to audiences at the time of its release.  Because many people were opposed to the Vietnam War.  George Romero was inspired from Richard Mattheson 1954 novel I Am Legend.  Romero’s movie was a very graphic, gross-out movie for its time.


title: Exploitation film

text: By the turn of the 21 Century, Zombie movies became popular from being inspired by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.  28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake were about incurable diseases.


title: Pete Best

text: Randolph Peter Best (né Scanland; born 24 November 1941) is an English musician known as the drummer of the English rock band the Beatles who was dismissed immediately prior to the band achieving worldwide fame. Fired from the group in 1962 after playing drums as a Beatle for the previous two years in Germany and England, he started his own band, the Pete Best Four. He later joined and started many bands over the years. He is one of several people who have been referred to as a fifth Beatle.


title: Pete Best

text: Best's mother, Mona Best (1924–1988), opened the Casbah Coffee Club in the cellar of the Bests' house in Liverpool. The Beatles (at the time known as the Quarrymen) played some of their first concerts at the club. The Beatles invited Best to join the band on 12 August 1960, on the eve of the group's first Hamburg season of club dates. Ringo Starr eventually replaced Best on 16 August 1962 when the group's manager, Brian Epstein, fired Best at the request of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison following the band's first recording session. Over 30 years later, Best received a major monetary payout for his work with the Beatles after the release of their 1995 compilation of their early recordings on "Anthology 1"; Best played the drums on ten of the album's tracks, including the Decca auditions.


title: Pete Best

text: After working in several commercially unsuccessful groups, Best gave up being in the music industry to work as a civil servant for 20 years before starting the Pete Best Band.


title: Pete Best

text: Best's mother, Mona Best, was born in Delhi, India, the daughter of Thomas (a major from Ireland) and Mary Shaw. Pete Best, her first child, was born on 24 November 1941 in Madras, then part of British India. Best's biological father was marine engineer Donald Peter Scanland, who subsequently died during World War II. Best's mother was training to become a doctor in the service of the Red Cross when she met Johnny Best, who came from a family of sports promoters in Liverpool who ran Liverpool Stadium, a boxing arena. During World War II, Johnny Best was a commissioned officer serving as a Physical Training Instructor in India, and was the Army's middleweight boxing champion. Soon after their marriage on 7 March 1944 at St Thomas's Cathedral, Bombay, Rory Best was born. In 1945, the Best family sailed for four weeks to Liverpool on the "Georgic", the last troop ship to leave India, carrying single and married soldiers who had previously been a part of General Sir William Slim's forces in south-east Asia. The ship docked in Liverpool on 25 December 1945.


title: Pete Best

text: Best's family lived for a short time at the family home, "Ellerslie" in West Derby until Best's mother fell out with her sister-in-law, Edna, who resented her brother's choice of wife. The family then moved to a small flat on Cases Street, Liverpool, but Mona Best was always looking for a large house—as she had been used to in India—instead of one of the smaller semi-detached houses prevalent in the area. The Bests moved to 17 Queenscourt Road in 1948 and remained there for nine years.


title: Pete Best

text: Best passed the eleven plus exam at Blackmoor Park primary school in West Derby, and was studying at the Liverpool Collegiate Grammar School in Shaw Street when he decided he wanted to be in a music group. Mona bought him a drum kit from Blackler's music store and Best formed his own band, the Black Jacks.


title: Pete Best

text: In 1957, Rory Best saw a large Victorian house for sale at 8 Hayman's Green and told Mona about it. The Best family claim that Mona had pawned all her jewelry to place a bet on Never Say Die, a horse that was ridden by Lester Piggott in the 1954 Epsom Derby; it won at 33–1 and she saved her winnings and in 1957 used them to buy the house. The house, built around 1860, had previously been owned by the West Derby Conservative Club and was unlike many other family houses in Liverpool as it was set back from the road and had 15 bedrooms and an acre of land. All the rooms were painted dark green or brown, and the large garden was totally overgrown. Mona later opened The Casbah Coffee Club in the house’s large cellar. The idea for the club first came from Best, as he asked his mother for somewhere his friends could meet and listen to the popular music of the day. As The Quarrymen, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ken Brown played at the club after helping Mona to finish painting the walls. Chas Newby and Bill Barlow joined the Black Jacks, as did Ken Brown, but only after he had left the Quarrymen. The Black Jacks later became the resident group at the Casbah, after the Quarrymen cancelled their residency because of an argument about money.


title: Pete Best

text: During 1960, Neil Aspinall became good friends with the young Best and subsequently rented a room in the Bests' house. During one of the extended business trips of Best's stepfather, Aspinall became romantically involved with Mona and in 1962 a son, Vincent Roag Best, was born to Aspinall and Mona. Aspinall later became the Beatles' road manager, and denied the story for years before publicly admitting that Roag was indeed his son.


title: Pete Best

text: In 1960, the Beatles' manager Allan Williams arranged a season of bookings in Hamburg, beginning on 17 August 1960, but complained the group did not impress him and hoped that he could find a better act.


title: Pete Best

text: Having no permanent drummer, Paul McCartney looked for someone to fill the Hamburg position. Best had been seen playing in the Casbah with his own group, the Black Jacks, and it was observed that he played the bass drum on all four beats in the bar, which pushed the rhythm. In Liverpool, his female fans knew him as being "mean, moody, and magnificent", which convinced McCartney he would be good for the group. After the Black Jacks broke up, McCartney persuaded Best to go to Hamburg with the band, by saying they would each earn £15 per week (equivalent to £ in 2022). As Best had passed his school exams (unlike Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, who had failed most of theirs), he had the chance to attend teacher-training college, but he decided that playing in Hamburg would be a better career move. Best had an audition in the Jacaranda Club, which Williams owned, and travelled to Hamburg the next day. Williams later said that the audition with Best was unnecessary, as the group had not found any other drummer willing to travel to Hamburg, but did not tell Best in case he asked for more money.


title: Pete Best

text: On their first trip to Hamburg, the group soon realised that the stage suits they wore could not stand up to the hours of sweating and jumping about on stage every night, so they all bought leather jackets, jeans and cowboy boots, which were much tougher. Best initially preferred to play in cooler short sleeves on stage, and so did not match the sartorial style of the group, even though he was later photographed wearing a leather jacket and jeans. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Stuart Sutcliffe were introduced to recreational drugs in Hamburg. As they played for hours every night, they often took Preludin to keep themselves awake, which they received from German customers or Astrid Kirchherr, whose mother bought them. Lennon often took four or five but Best always refused.


title: Pete Best

text: The Beatles first played a full show with Best on 17 August 1960 at the Indra Club in Hamburg, and the group slept in the Bambi Kino cinema in a small, dirty room with bunk beds, a cold and noisy former storeroom directly behind the screen. Upon first seeing the Indra, where they were booked to play, Best remembered it as a depressing place patronised by a few tourists, and having heavy, old, red curtains that made it seem shabby compared to the larger Kaiserkeller. As Best had been the only group member to study O-Level German at school, he could converse with the club's owner, Bruno Koschmider, and the clientele. After the Indra closed following complaints about the noise, the group started a residency in the Kaiserkeller.


title: Pete Best

text: In October 1960, the group left Koschmider's club to work at the Top Ten Club, which Peter Eckhorn ran, as he offered the group more money and a slightly better place to sleep. In doing so they broke their contract with Koschmider. When Best and McCartney returned to the Bambi Kino to retrieve their belongings they found it in almost total darkness. As a snub to Koschmider, McCartney found a condom, attached it to a nail on the concrete wall of the room, and set it alight. There was no real damage done, but Koschmider reported them both for attempted arson. Best and McCartney spent three hours in a local prison and were subsequently deported on 30 November 1960, as was George Harrison, for working under the legal age limit.


title: Pete Best

text: Back in Liverpool, the group members had no contact with each other for two weeks, but Best and his mother made numerous phone calls to Hamburg to recover the group's equipment In late 1961 Mona arranged all the bookings for the group in Liverpool after they parted company with Williams.


title: Pete Best

text: Chas Newby, the ex-Black Jacks guitarist, was invited to play bass for four concerts, as bassist Stuart Sutcliffe had decided to stay in Hamburg. Newby played with the group at Litherland Town Hall and at the Casbah. He was shocked at the vast improvement in their playing and singing, and remembered Best's drumming to be very powerful, which pushed the group to play harder and louder. It was probably thanks to McCartney that Best developed a loud drumming style, as he often told Best in Hamburg to "crank it up" (play as loud as possible). When the group returned to Hamburg, by which time McCartney had switched to bass, Best was asked to sing a speciality number written by McCartney, "Pinwheel Twist", while McCartney played drums, but he always felt uncomfortable being at the front of the stage.


title: Pete Best

text: The reunited Beatles returned to Hamburg in April 1961. While they played at the Top Ten Club, singer Tony Sheridan recruited them to act as his backing band on a recording for the German Polydor label, produced by bandleader Bert Kaempfert, who signed the group to a Polydor contract at the first session on 22 June 1961. On 31 October 1961, Polydor released the recording "My Bonnie" ("Mein Herz ist bei dir nur" / My heart is only for you) which appeared on the German charts under the name "Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers"—a generic name used for whoever happened to be in Sheridan's backup band. The song was later released in the UK. There was a second recording session on 23 June that year, and a third in May 1962.


title: Pete Best

text: Brian Epstein, who had been unofficially managing the Beatles for less than a month, arranged a recording audition at Decca Records in London on New Year's Day, 1962. The group recorded 15 songs, mostly cover versions with three Lennon–McCartney songs. Best also recorded the song "Going Back Manchester" with Lennon at this time, which would later feature as a bonus track on the special edition of his album "Best of the Beatles", the rights of the song belonging to Best due to a legal technicality. A month later, Decca informed Epstein the group had been rejected. All the band members were informed of the rejection except for Best. Epstein officially became the manager of the Beatles on 24 January 1962 with the contract signed in Best's house.


title: Pete Best

text: Epstein negotiated ownership of the Decca audition tape, which was then transferred to an acetate disc, to promote the band to other record companies in London. In the meantime, Epstein negotiated the release of the Beatles from their recording contract with Bert Kaempfert and Polydor Records in Germany, which expired on 22 June 1962. As a part of this contract, the Beatles recorded at Polydor's Studio Rahlstedt on 24 May 1962 in Hamburg as a sessions band, backing Tony Sheridan.


title: Pete Best

text: The record producer at EMI, George Martin, met with Epstein on 9 May 1962 at the Abbey Road studios, and was impressed with his enthusiasm. He agreed to sign the Beatles on a recording contract, based on listening to the Decca audition tape, without having met them or having seen them perform live. Soon after the recording contract was signed, the Beatles performed a "commercial test" (i.e. an evaluation of a signed artist) on 6 June 1962 in Studio Two at the Abbey Road studios. The Beatles were not new to studio recording and Best's drumming had been found acceptable by Polydor in Hamburg, but Martin was alerted to Best's unsuitability for British studio work. EMI engineer Norman Smith stated in a 2006 video interview that "it was mainly down to what he was playing and not how he was playing," when "Love Me Do" was first recorded, referring to the head arrangement. Martin however found Best's timing inadequate and wanted to replace Best with an experienced studio session drummer for the recordings, a common practice at the time.


title: Pete Best

text: When Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison learned that Martin and the engineers preferred replacing Best with a session drummer for their upcoming recording session on 4 September 1962, they considered dismissing Best from the group. Eventually, they asked Epstein to dismiss Best from the band. Epstein agonised over the decision. As he wrote in his autobiography, "A Cellarful of Noise", he "wasn't sure" about Martin's assessment of Best's drumming and "was not anxious to change the membership of the Beatles at a time when they were developing as personalities … I asked the Beatles to leave the group as it was". Epstein also asked Liverpool DJ Bob Wooler, who knew the Beatles intimately for advice, to which Wooler replied that it was not a good idea, as Best was very popular with the fans. Part of the dilemma for Epstein that arose at that time (when the band had not yet achieved national success, but rather local status as a good band with limited income), was that Best was an asset at gigs, popular with the girl fans, and put on a good show, ensuring venues would have a solid audience. The counter-argument, however, was the larger consideration of the band's having the best music producible for record sales. John, Paul and George ultimately decided that record production was more important than having a drummer for live stage performances who was more image than substance. In the meantime, Epstein refrained from telling Best that EMI had made a recording contract with the band (orally since June and in writing at the end of July 1962) which meant that a new drummer was now inevitable. There might have been legal issues had Best known.


title: Pete Best

text: Epstein decided that "If the group was to remain happy, Pete Best must go." Epstein summoned Best to his office and dismissed him on Thursday, 16 August, ten weeks and a day after the first recording session. Best played his last two gigs with the Beatles on 15 August at the Cavern Club, Liverpool. He was due to play his last show on 16 August at the Riverpark Ballroom, Chester, but never turned up; Johnny Hutchinson of the Big Three was rushed in as a substitute.


title: Pete Best

text: Best has said he saw the Beatles after his dismissal but "we never acknowledged each other or exchanged a word."


title: Pete Best

text: "Mersey Beat" magazine's editor, Bill Harry, claimed that Epstein initially offered the vacant drummer position in the group to Hutchinson, whom he also managed. Hutchinson is said to have refused the job, saying, "Pete Best is a very good friend of mine. I couldn't do the dirty on him." However, McCartney and Harrison have said they wanted Ringo from the beginning after he sat in with them at shows on several occasions when Best was absent. Best says that Epstein revealed at the dismissal meeting that Ringo would become the new drummer.


title: Pete Best

text: Best had been good friends with Neil Aspinall since 1961, when Aspinall had rented a room in the house where Best lived with his parents. While still part of the group, Best had asked Aspinall to become the band's road manager and personal assistant. Aspinall accepted the job and bought an old Commer van for £80 (equivalent to £ in 2022). Aspinall was waiting for Best downstairs in Epstein's NEMS record shop after the dismissal meeting. The two went to the "Grapes" pub on Mathew Street, the same street as the Cavern Club, where the group had played. Aspinall was furious at the news, insisting to Best that he would resign from the Beatles. Best strongly advised him to remain with the group. Aspinall's relationship with Mona Best (and their three-week-old baby, Roag) was ended. At the next concert Aspinall asked Lennon why they had fired Best, to which he replied "It's got nothing to do with you, you're only the driver."


title: Pete Best

text: Starr had previously played with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes – the alternating band at the Kaiserkeller – and had been deputised whenever Best was ill or unable to play in Hamburg and Liverpool. Bill Harry reported Best's dismissal on the front page of "Mersey Beat" magazine, upsetting many Beatles fans. The group encountered some jeering and heckling in the street and on stage for weeks afterwards, with some fans shouting, "Pete forever, Ringo never!" One agitated fan headbutted Harrison in The Cavern, giving him a black eye.


title: Pete Best

text: As Best's replacement, Starr accompanied the band on their second recording session with EMI at Abbey Road studios on 4 September 1962. George Martin initially refused to let Starr play, in that he was unfamiliar with Starr, and wanted to avoid any risk of his drumming not being up to par. On 11 September 1962, at the third EMI recording session, Martin used session musician Andy White on the drums for the whole session instead of Starr, as Martin had already booked White after the first session with Best. Starr played tambourine on some songs, while White played drums. Starr told biographer Hunter Davies years later that he had thought, "That's the end. They're pulling a Pete Best on me."


title: Pete Best

text: According to Best, Brian Epstein told him he was "not a good enough drummer" and "Ringo [Starr] was the better drummer." The other Beatles – as well as producers, musicians, and critics who had heard Best play with the group – confirmed this reasoning.


title: Pete Best

text: John Lennon said that Best was recruited only because they needed a drummer to go to Hamburg. "We were pretty sick of Pete Best, too, because he was a lousy drummer, you know? He never improved, you know? ... And we were always going to dump him when we could find a decent drummer" ... "By the time we'd rolled back from Germany we'd trained him to keep a, you know, a stick to keep going up and down at four in the bar; he couldn't do much else."


title: Pete Best

text: George Harrison, too, recalled preferring Ringo's drumming. He said, "Ringo kept sitting in with the band. And every time Ringo sat in with the band, it just seemed like, this was it."


title: Pete Best

text: Critic Richie Unterberger described Best's drumming at the Decca audition as "thinly textured and rather unimaginative", adding that Best "pushes the beat a little too fast for comfort". Unterberger thought Starr to be "more talented". Mike Savage, the session engineer, said, "I thought Pete Best was very average and didn't keep good time. You could pick up a better drummer in any pub in London. If you've got a quarter of the group being very average, that isn't good. The drummer should be the rock. If the rock isn't good, you start thinking, no. If Decca was going to sign the Beatles, we wouldn't have used Pete Best on the record." Beatles' historian Ian MacDonald, recounting the Decca audition, said that "Best's limitations as a drummer are nakedly apparent". MacDonald notes, of the EMI recording session on 6 June that "this audition version [of "Love Me Do"] shows one of the reasons why Best was sacked: in moving to the ride cymbal for the first middle eight, he slows down and the group falters." Beatles' critic Alan W. Pollack compared the Best, Starr, and Andy White versions of "Love Me Do", and concluded that Best was "an incredibly unsteady and tasteless drummer" on his version.


title: Pete Best

text: Tony Sheridan, a rock and roll singer who had previously used the Beatles as a backing band, said, "The producer [Bert Kaempfert] didn't think Pete's drumming was good enough for recording. Kaempfert suggested Pete not play his bass drum because he used to get too fast; the tempo was a problem ... Pete was a crap drummer. You can take my word for it. He was just not competent. There were discrepancies between his feet and his hands."


title: Pete Best

text: After the Beatles signed a contract, EMI producer Ron Richards said, "Pete Best wasn't very good. It was me who said to [producer] George Martin he's useless. We've got to change this drummer." Martin, for his part, said, "[Best] couldn't play drums very well. I mean he couldn't keep time too well. And I was aware that the band weren't tight. They needed that sort of binding force that a good drummer should give them. So I said to [Beatles manager] Brian [Epstein] I'll get another drummer for the recording session."


title: Pete Best

text: Still, Martin claimed to be surprised to learn that Best had been fired from stage shows, hearing the news from Mona via telephone. He said:


title: Pete Best

text: According to biographer Bob Spitz, "All Pete could do was play Fours", a style of drumming that uses kick drum notes on every quarter note to hold down the beat. Spitz's book also contains an account by engineer Ron Richards of his failed attempts to teach Best somewhat more complicated beats for different songs.


title: Pete Best

text: Despite this evidence, Best said he did not believe this was the "real reason" and that it "never held up water."


title: Pete Best

text: In 1968, authorised Beatles biographer Hunter Davies opined that the firing of Best was "one of the few murky incidents in the Beatles' history. There was something sneaky about the way it was done." Over twenty years later, Mark Lewisohn concluded that "Despite his alleged shortcomings, it was still shabby treatment for Pete... The Beatles had had two years in which to dismiss him but hadn't done so, and now – as they were beginning to reap the rewards for their long, hard slog, with money rolling in and an EMI contract secured – he was out. It was the most underhanded, unfortunate and unforgivable chapter in the Beatles' rise to monumental power."


title: Pete Best

text: Epstein claimed in his autobiography that Lennon, McCartney and Harrison thought that Best was "too conventional to be a Beatle" and added that "though he was friendly with John, he was not liked by George and Paul". It has been documented, in Cynthia Lennon's book "John" and elsewhere, that while Lennon, McCartney and Harrison usually spent their offstage time together in Hamburg and Liverpool, writing songs or socialising, Best generally went off alone. This left Best on the outside, as he was not privy to many of the group's experiences, references, and in-jokes.


title: Pete Best

text: A German photographer, Astrid Kirchherr, asked if they would not mind letting her take photographs of them in a photo session, which impressed them, as other groups only had snapshots taken by friends. The next morning Kirchherr took photographs on the Heiligengeistfeld, a municipal event area close to the Reeperbahn. In the afternoon, Kirchherr took them to her mother's house in Altona – minus Best, who decided not to attend. Dot Rhone, McCartney's then-girlfriend who later visited Hamburg, described Best as being very quiet and never taking part in conversations with the group.


title: Pete Best

text: It has been claimed that Epstein became exasperated with Best's refusal to adopt the mop-top-style Beatle haircut as part of their unified look, as he preferred to keep his quiffed hairstyle, though Best later stated that he was never asked to change his hairstyle. In a 1995 BBC Radio Merseyside interview, Kirchherr explained: "My boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, had this hairstyle, and Stuart [Sutcliffe] liked it very, very much. He was the first one who really got the nerve to get the Brylcreem out of his hair, and asking me to cut his hair for him. Pete Best has really curly hair, and it wouldn't work."


title: Pete Best

text: McCartney explained why Geoff Britton, one-time drummer in his subsequent band Wings, "didn't last long" in that group: "It's like in the Beatles, we had Pete Best. He was a really good drummer, but there just was something, he wasn't quite like the rest of us, we had like a sense of humour in common and he was nearly in with it all, but it's a fine line, you know, as to what is exactly in and what is nearly in. So he left the band and we were looking for someone who would fit." He told Mark Lewisohn, similarly, that when George Martin suggested "changing" their drummer the Beatles responded: "Well, we're quite happy with him, he works great in the clubs", but also that "Pete had never quite been like the rest of us. We were the wacky trio and Pete was perhaps a little more sensible; he was slightly different from us, he wasn't quite as artsy as we were."


title: Pete Best

text: Harrison said that "Pete kept being sick and not showing up for gigs" and admitted, "I was quite responsible for stirring things up. I conspired to get Ringo in for good; I talked to Paul and John until they came round to the idea."


title: Pete Best

text: Before Epstein took the Beatles on, Mona had been handling most of the management and promotional work. According to promoter and manager Joe Flannery, Mona had done a great deal for the band by arranging a number of important early gigs and lending them a badly needed helping hand when they returned from Hamburg the first time, but this came at the cost of having to contend with her overbearing nature. At this crucial time in the history of the Beatles, Lennon confided to Flannery that he considered Mona "bossy like [his aunt] Mimi" and believed that she was using the Beatles only for the sake of her son Pete, though this should be weighed against the fact that the Beatles' cordial relations with Mona soon resumed. She often met them while visiting Neil Aspinall at his London home. On these occasions, the Beatles often had small gifts for her which they had acquired on their travels. For her part, Mona allowed them to use her father's military medals in the photo shoot for the "Sgt. Pepper" album cover.


title: Pete Best

text: Although Epstein's publicly stated reluctance to fire Best quickly became a matter of record in the early biographies, he had found Mona to be the cause of mounting aggravation. Epstein's distaste for her interference in the Beatles' management, including her "aggressive opinions about his handling of her son's career", was obvious to everyone, and he also reportedly considered Mona a loose cannon who must not be allowed to interfere in his operations. Moreover, the very recent birth of her son Roag further complicated matters. Although Best himself was not personally responsible for this development, it may have still caused a scandal, at a crucial moment in the Beatles' career, had it become generally known, and Epstein may have been horrified at the prospect.