title: St. Bartholomew's Day massacre

text: A 1966 serial in the British science fiction television series "Doctor Who" entitled "The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve" is set during the events leading up to the Paris massacre. Leonard Sachs appeared as Admiral Coligny and Joan Young played Catherine de' Medici. This serial is missing from the BBC archives and survives only in audio form. It depicts the massacre as having been instigated by Catherine de' Medici for both religious and political reasons, and authorised by a weak-willed and easily influenced Charles IX.


title: St. Bartholomew's Day massacre

text: The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre is the setting for Tim Willocks' historical novel, "The Twelve Children of Paris" (Matthias Tannhauser Trilogy:2), published in 2013.


title: St. Bartholomew's Day massacre

text: Ken Follett's 2017 historical fiction novel "A Column of Fire" uses this event. Several chapters depict in great detail the massacre and the events leading up to it, with the book's protagonists getting some warning in advance and making enormous but futile efforts to avert it. Follett completely clears King Charles IX and his mother Catherine of any complicity and depicts them as sincere proponents of religious toleration, caught by surprise and horrified by the events; he places the entire responsibility on the Guise Family, following the "Machiavellian" view of the massacre and depicting it as a complicated Guise conspiracy, meticulously planned in advance and implemented in full detail.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Luis Buñuel Portolés (; 22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish-Mexican filmmaker who worked in France, Mexico, and Spain. He has been widely considered by many film critics, historians, and directors to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: When Buñuel died at age 83, his obituary in "The New York Times" called him "an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later". His first picture, "Un Chien Andalou"—made in the silent era—is still viewed regularly throughout the world and retains its power to shock the viewer, and his last film, "That Obscure Object of Desire"—made 48 years later—won him Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. Writer Octavio Paz called Buñuel's work "the marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating a new reality...scandalous and subversive".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Often associated with the surrealist movement of the 1920s, Buñuel created films from the 1920s through the 1970s. Having worked in Europe and North America, and in French and Spanish, Buñuel also directed films spanning various genres. Despite this variety, filmmaker John Huston believed that, regardless of genre, a Buñuel film is so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable, or, as Ingmar Bergman put it, "Buñuel nearly always made Buñuel films".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Seven of Buñuel's films are included in "Sight & Sound"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s 2012 critics' poll of the top 250 films of all time. Fifteen of his films are included in the "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?" list of the 1,000 greatest films of all time, second only to Jean-Luc Godard, with sixteen, and he ranks number 13 on their list of the top 250 directors.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel was born on 22 February 1900 in Calanda, a small town in the Aragon region of Spain. His father was Leonardo Buñuel, also a native of Calanda, who had left home at age 14 to start a hardware business in Havana, Cuba, ultimately amassing a fortune and returning home to Calanda at age 43, in 1898. He married the 18-year-old daughter of the only innkeeper in Calanda, María Portolés Cerezuela. The oldest of seven children, Luis had two brothers, Alfonso and Leonardo, and four sisters: Alicia, Concepción, Margarita and María. He would later describe his birthplace by saying that in Calanda, "the Middle Ages lasted until World War I".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: When Buñuel was four and a half months old, the family moved to Zaragoza, where they were one of the wealthiest families in town. In Zaragoza, Buñuel received a strict Jesuit education at the private Colegio del Salvador, starting at age 7 and continuing for the next seven years. After being kicked and insulted by the study hall proctor before a final exam, Buñuel refused to return to the school. He told his mother he had been expelled, which was not true; in fact, he had received the highest marks on his world history exam. Buñuel finished the last two years of his high school education at the local public school, graduating at age 16. Even as a child, Buñuel was something of a cinematic showman; friends from that period described productions in which Buñuel would project shadows on a screen using a magic lantern and a bedsheet. He also excelled at boxing and playing the violin.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In his youth, Buñuel was deeply religious, serving at Mass and taking Communion every day, until, at the age of 16, he grew disgusted with what he perceived as the illogicality of the Church, along with its power and wealth.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1917, he attended the University of Madrid, first studying agronomy then industrial engineering and finally switching to philosophy. He developed very close relationships with painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, among other important Spanish creative artists living in the Residencia de Estudiantes, with the three friends forming the nucleus of the Spanish Surrealist avant-garde, and becoming known as members of "La Generación del 27". Buñuel was especially taken with García Lorca, later writing in his autobiography: "We liked each other instantly. Although we seemed to have little in common—I was a redneck from Aragon, and he an elegant Andalusian—we spent most of our time together... We used to sit on the grass in the evenings behind the Residencia (at that time, there were vast open spaces reaching to the horizon), and he would read me his poems. He read slowly and beautifully, and through him I began to discover a wholly new world." Buñuel's relationship with Dalí was somewhat more troubled, being tinged with jealousy over the growing intimacy between Dalí and Lorca and resentment over Dalí's early success as an artist.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel's interest in films was intensified by a viewing of Fritz Lang's "Der müde Tod": "I came out of the Vieux Colombier [theater] completely transformed. Images could and did become for me the true means of expression. I decided to devote myself to the cinema". At age 72, Buñuel had not lost his enthusiasm for this film, asking the octogenarian Lang for his autograph.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1925 Buñuel moved to Paris, where he began work as a secretary in an organization called the International Society of Intellectual Cooperation. He also became actively involved in cinema and theater, going to the movies as often as three times a day. Through these interests, he met a number of influential people, including the pianist Ricardo Viñes, who was instrumental in securing Buñuel's selection as artistic director of the Dutch premiere of Manuel de Falla's puppet-opera "El retablo de maese Pedro" in 1926.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: He decided to enter the film industry and enrolled in a private film school run by Jean Epstein and some associates. At that time, Epstein was one of the most celebrated commercial directors working in France, his films being hailed as "the triumph of impressionism in motion, but also the triumph of the modern spirit". Before long, Buñuel was working for Epstein as an assistant director on "Mauprat" (1926) and "La chute de la maison Usher" (1928), and also for Mario Nalpas on "La Sirène des Tropiques" (1927), starring Josephine Baker. He appeared on screen in a small part as a smuggler in Jacques Feyder's "Carmen" (1926).


title: Luis Buñuel

text: When Buñuel derisively rejected Epstein's demand that he assist Epstein's mentor, Abel Gance, who was at the time working on the film "Napoléon", Epstein dismissed him angrily, saying "How can a little asshole like you dare to talk that way about a great director like Gance?" then added "You seem rather surrealist. Beware of surrealists, they are crazy people."


title: Luis Buñuel

text: After parting with Epstein, Buñuel worked as film critic for "La Gaceta Literaria" (1927) and "Les Cahiers d'Art" (1928). In the periodicals "L'Amic de les Arts" and "La gaseta de les Arts", he and Dalí carried on a series of "call and response" essays on cinema and theater, debating such technical issues as segmentation, découpage, the insert shot and rhythmic editing. He also collaborated with the celebrated writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna on the script for what he hoped would be his first film, "a story in six scenes" called "Los caprichos". Through his involvement with "Gaceta Literaria", he helped establish Madrid's first cine-club and served as its inaugural chairman.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: After his apprenticeship with Epstein, Buñuel shot and directed a 16-minute short, "Un Chien Andalou", with Salvador Dalí. The film, financed by Buñuel's mother, consists of a series of startling images of a Freudian nature, starting with a woman's eyeball being sliced open with a razor blade. "Un Chien Andalou" was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning French surrealist movement of the time and continues to be shown regularly in film societies to this day. It has been called "the most famous short film ever made" by critic Roger Ebert.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: The script was written in six days at Dalí's home in Cadaqués. In a letter to a friend written in February 1929, Buñuel described the writing process: "We had to look for the plot line. Dalí said to me, 'I dreamed last night of ants swarming around in my hands', and I said, 'Good Lord, and I dreamed that I had sliced somebody or other's eye. There's the film, let's go and make it.'" In deliberate contrast to the approach taken by Jean Epstein and his peers, which was to never leave anything in their work to chance, with every aesthetic decision having a rational explanation and fitting clearly into the whole, Buñuel and Dalí made a cardinal point of eliminating all logical associations. In Buñuel's words: "Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: It was Buñuel's intention to outrage the self-proclaimed artistic vanguard of his youth, later saying: "Historically the film represents a violent reaction against what in those days was called 'avant-garde,' which was aimed exclusively at artistic sensibility and the audience's reason." Against his hopes and expectations, the film was a popular success with the very audience he had wanted to insult, leading Buñuel to exclaim in exasperation, "What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?"


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Although "Un Chien Andalou" is a silent film, during the original screening (attended by the elite of the Parisian art world), Buñuel played a sequence of phonograph records which he switched manually while keeping his pockets full of stones with which to pelt anticipated hecklers. After the premiere, Buñuel and Dalí were granted formal admittance to the tight-knit community of Surrealists, led by poet André Breton.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Late in 1929, on the strength of "Un Chien Andalou", Buñuel and Dalí were commissioned to make another short film by Marie-Laurie and Charles de Noailles, owners of a private cinema on the Place des États-Unis and financial supporters of productions by Jacques Manuel, Man Ray and Pierre Chenal. At first, the intent was that the new film be around the same length as "Un Chien", only this time with sound. But by mid-1930, the film had grown segmentally to an hour's duration. Anxious that it was over twice as long as planned and at double the budget, Buñuel offered to trim the film and cease production, but Noailles gave him the go-ahead to continue the project.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: The film, entitled "L'Age d'Or", was begun as a second collaboration with Dalí, but, while working on the scenario, the two had a falling out; Buñuel, who at the time had strong leftist sympathies, desired a deliberate undermining of all bourgeois institutions, while Dalí, who eventually supported the Spanish fascist Francisco Franco and various figures of the European aristocracy, wanted merely to cause a scandal through the use of various scatological and anti-Catholic images. The friction between them was exacerbated when, at a dinner party in Cadaqués, Buñuel tried to throttle Dalí's girlfriend, Gala, the wife of Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In consequence, Dalí had nothing to do with the actual shooting of the film. During the course of production, Buñuel worked around his technical ignorance by filming mostly in sequence and using nearly every foot of film that he shot. Buñuel invited friends and acquaintances to appear, for nothing, in the film; for example, anyone who owned a tuxedo or a party frock got a part in the salon scene.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Concurrent with the "succès de scandale", both Buñuel and the film's leading lady, Lya Lys, received offers of interest from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and traveled to Hollywood at the studio's expense. While in the United States, Buñuel associated with other celebrity expatriates including Sergei Eisenstein, Josef Von Sternberg, Jacques Feyder, Charles Chaplin and Bertolt Brecht. All that was required of Buñuel by his loose-ended contract with MGM was that he "learn some good American technical skills", but, after being ushered off the first set he visited because the star, Greta Garbo, did not welcome intruders, he decided to stay at home most of the time and only show up to collect his paycheck. His only enduring contribution to MGM came when he served as an extra in "La Fruta Amarga", a Spanish-language remake of "Min and Bill". When, after a few months at the studio, he was asked to watch rushes of Lili Damita to gauge her Spanish accent, he refused and sent a message to studio boss Irving Thalberg stating that he was there as a Frenchman, not a Spaniard, and he "didn't have time to waste listening to one of the whores". He was back in Spain shortly thereafter.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Spain in the early 1930s was a time of political and social turbulence. Due to both a surge in anti-clerical sentiment and a longrunning desire for retribution for the corruption and malfeasance of the extreme right and their supporters in the church, Anarchists and Radical Socialists sacked monarchist headquarters in Madrid and proceeded to burn down or otherwise wreck more than a dozen churches in the capital. Similar revolutionary acts occurred in many other cities in southern and eastern Spain, in most cases with the acquiescence and occasionally with the assistance of the official Republican authorities.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel's future wife, Jeanne Rucar, recalled that during that period, "he got very excited about politics and the ideas that were everywhere in pre-Civil War Spain". In the first flush of his enthusiasm, Buñuel joined the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) in 1931, though later in life he denied becoming a Communist.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1932, Buñuel was invited to serve as film documentarian for the celebrated "Mission Dakar-Djibouti", the first large-scale French anthropological field expedition, which, led by Marcel Griaule, unearthed some 3,500 African artifacts for the new Musée de l'Homme. Although he declined, the project piqued his interest in ethnography. After reading the academic study, "Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine" (1927) by Maurice Legendre, he decided to make a film focused on peasant life in Extremadura, one of Spain's poorest states. The film, called "" (1933), was financed on a budget of 20,000 pesetas donated by a working-class anarchist friend named Ramón Acín, who had won the money in a lottery. In the film, Buñuel matches scenes of deplorable social conditions with narration that resembles travelogue commentary delivered by a detached-sounding announcer, while the soundtrack thunders inappropriate music by Brahms.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: "Las Hurdes" was banned by the Second Spanish Republic and then by the Francoist dictatorship. It is a film which continues to perplex viewers and resists easy categorization by film historians. "Las Hurdes" has been called one of the first examples of mockumentary, and has been labeled a "surrealist documentary", a term defined by critic Mercè Ibarz as "A multi-layered and unnerving use of sound, the juxtaposition of narrative forms already learnt from the written press, travelogues and new pedagogic methods, as well as a subversive use of photographed and filmed documents understood as a basis for contemporary propaganda for the masses". Catherine Russell has stated that in "Las Hurdes", Buñuel was able to reconcile his political philosophy with his surrealist aesthetic, with surrealism becoming "a means of awakening a marxist materialism in danger of becoming a stale orthodoxy".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: After "Las Hurdes" in 1933, Buñuel worked in Paris in the dubbing department of Paramount Pictures, but following his marriage in 1934, he switched to Warner Brothers because they operated dubbing studios in Madrid. A friend, Ricardo Urgoiti, who owned the commercial film company Filmófono, invited Buñuel to produce films for a mass audience. He accepted the offer, viewing it as an "experiment" as he knew the film industry in Spain was still far behind the technical level of Hollywood or Paris. According to film historian Manuel Rotellar's interviews with members of the cast and crew of the Filmófono studios, Buñuel's only condition was that his involvement with these pictures be completely anonymous, apparently for fear of damaging his reputation as a surrealist. Rotellar insists, however, "the truth is that it was Luis Buñuel who directed the Filmófono productions". José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, the titular director of two of the films created during Buñuel's years as "executive producer" at Filmófono, recounted that it was Buñuel who "explained to me every morning what he wanted...We looked at the takes together and it was Buñuel who chose the shots, and in editing, I wasn't even allowed to be present." Of the 18 films produced by Buñuel during his years at Filmófono, the four that are believed by critical consensus to have been directed by him are:


title: Luis Buñuel

text: During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Buñuel placed himself at the disposal of the Republican government. The minister for foreign affairs sent him first to Geneva (September 1936) and then to Paris for two years (1936–38), with official responsibility for cataloging Republican propaganda films. Besides the cataloguing, Buñuel took left-wing tracts to Spain, did some occasional spying, acted as a bodyguard, and supervised the making of a documentary, entitled "España 1936" in France and "Espana leal, ¡en armas!" in Spain, that covered the elections, the parades, the riots, and the war. In August 1936, Federico García Lorca was shot and killed by Nationalist militia. According to his son, Juan Luis, Buñuel rarely talked about Lorca but mourned the poet's untimely death throughout his life.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel essentially functioned as the coordinator of film propaganda for the Republic, which meant that he was in a position to examine all film shot in the country and decide what sequences could be developed and distributed abroad. The Spanish Ambassador suggested that Buñuel revisit Hollywood where he could give technical advice on films being made there about the Spanish Civil War, so in 1938, he and his family traveled to the United States using funds obtained from his old patrons, the Noailles. Almost immediately upon his arrival in America, however, the war ended and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America discontinued making films on the Spanish conflict. According to Buñuel's wife, returning to Spain was impossible since the Fascists had seized power, so Buñuel decided to stay in the U.S. indefinitely, stating that he was "immensely attracted by the American naturalness and sociability".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Returning to Hollywood in 1938, he was befriended by Frank Davis, an MGM producer and member of the Communist Party USA, who placed Buñuel on the payroll of "Cargo of Innocence", a film about Spanish refugee mothers and children fleeing from Bilbao to the USSR. The project was shelved precipitately when another Hollywood film about the Spanish Civil War, "Blockade", was met with disfavor by the Catholic League of Decency. In the words of biographer Ruth Brandon, Buñuel and his family "lived from one unsatisfactory crumb of work to another" because he "had none of the arrogance and pushiness essential for survival in Hollywood". He just wasn't flamboyant enough to capture the attention of Hollywood decision makers, in the opinion of film composer George Antheil: "Inasmuch as [Buñuel], his wife and his little boy seemed to be such absolutely normal, solid persons, as totally un-Surrealist in the Dalí tradition as one could possibly imagine." For the most part, he was snubbed by many of the people in the film community whom he met during his first trip to America, although he was able to sell some gags to Chaplin for his film "The Great Dictator".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In desperation, to market himself to independent producers, he composed a 21-page autobiography, a section of which, headed "My Present Plans", outlined proposals for two documentary films:


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Nobody showed any interest and Buñuel realized that staying in Los Angeles was futile, so he traveled to New York City to see if he could change his fortunes.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In New York City, Antheil introduced Buñuel to Iris Barry, chief curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Barry talked Buñuel into joining a committee formed to help educate those within the U.S. government who might not have appreciated fully the effectiveness of film as a medium of propaganda. Buñuel was hired to produce a shortened version of Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" (1935) as a demonstration project. The finished product was a compilation of scenes from Riefenstahl's Nazi epic with Hans Bertram's "Feuertaufe". Buñuel stayed at MoMA to work for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) as part of a production team that would gather, review and edit films intended as anti-fascist propaganda to be distributed in Latin America by American embassies. While being vetted for the job at the OCIAA, upon being asked if he was a Communist, he replied: "I am a Republican," and, apparently, the interviewer did not realize that Buñuel was referring to the Spanish socialist coalition government, not the American political party. Describing Buñuel's work at MoMA, his friend, composer Gustavo Pittaluga, stated: "Luis created maybe 2,000 remarkable works. We were sent anodyne documentaries, often extremely feeble primary materials, which the Museum team turned into marvellous films. And not just Spanish versions, but also Portuguese, French and English... He would "create" a good documentary through editing." [italics in original]


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1942, Buñuel applied for American citizenship, because he anticipated that MoMA would soon be put under federal control. But that same year, Dalí published his autobiography, "The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí", in which he made it clear that he had split with Buñuel because the latter was a Communist and an atheist. News of this reached Archbishop Spellman, who angrily confronted Barry with the question: "Are you aware that you are harbouring in this Museum the Antichrist, the man who made a blasphemous film "L'Age d'Or"?" At the same time, a campaign on the part of Hollywood, through its industry trade paper, the "Motion Picture Herald", to undermine the MoMA film unit resulted in a 66% reduction in the department's budget and Buñuel felt himself compelled to resign. In 1944, he returned to Hollywood for the third time, this time as Spanish Dubbing Producer for Warner Brothers. Before leaving New York City, he confronted Dalí at his hotel, the Sherry Netherland, to tell the painter about the damage his book had done and then shoot him in the knee. Buñuel did not carry out the violent part of his plan. Dalí explained himself by saying: "I did not write my book to put YOU on a pedestal. I wrote it to put ME on a pedestal".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel's first dubbing assignment on returning to Hollywood was "My Reputation", a Barbara Stanwyck picture which became "El Que Diran" in Buñuel's hands. In addition to his dubbing work, Buñuel attempted to develop a number of independent projects:


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1945, Buñuel's contract with Warner Brothers expired, and he decided not to renew it in order, as he put it: "to realize my life's ambition for a year: to do nothing". While his family enjoyed themselves at the beach, Buñuel spent much of his time in Antelope Valley with new acquaintances writer Aldous Huxley and sculptor Alexander Calder, from whom he rented a house.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In his autobiography, in a chapter about his second spell in America, Buñuel states that "[o]n several occasions, both American and European producers have suggested that I tackle a film version of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano"", but that after reading the book many times as well as eight different screenplays he was unable to come up with a solution for the cinema. The movie was eventually made in 1984 by John Huston.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1946, an old friend, producer Denise Tual, the widow of Pierre Batcheff, the leading man in "Un Chien Andalou", proposed that she and Buñuel adapt Lorca's play "La casa de Bernarda Alba" for production in Paris. As it turned out, though, before they could both make their way to Europe, they encountered problems in securing the rights from Lorca's family. While in Mexico City, on a stopover, they had asked Óscar Dancigers, a Russian émigré producer active in Mexico, for financing. Dancigers ran an independent production company that specialized in assisting U.S. film studios with on-location shooting in Mexico, but following World War II, he had lost his connection with Hollywood due to his being blacklisted as a Communist. Although Dancigers wasn't enthusiastic about the Lorca project, he did want to work with Buñuel and persuaded the Spanish director to undertake a totally different project.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: The Golden Age of Mexican cinema was peaking in the mid-to-late 1940s, at just the time Buñuel was connecting with Dancigers. Movies represented Mexico's third largest industry by 1947, employing 32,000 workers, with 72 film producers who invested 66 million pesos (approximately U.S. $13 million) per year, four active studios with 40 million pesos of invested capital, and approximately 1,500 theaters throughout the nation, with about 200 in Mexico City alone. For their first project, the two men selected what seemed like a sure-fire success, "Gran Casino", a musical period piece set in Tampico during the boom years of oil exploitation, starring two of the most popular entertainers in Latin America: Libertad Lamarque, an Argentine actress and singer, and Jorge Negrete, a Mexican singer and leading man in "charro" films. Buñuel recalled: "I kept them singing all the time—a competition, a championship".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: The film was not successful at the box office, with some even calling it a fiasco. Different reasons have been given for its failure with the public; for some, Buñuel was forced to make concessions to the bad taste of his stars, particularly Negrete, others cite Buñuel's rusty technical skills and lack of confidence after so many years out of the director's chair, while still others speculate that Mexican audiences were tiring of genre movies, called "churros", that were perceived as being cheaply and hastily made.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: The failure of "Gran Casino" sidelined Buñuel, and it was over two years before he had the chance to direct another picture. According to Buñuel, he spent this time "scratching my nose, watching flies and living off my mother's money", but he was actually somewhat more industrious than that may sound. With the husband/wife team of Janet and Luis Alcoriza, he wrote the scenario for "Si usted no puede, yo sí", which was filmed in 1950 by Julián Soler. He also continued developing the idea for a surrealistic film called "Ilegible, hijo de flauta", with the poet Juan Larrea. Dancigers pointed out to him that there was currently public interest in films about street urchins, so Buñuel scoured the back streets and slums of Mexico City in search of material, interviewing social workers about street gang warfare and murdered children.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: During this period, Dancigers was busy producing films for the actor/director Fernando Soler, one of the most durable of Mexican film personalities, having been referred to as the "national paterfamilias". Although Soler typically preferred to direct his own films, for their next collaboration, "El Gran Calavera", based on a play by Adolfo Torrado, he decided that doing both jobs would be too much trouble, so he asked Dancigers to find someone who could be trusted to handle the technical aspects of the directorial duties. Buñuel welcomed the opportunity, stating that: "I amused myself with the montage, the constructions, the angles... All of that interested me because I was still an apprentice in so-called 'normal' cinema." As a result of his work on this film, he developed a technique for making films cheaply and quickly by limiting them to 125 shots. "El Gran Calavera" was completed in 16 days at a cost of 400,000 pesos (approximately $46,000 US at 1948 exchange rates). The picture has been described as "a hilarious screwball send-up of the Mexican nouveau riche... a wild roller coaster of mistaken identity, sham marriages and misfired suicides", and it was a big hit at the box office in Mexico. In 2013, the picture was re-made by Mexican director Gary Alazraki under the title "The Noble Family". In 1949, Buñuel renounced his Spanish citizenship to become a naturalized Mexican.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: The commercial success of "El Gran Calavera" enabled Buñuel to redeem a promise he had extracted from Dancigers, which was that if Buñuel could deliver a money-maker, Dancigers would guarantee "a degree of freedom" on the next film project. Knowing that Dancigers was uncomfortable with experimentalism, especially when it might affect the bottom line, Buñuel proposed a commercial project titled "¡Mi huerfanito jefe!", about a juvenile street vendor who can't sell his final lottery ticket, which ends up being the winner and making him rich. Dancigers was open to the idea, but instead of a ""feuilleton"", he suggested making "something rather more serious". During his recent researches through the slums of Mexico City, Buñuel had read a newspaper account of a twelve-year-old boy's body being found on a garbage dump, and this became the inspiration, and final scene, for the film, eventually called "Los olvidados".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: The film tells the story of a street gang of children who terrorize their impoverished neighborhood, at one point brutalizing a blind man and at another assaulting a legless man who moves around on a dolly, which they toss down a hill. Film historian Carl J. Mora has said of "Los olvidados" that the director "visualized poverty in a radically different way from the traditional forms of Mexican melodrama. Buñuel's street children are not 'ennobled' by their desperate struggle for survival; they are in fact ruthless predators who are not better than their equally unromanticized victims". The film was made quickly (18 days) and cheaply (450,000 pesos), with Buñuel's fee being the equivalent of $2,000. During filming, a number of members of the crew resisted the production in a variety of ways: one technician confronted Buñuel and asked why he didn't make a "real" Mexican movie "rather than a miserable picture like this one"; the film's hairdresser quit on the spot over a scene in which the protagonist's mother refuses to give him food ("In Mexico, no mother would say that to her son."); another staff member urged Buñuel to abandon shooting on a "garbage heap", noting that there were many "lovely residential neighborhoods like Las Lomas" that were available; while Pedro de Urdimalas, one of the scriptwriters, refused to allow his name in the credits.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: This hostility was also felt by those who attended the movie's première in Mexico City on 9 November 1950, when "Los olvidados" was taken by many as an insult to Mexican sensibilities and to the Mexican nation. At one point, the audience shrieked in shock as one of the characters looked straight into the camera and hurled a rotten egg at it, leaving a gelatinous, opaque ooze on the lens for a few moments. In his memoir, Buñuel recalled that after the initial screening, Diego Rivera's wife the painter Frida Kahlo refused to speak to him, while poet León Felipe's wife had to be restrained physically from attacking him. There were even calls to have Buñuel's Mexican citizenship revoked. Dancigers, panicked by what he feared would be a complete debacle, quickly commissioned an alternate "happy" ending to the film, and also tacked on a preface showing stock footage of the skylines of New York City, London and Paris with voice-over commentary to the effect that behind the wealth of all the great cities of the world can be found poverty and malnourished children, and that Mexico City "that large modern city, is no exception". Regardless, attendance was so poor that Dancigers withdrew the film after only three days in theaters.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Through the determined efforts of future Nobel Prize winner for Literature Octavio Paz, who at the time was in Mexico's diplomatic service, "Los olvidados" was chosen to represent Mexico at the Cannes Film Festival of 1951, and Paz promoted the film assiduously by distributing a supportive manifesto and parading outside the cinema with a placard. Opinion in general was enthusiastic, with the Surrealists (Breton and poet Jacques Prevert) and other artistic intellectuals (painter Marc Chagall and poet/dramatist/filmmaker Jean Cocteau) laudatory, but the communist critic Georges Sadoul objected to what he saw as the film's "bourgeois morality" because of its positive depictions of a "bourgeois teacher" and a "bourgeois state" in rehabilitating street children, as well as a scene in which the police demonstrate their utility by stopping a pederast from assaulting a child. Buñuel won the Best Director prize that year at Cannes, and also won the FIPRESCI International Critics' Award. After receiving these accolades, the film was reissued in Mexico where it ran for two months to much greater acceptance and profit. "Los olvidados" and its triumph at Cannes made Buñuel an instant world celebrity and the most important Spanish-speaking film director in the world. In 2003, "Los olvidados" was recommended by UNESCO for inclusion in the Memory of the World Register, calling it: "the most important document in Spanish about the marginal lives of children in contemporary large cities".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel remained in Mexico for the rest of his life, although he spent periods of time filming in France and Spain. In Mexico, he filmed 21 films during an 18-year period. For many critics, although there were occasional widely acknowledged masterpieces like "Los olvidados" and "Él" (1953), the majority of his output consisted of generic fare which was adapted to the norms of the national film industry, frequently adopting melodramatic conventions that appealed to local tastes. Other commentators, however, have written of the deceptive complexity and intensity of many of these films, arguing that, collectively, they, "bring a philosophical depth and power to his cinema, together offering a sustained meditation on ideas of religion, class inequity, violence and desire". Although Buñuel usually had little choice regarding the selection of these projects, they often deal with themes that were central to his lifelong concerns:


title: Luis Buñuel

text: As busy as he was during the 1950s and early 1960s, there were still many film projects that Buñuel had to abandon due to lack of financing or studio support, including a cherished plan to film Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo", of which he said how much he enjoyed "the crossing from the mysterious to the real, almost without transition. I really like this mixture of reality and fantasy, but I don't know how to bring it to the screen." Other unrealized projects during his lifetime included adaptations of André Gide's "Les caves du Vatican"; Benito Pérez Galdós's "Fortunata y Jacinta", "Doña Perfecta", and "Ángel Guerra"; Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One"; William Golding's "Lord of the Flies"; Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun"; J. K. Huysmans' "Là-Bas"; Matthew Lewis's "The Monk"; José Donoso's "Lugar sin límites"; a film of four stories based on Carlos Fuentes's "Aura"; and Julio Cortázar's "Las ménades".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: As much as he welcomed steady employment in the Mexican film industry, Buñuel was quick to seize opportunities to re-emerge onto the international film scene and to engage with themes that were not necessarily focused on Mexican preoccupations. His first chance came in 1954, when Dancigers partnered with Henry F. Ehrlich, of United Artists, to co-produce a film version of Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe", using a script developed by the Canadian writer Hugo Butler. The film was produced by George Pepper, the former executive secretary of the Hollywood Democratic Committee. Both Butler and Pepper were emigres from Hollywood who had run afoul of authorities seeking out communists. The result, "Adventures of Robinson Crusoe", was Buñuel's first color film. Buñuel was given much more time than usual for the filming (three months), which was accomplished on location in Manzanillo, a Pacific seaport with a lush jungle interior, and was shot simultaneously in English and Spanish. When the film was released in the United States, its young star Dan O'Herlihy used his own money to fund a Los Angeles run for the film and gave free admission to all members of the Screen Actors Guild, who in turn rewarded the little-known actor with his only Oscar nomination.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In the mid-1950s, Buñuel got the chance to work again in France on international co-productions. The result was what critic Raymond Durgnat has called the director's "revolutionary triptych", in that each of the three films is "openly, or by implication, a study in the morality and tactics of armed revolution against a right-wing dictatorship". The first, "Cela s'appelle l'aurore" (Franco-Italian, 1956) required Buñuel and the "pataphysical" writer Jean Ferry to adapt a novel by Emmanuel Roblès after the celebrated writer Jean Genet failed to deliver a script after having been paid in full. The second film was "La Mort en ce jardin" (Franco-Mexican, 1956), which was adapted by Buñuel and his frequent collaborator Luis Alcoriza from a novel by the Belgian writer José-André Lacour. The final part of the "triptych" was "La Fièvre Monte à El Pao" (Franco-Mexican, 1959), the last film of the popular French star Gérard Philipe, who died in the final stages of the production. At one point during the filming, Buñuel asked Philipe, who was visibly dying of cancer, why the actor was making this film, and Philipe responded by asking the director the same question, to which both said they did not know. Buñuel was later to explain that he was so strapped for cash that he, "took everything that was offered to me, as long as it wasn't humiliating".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1960, Buñuel re-teamed with scenarist Hugo Butler and organizer George Pepper, allegedly his favorite producer, to make his second English-language film, a US/Mexico co-production called "The Young One", based on a short story by writer and former CIA-agent Peter Matthiessen. This film has been called "a surprisingly uncompromising study of racism and sexual desire, set on a remote island in the Deep South" and has been described by critic Ed Gonzalez as "salacious enough to make Elia Kazan's "Baby Doll" and Luis Malle's "Pretty Baby" blush". Although the film won a special award at the Cannes Film Festival for its treatment of racial discrimination, the US critics were so hostile upon its release that Buñuel was later to say that "a Harlem newspaper even wrote that I should be hung upside down from a lamppost on Fifth Avenue...I made this film with love, but it never had a chance."


title: Luis Buñuel

text: At the 1960 Cannes Festival, Buñuel was approached by the young director Carlos Saura, whose film "Los Golfos" had been entered officially to represent Spain. Two years earlier, Saura had partnered with Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga to form a production company called UNINCI, and the group was keen to get Buñuel to make a new film in his native country as part of their overall goal of creating a uniquely Spanish brand of cinema. At the same time, Mexican actress Silvia Pinal was eager to work with Buñuel and talked her producer-husband Gustavo Alatriste into providing additional funding for the project with the understanding that the director, who Pinal described as "a man worshiped and idolized", would be given "absolute freedom" in carrying out the work. Finally, Buñuel agreed to work again in Spain when further support was provided by producer Pere Portabella's company "Film 59".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel and his co-scenarist Julio Alejandro drafted a preliminary screenplay for "Viridiana", which critic Andrew Sarris has described as incorporating "a plot which is almost too lurid to synopsize even in these enlightened times", dealing with rape, incest, hints of necrophilia, animal cruelty and sacrilege, and submitted it to the Spanish censor, who, to the surprise of nearly everyone, approved it after requesting only minor modifications and one significant change to the ending. Although Buñuel accommodated the censor's demands, he came up with a final scene that was even more provocative than the scene it replaced: "even more immoral", as Buñuel was later to observe. Since Buñuel had more than adequate resources, top-flight technical and artistic crews, and experienced actors, filming of "Viridiana" (which took place on location and at Bardem's studios in Madrid) went smoothly and quickly.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel submitted a cutting copy to the censors and then arranged for his son, Juan Luis, to smuggle the negatives to Paris for the final editing and mixing, ensuring that the authorities would not have an opportunity to view the finished product before its planned submission as Spain's official entry to the 1961 Cannes Festival. Spain's director general of cinematography José Muñoz-Fontán presented the film on the last day of the festival and then, on the urging of Portabella and Bardem, appeared in person to accept the top prize, the Palme d'Or, which the film shared with the French entry "Une aussi longue absence", directed by Henri Colpi. Within days, "l'Osservatore Romano", the Vatican's official organ, denounced the film as an insult not only to Catholicism but to Christianity in general. Consequences to nearly all concerned were swift: Muñoz-Fontán was dismissed from his government post, the film was banned in Spain for the next 17 years, all mention of it in the press was prohibited, and the two Spanish production companies UNINCI and "Film 59" were disbanded.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel went on to make two more films in Mexico with Pinal and Alatriste, "El ángel exterminador" (1962) and "Simón del desierto" (1965) and was later to say that Alatriste had been the one producer who gave him the most freedom in creative expression.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1963, actor Fernando Rey, one of the stars of "Viridiana", introduced Buñuel to producer Serge Silberman, a Polish entrepreneur who had fled to Paris when his family died in the Holocaust and had worked with several renowned French directors, including Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Becker, Marcel Camus and Christian-Jaque. Silberman proposed that the two make an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau's "Journal d'une femme de chambre", which Buñuel had read several times. Buñuel wanted to do the filming in Mexico with Pinal, but Silberman insisted it be done in France.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Pinal was so determined to work again with Buñuel that she was ready to move to France, learn the language and even work for nothing in order to get the part of Célestine, the title character. Silberman, however, wanted French actress Jeanne Moreau to play the role, so he put Pinal off by telling her that Moreau, too, was willing to act with no fee. Ultimately, Silberman got his way, leaving Pinal so disappointed that she was later to claim that Alatriste's failure to help her secure this part led to the breakup of their marriage. When Buñuel requested a French-speaking writer with whom to collaborate on the screenplay, Silberman suggested the 32-year-old Jean-Claude Carrière, an actor whose previous screenwriting credits included only a few films for the comic star/director Pierre Étaix, but once Buñuel learned that Carrière was the heir to a wine-growing family, the newcomer was hired on the spot. At first, Carrière found it difficult to work with Buñuel, because the young man was so deferential to the famous director that he never challenged any of Buñuel's ideas, until, at Buñuel's covert insistence, Silberman told Carrière to stand up to Buñuel now and then; as Carrière was later to say: "In a way, Buñuel needed an opponent. He didn't need a secretary – he needed someone to contradict him and oppose him and to make suggestions." The finished 1964 film, "Diary of a Chambermaid", became the first of several to be made by the team of Buñuel, Carrière and Silberman. Carrière was later to say: "Without me and without Serge Silberman, the producer, perhaps Buñuel would not have made so many films after he was 65. We really encouraged him to work. That's for sure."


title: Luis Buñuel

text: This was the second filmed version of Mirbeau's novel, the first being a 1946 Hollywood production directed by Jean Renoir, which Buñuel refused to view for fear of being influenced by the famous French director, whom he venerated. Buñuel's version, while admired by many, has often been compared unfavorably to Renoir's, with a number of critics claiming that Renoir's "Diary" fits better in Renoir's overall "oeuvre", while Buñuel's "Diary" is not sufficiently "Buñuelian".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: After the 1964 release of "Diary", Buñuel again tried to make a film of Matthew Lewis' "The Monk", a project on which he had worked, on and off, since 1938, according to producer Pierre Braunberger. He and Carrière wrote a screenplay, but were unable to obtain funding for the project, which would be finally realized in 1973 under the direction of Buñuel devotee Ado Kyrou, with considerable assistance from both Buñuel and Carrière.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1965, Buñuel managed to work again with Silvia Pinal in what would turn out to be his last Mexican feature, co-starring Claudio Brook, "Simón del desierto". Pinal was keenly interested in continuing to work with Buñuel, trusting him completely and frequently stating that he brought out the best in her; however, this would be their last collaboration.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1966, Buñuel was contacted by the Hakim brothers, Robert and Raymond, Egyptian-French producers who specialized in sexy films directed by star filmmakers, who offered him the opportunity to direct a film version of Joseph Kessel's novel "Belle de Jour", a book about an affluent young woman who leads a double life as a prostitute, and that had caused a scandal upon its first publication in 1928. Buñuel did not like Kessel's novel, considering it "a bit of a soap opera", but he took on the challenge because: "I found it interesting to try to turn something I didn't like into something I did." So he and Carrière set out enthusiastically to interview women in the brothels of Madrid to learn about their sexual fantasies. Buñuel also was not happy about the choice of the 22-year-old Catherine Deneuve for the title role, feeling that she had been foisted upon him by the Hakim brothers and Deneuve's lover at the time, director François Truffaut. As a result, both actress and director found working together difficult, with Deneuve claiming, "I felt they showed more of me than they'd said they were going to. There were moments when I felt totally used. I was very unhappy," and Buñuel deriding her prudery on the set. The resulting film has been described by film critic Roger Ebert as "possibly the best-known erotic film of modern times, perhaps the best", even though, as another critic has written, "in terms of explicit sexual activity, there is little in "Belle de jour" we might not see in a Doris Day comedy from the same year". It was Buñuel's most successful film at the box office.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Critics have noted Buñuel's habit of following up a commercial or critical success with a more personal, idiosyncratic film that might have less chance of popular esteem.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: After the worldwide success of his 1967 "Belle de jour", and upon viewing Jean-Luc Godard's film "La Chinoise", Buñuel, who had wanted to make a film about Catholic heresies for years, told Carrière: "If that is what today's cinema is like, then we can make a film about heresies." The two spent months researching Catholic history and created the 1969 film "The Milky Way", a "picaresque road film" that tells the story of two vagabonds on pilgrimage to the tomb of the Apostle James at Santiago de Compostela, during which they travel through time and space to take part in situations illustrating heresies that arose from the six major Catholic dogmas. Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in the "New York Times", compared it to George Stevens' blockbuster "The Greatest Story Ever Told", in that Buñuel had made a film about Jesus casting nearly all the famous French performers of the time in cameo roles. "The Milky Way" was banned in Italy, only to have the Catholic Church intervene on its behalf.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: The 1970 film "Tristana" is a film about a young woman who is seduced and manipulated by her guardian, who attempts to thwart her romance with a young artist and who eventually induces her to marry him after she loses one of her legs due to a tumor. It has been considered by scholar Beth Miller the least understood of Buñuel's films, and consequently one of the most underrated, due to a "consistent failure to apprehend its political and, especially, its socialist-feminist statement". Buñuel had wanted to make a film of Benito Pérez Galdós' novel "Tristana" as early as 1952, even though he considered Galdós' book the author's weakest. After finishing "Viridiana" and in the wake of the scandal its release caused in 1962, the Spanish censor flatly turned down this project, and Buñuel had to wait for 8 years before he could receive backing from the Spanish production company Época Films. The censors had threatened to deny permission for the film on the grounds that it encouraged duelling, so Buñuel had to approach the subject matter very gingerly, in addition to making concessions to his French/Italian/Spanish producers, who insisted on casting two of the three primary roles with actors not of Buñuel's choosing: Franco Nero and Catherine Deneuve. On this occasion, however, Deneuve and Buñuel had a more mutually satisfactory working relationship, with Deneuve telling an interviewer, "but in the end, you know, it was actually rather a wonderful shoot. "Tristana" is one of my favorite films. Personally, as an actress, I prefer "Tristana" to "Belle de Jour"."


title: Luis Buñuel

text: The germ of the idea for their next film together, "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) came from Buñuel and Silberman discussing uncanny repetition in everyday life; Silberman told an anecdote about how he had invited some friends for dinner at his house, only to forget about it, so that, on the night of the dinner party, he was absent and his wife was in her nightclothes. The film tells of a group of affluent friends who are continually stymied in their attempts to eat a meal together, a situation that a number of critics have contrasted to the opposite dilemma of the characters in "The Exterminating Angel", where guests of a dinner party are mysteriously unable to leave after having completed their meal. For this film, Buñuel, Silberman and Carrière assembled a top-flight cast of European performers, "a veritable rogues' gallery of French art-house cinema", according to one critic. For the first time, Buñuel made use of a video-playback monitor, which allowed him to make much more extensive use of crane shots and elaborate tracking shots, and enabled him to cut the film in the camera and eliminate the need for reshoots. Filming required only two months and Buñuel claimed that editing took only one day. When the film was released, Silberman decided to skip the Cannes Festival in order to concentrate on getting it nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, which it won, leading Buñuel to express his contempt for a process that relied on the judgment of "2500 idiots, including for example the assistant dress designer of the studio".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: As was his habit, Buñuel took advantage of the popular success of "Discreet Charm" to make one of the "puzzling, idiosyncratic films he "really" wanted to make". In 1973, at the Monastery of Paular in the Spanish Somosierra, he wrote the screenplay for "The Phantom of Liberty" (1974) with Carrière for production by Silberman and his Hollywood partners. The resulting film is a series of 12 distinctive episodes with separate protagonists, linked together only by following a character from one episode to another in a relay-race manner. Buñuel has stated that he made the film as a tribute to poet Benjamin Péret, a founding member of French Surrealism, and called it his "most Surrealist film".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel's final film was "That Obscure Object of Desire" (1977), adapted by Buñuel and Carrière from an 1898 novel by Pierre Louÿs called "La Femme et le pantin", which had already been used as the basis of films directed by Josef von Sternberg ("The Devil is a Woman", 1935) and Julien Duvivier ("La Femme et le Pantin", 1959). The film, which tells the story of an older man who is obsessed by a young woman who continually evades his attempts to consummate a sexual relationship, starred the Spanish actor Fernando Rey, appearing in his fourth Buñuel film. Initially, the part of the young woman was to be played by Maria Schneider, who had achieved international fame for her roles in "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Passenger", but once shooting started, according to Carrière, her drug usage resulted in a "lackluster and dull" performance that caused tempestuous arguments with Buñuel on the set and her eventual dismissal. Silberman, the producer, decided to abandon the project at that point, but was convinced by Buñuel to continue shooting with two different actresses, Ángela Molina and Carole Bouquet playing the same role in alternating sequences throughout the film. In his autobiography, Buñuel claimed that this unusual casting decision was his own idea after drinking two dry martinis, saying: "If I had to list all the benefits derived from alcohol, it would be endless". Others have reported that Carrière had first broached the idea while developing the film's scenario, but had been brushed off by Buñuel as "the whim of a rainy day".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: After the release of "That Obscure Object of Desire", Buñuel retired from filmmaking. In 1982, he wrote (along with Carrière) his autobiography, "Mon Dernier Soupir" ("My Last Sigh"), which provides an account of his life, friends, and family as well as a representation of his eccentric personality. In it, he recounts dreams, encounters with many well-known writers, actors, and artists such as Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin as well as antics, like dressing up as a nun and walking around town.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In his seventies, Buñuel once told his friend, novelist Carlos Fuentes: "I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of dying alone in a hotel room, with my bags open and a shooting script on the night table. I must know whose fingers will close my eyes." According to his wife, Jeanne, Buñuel died in Mexico City in 1983 from diabetes complications. Fuentes has recounted that Buñuel spent his last week in hospital discussing theology with the Jesuit brother Julián Pablo Fernández, a long time friend. His funeral was very private, involving only family and close friends, among them poets Octavio Paz and Homero Aridjis.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Starting at age 17, Buñuel steadily dated the future poet and dramatist Concha Méndez, with whom he vacationed every summer at San Sebastián. He introduced her to his friends at the Residencia as his fiancée. After five years, she broke off the relationship, citing Buñuel's "insufferable character".


title: Luis Buñuel

text: During his student years, Buñuel became an accomplished hypnotist. He claimed that once, while calming a hysterical prostitute through hypnotic suggestion, he inadvertently put one of the several bystanders into a trance as well. He was often to insist that watching movies was a form of hypnosis: "This kind of cinematographic hypnosis is no doubt due to the darkness of the theatre and to the rapidly changing scenes, lights, and camera movements, which weaken the spectator's critical intelligence and exercise over him a kind of fascination."


title: Luis Buñuel

text: In 1926 he met his future wife, Jeanne Rucar Lefebvre, a gymnastics teacher who had won a bronze medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics. Buñuel courted her in a formal Aragonese manner, complete with a chaperone, and they married in 1934 despite a warning by Jean Epstein when Buñuel first proposed in 1930: "Jeanne, you are making a mistake... It's not right for you, don't marry him." The two remained married throughout his life and had two sons, Juan Luis and Rafael. Diego Buñuel, filmmaker and host of the National Geographic Channel's "Don't Tell My Mother" series, is their grandson.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel's technique of filmmaking was strongly influenced by mise-en-scène, sound editing and use of music. The influences on his filmmaking have included a positive relationship to surrealism and a critical approach to atheism and religion. Buñuel's style of directing was extremely economical; he shot films in a few weeks, rarely deviating from his script (the scene in "Tristana" where Catherine Deneuve exposes her breasts to Saturno – but not the audience – being a noted exception) and shooting as much as possible in order to minimize editing time. He remained true throughout his working life to an operating philosophy that he articulated at the beginning of his career in 1928: "The guiding idea, the silent procession of images that are concrete, decisive, measured in space and time—in a word, the film—was first projected inside the brain of the filmmaker". In this, Buñuel has been compared with Alfred Hitchcock, another director famous for precision, efficiency and preplanning, for whom actually shooting the film was an anticlimax, since each man would know, in Buñuel's words, "exactly how each scene will be shot and what the final montage will be". According to actress Jeanne Moreau: "He was the only director I know who never threw away a shot. He had the film in his mind. When he said 'action' and 'cut,' you knew that what was in between the two would be printed."


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel has been portrayed as a character in many films and television productions. A portion of the television mini-series "Lorca, muerte de un poeta" (1987–1988), directed by Juan Antonio Bardem recreates the student years of Buñuel, Lorca and Dalí, with Fernando Valverde portraying Buñuel in two episodes. He was played by Dimiter Guerasimof in the 1991 biopic "Dalí", directed by Antoni Ribas, despite the fact that Dalí and his attorney had written to Ribas objecting to the project in its early stages in 1985. Buñuel appeared as a character in Alejandro Pelayo's 1993 film "Miroslava", based on the life of actress Miroslava Stern, who committed suicide after appearing in "Ensayo de un crimen" (1955). Buñuel was played by three actors, El Gran Wyoming (old age), Pere Arquillué (young adult) and Juan Carlos Jiménez Marín (child), in Carlos Saura's 2001 fantasy, "Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón", which tells of Buñuel, Lorca and Dalí setting out in search of the mythical table of King Salomón, which is thought to have the power to see into the past, the present and the future. Buñuel was a character in a 2001 television miniseries "Severo Ochoa: La conquista de un Nobel", on the life of the Spanish émigré and Nobel Prize winner in medicine, who was also at the Residencia de Estudiantes during Buñuel's time there. Matt Lucas portrayed Buñuel in Richard Curson Smith's 2002 TV movie "Surrealissimo: The Scandalous Success of Salvador Dalí", a comedy depicting Dalí's "trial" by the Surrealists in 1934 for his pro-Hitler sympathies. A 2005 short called "The Death of Salvador Dali", directed by Delaney Bishop, contains sequences in which Buñuel appears, played by Alejandro Cardenas. Paul Morrison's "Little Ashes" hypothesizes a love affair between Dalí and Lorca, with Buñuel (played by Matthew McNulty) looking on suspiciously. Buñuel, played by Adrien de Van, is one of many notable personalities encountered by Woody Allen's protagonist in "Midnight in Paris" (2011). In 2019, Fermín Solís published a graphic novel titled "Buñuel en el Laberinto de las Tortugas" (english translation, 2021: "Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles") depecting the creation of "Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan". An animated film of the book was released in 2019, directed by Salvador Simó.


title: Luis Buñuel

text: Buñuel was given the Career Golden Lion in 1982 by the Venice Film Festival and the FIPRESCI Prize – Honorable Mention in 1969 by the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1977, he received the National Prize for Arts and Sciences for Fine Arts. At the 11th Moscow International Film Festival in 1979, he was awarded the Honorable Prize for his contribution to cinema. He was nominated once for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968.


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: Kelvin Harrison Jr. (born July 23, 1994) is an American actor. He is the recipient of such accolades as a Screen Actors Guild Award and nominations for a British Academy Film Award, Gotham Award, an Independent Spirit Award.


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: He began his career with small roles in the 2013 films "Ender's Game" and "12 Years a Slave". His breakthrough performance came as Travis in the 2017 horror film "It Comes at Night", and in 2019 he gained wider recognition for his work in "Luce" and "Waves". He then appeared in films such as "The High Note" (2020), "The Trial of the Chicago 7" (2020), "Cyrano" (2021) and "Elvis" (2022).


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: Harrison was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to musicians Shirlita and Kelvin Harrison. He grew up in the Garden District and later moved to The Westbank. He studied studio engineering and marketing, before moving to Los Angeles, California to pursue acting, where he began taking acting classes. He is also a skilled musician, mainly playing jazz and gospel on the piano, trumpet, as well as singing. His father was trained by Ellis Marsalis and grew up with Harry Connick Jr. Harrison studied under Jason Marsalis, recorded with Delfeayo Marsalis, and met Wynton Marsalis.


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: Harrison attended a private high school, where he was one of the few black kids in his class and struggled to fit in. He originally went to Loyola University New Orleans to major in studio engineering as his father felt he would excel in music. Harrison ultimately transferred to the University of New Orleans for film, with the goal of writing and directing his own films.


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: In 2012, Harrison was cast in "Ender's Game", based on the 1985 novel. He was upgraded to day-player and interacted with actors such as Viola Davis, Harrison Ford, and Ben Kingsley. Harrison credits Davis with making him take acting more seriously. He then had a small role in "12 Years a Slave". Harrison would later appear in an episode of WGN America's "Underground" and the 2016 remake of "Roots", both of which were produced in his home state of Louisiana. That same year, the actor had a small role in Nate Parker's "The Birth of a Nation". Harrison was initially hesitant to participate in "Roots" in part because it would be his fourth portrayal of a slave, and he did not have fond memories of watching the original as a child. In retrospect, Harrison realized just how different the projects were. In the meantime, Harrison landed a supporting role on Fox miniseries "Shots Fired" as well as a recurring role as Touie Dacey on Crackle's "StartUp"


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: Harrison began the year with a small supporting role in the Netflix acquired Dee Rees' "Mudbound", which opened at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. Later that year, he played the role of Travis in Trey Edward Shults' 2017 psychological horror film "It Comes at Night". The film focuses on a family hiding in a forest as the Earth is taken over by a highly contagious disease. The film had its premiere at the Overlook Film Festival at Timberline Lodge in Oregon on April 29, 2017 and was theatrically released on June 9, 2017 in the United States by A24, was received positively by critics and grossed over $19 million worldwide. Harrison received praise for his performance, getting nominated for Breakthrough Actor at the Gotham Awards that year. He has credited the role for giving him a reason to continue his acting career.


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: In 2018, Harrison notably starred in three films that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, which were "Monsters and Men", "Assassination Nation" & "Monster". In Reinaldo Marcus Green's "Monsters and Men", he portrays Zyrick, a gifted teenage baseball player that becomes politically awakened after seeing a video of a man murdered by the police. In Sam Levinson's "Assassination Nation" he has a smaller role as Mason, a friend of the female protagonists and in Anthony Mandler's "Monster", based on the Walter Dean Myers novel of the same name, Harrison plays Steve Harmon, a seventeen-year-old honour student whose world comes crashing down around him when he is charged with felony murder. "Assassination Nation" and "Monsters and Men" both got releases in the same year while "Monster" acquired a distribution deal with Netflix in 2021. He followed these up with supporting roles in the dramas "Jinn" and "JT LeRoy".


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: 2019 saw Harrison starring in two films that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, social thriller "Luce" and psychological thriller "The Wolf Hour", both starring Naomi Watts. For his titular role in Julius Onah's "Luce" alongside Octavia Spencer and Tim Roth, Harrison received critical acclaim as the all-star high school athlete and accomplished public speaker born in war-torn Eritrea adopted in the United States. Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Harrison's performance, at once slippery and surgically precise, compounds that ambiguity in ingenious fashion. He exhibits a quality that might have seemed like mere self-consciousness in a different actor's hands". "Harrison was nominated for Best Male Lead at the Independent Spirit Awards for his performance in the film.


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: Harrison later played Jesse in Nabil Elderkin's directorial debut "Gully". The film had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 27, 2019 and eventually found a national theatrical release on June 4, 2021. Harrison's major breakthrough of the year came with "Waves", which premiered to critical acclaim at the Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2019 and found him reuniting with "It Comes at Night" writer & director Trey Edward Shults. In the film, Harrison plays Tyler Williams, a popular high school senior and competitive wrestler whose life goes into disarray after suffering a career-ending injury. Shults stated that he wrote and tailored the role for Harrison, wanting to work with him again after their previous collaboration. Harrison's performance in the film received rave reviews, with many critics favorably comparing and contrasting it to his performance in "Luce". IndieWire's Eric Kohn stated that the two performances pushed him forward as 'the preeminent face of disgruntled teenage life'. The film is notable for widening his international exposure, leading to a BAFTA Rising Star Award nomination. He capped off the year with a supporting performance as musician Teddy Greene in the first season of Epix's "Godfather of Harlem" alongside Forest Whitaker.


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: The first half of 2020 saw Harrison venturing into more lighthearted and comedic roles, ranging from his studio debut in a smaller supporting role in Stella Meghie's romance film "The Photograph" to the male lead in Nisha Ganatra's musical comedy-drama "The High Note". In the latter Harrison plays David Cliff, a singer-songwriter who acts as the love interest to Dakota Johnson's Maggie. To prepare for the film and its soundtrack, Harrison worked with a vocal coach for 45 minutes a day, to expand his range, and took guitar lessons. He ended the year with a portrayal of revolutionary socialist Fred Hampton in Aaron Sorkin's biographical ensemble courtroom drama "The Trial of the Chicago 7", It was released in selected theaters on September 25, 2020, and began streaming digitally on Netflix on October 16. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards and Harrison and the rest of the cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: In 2021, Harrison portrayed Christian in Joe Wright's "Cyrano", a musical film adaptation of the Off-Broadway play by Erica Schmidt, itself based on the 1897 Edmond Rostand play Cyrano de Bergerac. Harrison was slated to appear in the second season of HBO's "Euphoria", which would have reunited him with "Assassination Nation" director Sam Levinson, but dropped out due to conflicting schedules attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: Harrison portrayed iconic musician B.B. King in Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis", a biopic about the musician of the same name.


title: Kelvin Harrison Jr.

text: In March 2021, he was cast in the titular role of classic composer Joseph Bologne in "Chevalier", directed by Stephen Williams. In August 2021, it was announced that Harrison will star in Barry Jenkins's follow-up to "The Lion King", as the voice of young Scar. In January 2022, it was reported that Harrison will portray the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in "Samo Lives", a biopic that will reunite him with "Luce" director Julius Onah.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The siege of Jerusalem of 70 CE was the decisive event of the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE), in which the Roman army led by future emperor Titus besieged Jerusalem, the center of Jewish rebel resistance in the Roman province of Judaea. Following a brutal five-month siege, the Romans destroyed the city and the Second Jewish Temple.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: In April 70 CE, three days before Passover, the Roman army started besieging Jerusalem. The city had been taken over by several rebel factions following a period of massive unrest and the collapse of a short-lived provisional government. Within three weeks, the Roman army broke the first two walls of the city, but a stubborn rebel standoff prevented them from penetrating the thickest and third wall. According to Josephus, a contemporary historian and the main source for the war, the city was ravaged by murder, famine and cannibalism.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: On Tisha B'Av, 70 CE (August 30), Roman forces finally overwhelmed the defenders and set fire to the Temple. Resistance continued for another month, but eventually the upper and lower parts of the city were taken as well, and the city was burned to the ground. Titus spared only the three towers of the Herodian citadel as a testimony to the city's former might. Josephus wrote that over a million people perished in the siege and the subsequent fighting. While contemporary studies dispute this figure, all agree that the siege had a major toll on human life, with many people being killed and enslaved, and large parts of the city destroyed. This victory gave the Flavian dynasty legitimacy to claim control over the empire. A triumph was held in Rome to celebrate the fall of Jerusalem, and two triumphal arches were built to commemorate it. The treasures looted from the Temple were put on display.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple marked a major turning point in Jewish history. The loss of mother-city and temple necessitated a reshaping of Jewish culture to ensure its survival. Judaism's Temple-based sects, including the priesthood and the Sadducees, diminished in importance. A new form of Judaism that became known as Rabbinic Judaism developed out of Pharisaic school and eventually became the mainstream form of the religion. Many followers of Jesus of Nazareth also survived the city's destruction. They spread his teachings across the Roman Empire, giving rise to the new religion of Christianity. After the war had ended, a military camp of Legio X Fretensis was established on the city's ruins. Jerusalem was later re-founded as the Roman colony of Aelia Capitolina. Foreign cults were introduced and Jews were forbidden entry. This event is often considered one of the catalysts for the Bar Kokhba revolt.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: During the Second Temple Period, Jerusalem was the center of religious and national life for Jews, including those in the Diaspora. The Second Temple attracted tens and maybe hundreds of thousands during the Three Pilgrimage Festivals. The city reached a peak in size and population during the late Second Temple period, when the city covered and had an estimated population of 200,000. In his "Natural History," Pliny the Elder celebrated it as "by far, the most famous of the cities of the East".


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: In the early Roman period, Jerusalem had two distinct precincts. The first encompassed the regions within the "first wall", the City of David and the Upper City, and was heavily built up, though less so at its wealthy parts. The second, known as the "suburb" or "Bethesda", lay north of the first and was sparsely populated. It contained that section of Jerusalem within the Herodian "second wall" (which was still standing), though it was itself surrounded by the new "third wall", built by king Agrippa I. Josephus stated that Agrippa wanted to build a wall at least 5 meters thick, literally impenetrable by contemporary siege engines. Agrippa, however, never moved beyond the foundations, out of fear of emperor Claudius "lest he should suspect that so strong a wall was built in order to make some innovation in public affairs." It was only completed later, to a lesser strength and in much haste, when the First Jewish–Roman War broke out and the defenses of Jerusalem had to be bolstered. Nine towers adorned the third wall.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The First Jewish–Roman War, also known as the Great Jewish Revolt, broke following the appointment of prefect Gessius Florus and his demand to receive Temple funds. Nero entrusted the job of crushing the rebellion in Judaea to Vespasian, a talented and unassuming general. In early 68 CE, Roman General Vespasian landed at Ptolemais and began suppression of the revolt with operations in the Galilee. By July 69 all of Judea but Jerusalem had been pacified and the city, now hosting rebel leaders from all over the country, came under Roman siege. A fortified stronghold, it may have held for a significant amount of time, if not for the intense civil war that then broke out between moderates and Zealots. In the summer of 69 CE, Vespasian departed Judea for Rome and in December became Emperor, with command of the Roman legions passing to his son Titus.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Josephus places the siege in the second year of Vespasian, which corresponds to year 70 of the Common Era. Titus began his siege a few days before Passover, on 14 Xanthicus (April), surrounding the city with three legions (V "Macedonica", XII "Fulminata", XV "Apollinaris") on the western side and a fourth (X "Fretensis") on the Mount of Olives, to the east. If the reference in his "Jewish War" at 6:421 is to Titus's siege, though difficulties exist with its interpretation, then at the time, according to Josephus, Jerusalem was thronged with many people who had come to celebrate Passover.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The thrust of the siege began in the west at the Third Wall, north of the Jaffa Gate. By May, this was breached and the Second Wall also was taken shortly afterwards, leaving the defenders in possession of the Temple and the upper and lower city.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The Jewish defenders were split into factions. Simon Bar Giora and John of Giscala, the two prominent Zealot leaders, placed all blame for the failure of the revolt on the shoulders of the moderate leadership. John of Gischala's group murdered another faction leader, Eleazar ben Simon, whose men were entrenched in the forecourts of the Temple. The Zealots resolved to prevent the city from falling into Roman hands by all means necessary, including the murder of political opponents and anyone standing in their way. There were still those wishing to negotiate with the Romans and bring a peaceful end to the siege. The most prominent of these was Yohanan ben Zakkai, whose students smuggled him out of the city in a coffin in order to deal with Vespasian. This, however, was insufficient to deal with the madness that had now gripped the Zealot leadership in Jerusalem and the reign of terror it unleashed upon the population of the city. Josephus describes various acts of savagery committed against the people by its own leadership, including the torching of the city's food supply in an apparent bid to force the defenders to fight for their lives.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The enmities between John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora were papered over only when the Roman siege engineers began to erect ramparts. Titus then had a wall built to girdle the city in order to starve out the population more effectively. After several failed attempts to breach or scale the walls of the Fortress of Antonia, the Romans finally launched a secret attack. Despite early successes in repelling the Roman sieges, the Zealots fought amongst themselves, and they lacked proper leadership, resulting in poor discipline, training, and preparation for the battles that were to follow. At one point they destroyed the food stocks in the city, a drastic measure thought to have been undertaken perhaps in order to enlist a merciful God's intervention on behalf of the besieged Jews, or as a stratagem to make the defenders more desperate, supposing that was necessary in order to repel the Roman army.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: According to Josephus, when the Romans reached Antonia they tried to destroy the wall which protected it. They removed four stones only, but during the night the wall collapsed. "That night the wall was so shaken by the battering rams in that place where John had used his stratagem before, and had undermined their banks, that the ground then gave way, and the wall fell down suddenly." (v. 28)


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Josephus goes on to say that the Jews then attacked the Romans on the east, near the Mount of Olives, but Titus drove them back to the valley. Zealots set the north-west colonnade on fire (v. 165). The Romans set the next one on fire, and the Jews wanted it to burn (v. 166), and they also trapped some Roman soldiers when they wanted to climb over the wall. They had burned wood under the wall when Romans were trapped on it (v.178–183).


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: After Jewish allies killed a number of Roman soldiers, Josephus claims that Titus sent him to negotiate with the defenders; this ended with Jews wounding the negotiator with an arrow, and another sally was launched shortly after. Titus was almost captured during this sudden attack, but escaped.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Overlooking the Temple compound, the fortress provided a perfect point from which to attack the Temple itself. Battering rams made little progress, but the fighting itself eventually set the walls on fire; a Roman soldier threw a burning stick onto one of the Temple's walls. Destroying the Temple was not among Titus's goals, possibly due in large part to the massive expansions done by Herod the Great mere decades earlier. Titus had wanted to seize it and transform it into a temple dedicated to the Roman Emperor and the Roman pantheon. However, the fire spread quickly and was soon out of control. The Temple was captured and destroyed on 9/10 Tisha B'Av, sometime in August 70 CE, and the flames spread into the residential sections of the city. Josephus described the scene:


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: As the legions charged in, neither persuasion nor threat could check their impetuosity: passion alone was in command. Crowded together around the entrances many were trampled by their friends, many fell among the still hot and smoking ruins of the colonnades and died as miserably as the defeated. As they neared the Sanctuary they pretended not even to hear Caesar's commands and urged the men in front to throw in more firebrands. The partisans were no longer in a position to help; everywhere was slaughter and flight. Most of the victims were peaceful citizens, weak and unarmed, butchered wherever they were caught. Round the Altar the heaps of corpses grew higher and higher, while down the Sanctuary steps poured a river of blood and the bodies of those killed at the top slithered to the bottom.Josephus's account absolves Titus of any culpability for the destruction of the Temple, but this may merely reflect his desire to procure favor with the Flavian dynasty.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The Roman legions quickly crushed the remaining Jewish resistance. Some of the remaining Jews escaped through hidden tunnels and sewers, while others made a final stand in the Upper City. This defense halted the Roman advance as they had to construct siege towers to assail the remaining Jews. Herod's Palace fell on 7 September, and the city was completely under Roman control by 8 September. The Romans continued to pursue those who had fled the city.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The account of Josephus described Titus as moderate in his approach and, after conferring with others, ordering that the 500-year-old Temple be spared. According to Josephus, it was the Jews who first used fire in the Northwest approach to the Temple to try and stop Roman advances. Only then did Roman soldiers set fire to an apartment adjacent to the Temple, starting a conflagration which the Jews subsequently made worse.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Josephus had acted as a mediator for the Romans and, when negotiations failed, witnessed the siege and aftermath. He wrote:


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Now as soon as the army had no more people to slay or to plunder, because there remained none to be the objects of their fury (for they would not have spared any, had there remained any other work to be done), [Titus] Caesar gave orders that they should now demolish the entire city and Temple, but should leave as many of the towers standing as they were of the greatest eminence; that is, Phasaelus, and Hippicus, and Mariamne; and so much of the wall enclosed the city on the west side. This wall was spared, in order to afford a camp for such as were to lie in garrison [in the Upper City], as were the towers [the three forts] also spared, in order to demonstrate to posterity what kind of city it was, and how well fortified, which the Roman valor had subdued; but for all the rest of the wall [surrounding Jerusalem], it was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it [Jerusalem] had ever been inhabited. This was the end which Jerusalem came to by the madness of those that were for innovations; a city otherwise of great magnificence, and of mighty fame among all mankind.<br>


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: And truly, the very view itself was a melancholy thing; for those places which were adorned with trees and pleasant gardens, were now become desolate country every way, and its trees were all cut down. Nor could any foreigner that had formerly seen Judaea and the most beautiful suburbs of the city, and now saw it as a desert, but lament and mourn sadly at so great a change. For the war had laid all signs of beauty quite waste. Nor had anyone who had known the place before, had come on a sudden to it now, would he have known it again. But though he [a foreigner] were at the city itself, yet would he have inquired for it.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Over the years, various remains that provide evidence of Jerusalem's destruction have been discovered, leading scholars to believe that Josephus' description is accurate. Ronny Reich wrote that "While remains relating to the destruction of the Temple are scant, those pertaining to the Temple Mount walls and their close vicinity, the Upper City, the western part of the city, and the Tyropoeon Valley are considerable. [...] It was found that in most cases the archaeological record coincides with the historical description, pointing to Josephus' reliability".


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: In the 1970s and 1980s, a team led by Nahman Avigad discovered traces of great fire that damaged the Upper City's residential buildings. The fires consumed all organic matter. In houses where there was a beamed ceiling between the floors, the fire caused the top of the building to collapse with the top rows of stone, along with the top rows of stone, and they buried everything that remained in the home under them. There are buildings where traces remain only in part of the house, and there are buildings that have been completely burned. Calcium oxides have been discovered in several locations, indicating that a lengthy burning damaged the limestones. The Burnt House in the Herodian Quarter, for example, shows signs of a fire that raged at the site during the city's destruction.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The fire left its mark even on household utensils and objects that were in the same buildings. Limestone vessels were stained with ash or even burned and turned into lime, glass vessels exploded and warped from the heat of the fire until they could not be recovered in the laboratory. In contrast, pottery and basalt survived. The layer of ash and charred wood left over from the fires reached a height of about an average meter, and the rock falls reached up to two meters and more.The great urban drainage channel and the Pool of Siloam in the Lower City silted up and stopped working, and the city walls collapsed in numerous places.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Massive stone collapses from the Temple Mount's walls were discovered laying over the Herodian street that runs along the Western Wall. Among these stones is the Trumpeting Place inscription, a monumental Hebrew inscription which was thrown down by Roman legionnaires during the destruction of the Temple.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Jerusalem was completely destroyed at the end of the siege; it is improbable that many Jews survived in Jerusalem or the surrounding area. Before and during the siege, according to Josephus, there were multiple waves of desertions from the city.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Josephus wrote that 1.1 million people were killed during the siege, of which a majority were Jewish. Josephus attributes this to the celebration of Passover which he uses as rationale for the vast number of people present among the death toll. The revolt had not deterred pilgrims from Jewish diaspora communities from trekking to Jerusalem to visit the Temple during the holiday, and a large number became trapped in the city and perished during the siege. Armed rebels, as well as the frail citizens, were put to death. All of Jerusalem's remaining citizens became Roman prisoners. After the Romans killed the armed and elder people, 97,000 were enslaved. Of the 97,000, thousands were forced to become gladiators and eventually expired in the arena. Many others were forced to assist in the building of the Forum of Peace and the Colosseum. Those under 17 years of age were sold into servitude.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Josephus' death toll assumptions were rejected as impossible by Seth Schwartz, as according to his estimates at that time about a million people lived in Palestine, about half of whom were Jews, and sizable Jewish populations remained in the area after the war was over, even in the hard-hit region of Judea. Schwartz, however, believes that the captive number of 97,000 is more reliable.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Titus and his soldiers celebrated victory upon their return to Rome by parading the Menorah and Table of the Bread of God's Presence through the streets. Up until this parading, these items had only ever been seen by the High Priest of the Temple. This event was memorialized in the Arch of Titus.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Some 700 Judean prisoners were paraded through the streets of Rome in chains during the triumph, among them Simon bar Giora and John of Giscala. Simon bar Giora was executed by being thrown to his death from the Tarpeian Rock at the Temple of Jupiter after being judged a rebel and a traitor, while John of Giscala was sentenced to life imprisonment.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: According to Philostratus, writing in the early years of the 3rd century, Titus reportedly refused to accept a wreath of victory, saying that the victory did not come through his own efforts but that he had merely served as an instrument of divine wrath.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: After the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the city and its temple, there were still a few Judean strongholds in which the rebels continued holding out, at Herodium, Machaerus, and Masada. Both Herodium and Machaerus fell to the Roman army within the next two years, with Masada remaining as the final stronghold of the Judean rebels. In 73 CE, the Romans breached the walls of Masada and captured the fortress, with Josephus claiming that nearly all of the Jewish defenders had committed mass suicide prior to the entry of the Romans. With the fall of Masada, the First Jewish–Roman War came to an end.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Six decades after the suppression of the revolt, another revolt known as the Bar Kokhba revolt erupted in Judaea in 132 CE. The construction of a roman colony named Aelia Capitolina over the ruins of Jerusalem and the construction of a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount, among other things, are thought to have been major catalysts for the revolt.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Supported by the Sanhedrin, Simon Bar Kosiba (later known as Bar Kokhba) established a short-lived independent state that was conquered by the Romans in 135 CE. The revolt resulted in the extensive depopulation of Judean communities, more so than during the First Jewish–Roman War. The Jewish communities of Judea were devastated to an extent which some scholars describe as a genocide. However, the Jewish population remained strong in other parts of Palestine, thriving in Galilee, Golan, Bet Shean Valley, and the eastern, southern, and western edges of Judea. Emperor Hadrian wiped the name Judaea off the map and replaced it with Syria Palaestina.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The Jewish Amoraim attributed the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem as punishment from God for the "baseless" hatred that pervaded Jewish society at the time. Many Jews in despair are thought to have abandoned Judaism for some version of paganism, many others sided with the growing Christian sect within Judaism.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The destruction was an important point in the separation of Christianity from its Jewish roots: many Christians responded by distancing themselves from the rest of Judaism, as reflected in the Gospels, which portray Jesus as anti-Temple and view the destruction of the temple as punishment for rejection of Jesus.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: Jerusalem retained its importance in Jewish life and culture even after its destruction, and it became a symbol of hope for return, rebuilding and renewal of national life. The belief in a Third Temple remains a cornerstone of Orthodox Judaism. This belief is embedded in Orthodox Jewish prayer services. Three times a day, Orthodox Jews recite the Amidah, which contains prayers for the Temple's restoration and for the resumption of sacrifices, and every day there is a recitation of the order of the day's sacrifices and the psalms the Levites would have sung that day.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The Flavian dynasty celebrated the fall of Jerusalem by building two monumental triumphal arches. The Arch of Titus, which stills stands today, was built 82 CE by the Roman Emperor Domitian on Via Sacra, Rome, to commemorate the siege and fall of Jerusalem. The bas-relief on the arch depicts soldiers carrying spoils from the Temple, including the Menorah, during a victory procession. A second, less known Arch of Titus constructed at the southeast entrance to the Circus Maximus was built by the Senate in 82 CE. Only a few traces of it remain today.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: In 75 CE, the Temple of Peace, also known as the Forum of Vespasian, was built under Emperor Vespasian in Rome. The monument was built to celebrate the conquest of Jerusalem and it is said to have housed the Temple Menorah from Herod's Temple.


title: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

text: The Colosseum, otherwise known as the Flavian Amphitheater, built in Rome between 70 and 82 CE, is believed to have been partially financed by the spoils of the Roman victory over the Jews. Archaeological discoveries have found a block of travertine that bears dowel holes that show the Jewish Wars financed the building of the amphitheater.


title: Vampire Weekend

text: Vampire Weekend is an American rock band from New York City, formed in 2006 and currently signed to Columbia Records. The band was formed by lead vocalist and guitarist Ezra Koenig, multi-instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij, drummer Chris Tomson, and bassist Chris Baio. Batmanglij departed the group in early 2016.


title: Vampire Weekend

text: The band's eponymous first album "Vampire Weekend" (2008)—which included charting singles "A-Punk" and "Oxford Comma"—showcased a blend of indie pop, Afropop influences, and chamber music elements, and has been hailed as one of the greatest debut albums. Their following album, "Contra" (2010), was similarly acclaimed and garnered strong commercial success with debuted at number one on the US "Billboard" 200; it featured the single "Holiday". Their subsequent studio albums "Modern Vampires of the City" (2013) and "Father of the Bride" (2019) continued its success, with each album topping the US chart and winning the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album in their respective years.


title: Vampire Weekend

text: The band members met while enrolled at Columbia University, beginning with a rap collaboration between Koenig and Tomson named "L'Homme Run". They bonded over a shared love of punk rock and African music. Koenig toured with The Dirty Projectors during a period of experimentation with African music, inspiring the band to incorporate world sounds into their earliest work. The band chose the name "Vampire Weekend" from the title of a short film project Koenig worked on during the summer between freshman and sophomore years in college. While home for the summer, Koenig watched the 1987 vampire film "The Lost Boys" and was inspired to make a Northeastern version of the film in which a man named Walcott travels to Cape Cod to warn the mayor that vampires are attacking the United States. Koenig abandoned the project after two days. The band began playing shows around Columbia University, starting with a battle of the bands at Lerner Hall in 2006. After graduating from college, the band self-produced their debut album while simultaneously working full-time jobs, Tomson as a music archivist and Koenig as a middle school English teacher.


title: Vampire Weekend

text: In 2007, Vampire Weekend's song "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" was ranked 67th on "Rolling Stone"'s list of the "100 Best Songs of the Year". In November 2007, they toured the UK with The Shins.