title: Arin (singer)

text: On April 20, 2015, Arin debuted as a member of Oh My Girl. She first performed their debut single on SBS MTV's "The Show" on April 21. On April 2, 2018, Arin debuted in Oh My Girl's first sub-unit, Oh My Girl Banhana. On September 7, 2019, it was announced that Arin would be appearing on XtvN's "The Ultimate Watchlist 2". In August 2019, it was confirmed that Arin would be taking part in "Queendom".


title: Arin (singer)

text: On July 20, 2020, Arin was announced as the new host for "Music Bank" with Choi Soo-bin of TXT. Their last broadcast from the role was on October 1, 2021.


title: Arin (singer)

text: In June 2022, she was cast in a supporting role in the tvN hit fantasy period drama "Alchemy of Souls".


title: Arin (singer)

text: On June 18, 2021, it was announced that Arin donated million to The Beautiful Foundation in honor of her 22nd birthday. Her donations will be used for supporting young adults who are living alone and have been discharged from child care facilities and foster care.


title: Arin (singer)

text: On August 11, 2022, Arin donated to help those affected by the 2022 South Korean floods through the Hope Bridge Korea Disaster Relief Association.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: Priscilla (; , "Priskilla" or "Priscila") and Aquila (; , "Akylas") were a first century Christian missionary married couple described in the New Testament. Aquila is traditionally listed among the Seventy Disciples. They lived, worked, and traveled with the Apostle Paul, who described them as his "fellow workers in Christ Jesus" ().


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: Priscilla and Aquila are described in the New Testament as providing a presence that strengthened the early Christian churches. Paul was generous in his recognition and acknowledgment of his indebtedness to them (). Together, they are credited with instructing Apollos, a major evangelist of the first century, and "[explaining] to him the way of God more accurately" ().


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: It is thought by some to be possible, in light of her apparent prominence, that Priscilla held the office of presbyter. She also is thought by some to be the anonymous author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: They are mentioned six times in four different books of the New Testament, always named as a couple and never individually. Of those six references, Aquila's name is mentioned first only twice: and one of the times on account of it being Paul's first encounter with them, probably through Aquila first. Priscilla's name is mentioned first on four occasions; this may indicate her equal status with her husband, or even possibly that Priscilla was thought of as the more prominent teacher and disciple. In 1900, Adolf von Harnack suggested that Priscilla wrote the epistle to the Hebrews.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: The Christian Church, beginning with Jesus, had a radical view of the status of women. Jesus demonstrated that he valued women and men equally as being made in the image of God. Luke clearly indicates Priscilla's "agency and her interdependent relationship with her husband. She is certainly not Aquila’s property – as was customary in Greco-Roman society – but rather his partner in ministry and marriage".


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: Priscilla and Aquila were tentmakers as was Paul. Priscilla and Aquila had been among the Jews expelled from Rome by the Roman Emperor Claudius in the year 49 as written by Suetonius. They ended up in Corinth. Paul lived with Priscilla and Aquila for approximately 18 months. Then the couple started out to accompany Paul when he proceeded to Syria, but stopped at Ephesus in the Roman province of Asia, now part of modern Turkey.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: In , Paul passes on the greetings of Priscilla and Aquila to their friends in Corinth, indicating that the couple were in his company. Paul founded the church in Corinth. His including them in his greetings implies that Priscilla and Aquila were also involved in the founding of that church. Since 1 Corinthians discusses a crisis deriving from a conflict between the followers of Apollos and the "followers of Cephas" (possibly the apostle Peter), it can be inferred that Apollos accompanied Priscilla and Aquila when they returned to Corinth. This happened before 54, when Claudius died and the expulsion of the Jews from Rome was lifted.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: In , thought to have been written in 56 or 57, Paul sends his greetings to Priscilla and Aquila and proclaims that both of them "risked their necks" to save Paul's life.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: Priscilla was a woman of Jewish heritage and one of the earliest known Christian converts who lived in Rome. Her name is a Roman diminutive for "Prisca" which was her formal name. She is often thought to have been the first example of a female preacher or teacher in early church history. Coupled with her husband, she was a celebrated missionary, and a friend and co-worker of Paul.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: While the view is not widely held among scholars, some scholars have suggested that Priscilla was the author of the Book of Hebrews. Although acclaimed for its artistry, originality, and literary excellence, it is the only book in the New Testament with author anonymity. Hoppin and others suggest that Priscilla was the author, but that her name was omitted either to suppress its female authorship, or to protect the letter itself from suppression.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: She is the only Priscilla named in the New Testament. The fact that she is always mentioned with her husband, Aquila, disambiguates her from different women revered as saints in Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Lutheranism, such as (1) Priscilla of the Roman Glabrio family, the wife of Quintus Cornelius Pudens, who according to some traditions hosted St. Peter circa AD 42, and (2) a third-century virgin martyr named Priscilla and also called Prisca.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: Aquila, husband of Priscilla, was originally from Pontus and also was a Jewish Christian. According to church tradition, Aquila did not dwell long in Rome: the Apostle Paul is said to have made him a bishop in Asia Minor. The "Apostolic Constitutions" identify Aquila, along with Nicetas, as the first bishops of Asia Minor (7.46).


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: This couple were among the earliest known Christian missionaries in the first century. In , Luke reports the couple explaining Jesus' baptism to Apollos, an important Jewish-Christian evangelist in Ephesus. Paul indicates Apollos is an apostle, an "eloquent speaker" who had a "thorough knowledge of the Scriptures". He had been "instructed in the way of the Lord" which he taught with great "enthusiasm". He began to preach boldly in the synagogue. However, he knew only the baptism of John the Baptist—not the baptism taught by Jesus. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the Way of God to him "more accurately".


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: Amongst churches today, this passage is often held in perceived tension with , in which the author, Paul, writes, "I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor." Opponents of female pastorship cite his reference to Adam and Eve to be indicating that the issue is a matter of universal gender propriety. On the other hand, Catherine and Richard Kroeger have written:


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: The fact is that women did indeed teach men, that women served as leaders, and that in doing so they enjoyed God’s blessing and won the praise of other believers. Priscilla instructed the learned Apollos, Lois and Eunice taught Timothy, and Phoebe is named as an overseer and a deacon in the church at Cenchrea. Furthermore, believers are enjoined to teach and to learn from one another, without reference to gender.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: Advocates of female pastorship perceive this as an imperative that was a reflection of cultural and legal restrictions of the day. They cite , where Paul writes "Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God" and his affirmation of Priscilla's instruction of the prominent evangelist Apollos as evidence that Paul was acceding to the law and customs of his day.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: The appearance of the two in the Acts of the Apostles helps to provide a chronological synchronism for the chronology of Paul's life. According to , before Paul meets them in Corinth, they were part of a group of Jews whom the Emperor Claudius ordered expelled from Rome; if this edict of the Emperor can be dated, then we would be able to infer when Paul arrived in Corinth.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: The evidence of other ancient sources points to two possible periods during the reign of Claudius: either during his first regnal year (AD 41; so Dio Cassius, "Roman History" 60.6.6), or during his ninth regnal year (49; so Orosius, "Historia" 7.6.15f). As a result, the experts are divided over when this expulsion took place: some, like Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, argue for the earlier year, while others, like Joseph Fitzmyer, argue for the later year.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: Priscilla and Aquila are regarded as saints in most Christian churches that canonize saints. In the Catholic Church, the Roman Martyrology lists their feast as July 8. The Greek Orthodox Church and the Antiochian Orthodox Church commemorate them together on February 13.


title: Priscilla and Aquila

text: In addition, the Greek Orthodox Church recognizes Aquila separately as an apostle on July 14. The Lutheran Church commemorates them on the same day along with Apollos.


title: Nouméa

text: Nouméa () is the capital and largest city of the French special collectivity of New Caledonia and is also the largest francophone city in Oceania. It is situated on a peninsula in the south of New Caledonia's main island, Grande Terre, and is home to the majority of the island's European, Polynesian (Wallisians, Futunians, Tahitians), Indonesian, and Vietnamese populations, as well as many Melanesians, Ni-Vanuatu and Kanaks who work in one of the South Pacific's most industrialised cities. The city lies on a protected deepwater harbour that serves as the chief port for New Caledonia.


title: Nouméa

text: At the September 2019 census, there were 182,341 inhabitants in the metropolitan area of Greater Nouméa (), 94,285 of whom lived in the city (commune) of Nouméa proper. 67.2% of the population of New Caledonia live in Greater Nouméa, which covers the communes of Nouméa, Le Mont-Dore, Dumbéa and Païta.


title: Nouméa

text: The first European to establish a settlement in the vicinity was British trader James Paddon in 1851. Eager to assert control of the island, the French established a settlement nearby three years later in 1854, moving from Balade in the north of the island. This settlement was initially called Port-de-France and was renamed Nouméa in 1866. The area served first as a penal colony, later as a centre for the exportation of the nickel and gold that was mined nearby.


title: Nouméa

text: From 1904 to 1940, Nouméa was linked to Dumbéa and Païta by the Nouméa-Païta railway, the only railway line that ever existed in New Caledonia.


title: Nouméa

text: During World War II, the United States Navy built Naval Base Noumea and Nouméa served as the headquarters of the United States military in the South Pacific. The five-sided U.S. military headquarters complex was adopted after the war as the base for a new regional intergovernmental development organisation: the South Pacific Commission, later known as the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, and later still as the Pacific Community.


title: Nouméa

text: The city maintains much of New Caledonia's unique mix of French and old Melanesian culture. Even today the United States wartime military influence lingers, both with the warmth that many New Caledonian people feel towards the United States after experiencing the relative friendliness of American soldiers and also with the names of several of the quarters in Nouméa. Districts such as "Receiving" and "Robinson", or even "Motor Pool", strike the anglophone ear strangely, until the historical context becomes clear.


title: Nouméa

text: The city is situated on an irregular, hilly peninsula near the southeast end of New Caledonia, which is in the south-west Pacific Ocean.


title: Nouméa

text: Nouméa features a tropical savanna climate (Köppen: Aw) with hot summers and warm winters. Temperatures are warmer in the months of January, February and March with average highs hovering around 30 degrees Celsius and cooler during the months of July and August where average high temperatures are around 23 degrees Celsius. The capital's dry season months are September and October. The rest of the year is noticeably wetter. Nouméa on average receives roughly of precipitation annually.


title: Nouméa

text: The Greater Nouméa urban area () had a total population of 182,341 inhabitants at the September 2019 census, 94,285 of whom lived in the commune of Nouméa proper.


title: Nouméa

text: The places of birth of the 179,509 residents in the Greater Nouméa urban area at the 2014 census were the following:


title: Nouméa

text: The self-reported ethnic communities of the 182,341 residents in the Greater Nouméa urban area at the 2019 census were as follows:


title: Nouméa

text: At the 2009 census, 98.7% of the population in the Greater Nouméa urban area whose age was 15 years old and older reported that they could speak French. 97.1% reported that they could also read and write it. Only 1.3% of the population whose age was 15 years old and older had no knowledge of French.


title: Nouméa

text: At the same census, 20.8% of the population in the Greater Nouméa urban area whose age was 15 years old and older reported that they could speak at least one of the Kanak languages. 4.3% reported that they could understand a Kanak language but not speak it. 74.9% of the population whose age was 15 years old and older had no knowledge of any Kanak language.


title: Nouméa

text: Although it is not currently a major tourist destination, Nouméa is one of the most rapidly growing cities in the Pacific and has experienced a major housing construction boom in the preceding decade. The installation of amenities has kept pace and the municipality boasts a public works programme. The mayor of Noumea is Sonia Lagarde; in 2020 her re-election was opposed by the former leader of the Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises (CPME), Cherifa Linossier, whose unsuccessful campaign was based on local economic revitalisation.


title: Nouméa

text: Aircalin, the international airline of New Caledonia, and Air Calédonie (Aircal), the domestic airline, have their headquarters in the city. Aircal's headquarters are on the grounds of Nouméa Magenta Airport,


title: Nouméa

text: which serves local routes. Nouméa's international airport is La Tontouta International Airport, from the city.


title: Nouméa

text: The Nouméa-Païta railway, which was the only railway line that ever existed in New Caledonia, was closed in 1940.


title: Nouméa

text: The University of New Caledonia (UNC) goes back to 1987 when the Université Française du Pacifique (French University of the Pacific) was created, with two centres, one in French Polynesia and the other in New Caledonia. In 1997 the decision was made to split the two parts into separate universities and so in 1999 the Université de la Nouvelle Calédonie and the Université de la Polynésie Française were formed.


title: Nouméa

text: UNC welcomes around 3,000 local and international students and 100 professors and researchers each year.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: Survivor: Nicaragua is the 21st season of the American CBS competitive reality television series "Survivor". It premiered on September 15, 2010 at 8:00pm, moving to the Wednesday timeslot for the first time since "". Applications were due in January 2010, filming started from June and ended in July 2010. "Nicaragua" and the following season, "", were filmed near San Juan del Sur in Rivas Department on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: This season's opening titles uses the original version of "Ancient Voices" — "Survivor"s opening theme song — first used for the debut "Survivor" season. Traditionally, each season features its own version of "Ancient Voices", using instruments and sounds meant to evoke that season's location or theme. One was created for "Nicaragua" but was not used, though the song was released onto iTunes on October 10. The reason for this omission has not been publicly disclosed. "Survivor" host Jeff Probst also announced that the Hidden Immunity Idol will continue to be used in the game. However, as idols had been found too easily in the past two seasons, the idol was hidden differently. The clues to the idols' locations were rebuses rather than text as in past seasons. In addition, the tribes vied for control of a new item, the Medallion of Power, which offered an advantage to the tribe who held it at a challenge, but should they use the Medallion, it went to the other tribe for the next challenge. This season also marked the return of the tribal swap, which was absent in the previous three seasons. When the tribal swap occurred in episode 5, the Medallion of Power was retired.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: This was the second season in which tribes were divided by age, the first one being "". Jud "Fabio" Birza was named the winner in the final episode on December 19, 2010, defeating Chase Rice and Matthew "Sash" Lenahan in a 5–4–0 vote. Birza became the youngest person to ever win the game, at age 21 years and 6 months. This was the first "Survivor" season to have an all-male final three. Jane Bright won $100,000 as the "Sprint Player of the Season."


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: The cast is composed of 20 players, initially splitting into two tribes based on their ages containing 10 members each. The tribes are Espada, contestants aged 40 and over; and La Flor, contestants aged 30 and younger. Their names come from the Spanish words "sword" and "flower", respectively. The merged tribe Libertad means "liberty" or "freedom" in Spanish, which was first suggested by contestant Marty Piombo.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: Notable contestants this season include Kelly Bruno, a triathlete whose leg was amputated at six months old because of a birth defect, Chase Rice, who became a country music artist after the season aired, and former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson. Bruno is the second "Survivor" contestant to be an amputee, the first being Chad Crittenden of "", who lost his right leg to cancer.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: Outside of "Survivor", Lowe appeared as one of the 26 models for Howie Mandel's show "Deal or No Deal".


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: Twenty new castaways were divided into tribes by age: La Flor, which consisted of castaways 30 and younger, and Espada, which consisted of castaways 40 and older. Both tribes also vied for ownership of the newly-introduced Medallion of Power, which granted them advantages either at camp or when played in challenges. Every time a tribe used its power, ownership of the Medallion would shift to the other tribe.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: Several members of the older Espada tribe vied for leadership. While Jimmy J. initially took control, he was quickly overthrown by Marty and voted out. Marty furthered his control of the tribe by finding the Hidden Immunity Idol and voting out aspiring leader Jimmy T. Despite dominating the challenges in the first eleven days of the game, the younger La Flor tribe also had their own share of conflicts. Two warring alliances emerged, one led by Shannon and the other led by Brenda, with both alliances vying for Chase's vote. A confused Shannon lashed out at La Flor's first Tribal Council, causing Chase and some of Shannon's own alliance members to vote him out.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: A tribe swap on Day 12 caused allegiances to shift. Alina, Benry, Chase, and NaOnka moved to Espada, while Marty, Jill, and Jane moved to La Flor. At the new Espada, Holly and Dan aligned themselves with the younger members. At the new La Flor, the once-powerful Marty fell from grace, and Jane teamed up with the original La Flor tribe members. Brenda planned to split the vote between Marty and original La Flor outsider Kelly B. in order to flush Marty's idol and send Kelly B. home. Unfortunately for them, Marty decided not to use his idol and Kelly B. was sent home anyway, while Marty still had his immunity idol. Sash told Marty that in order to remain in the game, he must give him his idol. Marty complied, and Sash stayed true to his word by keeping him around, only to send Jill, Marty's closest ally, home instead.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: On Day 19, the two tribes were merged into the Libertad tribe. Brenda's original La Flor alliance regrouped, with the addition of Holly and Jane. Marty, however, convinced Dan, Benry, and Fabio to follow him. Without any alliances, Alina was targeted by both voting blocs and sent to the jury first. Marty then tried to form an all-male rebellion against the females, which did not work and sent him home instead. It seemed that Brenda and Sash were in total control of the tribe, but Holly made her own move by turning everybody else on Brenda. Brenda put her faith wholly in her alliance without attempting to plead with them, but they ultimately eliminated her. Meanwhile, while the tribe was at a challenge, their unattended fire ignited their cache of food and supplies, burning them and part of their tarp. The remaining tribe members struggled with the meager rations.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: With Brenda gone and the sudden voluntary exits of Kelly S. and NaOnka as a result of the camp fire, Sash was left alone without any allies, but eventually regained power by winning the next Immunity Challenge, becoming the swing vote between Holly, Chase and Jane's alliance and the alliance of Dan, Fabio and Benry. Sash joined Chase, Holly and Jane to eliminate an unsuspecting Benry, whom Sash saw as the bigger threat. The newly formed majority alliance planned to eliminate Fabio next, but he went on to win individual immunity. While Dan was the only non-immune of the minority alliance, Chase, Holly and Sash decided to turn on jury threat Jane, and voted her out instead. Fabio won immunity again and Dan was voted out, but after Fabio won his third successive immunity challenge, Chase and Sash decided to turn on Holly, whom they thought had the best chance to win the game against them.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: At the Final Tribal Council, the jurors made it clear they would not vote for Sash for his numerous lies and deceptions. Chase was blasted for his inability to make strategic and social decisions, and Fabio was accused of being clueless about what was going on, not voting in the majority many times. Chase was praised however for his honesty, performing well in team challenges, and making relationships with people. Fabio said he was open with everyone, and intentionally was strategically clueless because he didn't want to hurt or play with anyone's emotions. Because of this, Fabio's unique strategy earned him the votes of five jurors, to Chase's four and Sash's zero.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: "Survivor: Nicaragua" was heavily panned by critics and fans, and is often considered to be one of the worst seasons in the series. "Survivor" columnist Dalton Ross of "Entertainment Weekly" ranked "Nicaragua" as the second-worst season of the entire series, only better than "", for four reasons: "1) Splitting the tribes up by age and the Medallion of Power were both enormous flops. 2) Like "", "" and "", just too many unlikable players. 3) Two people quitting with only 11 days left. 4) No big memorable moments. Even "Thailand" had the fake merge and "Fiji" had the big Yau-Man/Dreamz free car deal gone bad, but what was "Nicaragua"s signature moment? Unfortunately, it was people quitting, and that was memorable for all the wrong reasons." This season was similarly ranked as the second-worst by "Inside Survivor" in 2020 due to underwhelming gameplay, pointless twists, and an unlikeable cast. "Nicaragua" was ranked as the worst season by fan site "The Purple Rock Podcast" in 2020, describing it as having "terrible casting, a terrible gimmick, and a terrible winner," combined to make "a truly horrendous Survivor viewing experience." In 2015, a poll by "Rob Has a Podcast" ranked rank 27th out of 30 with Rob Cesternino ranking it at number 23. This was updated in 2021 during Cesternino's podcast, "Survivor All-Time Top 40 Rankings", ranking 34th. The gameplay of winner Jud "Fabio" Birza also received very negative reception. Birza placed last out of the first 34 winners in a fan poll conducted by "Entertainment Weekly" in 2017 and also received the most last-place and second-to-last place votes out of every other winner in the poll - by a wide margin.


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: When Jimmy Fallon, a longtime fan of the show interviewed Jeff Probst on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon", he said that he was disappointed with this season and called it a popularity contest. Probst felt that "Nicaragua" was boring, and was the motivating factor that led the producers and himself to add the "Redemption Island" twist for the (which would fare even worse than "Nicaragua" due in no small part to the twist). "Nicaragua" is ranked as the third-worst season of the series by Examiner.com (only ahead of "" and "Fiji"), and the fourth-worst season by "The Wire" (only ahead of "", "Gabon", and "Redemption Island"). In 2012, when "Survivor" fan site ""Survivor" Oz" held its first annual poll ranking every season of the series (up to that point), "Nicaragua" was ranked as the second-worst season of the series, only ahead of "Redemption Island".


title: Survivor: Nicaragua

text: In the official issue of "CBS Watch" magazine commemorating the 15th anniversary of "Survivor", Probst stated that "Nicaragua"s tribe division by age "is a division I hope we never do again," (however, 6 years later, "" saw a similar division) and also called the Medallion of Power "one of the worst named and most poorly executed twists we’ve ever come up with [and] embarrassing on all accounts."


title: Diyarbakır

text: Diyarbakır (; ; ; ) is the largest Kurdish-majority city in Turkey. It is the administrative center of Diyarbakır Province.


title: Diyarbakır

text: Situated around a high plateau by the banks of the Tigris river on which stands the historic Diyarbakır Fortress, it is the administrative capital of the Diyarbakır Province of southeastern Turkey. It is the second-largest city in the Southeastern Anatolia Region. As of December 2021, the Metropolitan Province population was 1,791,373 of whom 1,129,218 lived in the built-up (or metro) area made of the 4 urban districts (Bağlar, Kayapınar, Sur and Yenişehir).


title: Diyarbakır

text: Diyarbakır has been a main focal point of the conflict between the Turkish state and various Kurdish separatist groups, and is seen by many Kurds as the de facto capital of Kurdistan. The city was intended to become the capital of an independent Kurdistan following the Treaty of Sèvres, but this was disregarded following subsequent political developments.


title: Diyarbakır

text: The name Diyarbakır derives from the Arabic "The abode of Bakr", which was named after the Arab tribe of Banu Bakr who settled the wider region of Diyar Bakr during the 6th century. The name "Amit" is found in Empire of Trebizond official documents from 1358.


title: Diyarbakır

text: Later on, the city became known as the "Diyar Bakr" ( land of the Bakr tribe; ). In November 1937, Turkish President Atatürk visited the city and, after expressing uncertainty on the exact etymology of the city, in December of the same year ordered that it be renamed "Diyarbakır", which means "land of copper" in Turkish after the abundant resources of copper around the city. This was one of the early examples of the Turkification process of non-Turkish place names, in which non-Turkish (Kurdish, Armenian, Arabic and other) geographical names were changed to Turkish alternatives.


title: Diyarbakır

text: The modern Armenian name of the city is (Tigranakert) and in Kurdish. Moreover, the Syriac name is (Āmīd).


title: Diyarbakır

text: People have inhabited the area around Diyarbakr since the Stone Age and the area continues to be inhabited.


title: Diyarbakır

text: The first major civilization to establish itself in the region of Diyarbakır was the Hurrian kingdom of the Mitanni. It was then ruled by a succession of nearly every polity that controlled Upper Mesopotamia, including the Arameans, Assyrians, Urartu, Armenians, Achaemenid Persians, Medes, Seleucids, and Parthians. The Roman Republic gained control of the city in 66 BC, by which stage it was named "Amida". In 359, Shapur II of Persia captured Amida after a siege of 73 days.


title: Diyarbakır

text: According to the "Synecdemus" of Hierocles, as Amida, Diyarbakır was the major city of the Roman province of Mesopotamia. It was the episcopal see of the Christian diocese of Mesopotamia. Ancient texts record that ancient Amida had an amphitheatre, "thermae" (public baths), warehouses, a tetrapylon monument, and Roman aqueducts supplying and distributing water. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus was serving in the late Roman army during the Siege of Amida by the Sasanian Empire under Shapur II (), and described the successful siege in detail. Amida was then enlarged by refugees from ancient Nisibis (Nusaybin), which the emperor Jovian () was forced to evacuate and cede to Shapur's Persians after the defeat of his predecessor Julian's Persian War, becoming the main Roman stronghold in the region. The chronicle attributed to Joshua the Stylite describes the capture of Amida by the Persians under Kavad I () in the second Siege of Amida in 502–503, part of the Anastasian War.


title: Diyarbakır

text: Either the emperor Anastasius Dicorus () or the emperor Justinian the Great () rebuilt the walls of Amida, a feat of defensive architecture praised by the Greek historian Procopius. As recorded by the works of John of Ephesus, Zacharias Rhetor, and Procopius, the Romans and Persians continued to contest the area, and in the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 Amida was captured and held by the Persians for twenty-six years, being recovered in 628 for the Romans by the emperor Heraclius (), who also founded a church in the city on his return to Constantinople (Istanbul) from Persia the following year.


title: Diyarbakır

text: Syriac Christianity took hold in the region between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, particularly amongst the Assyrians of the city. The Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II (408–450) divided the Roman province of Mesopotamia into two, and made Amida the capital of Mesopotamia Prima, and thereby also the metropolitan see for all the province's bishoprics.


title: Diyarbakır

text: At some stage, Amida became a see of the Armenian Church. The bishops who held the see in 1650 and 1681 were in full communion with the Holy See, and in 1727 Peter Derboghossian sent his profession of faith to Rome. He was succeeded by two more bishops of the Armenian Catholic Church, Eugenius and Ioannes of Smyrna, the latter of whom died in Constantinople in 1785. After a long vacancy, three more bishops followed. The diocese had some 5,000 Armenian Catholics in 1903, but it lost most of its population in the 1915 Armenian genocide. The last diocesan bishop of the see, Andreas Elias Celebian, was killed with some 600 of his flock in the summer of 1915.


title: Diyarbakır

text: An eparchy for the local members of the Syriac Catholic Church was established in 1862. Persecution of Christians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War brought an end to the existence of both these Syrian residential sees.


title: Diyarbakır

text: In 639, as part of the Muslim conquest of the Levant during the early Arab–Byzantine wars, Amida fell to the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate led by Iyad ibn Ghanm, and the Great Mosque of Amida was constructed afterwards in the city's centre, possibly on the site of the Heraclian Church of Saint Thomas. There were as many as five Christian monasteries in the city, including the Zuqnin Monastery and several ancient churches mentioned by John of Ephesus. One of these, the Church of the Virgin Mary, remains the city's cathedral and the see of the bishop of Diyarbakır in the Syriac Orthodox Church. Another ancient church, the Church of Mar Cosmas, was seen by the British explorer Gertrude Bell in 1911 but was destroyed in 1930, while the former Church of Saint George, in the walled citadel, may originally have been built for Muslim use or for the Church of the East.


title: Diyarbakır

text: The city was part of the Umayyad Caliphate and then the Abbasid Caliphate, but then came under more local rule until its recovery in 899 by forces loyal to the caliph al-Mu'tadid () before falling under the sway of first the Hamdanid dynasty and then the Buyid dynasty, followed by a period of control by the Marwanids. The city was taken by the Seljuks in 1085 and by the Ayyubids in 1183. Ayyubid control lasted until the Mongol invasions of Anatolia, and the Mongol capture of the city in 1260. Between the Mongol occupation and conquest by the Safavid dynasty of Iran, the Kara Koyunlu and Aq Qoyunlu – two Turkoman confederations – were in control of the city in succession. Diyarbakır was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1514 by Bıyıklı Mehmed Pasha, in the reign of the sultan Selim I (). Mohammad Khan Ustajlu, the Safavid governor of Diyarbakir, was evicted from the city and killed in the following Battle of Chaldiran in 1514.


title: Diyarbakır

text: The Classical Age of the Ottoman Empire saw it expand into Western Armenia and all but the eastern regions of Kurdistan at the expense of the Safavids. From the early 16th century, the city and the wider region was the source of intrigue between the Safavids and the Ottoman Empire, both of whom sought the support of the Kurdish chieftains around Idris Bitlisi. It was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1514 in the campaigns of Bıyıklı Mehmed Pasha, under the rule of Sultan Selim I. Mohammad Khan Ustajlu, the Safavid Governor of Diyarbakir, was evicted from the city and killed in the following Battle of Chaldiran in 1514.


title: Diyarbakır

text: Following their victory, the Ottomans established the Diyarbekir Eyalet with its administrative centre in Diyarbakır. The Eyalet of Diyarbakır corresponded to today's Turkish Kurdistan, a rectangular area between the Lake Urmia to Palu and from the southern shores of Lake Van to Cizre and the beginnings of the Syrian desert, although its borders saw some changes over time. The city was an important military base for controlling the region and at the same time a thriving city noted for its craftsmen, producing glass and metalwork. For example, the doors of Rumi's tomb in Konya were made in Diyarbakır, as were the gold and silver decorated doors of the tomb of Ebu Hanife in Baghdad. Ottoman rule was confirmed by the 1555 Peace of Amasya which followed the Ottoman–Safavid War (1532–1555).


title: Diyarbakır

text: Concerned with independent-mindedness of the Kurdish principalities, the Ottomans sought to curb their influence and bring them under the control of the central government in Constantinople. However, removal from power of these hereditary principalities led to more instability in the region from the 1840s onwards. In their place, sufi sheiks and religious orders rose to prominence and spread their influence throughout the region. One of the prominent Sufi leaders was "Shaikh Ubaidalla Nahri", who began a revolt in the region between Lakes Van and Urmia. The area under his control covered both Ottoman and Qajar territories. Shaikh Ubaidalla is regarded as one of the earliest proponents of Kurdish nationalism. In a letter to a British Vice-Consul, he declared: "The Kurdish nation is a people apart... we want our affairs to be in our hands."


title: Diyarbakır

text: In 1895 an estimated 25,000 Armenians and Assyrians were massacred in Diyarbekir Vilayet, including in the city. At the turn of the 19th century, the Christian population of the city was mainly made up of Armenians and Syriac Orthodox Christians. The city was also a site of ethnic cleansing during the 1915 Armenian and Assyrian genocide; nearly 150,000 were expelled from the city to the death marches in the Syrian desert.


title: Diyarbakır

text: In January 1928, Diyarbakır became the center of the First Inspectorate-General, a regional subdivision for an area containing the provinces of Hakkari, Van, Şırnak, Mardin, Siirt, Bitlis and Şanlıurfa. In a reorganization of the provinces in 1952, Diyarbakır city was made the administrative capital of the Diyarbakır Province. In 1993, Diyarbakir was established as a Metropolitan Municipality. Its districts are Bağlar, Bismil, Ergani, Hazro, Kayapinar, Çermik, Çinar, Eğil, Dicle, Kulp, Kocaköy, Lice, Silvan, Sur, Yenişehir, Hani and Çüngüş.


title: Diyarbakır

text: Diyarbakır has seen much violence in recent years, involving Turkish security forces, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Between 8 November 2015 and 15 May 2016 large parts of Sur were destroyed in fighting between the Turkish military and the PKK.


title: Diyarbakır

text: A 2018 report by Arkeologlar Derneği İstanbul found that, since 2015, 72% of the city's historic Sur district had been destroyed through demolition and redevelopment, and that laws designed to protect historic monuments had been ignored. They found that the city's "urban regeneration" policy was one of demolition and redevelopment rather than one of repairing cultural assets damaged during the recent civil conflict, and because of that many registered historic buildings had been completely destroyed. The extent of the loss of non-registered historic structures is unknown because any historic building fragments revealed during the demolition of modern structures were also demolished. As of 2021, large parts of the city and district have been restored and government officials are looking towards tourism again.


title: Diyarbakır

text: The most notable football clubs of the city are Diyarbakırspor (established 1968) and Amed SK (established 1990), with Deniz Naki being one of the most notable footballers from the city. The women's football team Amed SFK were promoted at the end of the 2016–17 Turkish Women's Second Football League season to the Women's First League.


title: Diyarbakır

text: In the 2014 local elections, Gültan Kışanak and Fırat Anlı of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) were elected co-mayors of Diyarbakır. However, on 25 October 2016, both were detained by Turkish authorities "on thinly supported charges of being a member of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)". The Turkish government ordered a general internet blackout after the arrest. Nevertheless, on 26 October, several thousand demonstrators at Diyarbakir city hall demanded the mayors' release. Some days later, the Turkish government appointed an unelected state trustee as the mayor. In November, public prosecutors demanded a 230-year prison sentence for Kışanak.


title: Diyarbakır

text: In January 2017, the unelected state trustee appointed by the Turkish government ordered the removal of the Assyrian sculpture of a mythological winged bull from the town hall, which had been erected by the BDP mayors to commemorate the Assyrian history of the town and its still resident Assyrian minority. All Kurdish language street signs were also removed, alongside the shutting down of organisations concerned with Kurdish language and culture, removal of Kurdish names from public parks, and removal of Kurdish cultural monuments and linguistic symbols.


title: Diyarbakır

text: In the 2019 municipal elections, Adnan Selçuk Mızraklı of the HDP party was elected mayor of Diyarbakir. In August 2019 he was dismissed and subsequently sentenced to 9 years and 4 months imprisonment accused of supporting terrorism as part of a government crackdown against politicians of the Kurdish HDP party; the Turkish state appointed Münir Karaloğlu in his place. Other Kurdish mayors in Kurdish cities across the region also suffered a similar fate, with Turkish President Erdogan vowing to remove any future Kurdish mayors too. Protests against the decision arose which were suppressed by the Turkish police with the use of water cannons; some protestors were killed. Diyarbakir's prison has become home to many political prisoners, mainly Kurdish activists and politicians accused of terrorism charges by the Turkish state. Inmates have been subject to torture, rape, humiliation, beating, murder and other abuses.


title: Diyarbakır

text: Historically, Diyarbakır produced wheat and sesame. They would preserve the wheat in warehouses, with coverings of straw and twigs from licorice trees. This system would allow the wheat to be preserved for up to ten years. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Diyarbakır exported raisins, almonds, and apricots to Europe. Angora goats were raised, and wool and mohair was exported from Diyarbakır. Merchants would also come from Egypt, Istanbul, and Syria, to purchase goats and sheep. Honey was also produced, but not so much exported, but used by locals. Sericulture was observed in the area, too.


title: Diyarbakır

text: Prior to World War I, Diyarbakır had an active copper industry, with six mines. Three were active, with two being owned by locals and the third being owned by the Turkish government. Tenorite was the primary type of copper mined. It was mined by hand by Kurds. A large portion of the ore was exported to England. The region also produced iron, gypsum, coal, chalk, lime, jet, and quartz, but primarily for local use.


title: Diyarbakır

text: The city is served by Diyarbakır Airport and Diyarbakır railway station. In 1935 the railway between Elazığ and Diyarbakır was inaugurated.


title: Diyarbakır

text: At the turn of the 19th century, the Christian population of the city was mainly made up of Armenians and Assyrians. The Assyrian and Armenian presence dates to antiquity. There was also a small Jewish community in the city. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition from 1911, the population numbered 38 thousand, almost half being Christian and consisting of Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Turkomans, Armenians, Chaldeans, Jacobites, and a few Greeks. During the Governorship of Mehmed Reshid in the Vilayet of Diyarbakır, the Armenian population of Diyarbakir was resettled and exterminated.


title: Diyarbakır

text: After World War II, as the Kurdish population moved from the villages and mountains to urban centres, Diyarbakir's Kurdish population continued to grow. Diyarbakır grew from a population of 30,000 in the 1930s to 65,000 by 1956, to 140,000 by 1970, to 400,000 by 1990, and eventually swelled to about 1.5 million by 1997. During the 1990s, the city grew dramatically due to the immigrant population from thousands of Kurdish villages depopulated by Turkey during the Kurdish-Turkish conflict.


title: Diyarbakır

text: According to a November 2006 survey by the Sûr Municipality, 72% of the inhabitants of the municipality use Kurdish most often in their daily speech due to the overwhelming Kurdish majority in the city, followed by minorities of Assyrian, Armenian and Turkish.


title: Diyarbakır

text: There are some Alevi Turkmen villages around Diyarbakır's old city, but there are no official reports about their population numbers.


title: Diyarbakır

text: There have been attempts by Turkish lawmakers to deny Diyarbakır's Kurdish majority identity, with Turkey's Education Ministry releasing a school book named "Our City, Diyarbakir" (""Şehrimiz Diyarbakır"" in Turkish) on Diyarbakir Province in which it claims that a Turkish similar to that spoken in Baku is spoken in the city along with regional languages without any mention of Kurdish. Critics link this to a general trend towards anti-Kurdish sentiment in Turkey.


title: Diyarbakır

text: There is local jewelry making and other craftwork. Folk dancing to the drum and zurna (pipe) are a part of weddings and celebrations in the area. The Diyarbakir Municipality Theatre was founded in 1990, and had to close its doors in 1995. In was re-opened in 1999, under Mayor Osman Baydemir. It was closed down in 2016 after the dismissal of the mayor in 2016. The Municipality City Theatre also performed plays in the Kurdish language.


title: Diyarbakır

text: Diyarbakır's cuisine includes lamb dishes which use spices such as black pepper, sumac and coriander; rice, bulgur and butter. Local dishes include Meftune, lamb meat and vegetables with garlic and sumac, and Kaburga Dolması, baked lamb's ribs stuffed with rice, almonds and spices. Watermelons are grown locally and there is an annual Watermelon Festival.


title: Diyarbakır

text: The core of Diyarbakır is surrounded by an almost intact set of high walls of black basalt forming a circle around the old city. There are four gates into the old city and 82 watch-towers on the walls, which were built in antiquity and restored and extended by the Roman emperor Constantius II in 349. The area inside the walls is known as the Sur district; before its recent demolition and redevelopment this district had 599 registered historical buildings.


title: Diyarbakır

text: Diyarbakır has a Mediterranean (Köppen climate classification: "Csa") or Temperate continental climate (Trewartha climate classification: Dca")". Summers are very hot and very dry, due to its location on the Mesopotamian plain which is subject to hot air masses from the deserts of Syria and Iraq to the south. The highest recorded temperature was 46.2 °C (112.64 °F) on 21 July 1937. Winters are chilly with moderate precipitation and frosty nights. Snowfall is quite common between the months of December and March, snowing for a week or two. The lowest recorded temperature was −24.2 °C (−10.12 °F) on 11 January 1933. Highest recorded snow depth was 65 cm (25.6 inches) on 16 January 1971.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: Osaka is the capital and largest city of Osaka Prefecture, and the third-largest city in Japan, with other major cities including Sakai, Higashiōsaka, and Hirakata. Osaka Prefecture is the third-most-populous prefecture, but by geographic area the second-smallest; at it is the second-most densely populated, below only Tokyo. Osaka Prefecture is one of Japan's two "urban prefectures" using the designation "fu" (府) rather than the standard "ken" for prefectures, along with Kyoto Prefecture. Osaka Prefecture forms the center of the Keihanshin metropolitan area, the second-most-populated urban region in Japan after the Greater Tokyo area and one of the world's most productive regions by GDP.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: Prior to the Meiji Restoration, the modern-day area of Osaka Prefecture was split between Kawachi, Izumi, and Settsu provinces.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: Osaka Prefecture was created on June 21, 1868, at the very beginning of the Meiji era. During the instigation of Fuhanken Sanchisei in 1868, the prefecture received its suffix "fu", designating it as a prefecture.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: On September 1, 1956, the city of Osaka was promoted to a city designated by government ordinance and thereby divided into 24 wards. Sakai became the second city in the prefecture to be promoted to a city designated by government ordinance on April 1, 2006, and was divided into seven wards.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: In 2000, Fusae Ota became Japan's first female governor when she replaced Knock Yokoyama, who resigned after prosecution for sexual harassment. Tōru Hashimoto, previously famous as a counselor on television, was elected in 2008 at the age of 38, becoming the youngest governor in Japan.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: On June 18, 2018, an earthquake struck the northern region of the prefecture. It killed 4 people and caused minor damage across Greater Osaka.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: In 2010, the Osaka Restoration Association was created with backing by Governor Tōru Hashimoto, with hopes of reforming Osaka Prefecture into the Osaka Metropolis and merging with the City of Osaka. In the 2011 local elections, the association was able to win the majority of the prefectural seats and Hashimoto was elected as mayor of Osaka.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: A referendum on the issue was held in 2015 and was defeated with 50.38% of voters opposed to the plan. A second referendum in 2020 was rejected by 50.6% of voters.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: Osaka Prefecture neighbors the prefectures of Hyōgo and Kyoto in the north, Nara in the east and Wakayama in the south. The west is open to Osaka Bay. The Yodo and Yamato Rivers flow through the prefecture.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: Prior to the construction of Kansai International Airport, Osaka was the smallest prefecture in Japan. The artificial island on which the airport was built added enough area to make it slightly larger than Kagawa Prefecture.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: As of 1 April 2012, 11% of the total land area of the prefecture was designated as Natural Parks, namely Kongō-Ikoma-Kisen and Meiji no Mori Minō Quasi-National Parks and Hokusetsu and Hannan-Misaki Prefectural Natural Parks.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: Since 2005, Osaka consists of 43 municipalities: 33 cities, nine towns and one village. As of 2021, the 33 cities include two designated major cities, seven core cities and two (transitional) special case cities (after legal abolition in 2015, to be replaced with the core city system in the 2020s).


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: After the modern reactivation of districts in 1878/79, Osaka, including Sakai which was only merged into Osaka in 1881, consisted of 5 urban districts "(-ku)" and 27 rural districts "(-gun)", excluding 15 districts in Yamato Province which was later separated from Osaka as Nara Prefecture in 1887. When the prefectures were subdivided into modern municipalities in 1889, the five urban districts were turned into two district-independent cities: Osaka City and Sakai City, and Osaka's [rural] districts were subdivided into 12 towns and 310 villages. After Osaka City had absorbed many surrounding municipalities in the interwar/Taishō period, the number of municipalities in Osaka had already dropped to 149 by 1953. The Great Shōwa mergers of the 1950s reduced the total to 47 by 1961, including 26 cities by then. The current total of 43 was reached during the Great Heisei mergers in 2005.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: The gross prefecture product of Osaka for the fiscal year 2004 was ¥38.7 trillion, second after Tokyo with an increase of 0.9% from the previous year. This represented approximately 48% of the Kinki region. The per capita income was ¥3.0 million, seventh in the nation. Commercial sales the same year was ¥60.1 trillion.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: Overshadowed by such globally renowned electronics giants as Panasonic and Sharp, the other side of Osaka's economy can be characterized by its Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) activities. The number of SMEs based in Osaka in 2006 was 330,737, accounting for 99.6% of the total number of businesses in the prefecture. While this proportion is similar to other prefectures (the average nationwide was 99.7%), the manufactured output of the SMEs amounted to 65.4% of the total within the prefecture, a rate significantly higher than Tokyo's 55.5%, or Kanagawa's 38.4%. One model from Osaka of serving the public interest and restimulating the regional economy, combined with industry-education cooperation efforts, is the Astro-Technology SOHLA, with its artificial satellite project. Having originally started from a gathering of Higashiosaka based SMEs, Astro-Technology SOHLA has not only grown into a Kansai region-wide group but has also won support from the government, through technology and material support from Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and financial support from NEDO.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: The Osaka Securities Exchange, specializing in derivatives such as Nikkei 225 Futures, is based in Osaka.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: There are many electrical, chemical, pharmaceutical, heavy industry, food, and housing companies in Osaka Prefecture.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: According to the 2005 Population Census of Japan, Osaka prefecture has a population of 8,817,166, an increase of 12,085, or 0.14%, since the Census of year 2000.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: As of 2020 this prefecture has about 99,000 ethnic Korean persons, the largest such population of any prefecture in Japan. Osaka City. As of 2013 most ethnic Korean children attend ordinary Japanese public schools, although some Korean schools operated by the Chongryon and classes for ethnic Koreans had opened in the prefecture. During the Japanese rule of Korea many ethnic Koreans came to the Osaka area to look for work. Many people from Jeju came to the Osaka area after a 1922 ferry line between Osaka and Jeju opened. During World War II Japanese authorities forced additional ethnic Koreans to move to the Osaka area.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: Public elementary and junior high schools in the prefecture are operated by the municipalities. Public high schools are operated by the Osaka Prefectural Board of Education.


title: Osaka Prefecture

text: The symbol of Osaka Prefecture, called the "sennari byōtan" or "thousand gourds," was originally the crest of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the feudal lord of Osaka Castle.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Nicholas Ray (born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr., August 7, 1911 – June 16, 1979) was an American film director, screenwriter, and actor best known for the 1955 film "Rebel Without a Cause." He is appreciated for many narrative features produced between 1947 and 1963 including "They Live By Night", "In A Lonely Place", "Johnny Guitar", and "Bigger Than Life", as well as an experimental work produced throughout the 1970s titled "We Can't Go Home Again", which was unfinished at the time of Ray's death.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray's compositions within the CinemaScope frame and use of color are particularly well-regarded and he was an important influence on the French New Wave, with Jean-Luc Godard famously writing in a review of "Bitter Victory", "... there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray was born in Galesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children and only son of Olene "Lena" (Toppen) and Raymond Nicholas Kienzle, a contractor and builder. His paternal grandparents were German and his maternal grandparents were Norwegian. He grew up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, also the home town of future fellow director Joseph Losey. A popular but erratic student prone to delinquency and alcohol abuse, with his alcoholic father as an example, at age sixteen Ray was sent to live with his older, married sister in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended Waller High School and immersed himself in the Al Capone-era nightlife. Upon his return to La Crosse in his senior year, he emerged as a talented orator, winning a contest at local radio station WKBH (now WIZM) while also hanging around a local stock theater.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: With strong grades in English and public speaking and failures in Latin, physics, and geometry, he graduated at the bottom (ranked 152nd in a class of 153) of his class at La Crosse Central High School in 1929. He studied drama at La Crosse State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse) for two years before earning the requisite grades to apply for admission to the University of Chicago in the fall of 1931. Although he spent only one semester at the institution because of excessive drinking and poor grades, Ray managed to cultivate a relationship with dramatist Thornton Wilder, then a professor.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Having been active in the Student Dramatic Association during his time in Chicago, Ray returned to his hometown and started the La Crosse Little Theatre Group, which presented several productions over 1932. He also briefly re-enrolled at the State Teachers College in the fall of that year. Before his stint at Chicago, he had contributed a regular column of musings, called "The Bullshevist," to the "Racquet", the college's weekly publication, and resumed writing for it when he returned, but, according to biographer Patrick McGilligan, Ray, with friend Clarence Hiskey, also arranged meetings to try to organize a La Crosse chapter of the Communist Party USA. By early 1933, he had left the State Teachers College and began to employ the moniker of "Nicholas Ray" in his correspondence.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Through his connections with Thornton Wilder and others he had got to know in Chicago, Ray met Frank Lloyd Wright at Wright's home, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin. He cultivated a relationship with Wright in order to try to win an invitation to join "the Fellowship," as the community of Wright "apprentices" was known. In late 1933 Wright asked Ray to organize the newly built Hillside Playhouse, a room at Taliesin to be used for musical and dramatic performances, and other presentations. There, at regular film screenings often encompassing foreign productions, Ray likely had his first exposure to non-Hollywood cinema. However he and his mentor had a falling-out in spring 1934 with Wright directing him to leave the compound immediately.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: While negotiating with Wright, Ray visited New York City, where he had his first encounters with the political theatre growing in response to the Great Depression. Returning after his ejection from Taliesin, Ray joined the Workers' Laboratory Theatre, a communal troupe formed in 1929, which had recently changed its name to the Theatre of Action. Briefly billing himself as Nik Ray, he acted in several productions, collaborating with a number of performers, some of whom he later cast in his films, including Will Lee and Curt Conway, and some who became friends for life, including Elia Kazan. He was subsequently employed by the Federal Theatre Project, part of the Works Progress Administration. He befriended folklorist Alan Lomax and traveled with him through rural America, collecting traditional vernacular music. In 1940–41, Lomax produced and Ray directed "Back Where I Come From", a pioneering folk music radio program featuring such artists as Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, the Golden Gate Quartet, and Pete Seeger, for CBS. American folk songs would later figure prominently in several of his films.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: During the early years of World War II, Ray directed and supervised radio propaganda programs for the United States Office of War Information and the Voice of America broadcasting service under the aegis of John Houseman. In the summer of 1942 Ray was investigated by the FBI, and was given its B-2 classification of "tentative dangerousness." Additionally, Director J. Edgar Hoover personally recommended "Custodial Detention." Though Hoover's scheme was later quashed by the Justice Department, in autumn 1943 Ray was among more than twenty OWI employees identified publicly as having Communist affiliations or sympathies, noting that he was "discharged from the WPA community service of Washington DC for Communist activities." The FBI soon determined the case of "Nicholas K. Ray," however, "as not warranting investigation." At the OWI, Ray renewed his acquaintance with Molly Day Thatcher, Houseman's assistant, and her husband, Elia Kazan, from the New York theatre days. In 1944, heading to Hollywood to direct "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", Kazan suggested Ray go west, too, and hired him as an assistant on the production.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Returning east, Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke Ellington-John Latouche musical "Beggar's Holiday", in 1946. Earlier that year he was assistant director, under director Houseman, of another Broadway musical, "Lute Song", with music by Raymond Scott. Also through Houseman, Ray had the opportunity to work in television, one of his few forays into the new medium. Houseman had agreed to direct an adaption of Lucille Fletcher's radio thriller, "Sorry, Wrong Number", for CBS, and took Ray on as his collaborator. They cast Mildred Natwick as the invalid woman who thinks that she's the object of a murder scheme she overhears on her phone. When "Lute Song" called on Houseman's time and attention, Ray took over the task of staging the broadcast, which aired on January 30, 1946. The next year, Ray directed his first film, "They Live by Night" (1949), for RKO Pictures.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: "They Live By Night" was reviewed (under one of its working titles, "The Twisted Road") as early as June 1948, but not released until November 1949, due to the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes's takeover of RKO Pictures. As a result of the delay, the second and third pictures Ray directed, RKO's "A Woman's Secret" (1949) and "Knock On Any Door" (1949), a loan-out to Humphrey Bogart's Santana Productions and Columbia, were released before his first.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Almost an impressionistic take on film noir, starring Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as a thief and his newlywed wife, "They Live By Night" was notable for its empathy for society's young outsiders, a recurring motif in Ray's oeuvre. Its subject matter, two young lovers running from the law, had an influence on the sporadically popular movie subgenre involving a fugitive criminal couple, including Joseph H. Lewis's "Gun Crazy" (1950), Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967), Terrence Malick's "Badlands" (1973), and Robert Altman's 1974 adaptation of the Edward Anderson novel that had also served as the basis for Ray's film, "Thieves Like Us".


title: Nicholas Ray

text: "The New York Times" gave "They Live By Night" a positive review (despite calling his trademark sympathetic eye to rebels and criminals "misguided") and acclaimed Ray for "good, realistic production and sharp direction...Mr. Ray has an eye for action details. His staging of the robbery of a bank, all seen by the lad in the pick-up car, makes a fine clip of agitating film. And his sensitive juxtaposing of his actors against highways, tourist camps and bleak motels makes for a vivid comprehension of an intimate personal drama in hopeless flight."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray made several more contributions to the noir genre, most notably the 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie, also for Santana and released by Columbia, "In a Lonely Place", about a troubled screenwriter suspected of a violent murder, and "On Dangerous Ground" (1951), in which Robert Ryan plays an alienated, brutally violent detective on a city police force who finds redemption, and love, after he is sent to investigate a murder in a rural community.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: While at RKO, Ray also directed "A Woman's Secret", co-starring his wife-to-be Gloria Grahame as a singer who becomes the subject of a crime and an investigation of her past, and "Born to Be Bad" (1950), with Joan Fontaine as a San Francisco social climber.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: In January 1949, Ray was announced as set to direct "I Married a Communist", a litmus test that RKO head Howard Hughes had concocted to weed out Communists at the studio. John Cromwell and Joseph Losey had previously turned it down, and both were punished by the studio and subsequently blacklisted. Soon after the public announcement, and prior to the start of production, Ray stepped away from the project. While the studio considered dismissing him or suspending him, instead it extended his contract, evidently with Hughes's consent. As late as 1979, Ray insisted that Hughes "saved me from blacklisting," although Ray also likely wrote to the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his political past or testified in private, in order to protect himself.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: His final film at the studio, "The Lusty Men" (1952), starred Robert Mitchum as a veteran champion bronc rider who tutors a younger man in the skills and ways of rodeoing, while becoming emotionally involved with the younger cowpoke's wife. At a March 1979 college appearance documented in the first sequence of "Lightning Over Water" (1980) to be shot, Ray talks about "The Lusty Men" as a film about "a man who wants to bring himself all together before he dies."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: After leaving RKO, Ray signed with a new agent, MCA's Lew Wasserman, a major Hollywood force, who steered the director's career through the 1950s. During that time, Ray directed one or two films for most of the major studios, and one generally considered to be a minor, Republic Pictures. He made films in conventionalized genres, including Westerns and melodramas, as well as others that resisted easy categorization.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: In the mid-fifties he made the two films for which he is best remembered: "Johnny Guitar" (1954) and "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955). The former, made at Republic, was a Western starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in action roles of the kind customarily played by men. Stylized, and highly eccentric in its time, it was much loved by French critics. (François Truffaut called it "the "Beauty and the Beast" of Westerns, a Western dream.")


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Between feature-length projects, and after shooting another Western, "Run For Cover" (1955), starring James Cagney, Ray was asked to take on a television film for "G. E. Theater". The anthology series was produced by MCA-Revue, a subsidiary of the agency to which the director was signed, and aired on CBS. "High Green Wall" was an adaptation, by Charles Jackson, of an Evelyn Waugh story, "The Man Who Liked Dickens," about an illiterate man, played by Thomas Gomez, who holds captive a stranded traveller, played by Joseph Cotten, in the jungle, forcing him to read aloud from Dickens novels. Shot on film over a few days, after a week's rehearsal, the half-hour drama was broadcast on October 3, 1954. Ray did not work in broadcast television after, and rarely spoke of the program, later expressing his disappointment: "I was hoping for something new, accidental or planned, to happen. But it didn't."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: In 1955, at Warner Bros., Ray directed "Rebel Without a Cause", twenty-four hours in the life of a troubled teenager, starring James Dean in what proved to be his most famous role. When "Rebel" was released, only a few weeks after Dean's early death in an automobile crash, it had a revolutionary impact on movie-making and youth culture, virtually giving birth to the contemporary concept of the American teenager. Looking past its social and pop-culture significance, "Rebel Without a Cause" is the purest example of Ray's cinematic style and vision, with an expressionistic use of colour, dramatic use of architecture, and an empathy for social misfits.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: "Rebel Without a Cause" was Ray's biggest commercial success, and marked a breakthrough in the careers of child actors Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. Ray engaged in a tempestuous "spiritual marriage" with Dean, and awakened the latent homosexuality of Mineo, through his role as Plato, who would become the first gay teenager to appear on film. During filming Ray began a short-lived affair with Wood, who, at age 16, was 27 years his junior. This created a tense atmosphere between Ray and Dennis Hopper, who was also involved with Wood at the time, but they were reconciled later.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: In 1956, Ray was chosen to direct the melodrama "Bigger Than Life" at Twentieth Century-Fox by the film's star and producer, James Mason, who played an elementary-school teacher, stricken with a rare circulatory ailment, and driven delusional by his abuse of a new wonder drug, Cortisone. In 1957, completing a two-picture deal, Ray reluctantly directed "The True Story of Jesse James", a remake of the 1939 Fox release, "Jesse James". Ray wanted to cast Elvis Presley as the legendary bandit, and Presley had made his first film, "Love Me Tender" (1956), at the studio. Fox demurred, however, and Presley moved to Paramount, leaving contract players Robert Wagner and Jeffrey Hunter to play the James brothers.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Warner's commitment to "Rebel Without a Cause" led the studio to send Ray on his first overseas trip, in September 1955, to publicize the film, while it was still in previews in the US. He visited Paris, where he met some of the French critics, eager to talk with the director of "Johnny Guitar", one of whom, he later remarked, "almost persuaded me it was a great movie." He was in London when he received the call telling him of James Dean's death, on the last day of the month, and then travelled to Germany, to drink and mourn. Nonetheless, this moment marked a professional change for Ray, most of whose remaining mainstream films were produced outside Hollywood. He returned to Warner Bros. for "Wind Across the Everglades" (1958), an ecologically themed period drama about plume poachers, written by Budd Schulberg and produced by his brother, Stuart Schulberg, and at MGM he directed "Party Girl" (1958), which harked back to Ray's youth in Chicago, a Roaring Twenties gangster drama that included musical numbers performed by star Cyd Charisse.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Prior to those projects, however, Ray returned to France to direct "Bitter Victory" (1957), a World War II drama starring Richard Burton and Curd Jürgens as Leith and Brand, British army officers on a mission to raid a Nazi station in Benghazi, and Ruth Roman as Brand's wife and, before the war, Leith's lover. Shot on location in the Libyan desert, with some sequences in a studio in Nice, it was by all accounts an arduous production, exacerbated for Ray by his drinking and drug use. As much an art film as a conventional war picture, "Bitter Victory" confused many while enthusing Ray's continental supporters, such as Godard and Éric Rohmer.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: While for the first decade of his career Ray's films had been studio pictures, and relatively small in scale, by the late 1950s, they were increasing in logistical complexity and difficulty, and cost. As well, the studio system that had both challenged and supported him was changing, making Hollywood less viable for him as a professional base.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Though he contributed to the writing of most of his films—perhaps most extensively "The Lusty Men", which started production with only a handful of pages—"The Savage Innocents" (1960) was the only screenplay of a film he directed for which he received credit. Adapting a novel about Inuit life by Hans Ruesch, "Top of the World", Ray also drew on the writing of explorer Peter Freuchen, and the 1933 film based on one of Freuchen's books, "Eskimo". An epic-scale production, with Italian backing and distribution by Paramount, Ray began shooting the film, with lead Anthony Quinn, in the brutal cold of northern Manitoba and on Baffin Island, but much of the footage was lost in a plane crash. He had to use process photography to replace the lost location scenes, when the production moved to Rome, as planned, for studio work.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Now largely based in Europe, Ray signed on to direct producer Samuel Bronston's life of Christ as a replacement for the original director, John Farrow. Shooting in Spain, Ray cast Jeffrey Hunter, who had played Jesse James's brother Frank for the director a few years before, as Jesus. A vast undertaking by any account, the production endured intervention by backing studio MGM, logistical challenges (the Sermon on the Mount sequence required five cameras and employed 5,400 extras), and the project grew in ways that Ray was not strong enough to control. Perhaps predictably, "King of Kings" (1961) was received with hostility by the US press, the Catholic periodical "America", in a review titled "Christ or Credit Card?" calling it "disedifying and antireligious."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Screenwriter Philip Yordan, Ray's collaborator on several projects, back to "Johnny Guitar" and including "King of Kings", looking at an extremely lucrative prospect, persuaded the director to sign again with Bronston for another epic, this one about the Boxer Rebellion. As biographer Bernard Eisenschitz observes, "Accounts of Ray during the making of "55 Days at Peking" portray, not a man who was drinking (the rationale often advanced), but a film-maker who couldn't make up his mind, seeking refuge in frenzied activity and loading himself with unnecessary burdens." With an international cast, including Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, David Niven, and most of the staff of Madrid's Chinese restaurants (as extras, not the Chinese principals), again for Ray, the project was being rewritten on the fly, and he was directing with little preparation. By habit and because of the pressures of the job, he was heavily medicated and slept little, and finally, he collapsed on the set, according to his wife suffering a tachycardia. He was replaced by Andrew Marton, a highly regarded second-unit director fresh off another runaway spectacle, "Cleopatra" (1963), with some of Heston's final scenes with Gardner directed by Guy Green, at Heston's request. Released from hospital, Ray tried to participate in the editing process, but, according to Marton, "was so abusive and so critical of the first part of the picture, which was my part," that Bronston forbade Ray from viewing any more of the assembled scenes. Though Marton estimated that sixty-five per cent of the picture was his, and though he wanted the directing credit, he accepted a financial settlement from Bronston. Ray was credited as director, and represented the film, his last mainstream motion picture, at its May 1963 premiere in London.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s, and after "55 Days at Peking", he did not direct again until the 1970s, though he continued to try to develop projects while in Europe.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: He attempted an adaptation of Ibsen's "The Lady From the Sea", first with Ingrid Bergman in mind, and later Romy Schneider. He optioned a novel, "Next Stop—Paradise", by the Polish writer Marek Hlasko. In late 1963, in Paris, he worked with novelist James Jones on a Western titled "Under Western Skies", drawing on "Hamlet".


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Moving to London, urged to treat his alcohol and drug abuse, he consulted the physician and psychiatrist, Barrington Cooper, who prescribed script work as "occupational therapy." They formed a production company, Emerald Films, under which they developed two projects that were among the few in Ray's European sojourn to come anywhere near fruition. "The Doctor and the Devils" was a screenplay written by Dylan Thomas (whom Cooper had also treated), inspired by the 1828 case of Dr. Robert Knox and murderers Burke and Hare, who supplied him with corpses for dissection, to be used during medical lessons. Ray struck up a deal with Avala Film, the largest production company in Yugoslavia, to back that film and three others, leading him from London to Zagreb. Production was announced as starting on September 1, 1965, amended to October 21, with Maximilian Schell, Susannah York, and Geraldine Chaplin in the cast, but Ray insisted on rewrites, asking, among others, John Fowles, who declined, and Gore Vidal, who in retrospect wondered why he agreed. Ray tried in vain to enlist US investment, by Seven Arts and Warner Bros., on a budget that was mounting, to upwards of $2.5 million. Accounts of the productions failure vary, including the assertion that on the first day of shooting, Ray was out of the country, and the conclusion that he was paralysed by doubt and indecision. Whatever the case, prospects for a new, major Nicholas Ray film dissolved.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Dave Wallis's novel, "Only Lovers Left Alive", was the second property that Ray tried to develop as an Emerald Films venture. As a dystopian parable, in which adults have abandoned society and adolescents have formed gangs to take charge, it might have seemed perfect for the director of "Rebel Without A Cause", and, announced in spring 1966, it was to star the Rolling Stones. According to Cooper, the Stones' US manager Allen Klein treated him and Ray to lavish visits to New York, and then Los Angeles, for meetings, then "conned" Ray into giving up his rights to the property, with a "lucrative director's contract," and evidently nothing to direct. (Jim Jarmusch, who befriended Ray a few years before Ray died, later made a film titled "Only Lovers Left Alive" (2013). The story of a young vampire couple—who of course are not young at all—its only connection with the Wallis novel or Ray's project is its title.)


title: Nicholas Ray

text: While working with Dr. Cooper, and after, Ray maintained some degree of cash flow by developing and editing scripts, but for films that never came to be. He made the German island Sylt his base of operations and imagined projects that might be shot there, including one to star Jane Fonda and Paul Newman, titled "Go Where You Want, Die As You Must", a production that would also demand 2,000 extras. While in Europe, he attracted some of the current generation of filmmakers. He had been introduced to Volker Schlöndorff by Hanne Axmann, who had starred in Schlöndorff's first film, and Ray brokered a deal to sell his second, "Mord und Totschlag" (1969), to Universal Pictures, pocketing about one-third of the money as his fee and for expenses. When in Paris, he sometimes stayed with Barbet Schroeder, whose production company tried to find backing for one or another of Ray's projects. There, in the wake of the May 1968 demonstrations, he collaborated with and producer Henry Lange to shoot a three-part, one-hour film, which he later titled "Wha-a-at?", one of several projects, concerning contemporary young people during a time of questioning, rebellion, and revolt, that never came to be. Similarly, Ray enticed Schroeder's friend Stéphane Tchalgadjieff to raise funding for "L'Evadé" ("The Substitute"), a story about mixed and assumed identities, and Tchalgadjieff raised a half-million dollars, only for Ray to manoeuvre him out, and for nothing to emerge from the enterprise.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray's reputation for youth-oriented films led Ellen Ray (unrelated to him) and her partners in Dome Films to solicit him to direct her screenplay about a young man on trial for possession of marijuana, which became the reason for Ray's return to the United States in November 1969. Instead of "The Defendant", however, Ray embarked on projects concerning young Americans in turbulent times, notably the Chicago Seven, forming a production company called Leo Seven, and drawing some financial interest from Michael Butler, producer of the hit stage musical "Hair". Shooting material for "Conspiracy" on almost every current gauge of film stock, from 35mm to Super 8, he accumulated documentary sequences, dramatized reconstructions of the trial, and collage-like multiple-image footage. In order to continue, he financed production by selling paintings that he owned, and sought backing from anyone he could.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Migrating from Chicago to New York City, and then, at Dennis Hopper's invitation, New Mexico, in 1971 Ray landed in upstate New York, and started a new career as a teacher, accepting an appointment at Harpur College, in Binghamton. There he found a cast and crew, students who were eager and imaginative, but also inexperienced. Devoted to the idea of learning by doing, Ray and his class embarked on a major, feature-length project. Rather than the strict division of labour characteristic of his Hollywood career, Ray devised a rotation in which a student would take on different roles behind or in front of the camera. Similar to the Chicago Seven project—some footage from which he incorporated into the new film—the Harpur film, which came to be titled "We Can't Go Home Again", used material shot on numerous gauges of film, as well as video that was later processed and manipulated with a synthesizer provided by Nam June Paik. The pictures were combined into multiple-image constructions using as many as five projectors, and refilming the images in 35mm from a screen. Two documentaries provide records of Ray's methods and the work of his class: the near-contemporary biography, "I'm A Stranger Here Myself: A Portrait of Nicholas Ray" (1975), directed by David Helpern Jr., and Susan Ray's retrospective account, "Don't Expect Too Much" (2011).


title: Nicholas Ray

text: In the spring of 1972, Ray was asked to show some footage from the film at a conference. The audience was shocked to see footage of Ray and his students smoking marijuana together. An early version of "We Can't Go Home Again" was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, to an abiding lack of interest. Ray shot additional scenes in Amsterdam, shortly after the Cannes screening, in New York in January 1974, and two months later in San Francisco, and edited a second version, with the hopes of attracting a distributor in 1976. It remained uncompleted and without distribution at Ray's death, in 1979, but some prints of the 1973 version were made and screened at festivals and retrospectives through the 1980s. A restored version, based on the 1973 cut, was released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2011, by Oscilloscope Films.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: In the spring of 1973, Ray's contract at Binghamton was not renewed. Over the next couple of years, he relocated several times, trying to raise money and continue work on the film, before he returned to New York City. There, he continued to prepare script materials and try to develop film projects, the most viable of which was "City Blues", before the production collapsed. He was also able to continue teaching acting and directing, at the Lee Strasberg Institute and New York University, where his teaching assistant was graduate student Jim Jarmusch.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray directed two short films in the 1970s. One, "The Janitor", was a segment of the feature-length "Wet Dreams", also known as "Dreams of Thirteen" (1974). Within a collection of shorts, most of which satirized pornography, Ray's was also a very personal film in which he cast himself in the double role of a caretaker and a preacher, and used visual techniques comparable to those in his previous film. The second, "Marco" (1978), derived from one of his Strasberg Institute classes and was based on the first few pages of a recent novel of the same name, by Curtis Bill Pepper. Ray's film was included in the 2011 DVD/Blu-ray release of "We Can't Go Home Again".


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Having contracted cancer and facing mortality, Ray and his son Tim conceived a documentary about a father-son relationship. That idea, and Ray's hunger to continue working, led to the involvement of German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who had previously employed Ray as an actor, in a small but notable role in "The American Friend" (1977). Their collaboration, "Lightning Over Water" (1980), also known as "Nick's Film", uses documentary footage and dramatic constructions, juxtaposing film and video. It charts their passage in making a film, as well as recording events of Ray's last months, including directing a stage scene with actor Gerry Bamman, and directing and acting a scene with Ronee Blakley (then married to Wenders), inspired by "King Lear". The film was completed after Ray's death, in June 1979.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray was diagnosed with lung cancer in November 1977, though he may have contracted the disease several years earlier. He was treated with cobalt therapy, and in April 1978 radioactive particles were implanted as treatment. The next month, he had surgery to remove a brain tumour. He survived another year, dying of heart failure on June 16, 1979, in New York City. His ashes were buried at Oak Grove Cemetery in La Crosse, Wisconsin.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray's directorial style and preoccupations evident in his films have led critics to consider him an auteur. Further, Ray is considered a central figure in the development of auteur theory itself. He was often singled out by Cahiers du cinéma critics who coined the term to designate exemplars (alongside such major figures as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks) of film directors who worked in Hollywood, and whose work had a recognizable and distinctive stamp seen to transcend the standardized industrial system in which they were produced. Still, critic Andrew Sarris, among the first to popularize auteurism in the United States, placed Ray below his "Pantheon," and in his second-rung category "The Far Side of Paradise," in his 1968 assessment of sound-era American directors: "Nicholas Ray is not the greatest director who ever lived; nor is he a Hollywood hack. The Truth lies somewhere in between."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Like many US theatre practitioners of the 1930s, Ray was strongly influenced by the theories and practices of early-twentieth century Russian dramatists, and the system of actor training that evolved into "Method acting." Late in life, he told students, "My first orientation to the theatre was more toward Meyerholdt, then Vakhtangov, than Stanislavsky," citing Vakhtangov's notion of "agitation from the essence" as being "a principal guideline for me in my directing career." On a few occasions, he was able to work with actors who were so trained, notably James Dean, but as a director working in the Hollywood studio system, most of his performers were trained classically, on stage, or in the studios themselves. Some found Ray agreeable as a director, while others resisted his methods. On "Born To Be Bad", for example, Ray started rehearsals with a "table read," then customary in a stage production but less so for a film, and star Joan Fontaine found the exercise discomfiting, tainting her relationship with the director, whom she thought "not right for this kind of picture." On the same film, Joan Leslie appreciated Ray's hands-on direction, even though they differed in their interpretation of a scene. Their co-star, the Reinhardt-trained Robert Ryan, remembered favourably his second Ray project, "On Dangerous Ground", "He directs very little... Right from the start of our collaboration, he offered me a very few suggestions. ... He never told me what to do. He was never specific about anything at all."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Most of Ray's films take place in the United States, and biographer Bernard Eisenschitz stresses the distinctively American themes that run through his motion pictures, and Ray's life. His early work alongside Alan Lomax, as a WPA folklorist and then in radio, and his acquaintance with musicians including Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, and Josh White, informed his approach to American society in his films, and the interest in ethnography evident in his films. Ray frequently made films characterized by their examination of outsider figures, and most of his movies implicitly or explicitly critique conformity. With examples including "They Live By Night" and "Rebel Without a Cause", he has been cited for his sympathetic treatment of contemporary youth, but other films of his adeptly deal with the crises of more experienced and older characters, among them "In A Lonely Place", "The Lusty Men", "Johnny Guitar", and "Bigger Than Life". The stories and themes explored in his films stood out in their time for being non-conformist and sympathetic to or even encouraging of instability and the adoption of then-questionable morals. His work has been singled out for the unique way in which it "define[s] the peculiar anxieties and contradictions of America in the ’50s."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: While he started working in Hollywood on film noir and other black-and-white pictures, in the standard Academy ratio, Ray later became better known for his vivid use of color and widescreen. His films have also been noted for their stylized "mise en scène" with carefully choregraphed blocking and composition that often emphasizes architecture. Ray himself credited his affection for widescreen formats to Frank Lloyd Wright: "I like the horizontal line, and the horizontal was essential for Wright." As V. F. Perkins observes, however, many of Ray's compositions "are deliberately, sometimes startlingly, unbalanced to give an effect of displacement," further noting his use of "static masses with bold lines ... which intrude into the frame and at the same time disrupt and unify his compositions." Bernard Eisenschitz also links Wright to Ray's desire to "destroy the rectangular frame" (as the filmmaker said, adding, "I couldn't stand the formality of it"), through the multiple-image techniques he used in "We Can't Go Home Again". He had envisioned using split-screen techniques as early as "Rebel Without a Cause", and proposed, unsuccessfully, that "The True Story of Jesse James" be "stylized in every respect, all of it shot on the stage, including the horses, the chases, everything, and do it in areas of light."


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray uses color boldly—Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, has referred to the "vibrant color-coding" of "Johnny Guitar", and the "delirious color" of "Party Girl"—but meaningfully, determined by the circumstances of the film's story and its characters. As V. F. Perkins points out, he uses colors "for their emotional effect," but more characteristically "for the extent to which they blend or clash with background." The reds that Cyd Charisse wears in "Party Girl", for instance, "have an autonomous emotional value," but also have impact measured against the "somber browns of a courtroom" or against "the darker red of a sofa on which she sleeps." Ray himself used the latter example to discuss the varying meaning of color, referring to the red-on-red of James Dean's jacket on a red couch, in "Rebel Without a Cause", as "smoldering danger," while the same arrangement of Charisse's gown and sofa "was an entirely different value" (which he did not specify). In "Party Girl", he says, green was "sinister and jealous," while in "Bigger Than Life" it was "life, grass, and hospital walls," and, referring to the use of color in "Johnny Guitar", he cites the costuming of the posse in stark black and white. Implicitly their dress befits the situation—they have come directly from a funeral—but also situates them in stark contrast to Joan Crawford's Vienna, the character they are persecuting, who changes her wardrobe, in a wide range of vivid colors, from one scene to the next.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: About Ray's editing style, V. F. Perkins describes it as "dislocated ... [reflecting] the dislocated lives which many of his characters live," citing as a characteristic feature the use of camera movements that are in process at the start of the shot and not yet at rest at the end. Frequently, as well, Ray cuts abruptly, and disruptively, from the main action of a scene to the response, in close-up, of "a character who is, to all appearances, only peripherally involved." Another distinctive trait is the frequent use of dissolves for scene transitions, "more than most Hollywood directors of his time," as Terrence Rafferty points out, inferring from this, "perhaps an indication of his general preference for fluidity over hard, nailed-down meanings." Ray himself cited comic strips as instructive, when he started in pictures, as providing examples that deviated from the most conventional Hollywood editing. He also remembered that when shooting his first film, the editor (Sherman Todd) encouraged him to "shoot double reverses" (that is, to violate the 180-degree rule), which he did, strategically, in several sequences of "They Live By Night", "In A Lonely Place", and other of his Hollywood films.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Ray distinguished himself by working in nearly every conventionalised Hollywood genre, infusing them with distinctive stylistic and thematic approaches: Crime films, within the film noir cycle: "They Live By Night", "In A Lonely Place", and "On Dangerous Ground"; the social problem film "Knock On Any Door"; Westerns: "Run For Cover", "Johnny Guitar", and "The True Story of Jesse James"; Women's pictures: "A Woman's Secret" and "Born To Be Bad"; World War II dramas: "Flying Leathernecks" and "Bitter Victory"; the family melodrama: "Rebel Without A Cause" and "Bigger Than Life": Epic spectacles: "King of Kings" and "55 Days at Peking". Yet he also applied himself to films that fell between genres, such as the gangster film, punctuated by dance numbers but not quite a musical, "Party Girl", and others of more marginalised categories—the rodeo film "The Lusty Men", the ethnographic dramas "Hot Blood" and "The Savage Innocents"—or which even predicted more significant, later concerns, such as the ecologically themed drama "Wind Across the Everglades".


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr. was the youngest child in his family, and the only boy, called "Ray" or "Junior." His three sisters were significantly older than he: Alice, born 1900; Ruth, born 1903; and Helen, born 1905. (He had two half-sisters, from his father's first marriage. They had both married, but continued to live near their father.) Raymond Sr. was a building contractor, age forty-eight when his son was born. After World War I, he retired and moved his family from the small town of Galesville to his own hometown, the larger community of La Crosse, where they would be nearer his mother. Raymond Sr. loved to read, and he loved music, and so did son Ray, who remembered hearing Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin, playing on the banks of the Mississippi River, around 1920. Mother Lena was a Lutheran and teetotaler, but the father drank and frequented speakeasies, and it was in one, when his father went missing in 1927, that Ray tracked down his father's mistress, who led him to a hotel room where Raymond Sr. was insensate; he died the next day. Ray was sixteen.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: As the youngest, Ray had been indulged by his mother and sisters, and now he was the only male in the family. One by one, though, his sisters left home. By 1924, Alice had completed training as a nurse, married, and moved to Madison, and, by the time her father died, Oshkosh. Middle sister Ruth had taken Ray to his first movie, "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), and she was the first in the family with theatrical ambitions—"stagestruck," as he later characterized her—but they were foiled by the family. She moved to Chicago and married a scientist, but indulged her love of the arts as an avid audience member. Helen too had performance in her veins, working awhile reading stories on a children's radio broadcast, then becoming a teacher.


title: Nicholas Ray

text: Increasingly unmanageable after his father's death, Ray was sent to Chicago to live with his sister Ruth and enrol in Robert A. Waller High, returning to La Crosse Central midway through his final year. According to school newspapers and yearbooks, he was popular, with a good sense of humour about himself. He played football and basketball, and was a cheerleader, perhaps more social activities than athletic commitments. Debate was a greater interest, and he took elocution lessons, and then joined "Falstaff Club," the school's drama group, though not as an onstage presence. According to biographer Patrick McGilligan, as an adolescent he was "fundamentally restless and lonely," and "prone to long, ambiguous silences." This was characteristic of conversations with Ray for the rest of his life. Gifted with a mellifluous, deep voice, however, Ray won a scholarship to be an announcer at the local radio station, WKBH, for a year, while he was enrolled in La Crosse Teachers College. (Later, he would describe this award as "a scholarship to any university in the world"—a narrative embellishment typical of him. He reported that the summer following, he joined a troupe of stunt fliers, but also of working with an airborne bootlegger.)


title: Nicholas Ray

text: As in high school, he joined the drama society, the Buskin Club, where he also found a girlfriend, Kathryn Snodgrass, daughter of the school president. They also collaborated as editors on the "Racquet", the school newspaper, she on features, and he on sports, and as co-writers of a stage revue revolving around a college student who goes to Hollywood. The couple was known around campus as "Ray and Kay." For the revue, titled "February Follies", Ray took the stage, as compere. In April 1930, he advanced to play the lead in the school's major production, of "The New Poor", a 1924 comedy by Cosmo Hamilton"." In due course, Ray led the Buskins, and started dressing the role of an early twentieth-century aesthete. As well, he started to offer more left-leaning political commentary in the college paper. He fostered other proclivities that would persist through most of his life. After he and Kay Snodgrass broke up, and she transferred to the university in Madison, he courted numerous young women, and balanced insomnia with alcohol-fed socializing all night long.