Spirit of America is a 501(c)(3) organization.

(meta data) TITLE: General Jack Keane | Spirit of America

General Jack Keane served 37 years in the Army, rising to the rank of four-star General.

Most recently, he held the position of the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army.

During his four years in this job as Chief Operating Officer of the United States Army, he managed operations of more than 1.5 million soldiers and civilians in over 120 countries and an annual budget in excess of $110 billion dollars.

Throughout his tenure in this position the Army has fought and won wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while supporting numerous worldwide peace operation, maintaining readiness, and transforming to a faster, more deployable force.

As the Vice Chief of Staff, General Keane developed and maintained strong relationships, on behalf of the Army, with Congress, the media, opinion leaders, national security policy makers, and the American people.

In doing so, he delivered over 400 speeches in four years, communicating critical Department of Defense and Army messages.

He testified before Congress on 18 separate occasions on subjects as diverse as the war in Iraq, Military Health Care, the Budget, Environmental Law, Army Readiness and Army transformation.

General Keane was a career paratrooper who commanded at every level to include the 18th Airborne Corps and Fort Bragg, NC; the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and Fort Campbell, KY; and the Joint Readiness Training Center.

He also served as the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the United States Atlantic Command prior to becoming the Army's Vice Chief of Staff, and was featured in Tom Clancy's book, AIRBORNE.

General Keane is a combat veteran having served as a platoon leader and company commander in Viet Nam.

His units deployed to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.

General Keane graduated from Fordham University business school in 1966 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Accounting and holds a Masters of Arts Degree in Philosophy from Western Kentucky University.

His military education includes the Infantry Officers Basic and Advanced Courses, the United States Army Command and General Staff College, and the United States Army War College.

General Keane is the recipient of an honorary PH.D in Law from Fordham University and an honorary PH.D in Public Service from Eastern Kentucky University.

General Keane's Army awards and decorations include: two Defense Distinguished Service Medals, two Army Distinguished Service Medals, the Silver Star, five Legions of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, the Ranger Tab, the Combat Infantryman's Badge, the Master Parachutist Badge, and the Air Assault Badge.

Since his retirement from the Army, General Keane is currently President GSI, LLC, is senior advisor to Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts and Co. and advisor to Chairman and CEO, URS Corporation.

He is a director of METLIFE, Inc and General Dynamics Corporation.

General Keane serves as a member of the Department of Defense Policy Board.

He is also a military contributor and analyst for ABC News.

General Keane is married to the former Theresa W. Doyle.

They have two adult children, Matthew and Daniel.

General Keane is currently a member of the Spirit of America advisory board.

Learn more about our work helping America's troops, diplomats, and local people in the world's toughest places.

This iframe contains the logic required to handle Ajax powered Gravity Forms.

He said, "You're going to get about 15 minutes at best and put it all out there. And when you walk out of that room, feel good that you got it all out there." So that was sound advice, and I did put it all out there. Keane was asked by Vice President Cheney to go back on active duty and lead the surge in the field. When Keane declined, Cheney pressed him to come work in the White House and oversee both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Keane again declined. Keane ended up briefly working at the White House and then later traveled to Iraq several times to advise General Petraeus.
 Keane currently sits on the board of directors of  General Dynamics, and is a consultant/strategic advisor for Academi. Keane was a lobbyist for AM General, the firm that produces the Humvee. In October 2016, Keane became the AM General's executive chairman. Keane is an Advisory Board Member of Spirit of America.


The organization supports the safety and success of Americans serving abroad.

(meta data) TITLE: General Jack Keane | Spirit of America

General Jack Keane served 37 years in the Army, rising to the rank of four-star General.

Most recently, he held the position of the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army.

During his four years in this job as Chief Operating Officer of the United States Army, he managed operations of more than 1.5 million soldiers and civilians in over 120 countries and an annual budget in excess of $110 billion dollars.

Throughout his tenure in this position the Army has fought and won wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while supporting numerous worldwide peace operation, maintaining readiness, and transforming to a faster, more deployable force.

As the Vice Chief of Staff, General Keane developed and maintained strong relationships, on behalf of the Army, with Congress, the media, opinion leaders, national security policy makers, and the American people.

In doing so, he delivered over 400 speeches in four years, communicating critical Department of Defense and Army messages.

He testified before Congress on 18 separate occasions on subjects as diverse as the war in Iraq, Military Health Care, the Budget, Environmental Law, Army Readiness and Army transformation.

General Keane was a career paratrooper who commanded at every level to include the 18th Airborne Corps and Fort Bragg, NC; the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and Fort Campbell, KY; and the Joint Readiness Training Center.

He also served as the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the United States Atlantic Command prior to becoming the Army's Vice Chief of Staff, and was featured in Tom Clancy's book, AIRBORNE.

General Keane is a combat veteran having served as a platoon leader and company commander in Viet Nam.

His units deployed to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.

General Keane graduated from Fordham University business school in 1966 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Accounting and holds a Masters of Arts Degree in Philosophy from Western Kentucky University.

His military education includes the Infantry Officers Basic and Advanced Courses, the United States Army Command and General Staff College, and the United States Army War College.

General Keane is the recipient of an honorary PH.D in Law from Fordham University and an honorary PH.D in Public Service from Eastern Kentucky University.

General Keane's Army awards and decorations include: two Defense Distinguished Service Medals, two Army Distinguished Service Medals, the Silver Star, five Legions of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, the Ranger Tab, the Combat Infantryman's Badge, the Master Parachutist Badge, and the Air Assault Badge.

Since his retirement from the Army, General Keane is currently President GSI, LLC, is senior advisor to Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts and Co. and advisor to Chairman and CEO, URS Corporation.

He is a director of METLIFE, Inc and General Dynamics Corporation.

General Keane serves as a member of the Department of Defense Policy Board.

He is also a military contributor and analyst for ABC News.

General Keane is married to the former Theresa W. Doyle.

They have two adult children, Matthew and Daniel.

General Keane is currently a member of the Spirit of America advisory board.

Learn more about our work helping America's troops, diplomats, and local people in the world's toughest places.

This iframe contains the logic required to handle Ajax powered Gravity Forms.

He said, "You're going to get about 15 minutes at best and put it all out there. And when you walk out of that room, feel good that you got it all out there." So that was sound advice, and I did put it all out there. Keane was asked by Vice President Cheney to go back on active duty and lead the surge in the field. When Keane declined, Cheney pressed him to come work in the White House and oversee both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Keane again declined. Keane ended up briefly working at the White House and then later traveled to Iraq several times to advise General Petraeus.
 Keane currently sits on the board of directors of  General Dynamics, and is a consultant/strategic advisor for Academi. Keane was a lobbyist for AM General, the firm that produces the Humvee. In October 2016, Keane became the AM General's executive chairman. Keane is an Advisory Board Member of Spirit of America. Spirit of America is a 501(c)(3) organization.


The organization supports the local people and partners they seek to help.

(meta data) TITLE: General Jack Keane | Spirit of America

General Jack Keane served 37 years in the Army, rising to the rank of four-star General.

Most recently, he held the position of the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army.

During his four years in this job as Chief Operating Officer of the United States Army, he managed operations of more than 1.5 million soldiers and civilians in over 120 countries and an annual budget in excess of $110 billion dollars.

Throughout his tenure in this position the Army has fought and won wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while supporting numerous worldwide peace operation, maintaining readiness, and transforming to a faster, more deployable force.

As the Vice Chief of Staff, General Keane developed and maintained strong relationships, on behalf of the Army, with Congress, the media, opinion leaders, national security policy makers, and the American people.

In doing so, he delivered over 400 speeches in four years, communicating critical Department of Defense and Army messages.

He testified before Congress on 18 separate occasions on subjects as diverse as the war in Iraq, Military Health Care, the Budget, Environmental Law, Army Readiness and Army transformation.

General Keane was a career paratrooper who commanded at every level to include the 18th Airborne Corps and Fort Bragg, NC; the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and Fort Campbell, KY; and the Joint Readiness Training Center.

He also served as the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the United States Atlantic Command prior to becoming the Army's Vice Chief of Staff, and was featured in Tom Clancy's book, AIRBORNE.

General Keane is a combat veteran having served as a platoon leader and company commander in Viet Nam.

His units deployed to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.

General Keane graduated from Fordham University business school in 1966 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Accounting and holds a Masters of Arts Degree in Philosophy from Western Kentucky University.

His military education includes the Infantry Officers Basic and Advanced Courses, the United States Army Command and General Staff College, and the United States Army War College.

General Keane is the recipient of an honorary PH.D in Law from Fordham University and an honorary PH.D in Public Service from Eastern Kentucky University.

General Keane's Army awards and decorations include: two Defense Distinguished Service Medals, two Army Distinguished Service Medals, the Silver Star, five Legions of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, the Ranger Tab, the Combat Infantryman's Badge, the Master Parachutist Badge, and the Air Assault Badge.

Since his retirement from the Army, General Keane is currently President GSI, LLC, is senior advisor to Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts and Co. and advisor to Chairman and CEO, URS Corporation.

He is a director of METLIFE, Inc and General Dynamics Corporation.

General Keane serves as a member of the Department of Defense Policy Board.

He is also a military contributor and analyst for ABC News.

General Keane is married to the former Theresa W. Doyle.

They have two adult children, Matthew and Daniel.

General Keane is currently a member of the Spirit of America advisory board.

Learn more about our work helping America's troops, diplomats, and local people in the world's toughest places.

This iframe contains the logic required to handle Ajax powered Gravity Forms.

He said, "You're going to get about 15 minutes at best and put it all out there. And when you walk out of that room, feel good that you got it all out there." So that was sound advice, and I did put it all out there. Keane was asked by Vice President Cheney to go back on active duty and lead the surge in the field. When Keane declined, Cheney pressed him to come work in the White House and oversee both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; Keane again declined. Keane ended up briefly working at the White House and then later traveled to Iraq several times to advise General Petraeus.
 Keane currently sits on the board of directors of  General Dynamics, and is a consultant/strategic advisor for Academi. Keane was a lobbyist for AM General, the firm that produces the Humvee. In October 2016, Keane became the AM General's executive chairman. Keane is an Advisory Board Member of Spirit of America. Spirit of America is a 501(c)(3) organization. The organization supports the safety and success of Americans serving abroad.


As of April 2013, the movie is reported to have survived.

(meta data) TITLE: Observations on film art : Silent films, old and new

Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages pdf online

Pandora's Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies pdf online

Planet Hong Kong, second edition pdf online

Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema pdf online

Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907–1934 pdf online

CinemaScope: The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses

Constructive editing in Pickpocket: A video essay

Lessons with Bazin: Six Paths to a Poetics

A Celestial Cinémathèque? or, Film Archives and Me: A Semi-Personal History

Shklovsky and His "Monument to a Scientific Error"

Murder Culture: Adventures in 1940s Suspense

The Viewer's Share: Models of Mind in Explaining Film

Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory?

The Classical Hollywood Cinema Twenty-Five Years Along

William Cameron Menzies: One Forceful, Impressive Idea

Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong

The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema

Preface, Croatian edition, On the History of Film Style

Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages

Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies

299 pages, 11 × 8.5 inches, 441 color illustrations

Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood

400 pages, 6 × 9 inches, 12 color illustrations;

to Amazon | go to The Frodo Franchise blog]

Textbook written with Kristin Thompson and Jeff Smith.

Textbook written with Kristin Thompson (first-named author).

When worlds collide: Mixing the show-biz tale with true crime in ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOODKindest, E.: A memoir of Edward BraniganThe Criterion Channel:

The best news for film culture you will hear today (and probably all year)Nolan book 2.0:

Cerebral blockbusters meet blunt-force cinephiliaThe ten best films of ...

1928Venice 2018: Welles and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WINDLA LA LAND: Singin' in the sunHow

LA LA LAND is madeARRIVAL: When is Now?It

's all over, until the next timeA BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY: Yang and his gangsFILM ART:

The eleventh edition arrives!Open secrets of classical storytelling: Narrative analysis 101The waning thrills of CGIHarry Potter and the Twelve-Year BoyhoodBIRDMAN:

Following Riggan's ordersSay hello to GOODBYE TO LANGUAGEGone GrrrlADIEU AU LANGAGE: 2 + 2 x 3DMOONRISE KINGDOM: Wes in

GRANDMASTER: Moving forward, turning backMixing business with pleasure: Johnnie To's DRUG WARDavid Koepp: Making the world movie-sizedPandora's digital box: End timesScoping things out: A new video lectureAll play and no work?

RichieA hobbit is chubby, but is he off-balance?What

A video essay on constructive editingThe wayward charms of CineramaNolan vs. NolanTINKER TAILOR:

A guide for the perplexedHUGO: Scorsese's birthday present to Georges MélièsDown in front!

Notes from the Raccoon LodgeYou are my densityA variation on a sunbeam: Exploring a Griffith Biograph filmDo not forget to return

your 3D glassesCapellani trionfanteCognitive scientists 1, screenplay gurus 0Graphic content aheadMolly wanted moreEndurance: Survival lessons from LumetWatching you watch THERE WILL BE BLOODTHE SOCIAL NETWORK: Faces behind facebook

PLANET HONG KONG: backstories and sidestories

The Rhapsodes: American film critics of the 1940s

Jan-Christopher Horak's "Archival Spaces" blog

Midnight Eye: The Latest and Best in Japanese Film

Mike Grost's Classic Film and Television

Reid Rosefelt on Social Media for Filmmakers

The Golden Rock on Asian movies and popular culture

Timeline: Visual Effects, Computer Graphics, Computer Animation

Virginia Wright Wexman on enjoying film festivals

Zigzigger: On the Audiovisual and Beyond

« "We didn't have a sense that VERTIGO was special":

Scoping things out: A new video lecture »

Sunday | April 21, 2013 open printable version

February and March have been good to silent cinema.

Time for a round-up of some highlights as we impatiently anticipate Il Cinema Ritrovato, coming up in a little over two months.

In reporting on the 2010 and 2011 programs of Il Cinema Ritrovato, I highlighted one of the festival's major revelations, that of the silent films of Albert Capellani.

These generous doses of Capellani's splendid films were put together by Mariann Lewinsky, who realized his importance after she included some of his shorts in her annual "Cento Anni Fa" programs.

In my entries I argued that Capellani was revealed as one of the early cinema's great masters.

(The 2010 entry is here, and the 2011 one here.)

Not surprisingly, during the intervening years, scholars have been busy researching Capellani's films and career.

March 6 to 24 saw a major retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française.

(Information on the program is still available online, as is a detailed press release.)

Shortly before it began, the first biography appeared: Christine Leteux's Albert Capellani: Cineaste du Romanesque, with a foreword by Kevin Brownlow.

Leteux discovered Capellani in May of 2012, thanks to seeing Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables at the Forum des Images in Paris.

Setting out to learn more about the filmmaker, she realized how thoroughly his memory had nearly vanished from film history.

She sought out and received the cooperation of his grandson, Bernard Basset-Capellani, whom she describes as "intarissable" (inexhaustible) on the subject.

The result is a solid, traditional biography, with chapters mostly organized around the companies for which Capellani worked (Pathe, SCAGL, World, Mutual, and so on) and some of his key films (Les Misérables, The Red Lantern).

The prose style is easily readable French, at least to someone like me with an average knowledge of the language.

For an interview with Leteux concerning the book, see here.

The book is on sale at the Cinémathèque's shop, which unfortunately does not sell online.

It was supposed to be available on Amazon.fr, but so far is not.

The easiest way for those outside France to order it is through three third-party book-sellers on amazon.fr, all offering it at the cover price of 14.90 €.

Leteux's book is a vital source for anyone interested in early cinema.

I was pleased to see that the last chapter ends with some quotations from my second entry on Capellani, ending with "With the end of the main retrospective, however, it is safe to say that from now on anyone who claims to know early film history will need to be familiar with Capellani's work."

The book includes a filmography and list of films available on DVD.

These include a new one, a restoration of The Red Lantern by our friends at the Cinematek in Brussels, available on Amazon.fr or directly from the Cinematek's shop.

The French-language historical journal on cinema, 1895, timed its March, 2013 issue to coincide with the Cinémathèque's retrospective.

I have not had a chance to see it yet, but the table of contents is available here.

The only online purchasing source for individual issues I have found is here; the page gives a lengthy summary of the contents.

Mariann continues to search for more surviving prints for restoration and eventual inclusion in future editions of Il Cinema Ritrovato.

She has sent me some tantalizing news about recent discoveries and restorations.

There will be a third Capellani season in 2014.

This will probably include some of the director's American films: Social Hypocrites (now restored), Flash of the Emerald (the one surviving reel), Inside of the Cup (surviving but so far with no projection print), Eye for Eye (two surviving reals), Sisters, and the French film Le Nabab.

Other possible restorations include House of Mirth, La belle limonadiere, and Oh Boy!

A description of the 2013 Ritrovato festival is available here.

Early this year we posted our annual list of the ten best films of ninety years ago.

It featured the classic early documentary, Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.

In March our friends at Flicker Alley released a two-disc Blu-ray edition of Nanook paired with the 1934 Danish feature, The Wedding of Palo (Palos Brudefærd).

The latter is one of those titles that one occasionally encounters on the fringes of older historical surveys, but it has been difficult indeed to see.

This new print is a 2012 restoration from a George Eastman House original 35mm nitrate copy.

Nanook is familiar enough, but The Wedding of Palo is not.

It was made by the Danish explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, who appears in a brief introductory passage.

Clearly he was influenced by Flaherty's work.

He combines a simple fictional narrative with documentary scenes of traditional Inuit life in eastern Greenland.

The basic story involves the heroine Navarona, whose brothers are reluctant to lose their housekeeper by allowing her to marry.

Two men of the tribe court her and come into violent jealous conflict.

Interjected are sequences of a salmon hunt, a festival, a traditional song duel between the two rivals, and a polar-bear hunt.

The staged dialogue scenes involve sound recording, with no subtitles but the occasional brief intertitle to translate.

As in Nanook, the non-professional actors are remarkably natural, especially the "actress" portraying the heroine.

There is a cute young boy brought in at intervals for comic appeal, and the members of the village seem always to be laughing and enjoying a suspiciously carefree life.

The film has the advantage of more spectacular scenery than that in Flaherty's film, with huge mountains and glaciers in place of the vast ice-covered vistas (see bottom image).

As usual, the Flicker Alley team has gone beyond the call of duty with this release.

It includes not only the two features, but six bonus films, as described in the press release:

Nanook Revisited (Saumialuk) by Claude Massot was made in the same locations used by Flaherty.

It shows how Inuit life changed in the intervening decades, how Flaherty consciously depicted a culture which was then already vanishing, and how Nanook is used today to teach the Inuit their heritage.

Nanook Revisited was produced in 1988 on standard definition video for French television.

Dwellings of the Far North (1928) is the igloo-building sequence of Nanook re-edited and re-titled as an educational film; Arctic Hunt (1913) and extended excerpts from Primitive Love (1927) are by Arctic explorer Frank E. Kleinschmidt; Eskimo Hunters of Northwest Alaska (1949) by Louis deRochemont shows many activities seen in Nanook thirty years after, and Face of the High Arctic (1959) depicts the ecology of the region, produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

Altogether, the films run an impressive 281 minutes.

There's also a booklet with excerpts from Flaherty's book, My Eskimo Friends, an essay by Lawrence Millman, "Knud Rasmussen and The Wedding of Palo," and notes on the films.

Snow White and the Seven (?) Bullfighting Dwarves

In 2011, a French film, The Artist, gained huge attention in the infotainment media as a modern version of silent cinema, winning yet another Best Picture Oscar for the Weinstein brothers.

It was a reasonably successful imitation of mid- to late 1920s cinema during the transition to sound.

Now a much better modern silent film has arrived, Pablo Berger's Blancanieves, a loose version of the Snow White story transposed to 1920s Spain.

A famous bullfighter is paralyzed after being gored in the ring.

His wife dies in childbirth and his scheming nurse marries him.

She keeps his daughter, Carmen, away from her father by setting her to work as a downtrodden servant in his country estate.

Upon her father's death, the evil wife schemes to have her killed, and she escapes to the protection of a troupe of six bullfighting dwarves who, possessing uncertain arithmetic skills, bill themselves as seven bullfighting dwarves.

While The Artist was a fairly good imitation of 1920s Hollywood filmmaking, Blancanieves is a pastiche of the 1928-29 era of European silent cinema.

It draws on what I have termed the International Style of filmmaking, a late 1920s blend of influences from the French Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Soviet Montage movements.

One could almost pass it off as a genuine film of the era.

At times there are subjective effects à la Impressionism.

A superimposition conveys Carmen's memories of her father's crucial instructions to her, and superimposed images of hands waving handkerchiefs present the enthusiam of the crowd's plea for the bull to be pardoned.

This was also the period in which the power of the wide angle lens, particularly in close-ups and in low-angle shots, was exploited, initially in Soviet cinema and then all over Europe.

Blancanieves is full of such shots, as in the frame at the top of this entry and in these two shots from the opening scene:

There are also montage sequences, building up to flurries of very short shots.

This accelerated-editing technique is typical of both Soviet and French filmmaking of the era.

The too-frequent use of handheld camera in Blancanieves detracts somewhat from the feeling of authenticity.

In the late 1920s, cameras were too heavy to be handheld.

They could be strapped to the body of the cinematographer with harnesses, but that creates a subtly different look.

And during the late 1920s, shots with the camera holding on a character while the background spins around behind him or her would have been achieved by placing both camera and actor on a large turntable.

(This effect apparently was pioneered in Germany in the mid-1920s).

But the occasional dramatic lighting effects, particularly in the climactic scene, are distinctly reminiscent of German cinema.

In general, the narrative is charming and amusing.

The heroine's pet rooster provides exactly the sort of comic relief that is common in films of the 1920s, and the story has an effective fairy-tale quality.

I found the ending a bit disappointing and certainly not typical of the films of the 1920s.

Still, Berger has clearly watched an enormous number of 1920s European films and absorbed their styles.

He can imitate the International Style remarkably well, telling a tale that is appropriate to the 1920s and yet has a touch of humor that doesn't belittle the silent era.

Blancanieves was released in the US on March 29 and is currently making the rounds of art-houses and festivals.

Other entries discussing the International Style and wide-angle filming at the end of the silent era can be found here and here.

Last Modified: Sunday | April 21, 2013 @ 20:29 open printable version

on Sunday | April 21, 2013 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Art cinema, Directors: Capellani, Documentary film, Film comments, Film history, National cinemas: Denmark, National cinemas: Spain and Portugal, Silent film.

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In January 1921 a film adaptation of the novel was released, directed by Albert Capellani, and featuring William P. Carleton as John Hodder, David Torrence as Eldon Parr, and Edith Hallor as Alison Parr.


As of April 2013, the movie does not have a projection print.

(meta data) TITLE: Observations on film art : Silent films, old and new

Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages pdf online

Pandora's Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies pdf online

Planet Hong Kong, second edition pdf online

Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema pdf online

Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market 1907–1934 pdf online

CinemaScope: The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses

Constructive editing in Pickpocket: A video essay

Lessons with Bazin: Six Paths to a Poetics

A Celestial Cinémathèque? or, Film Archives and Me: A Semi-Personal History

Shklovsky and His "Monument to a Scientific Error"

Murder Culture: Adventures in 1940s Suspense

The Viewer's Share: Models of Mind in Explaining Film

Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory?

The Classical Hollywood Cinema Twenty-Five Years Along

William Cameron Menzies: One Forceful, Impressive Idea

Another Shaw Production: Anamorphic Adventures in Hong Kong

The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema

Preface, Croatian edition, On the History of Film Style

Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages

Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies

299 pages, 11 × 8.5 inches, 441 color illustrations

Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood

400 pages, 6 × 9 inches, 12 color illustrations;

to Amazon | go to The Frodo Franchise blog]

Textbook written with Kristin Thompson and Jeff Smith.

Textbook written with Kristin Thompson (first-named author).

When worlds collide: Mixing the show-biz tale with true crime in ONCE UPON A TIME . . . IN HOLLYWOODKindest, E.: A memoir of Edward BraniganThe Criterion Channel:

The best news for film culture you will hear today (and probably all year)Nolan book 2.0:

Cerebral blockbusters meet blunt-force cinephiliaThe ten best films of ...

1928Venice 2018: Welles and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WINDLA LA LAND: Singin' in the sunHow

LA LA LAND is madeARRIVAL: When is Now?It

's all over, until the next timeA BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY: Yang and his gangsFILM ART:

The eleventh edition arrives!Open secrets of classical storytelling: Narrative analysis 101The waning thrills of CGIHarry Potter and the Twelve-Year BoyhoodBIRDMAN:

Following Riggan's ordersSay hello to GOODBYE TO LANGUAGEGone GrrrlADIEU AU LANGAGE: 2 + 2 x 3DMOONRISE KINGDOM: Wes in

GRANDMASTER: Moving forward, turning backMixing business with pleasure: Johnnie To's DRUG WARDavid Koepp: Making the world movie-sizedPandora's digital box: End timesScoping things out: A new video lectureAll play and no work?

RichieA hobbit is chubby, but is he off-balance?What

A video essay on constructive editingThe wayward charms of CineramaNolan vs. NolanTINKER TAILOR:

A guide for the perplexedHUGO: Scorsese's birthday present to Georges MélièsDown in front!

Notes from the Raccoon LodgeYou are my densityA variation on a sunbeam: Exploring a Griffith Biograph filmDo not forget to return

your 3D glassesCapellani trionfanteCognitive scientists 1, screenplay gurus 0Graphic content aheadMolly wanted moreEndurance: Survival lessons from LumetWatching you watch THERE WILL BE BLOODTHE SOCIAL NETWORK: Faces behind facebook

PLANET HONG KONG: backstories and sidestories

The Rhapsodes: American film critics of the 1940s

Jan-Christopher Horak's "Archival Spaces" blog

Midnight Eye: The Latest and Best in Japanese Film

Mike Grost's Classic Film and Television

Reid Rosefelt on Social Media for Filmmakers

The Golden Rock on Asian movies and popular culture

Timeline: Visual Effects, Computer Graphics, Computer Animation

Virginia Wright Wexman on enjoying film festivals

Zigzigger: On the Audiovisual and Beyond

« "We didn't have a sense that VERTIGO was special":

Scoping things out: A new video lecture »

Sunday | April 21, 2013 open printable version

February and March have been good to silent cinema.

Time for a round-up of some highlights as we impatiently anticipate Il Cinema Ritrovato, coming up in a little over two months.

In reporting on the 2010 and 2011 programs of Il Cinema Ritrovato, I highlighted one of the festival's major revelations, that of the silent films of Albert Capellani.

These generous doses of Capellani's splendid films were put together by Mariann Lewinsky, who realized his importance after she included some of his shorts in her annual "Cento Anni Fa" programs.

In my entries I argued that Capellani was revealed as one of the early cinema's great masters.

(The 2010 entry is here, and the 2011 one here.)

Not surprisingly, during the intervening years, scholars have been busy researching Capellani's films and career.

March 6 to 24 saw a major retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française.

(Information on the program is still available online, as is a detailed press release.)

Shortly before it began, the first biography appeared: Christine Leteux's Albert Capellani: Cineaste du Romanesque, with a foreword by Kevin Brownlow.

Leteux discovered Capellani in May of 2012, thanks to seeing Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables at the Forum des Images in Paris.

Setting out to learn more about the filmmaker, she realized how thoroughly his memory had nearly vanished from film history.

She sought out and received the cooperation of his grandson, Bernard Basset-Capellani, whom she describes as "intarissable" (inexhaustible) on the subject.

The result is a solid, traditional biography, with chapters mostly organized around the companies for which Capellani worked (Pathe, SCAGL, World, Mutual, and so on) and some of his key films (Les Misérables, The Red Lantern).

The prose style is easily readable French, at least to someone like me with an average knowledge of the language.

For an interview with Leteux concerning the book, see here.

The book is on sale at the Cinémathèque's shop, which unfortunately does not sell online.

It was supposed to be available on Amazon.fr, but so far is not.

The easiest way for those outside France to order it is through three third-party book-sellers on amazon.fr, all offering it at the cover price of 14.90 €.

Leteux's book is a vital source for anyone interested in early cinema.

I was pleased to see that the last chapter ends with some quotations from my second entry on Capellani, ending with "With the end of the main retrospective, however, it is safe to say that from now on anyone who claims to know early film history will need to be familiar with Capellani's work."

The book includes a filmography and list of films available on DVD.

These include a new one, a restoration of The Red Lantern by our friends at the Cinematek in Brussels, available on Amazon.fr or directly from the Cinematek's shop.

The French-language historical journal on cinema, 1895, timed its March, 2013 issue to coincide with the Cinémathèque's retrospective.

I have not had a chance to see it yet, but the table of contents is available here.

The only online purchasing source for individual issues I have found is here; the page gives a lengthy summary of the contents.

Mariann continues to search for more surviving prints for restoration and eventual inclusion in future editions of Il Cinema Ritrovato.

She has sent me some tantalizing news about recent discoveries and restorations.

There will be a third Capellani season in 2014.

This will probably include some of the director's American films: Social Hypocrites (now restored), Flash of the Emerald (the one surviving reel), Inside of the Cup (surviving but so far with no projection print), Eye for Eye (two surviving reals), Sisters, and the French film Le Nabab.

Other possible restorations include House of Mirth, La belle limonadiere, and Oh Boy!

A description of the 2013 Ritrovato festival is available here.

Early this year we posted our annual list of the ten best films of ninety years ago.

It featured the classic early documentary, Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North.

In March our friends at Flicker Alley released a two-disc Blu-ray edition of Nanook paired with the 1934 Danish feature, The Wedding of Palo (Palos Brudefærd).

The latter is one of those titles that one occasionally encounters on the fringes of older historical surveys, but it has been difficult indeed to see.

This new print is a 2012 restoration from a George Eastman House original 35mm nitrate copy.

Nanook is familiar enough, but The Wedding of Palo is not.

It was made by the Danish explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, who appears in a brief introductory passage.

Clearly he was influenced by Flaherty's work.

He combines a simple fictional narrative with documentary scenes of traditional Inuit life in eastern Greenland.

The basic story involves the heroine Navarona, whose brothers are reluctant to lose their housekeeper by allowing her to marry.

Two men of the tribe court her and come into violent jealous conflict.

Interjected are sequences of a salmon hunt, a festival, a traditional song duel between the two rivals, and a polar-bear hunt.

The staged dialogue scenes involve sound recording, with no subtitles but the occasional brief intertitle to translate.

As in Nanook, the non-professional actors are remarkably natural, especially the "actress" portraying the heroine.

There is a cute young boy brought in at intervals for comic appeal, and the members of the village seem always to be laughing and enjoying a suspiciously carefree life.

The film has the advantage of more spectacular scenery than that in Flaherty's film, with huge mountains and glaciers in place of the vast ice-covered vistas (see bottom image).

As usual, the Flicker Alley team has gone beyond the call of duty with this release.

It includes not only the two features, but six bonus films, as described in the press release:

Nanook Revisited (Saumialuk) by Claude Massot was made in the same locations used by Flaherty.

It shows how Inuit life changed in the intervening decades, how Flaherty consciously depicted a culture which was then already vanishing, and how Nanook is used today to teach the Inuit their heritage.

Nanook Revisited was produced in 1988 on standard definition video for French television.

Dwellings of the Far North (1928) is the igloo-building sequence of Nanook re-edited and re-titled as an educational film; Arctic Hunt (1913) and extended excerpts from Primitive Love (1927) are by Arctic explorer Frank E. Kleinschmidt; Eskimo Hunters of Northwest Alaska (1949) by Louis deRochemont shows many activities seen in Nanook thirty years after, and Face of the High Arctic (1959) depicts the ecology of the region, produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

Altogether, the films run an impressive 281 minutes.

There's also a booklet with excerpts from Flaherty's book, My Eskimo Friends, an essay by Lawrence Millman, "Knud Rasmussen and The Wedding of Palo," and notes on the films.

Snow White and the Seven (?) Bullfighting Dwarves

In 2011, a French film, The Artist, gained huge attention in the infotainment media as a modern version of silent cinema, winning yet another Best Picture Oscar for the Weinstein brothers.

It was a reasonably successful imitation of mid- to late 1920s cinema during the transition to sound.

Now a much better modern silent film has arrived, Pablo Berger's Blancanieves, a loose version of the Snow White story transposed to 1920s Spain.

A famous bullfighter is paralyzed after being gored in the ring.

His wife dies in childbirth and his scheming nurse marries him.

She keeps his daughter, Carmen, away from her father by setting her to work as a downtrodden servant in his country estate.

Upon her father's death, the evil wife schemes to have her killed, and she escapes to the protection of a troupe of six bullfighting dwarves who, possessing uncertain arithmetic skills, bill themselves as seven bullfighting dwarves.

While The Artist was a fairly good imitation of 1920s Hollywood filmmaking, Blancanieves is a pastiche of the 1928-29 era of European silent cinema.

It draws on what I have termed the International Style of filmmaking, a late 1920s blend of influences from the French Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Soviet Montage movements.

One could almost pass it off as a genuine film of the era.

At times there are subjective effects à la Impressionism.

A superimposition conveys Carmen's memories of her father's crucial instructions to her, and superimposed images of hands waving handkerchiefs present the enthusiam of the crowd's plea for the bull to be pardoned.

This was also the period in which the power of the wide angle lens, particularly in close-ups and in low-angle shots, was exploited, initially in Soviet cinema and then all over Europe.

Blancanieves is full of such shots, as in the frame at the top of this entry and in these two shots from the opening scene:

There are also montage sequences, building up to flurries of very short shots.

This accelerated-editing technique is typical of both Soviet and French filmmaking of the era.

The too-frequent use of handheld camera in Blancanieves detracts somewhat from the feeling of authenticity.

In the late 1920s, cameras were too heavy to be handheld.

They could be strapped to the body of the cinematographer with harnesses, but that creates a subtly different look.

And during the late 1920s, shots with the camera holding on a character while the background spins around behind him or her would have been achieved by placing both camera and actor on a large turntable.

(This effect apparently was pioneered in Germany in the mid-1920s).

But the occasional dramatic lighting effects, particularly in the climactic scene, are distinctly reminiscent of German cinema.

In general, the narrative is charming and amusing.

The heroine's pet rooster provides exactly the sort of comic relief that is common in films of the 1920s, and the story has an effective fairy-tale quality.

I found the ending a bit disappointing and certainly not typical of the films of the 1920s.

Still, Berger has clearly watched an enormous number of 1920s European films and absorbed their styles.

He can imitate the International Style remarkably well, telling a tale that is appropriate to the 1920s and yet has a touch of humor that doesn't belittle the silent era.

Blancanieves was released in the US on March 29 and is currently making the rounds of art-houses and festivals.

Other entries discussing the International Style and wide-angle filming at the end of the silent era can be found here and here.

Last Modified: Sunday | April 21, 2013 @ 20:29 open printable version

on Sunday | April 21, 2013 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Art cinema, Directors: Capellani, Documentary film, Film comments, Film history, National cinemas: Denmark, National cinemas: Spain and Portugal, Silent film.

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In January 1921 a film adaptation of the novel was released, directed by Albert Capellani, and featuring William P. Carleton as John Hodder, David Torrence as Eldon Parr, and Edith Hallor as Alison Parr. As of April 2013, the movie is reported to have survived.


The organization aims to reform Taiwan's referendum laws.

Student protesters form new group to tackle referendum rules | Society | FOCUS TAIWAN - CNA ENGLISH NEWS

FOCUS TAIWANCNA|Español|フォーカス台湾|Mobile|Business|Publications|Service|PhotosjapaneseespañolU.S. dollar down in Taipei tradingTaiwan shares open higherNew pro-independence political party launched in T...Taiwan to expand hand luggage checks to arrivals f...

Farm losses from recent rains estimated at almost ...Sunday's headlines newsTaiwan thanks Republican National Committee for supportive resolutionHome > Society

# Student protesters form new group to tackle referendum rules

Lin Fei-fan and Chen Wei-ting, the two main leaders of a recent student-led occupation of the Legislature, established a new organization on Sunday with the primary aim of pushing for reform of the country's referendum law.

Specifically, the new group, called Taiwan March, will advocate lowering the voter turnout threshold for a national referendum, which is currently 50 percent.

To this end, it will launch a petition seeking at least 100,000 signatures within six months, for an amendment to the Referendum Act, Lin said at a press conference.

In its broader efforts to push for political reforms, Taiwan March will collaborate with other civic groups to discuss draft bills on public issues such as free economic pilot zones in Taiwan and oversight of cross-strait agreements, Lin said.

The discussions will also include legislative review of a trade-in-services pact with China, he said, referring to the issue that spurred the student-led protests in Taiwan in March.

Chen, the more emotive of the two leaders, said Taiwan March has no intension at this point of evolving into a political party or joining any individual campaign for the year-end elections - not even that of the green-leaning independent Ko Wen-je who is running for Taipei mayor.

Lin and Chen led the Sunflower Movement, a series of protests organized by a coalition of students and civic groups from March 18 to April 10 against the cross-strait service trade pact.

(By Wen Kuei-hsiang and Jeffrey Wu)ENDITEM/pc

(Click here for a timeline of major events of the Sunflower Movement between March 17 and April 7.)

## Taiwan to expand hand luggage checks to arrivals from Philippines

## Farm losses from recent rains estimated at almost NT$17 million

## First case of domestic dengue fever in Taipei this year confirmed

## Magnitude 4.8 earthquake jolts eastern Taiwan

## Hualien forest office loses track of bear cub released into the wild

## Two handed life sentences for murder of baby girl

## Hundreds of Filipinos celebrate Ilocano heritage in Taichung

## Premier gives nod to minimum wage hike

## Taiwan passport to allow Hoklo, Hakka, indigenous language names

## Man missing hand, makes hands for others

In a meeting with Taiwanese politician James Soong on 7 May 2014, CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping said that economic integration between China and Taiwan was mutually beneficial, would bring positive results for both sides and should not be disturbed. Xi appeared to address the Sunflower Movement indirectly, saying China wanted to know more about the concerns of people in Taiwan.  Soong urged Beijing to be more tolerant of Taiwan's centrist and pluralist views.
 On May 18, Lin Fei-fan, Chen Wei-ting and Huang Kuo-chang formed a new organization, Taiwan March.


The organization aims to push for legislative review of the CSSTA.

Student protesters form new group to tackle referendum rules | Society | FOCUS TAIWAN - CNA ENGLISH NEWS

FOCUS TAIWANCNA|Español|フォーカス台湾|Mobile|Business|Publications|Service|PhotosjapaneseespañolU.S. dollar down in Taipei tradingTaiwan shares open higherNew pro-independence political party launched in T...Taiwan to expand hand luggage checks to arrivals f...

Farm losses from recent rains estimated at almost ...Sunday's headlines newsTaiwan thanks Republican National Committee for supportive resolutionHome > Society

# Student protesters form new group to tackle referendum rules

Lin Fei-fan and Chen Wei-ting, the two main leaders of a recent student-led occupation of the Legislature, established a new organization on Sunday with the primary aim of pushing for reform of the country's referendum law.

Specifically, the new group, called Taiwan March, will advocate lowering the voter turnout threshold for a national referendum, which is currently 50 percent.

To this end, it will launch a petition seeking at least 100,000 signatures within six months, for an amendment to the Referendum Act, Lin said at a press conference.

In its broader efforts to push for political reforms, Taiwan March will collaborate with other civic groups to discuss draft bills on public issues such as free economic pilot zones in Taiwan and oversight of cross-strait agreements, Lin said.

The discussions will also include legislative review of a trade-in-services pact with China, he said, referring to the issue that spurred the student-led protests in Taiwan in March.

Chen, the more emotive of the two leaders, said Taiwan March has no intension at this point of evolving into a political party or joining any individual campaign for the year-end elections - not even that of the green-leaning independent Ko Wen-je who is running for Taipei mayor.

Lin and Chen led the Sunflower Movement, a series of protests organized by a coalition of students and civic groups from March 18 to April 10 against the cross-strait service trade pact.

(By Wen Kuei-hsiang and Jeffrey Wu)ENDITEM/pc

(Click here for a timeline of major events of the Sunflower Movement between March 17 and April 7.)

## Taiwan to expand hand luggage checks to arrivals from Philippines

## Farm losses from recent rains estimated at almost NT$17 million

## First case of domestic dengue fever in Taipei this year confirmed

## Magnitude 4.8 earthquake jolts eastern Taiwan

## Hualien forest office loses track of bear cub released into the wild

## Two handed life sentences for murder of baby girl

## Hundreds of Filipinos celebrate Ilocano heritage in Taichung

## Premier gives nod to minimum wage hike

## Taiwan passport to allow Hoklo, Hakka, indigenous language names

## Man missing hand, makes hands for others

In a meeting with Taiwanese politician James Soong on 7 May 2014, CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping said that economic integration between China and Taiwan was mutually beneficial, would bring positive results for both sides and should not be disturbed. Xi appeared to address the Sunflower Movement indirectly, saying China wanted to know more about the concerns of people in Taiwan.  Soong urged Beijing to be more tolerant of Taiwan's centrist and pluralist views.
 On May 18, Lin Fei-fan, Chen Wei-ting and Huang Kuo-chang formed a new organization, Taiwan March. The organization aims to reform Taiwan's referendum laws.


The organization aims to push for legislative review of other cross-strait pacts.

Student protesters form new group to tackle referendum rules | Society | FOCUS TAIWAN - CNA ENGLISH NEWS

FOCUS TAIWANCNA|Español|フォーカス台湾|Mobile|Business|Publications|Service|PhotosjapaneseespañolU.S. dollar down in Taipei tradingTaiwan shares open higherNew pro-independence political party launched in T...Taiwan to expand hand luggage checks to arrivals f...

Farm losses from recent rains estimated at almost ...Sunday's headlines newsTaiwan thanks Republican National Committee for supportive resolutionHome > Society

# Student protesters form new group to tackle referendum rules

Lin Fei-fan and Chen Wei-ting, the two main leaders of a recent student-led occupation of the Legislature, established a new organization on Sunday with the primary aim of pushing for reform of the country's referendum law.

Specifically, the new group, called Taiwan March, will advocate lowering the voter turnout threshold for a national referendum, which is currently 50 percent.

To this end, it will launch a petition seeking at least 100,000 signatures within six months, for an amendment to the Referendum Act, Lin said at a press conference.

In its broader efforts to push for political reforms, Taiwan March will collaborate with other civic groups to discuss draft bills on public issues such as free economic pilot zones in Taiwan and oversight of cross-strait agreements, Lin said.

The discussions will also include legislative review of a trade-in-services pact with China, he said, referring to the issue that spurred the student-led protests in Taiwan in March.

Chen, the more emotive of the two leaders, said Taiwan March has no intension at this point of evolving into a political party or joining any individual campaign for the year-end elections - not even that of the green-leaning independent Ko Wen-je who is running for Taipei mayor.

Lin and Chen led the Sunflower Movement, a series of protests organized by a coalition of students and civic groups from March 18 to April 10 against the cross-strait service trade pact.

(By Wen Kuei-hsiang and Jeffrey Wu)ENDITEM/pc

(Click here for a timeline of major events of the Sunflower Movement between March 17 and April 7.)

## Taiwan to expand hand luggage checks to arrivals from Philippines

## Farm losses from recent rains estimated at almost NT$17 million

## First case of domestic dengue fever in Taipei this year confirmed

## Magnitude 4.8 earthquake jolts eastern Taiwan

## Hualien forest office loses track of bear cub released into the wild

## Two handed life sentences for murder of baby girl

## Hundreds of Filipinos celebrate Ilocano heritage in Taichung

## Premier gives nod to minimum wage hike

## Taiwan passport to allow Hoklo, Hakka, indigenous language names

## Man missing hand, makes hands for others

In a meeting with Taiwanese politician James Soong on 7 May 2014, CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping said that economic integration between China and Taiwan was mutually beneficial, would bring positive results for both sides and should not be disturbed. Xi appeared to address the Sunflower Movement indirectly, saying China wanted to know more about the concerns of people in Taiwan.  Soong urged Beijing to be more tolerant of Taiwan's centrist and pluralist views.
 On May 18, Lin Fei-fan, Chen Wei-ting and Huang Kuo-chang formed a new organization, Taiwan March. The organization aims to reform Taiwan's referendum laws. The organization aims to push for legislative review of the CSSTA.


The organization aims to push for legislative review of economic bills.

Student protesters form new group to tackle referendum rules | Society | FOCUS TAIWAN - CNA ENGLISH NEWS

FOCUS TAIWANCNA|Español|フォーカス台湾|Mobile|Business|Publications|Service|PhotosjapaneseespañolU.S. dollar down in Taipei tradingTaiwan shares open higherNew pro-independence political party launched in T...Taiwan to expand hand luggage checks to arrivals f...

Farm losses from recent rains estimated at almost ...Sunday's headlines newsTaiwan thanks Republican National Committee for supportive resolutionHome > Society

# Student protesters form new group to tackle referendum rules

Lin Fei-fan and Chen Wei-ting, the two main leaders of a recent student-led occupation of the Legislature, established a new organization on Sunday with the primary aim of pushing for reform of the country's referendum law.

Specifically, the new group, called Taiwan March, will advocate lowering the voter turnout threshold for a national referendum, which is currently 50 percent.

To this end, it will launch a petition seeking at least 100,000 signatures within six months, for an amendment to the Referendum Act, Lin said at a press conference.

In its broader efforts to push for political reforms, Taiwan March will collaborate with other civic groups to discuss draft bills on public issues such as free economic pilot zones in Taiwan and oversight of cross-strait agreements, Lin said.

The discussions will also include legislative review of a trade-in-services pact with China, he said, referring to the issue that spurred the student-led protests in Taiwan in March.

Chen, the more emotive of the two leaders, said Taiwan March has no intension at this point of evolving into a political party or joining any individual campaign for the year-end elections - not even that of the green-leaning independent Ko Wen-je who is running for Taipei mayor.

Lin and Chen led the Sunflower Movement, a series of protests organized by a coalition of students and civic groups from March 18 to April 10 against the cross-strait service trade pact.

(By Wen Kuei-hsiang and Jeffrey Wu)ENDITEM/pc

(Click here for a timeline of major events of the Sunflower Movement between March 17 and April 7.)

## Taiwan to expand hand luggage checks to arrivals from Philippines

## Farm losses from recent rains estimated at almost NT$17 million

## First case of domestic dengue fever in Taipei this year confirmed

## Magnitude 4.8 earthquake jolts eastern Taiwan

## Hualien forest office loses track of bear cub released into the wild

## Two handed life sentences for murder of baby girl

## Hundreds of Filipinos celebrate Ilocano heritage in Taichung

## Premier gives nod to minimum wage hike

## Taiwan passport to allow Hoklo, Hakka, indigenous language names

## Man missing hand, makes hands for others

In a meeting with Taiwanese politician James Soong on 7 May 2014, CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping said that economic integration between China and Taiwan was mutually beneficial, would bring positive results for both sides and should not be disturbed. Xi appeared to address the Sunflower Movement indirectly, saying China wanted to know more about the concerns of people in Taiwan.  Soong urged Beijing to be more tolerant of Taiwan's centrist and pluralist views.
 On May 18, Lin Fei-fan, Chen Wei-ting and Huang Kuo-chang formed a new organization, Taiwan March. The organization aims to reform Taiwan's referendum laws. The organization aims to push for legislative review of the CSSTA. The organization aims to push for legislative review of other cross-strait pacts.


Olivier offered her the chance to work and study at the Bristol Old Vic.

(meta data) TITLE: Jean Simmons: an unforgettable English rose | Film | The Guardian

(meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/philipfrench

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/theguardian

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2010-01-23T12:44:15-0500

Available for everyone, funded by readers

# Jean Simmons: an unforgettable English rose

Philip French pays tribute to the Rank Organisation starlet who went on to become one of Hollywood's most luminous actresses

First published on Sat 23 Jan 2010 12.44 EST

Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando in the 1955 film Guys and Dolls

Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Features

Jean Simmons, who has died at the age of 80 of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California, was among the finest, most beautiful British movie actresses of the postwar years.

She was one of only two from that great 1940s flourishing of our native industry under J Arthur Rank to become a major star in Hollywood; the other was Deborah Kerr, with whom she twice appeared.

Born in 1929, the daughter of a gym teacher who had represented Britain in the 1912 Olympics, she grew up in Cricklewood, north London, of which she once disloyally remarked: "No Cricklewood girl would ever admit to being from there."

She got a deal of work as a child actress, without becoming a child star (her most memorable early appearance is singing at a forces concert in the morale-building wartime favourite The Way to the Stars), then found fame as a teenager.

She is often spoken of as a demure English rose, and indeed a 2004 American TV documentary was called Jean Simmons: Rose of England, and she crossed the Atlantic at a time when British actresses were not required to adopt American accents.

But the early roles that established her reputation were dangerously troubled figures in postwar British classics: Estella, the wilful agent of the destructive Miss Havisham in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946); the eastern temptress in the Himalayan convent in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947); and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948).

In his review of Hamlet, America's greatest film critic of the time, James Agee, said she was "the only person in the picture who gives every one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life".

She received the first of her Oscar nominations for the part, though she had never read or seen a Shakespeare play before, and Olivier's suggestion that she go to drama school was vetoed by the Rank Organisation.

Rank then sold her contract to Howard Hughes, and she went to Hollywood in 1950 with her husband, Stewart Granger, then a major star and 16 years her senior, whom she had worked with on the romantic comedy Adam and Evelyne (1949).

The capricious Hughes ill-used her talent.

She flourished, however, as soon as she broke free of him, becoming for more than a decade one of the dominant performers in an industry where the studio system was in decline.

The first great part was playing the Roman patrician converted to Christianity in the widescreen epic The Robe (1953), the first feature made in CinemaScope.

In it she acted opposite Richard Burton, and at different times she co-starred with Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy (she called her first child Tracy Granger), Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Cary Grant, and was directed by Otto Preminger, George Cukor, Joseph L Mankiewicz, William Wyler, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Donen and her second husband, Richard Brooks (with whom she had a daughter named Kate after Katharine Hepburn).

Simmons was impressive in her first Hollywood role as a homicidal psychopath in the noir thriller Angel (made under Hughes's auspices) and in 1958 gave one of her greatest performances as an overbearing academic's wife experiencing a breakdown in Home Before Dark.

Her characteristic roles at this time were strong but never sanctimonious super ego figures, people of moral stature, as varied as the Salvation Army officer Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls (which allowed her to sing and show her delightful sense of comedy), the schoolmarm acting as a restraining influence during a Texas range war in The Big Country, the slave Verina courted by Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, and the dedicated evangelist in Elmer Gantry.

There are unforgettable scenes in all these pictures.

From the mid-70s onwards, her work was mainly for television in such mini-series as The Thorn Birds and North and South, and her career came full circle when she played Miss Havisham in a television version of Great Expectations.

She made a notable return to London and the stage in 1975 as Desirée Armfeldt in a West End production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, a role created on Broadway by Glynis Johns, another British expatriate and Simmons's closest friend.

She was excellent, and infinitely superior to Elizabeth Taylor in the film version.

Most recently she came out of retirement to appear in a final movie in Britain, David Rocksavage's Shadows in the Sun, playing a frail, terminally ill poet determined to hang on to her family house in East Anglia, who dies shortly after watching an alfresco production of that wise play about departure and death, The Tempest.

It opened last June, the same day that Spartacus was reissued, and it was a deeply moving experience to see the two performances, separated by nearly half a century, on the same day.

Biography.:"Great Expectations" and stardom.

I thought acting was just a lark, meeting all those exciting movie stars, and getting £5 a day which was lovely because we needed the money. But I figured I'd just go off and get married and have children like my mother. It was working with David Lean that convinced me to go on. Simmons had support roles in "Hungry Hill" (1947) with Margaret Lockwood and the Powell-Pressburger film "Black Narcissus" (1947), playing an Indian in the latter alongside Sabu. Simmons was top-billed for the first time in a drama, "Uncle Silas" (1947). She followed it with "The Woman in the Hall" (1947).
 Neither of those films was particularly successful. But Simmons was then in a huge international hit, playing Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet" (1948), for which she received her first Oscar nomination.


Olivier advised her to play anything they threw at her to get experience.

(meta data) TITLE: Jean Simmons: an unforgettable English rose | Film | The Guardian

(meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/philipfrench

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/theguardian

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2010-01-23T12:44:15-0500

Available for everyone, funded by readers

# Jean Simmons: an unforgettable English rose

Philip French pays tribute to the Rank Organisation starlet who went on to become one of Hollywood's most luminous actresses

First published on Sat 23 Jan 2010 12.44 EST

Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando in the 1955 film Guys and Dolls

Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Features

Jean Simmons, who has died at the age of 80 of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California, was among the finest, most beautiful British movie actresses of the postwar years.

She was one of only two from that great 1940s flourishing of our native industry under J Arthur Rank to become a major star in Hollywood; the other was Deborah Kerr, with whom she twice appeared.

Born in 1929, the daughter of a gym teacher who had represented Britain in the 1912 Olympics, she grew up in Cricklewood, north London, of which she once disloyally remarked: "No Cricklewood girl would ever admit to being from there."

She got a deal of work as a child actress, without becoming a child star (her most memorable early appearance is singing at a forces concert in the morale-building wartime favourite The Way to the Stars), then found fame as a teenager.

She is often spoken of as a demure English rose, and indeed a 2004 American TV documentary was called Jean Simmons: Rose of England, and she crossed the Atlantic at a time when British actresses were not required to adopt American accents.

But the early roles that established her reputation were dangerously troubled figures in postwar British classics: Estella, the wilful agent of the destructive Miss Havisham in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946); the eastern temptress in the Himalayan convent in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947); and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948).

In his review of Hamlet, America's greatest film critic of the time, James Agee, said she was "the only person in the picture who gives every one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life".

She received the first of her Oscar nominations for the part, though she had never read or seen a Shakespeare play before, and Olivier's suggestion that she go to drama school was vetoed by the Rank Organisation.

Rank then sold her contract to Howard Hughes, and she went to Hollywood in 1950 with her husband, Stewart Granger, then a major star and 16 years her senior, whom she had worked with on the romantic comedy Adam and Evelyne (1949).

The capricious Hughes ill-used her talent.

She flourished, however, as soon as she broke free of him, becoming for more than a decade one of the dominant performers in an industry where the studio system was in decline.

The first great part was playing the Roman patrician converted to Christianity in the widescreen epic The Robe (1953), the first feature made in CinemaScope.

In it she acted opposite Richard Burton, and at different times she co-starred with Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy (she called her first child Tracy Granger), Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Cary Grant, and was directed by Otto Preminger, George Cukor, Joseph L Mankiewicz, William Wyler, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Donen and her second husband, Richard Brooks (with whom she had a daughter named Kate after Katharine Hepburn).

Simmons was impressive in her first Hollywood role as a homicidal psychopath in the noir thriller Angel (made under Hughes's auspices) and in 1958 gave one of her greatest performances as an overbearing academic's wife experiencing a breakdown in Home Before Dark.

Her characteristic roles at this time were strong but never sanctimonious super ego figures, people of moral stature, as varied as the Salvation Army officer Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls (which allowed her to sing and show her delightful sense of comedy), the schoolmarm acting as a restraining influence during a Texas range war in The Big Country, the slave Verina courted by Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, and the dedicated evangelist in Elmer Gantry.

There are unforgettable scenes in all these pictures.

From the mid-70s onwards, her work was mainly for television in such mini-series as The Thorn Birds and North and South, and her career came full circle when she played Miss Havisham in a television version of Great Expectations.

She made a notable return to London and the stage in 1975 as Desirée Armfeldt in a West End production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, a role created on Broadway by Glynis Johns, another British expatriate and Simmons's closest friend.

She was excellent, and infinitely superior to Elizabeth Taylor in the film version.

Most recently she came out of retirement to appear in a final movie in Britain, David Rocksavage's Shadows in the Sun, playing a frail, terminally ill poet determined to hang on to her family house in East Anglia, who dies shortly after watching an alfresco production of that wise play about departure and death, The Tempest.

It opened last June, the same day that Spartacus was reissued, and it was a deeply moving experience to see the two performances, separated by nearly half a century, on the same day.

I thought acting was just a lark, meeting all those exciting movie stars, and getting £5 a day which was lovely because we needed the money. But I figured I'd just go off and get married and have children like my mother. It was working with David Lean that convinced me to go on. Simmons had support roles in "Hungry Hill" (1947) with Margaret Lockwood and the Powell-Pressburger film "Black Narcissus" (1947), playing an Indian in the latter alongside Sabu. Simmons was top-billed for the first time in a drama, "Uncle Silas" (1947). She followed it with "The Woman in the Hall" (1947).
 Neither of those films was particularly successful. But Simmons was then in a huge international hit, playing Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet" (1948), for which she received her first Oscar nomination. Olivier offered her the chance to work and study at the Bristol Old Vic.


She was under contract to the Rank Organisation.

(meta data) TITLE: Jean Simmons: an unforgettable English rose | Film | The Guardian

(meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/philipfrench

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/theguardian

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2010-01-23T12:44:15-0500

Available for everyone, funded by readers

# Jean Simmons: an unforgettable English rose

Philip French pays tribute to the Rank Organisation starlet who went on to become one of Hollywood's most luminous actresses

First published on Sat 23 Jan 2010 12.44 EST

Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando in the 1955 film Guys and Dolls

Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Features

Jean Simmons, who has died at the age of 80 of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California, was among the finest, most beautiful British movie actresses of the postwar years.

She was one of only two from that great 1940s flourishing of our native industry under J Arthur Rank to become a major star in Hollywood; the other was Deborah Kerr, with whom she twice appeared.

Born in 1929, the daughter of a gym teacher who had represented Britain in the 1912 Olympics, she grew up in Cricklewood, north London, of which she once disloyally remarked: "No Cricklewood girl would ever admit to being from there."

She got a deal of work as a child actress, without becoming a child star (her most memorable early appearance is singing at a forces concert in the morale-building wartime favourite The Way to the Stars), then found fame as a teenager.

She is often spoken of as a demure English rose, and indeed a 2004 American TV documentary was called Jean Simmons: Rose of England, and she crossed the Atlantic at a time when British actresses were not required to adopt American accents.

But the early roles that established her reputation were dangerously troubled figures in postwar British classics: Estella, the wilful agent of the destructive Miss Havisham in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946); the eastern temptress in the Himalayan convent in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947); and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948).

In his review of Hamlet, America's greatest film critic of the time, James Agee, said she was "the only person in the picture who gives every one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life".

She received the first of her Oscar nominations for the part, though she had never read or seen a Shakespeare play before, and Olivier's suggestion that she go to drama school was vetoed by the Rank Organisation.

Rank then sold her contract to Howard Hughes, and she went to Hollywood in 1950 with her husband, Stewart Granger, then a major star and 16 years her senior, whom she had worked with on the romantic comedy Adam and Evelyne (1949).

The capricious Hughes ill-used her talent.

She flourished, however, as soon as she broke free of him, becoming for more than a decade one of the dominant performers in an industry where the studio system was in decline.

The first great part was playing the Roman patrician converted to Christianity in the widescreen epic The Robe (1953), the first feature made in CinemaScope.

In it she acted opposite Richard Burton, and at different times she co-starred with Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy (she called her first child Tracy Granger), Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Cary Grant, and was directed by Otto Preminger, George Cukor, Joseph L Mankiewicz, William Wyler, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Donen and her second husband, Richard Brooks (with whom she had a daughter named Kate after Katharine Hepburn).

Simmons was impressive in her first Hollywood role as a homicidal psychopath in the noir thriller Angel (made under Hughes's auspices) and in 1958 gave one of her greatest performances as an overbearing academic's wife experiencing a breakdown in Home Before Dark.

Her characteristic roles at this time were strong but never sanctimonious super ego figures, people of moral stature, as varied as the Salvation Army officer Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls (which allowed her to sing and show her delightful sense of comedy), the schoolmarm acting as a restraining influence during a Texas range war in The Big Country, the slave Verina courted by Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, and the dedicated evangelist in Elmer Gantry.

There are unforgettable scenes in all these pictures.

From the mid-70s onwards, her work was mainly for television in such mini-series as The Thorn Birds and North and South, and her career came full circle when she played Miss Havisham in a television version of Great Expectations.

She made a notable return to London and the stage in 1975 as Desirée Armfeldt in a West End production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, a role created on Broadway by Glynis Johns, another British expatriate and Simmons's closest friend.

She was excellent, and infinitely superior to Elizabeth Taylor in the film version.

Most recently she came out of retirement to appear in a final movie in Britain, David Rocksavage's Shadows in the Sun, playing a frail, terminally ill poet determined to hang on to her family house in East Anglia, who dies shortly after watching an alfresco production of that wise play about departure and death, The Tempest.

It opened last June, the same day that Spartacus was reissued, and it was a deeply moving experience to see the two performances, separated by nearly half a century, on the same day.

I thought acting was just a lark, meeting all those exciting movie stars, and getting £5 a day which was lovely because we needed the money. But I figured I'd just go off and get married and have children like my mother. It was working with David Lean that convinced me to go on. Simmons had support roles in "Hungry Hill" (1947) with Margaret Lockwood and the Powell-Pressburger film "Black Narcissus" (1947), playing an Indian in the latter alongside Sabu. Simmons was top-billed for the first time in a drama, "Uncle Silas" (1947). She followed it with "The Woman in the Hall" (1947).
 Neither of those films was particularly successful. But Simmons was then in a huge international hit, playing Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet" (1948), for which she received her first Oscar nomination. Olivier offered her the chance to work and study at the Bristol Old Vic. Olivier advised her to play anything they threw at her to get experience.


(meta data) TITLE: Jean Simmons: an unforgettable English rose | Film | The Guardian

(meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/philipfrench

(meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/theguardian

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2010-01-23T12:44:15-0500

Available for everyone, funded by readers

# Jean Simmons: an unforgettable English rose

Philip French pays tribute to the Rank Organisation starlet who went on to become one of Hollywood's most luminous actresses

First published on Sat 23 Jan 2010 12.44 EST

Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando in the 1955 film Guys and Dolls

Photograph: Everett Collection / Rex Features

Jean Simmons, who has died at the age of 80 of lung cancer in Santa Monica, California, was among the finest, most beautiful British movie actresses of the postwar years.

She was one of only two from that great 1940s flourishing of our native industry under J Arthur Rank to become a major star in Hollywood; the other was Deborah Kerr, with whom she twice appeared.

Born in 1929, the daughter of a gym teacher who had represented Britain in the 1912 Olympics, she grew up in Cricklewood, north London, of which she once disloyally remarked: "No Cricklewood girl would ever admit to being from there."

She got a deal of work as a child actress, without becoming a child star (her most memorable early appearance is singing at a forces concert in the morale-building wartime favourite The Way to the Stars), then found fame as a teenager.

She is often spoken of as a demure English rose, and indeed a 2004 American TV documentary was called Jean Simmons: Rose of England, and she crossed the Atlantic at a time when British actresses were not required to adopt American accents.

But the early roles that established her reputation were dangerously troubled figures in postwar British classics: Estella, the wilful agent of the destructive Miss Havisham in David Lean's Great Expectations (1946); the eastern temptress in the Himalayan convent in Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (1947); and Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948).

In his review of Hamlet, America's greatest film critic of the time, James Agee, said she was "the only person in the picture who gives every one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life".

She received the first of her Oscar nominations for the part, though she had never read or seen a Shakespeare play before, and Olivier's suggestion that she go to drama school was vetoed by the Rank Organisation.

Rank then sold her contract to Howard Hughes, and she went to Hollywood in 1950 with her husband, Stewart Granger, then a major star and 16 years her senior, whom she had worked with on the romantic comedy Adam and Evelyne (1949).

The capricious Hughes ill-used her talent.

She flourished, however, as soon as she broke free of him, becoming for more than a decade one of the dominant performers in an industry where the studio system was in decline.

The first great part was playing the Roman patrician converted to Christianity in the widescreen epic The Robe (1953), the first feature made in CinemaScope.

In it she acted opposite Richard Burton, and at different times she co-starred with Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy (she called her first child Tracy Granger), Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster and Cary Grant, and was directed by Otto Preminger, George Cukor, Joseph L Mankiewicz, William Wyler, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Donen and her second husband, Richard Brooks (with whom she had a daughter named Kate after Katharine Hepburn).

Simmons was impressive in her first Hollywood role as a homicidal psychopath in the noir thriller Angel (made under Hughes's auspices) and in 1958 gave one of her greatest performances as an overbearing academic's wife experiencing a breakdown in Home Before Dark.

Her characteristic roles at this time were strong but never sanctimonious super ego figures, people of moral stature, as varied as the Salvation Army officer Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls (which allowed her to sing and show her delightful sense of comedy), the schoolmarm acting as a restraining influence during a Texas range war in The Big Country, the slave Verina courted by Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, and the dedicated evangelist in Elmer Gantry.

There are unforgettable scenes in all these pictures.

From the mid-70s onwards, her work was mainly for television in such mini-series as The Thorn Birds and North and South, and her career came full circle when she played Miss Havisham in a television version of Great Expectations.

She made a notable return to London and the stage in 1975 as Desirée Armfeldt in a West End production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, a role created on Broadway by Glynis Johns, another British expatriate and Simmons's closest friend.

She was excellent, and infinitely superior to Elizabeth Taylor in the film version.

Most recently she came out of retirement to appear in a final movie in Britain, David Rocksavage's Shadows in the Sun, playing a frail, terminally ill poet determined to hang on to her family house in East Anglia, who dies shortly after watching an alfresco production of that wise play about departure and death, The Tempest.

It opened last June, the same day that Spartacus was reissued, and it was a deeply moving experience to see the two performances, separated by nearly half a century, on the same day.

I thought acting was just a lark, meeting all those exciting movie stars, and getting £5 a day which was lovely because we needed the money. But I figured I'd just go off and get married and have children like my mother. It was working with David Lean that convinced me to go on. Simmons had support roles in "Hungry Hill" (1947) with Margaret Lockwood and the Powell-Pressburger film "Black Narcissus" (1947), playing an Indian in the latter alongside Sabu. Simmons was top-billed for the first time in a drama, "Uncle Silas" (1947). She followed it with "The Woman in the Hall" (1947).
 Neither of those films was particularly successful. But Simmons was then in a huge international hit, playing Ophelia in Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet" (1948), for which she received her first Oscar nomination. Olivier offered her the chance to work and study at the Bristol Old Vic. Olivier advised her to play anything they threw at her to get experience. She was under contract to the Rank Organisation.


On 21 June 2017, Becker was declared bankrupt.

(meta data) TITLE: Tennis champion Boris Becker declared bankrupt

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2019-08-19T08:00:00

# Tennis champion Boris Becker declared bankrupt

To a generation of tennis fans he will always be 'Boom Boom' Becker, the explosive young German who won the men's singles title at Wimbledon three times - the first in 1985 as a mere 17-year-old.

But after a sparkling tennis career, followed by one as a TV pundit for the sport, he has now added a rather less than glorious chapter to his CV, that of bankrupt.

Becker, now 49, was declared bankrupt on Wednesday over undisclosed sums of money he has owed to the London-based private bankers Arbuthnot Latham & Co, since October 2015.

And it must have come as little comfort to him that the judge who handed down the ruling reminisced over seeing him in action on Wimbledon's Centre Court.

Boris Becker stretches to make a diving backhand return during the Men's singles semi final at Wimbledon in July 1985

Following the bankruptcy declaration Becker's remaining assets and property will be disposed of to pay his creditors.

There is also the possibility they will seek any earnings he makes as a commentator at next month's Wimbledon Championships to be used as payment towards his debts.

The Bankruptcy and Companies Court heard that Becker, who has a home in Wimbledon, had offered to remortgage his €6 million property (£5.2m) in Majorca as part of a deal to pay off the debt.

John Briggs, Becker's advocate, told the bankruptcy judge, Christine Derrett, that it was expected the deal would be approved by a Spanish bank in around a month.

It is clearly in the interests (of Arbuthnot Latham) for there to be refinancing," said Mr Briggs.

Becker, who was the youngest player to win the men's singles championship and went on to win it again in 1986 and 1989, was once estimated to be worth upwards of £100 million.

But Mr Briggs conceded: "He is not a sophisticated individual when it comes to finances."

Indeed Becker's abilities when it comes to financial matters have not been on a par with his skill on the court.

Boris Becker, the German former tennis player

In 2001 he was landed with divorce and paternity settlements totalling more than £20 million to his first wife, Barbara, and Angela Ermakova, the Russian model who had his baby following an encounter in the broom cupboard of a London restaurant.

The following year Becker received a two-year suspended sentence for tax evasion and was ordered to pay £2.5 million in back tax, fines, and costs after claiming Monaco as his main residence while spending much of his time in Munich.

Then in 2011 the Dubai property development to which he had lent his name, the Boris Becker Business Tower, went bust.

And in 2012 a Spanish court judge ordered a house Becker had built for him in Majorca should be auctioned to pay a debt of £225,000 he owed a local landscape gardening company.

In a separate civil court hearing, also in Palma, a judge ordered him to hand a further £345,000 to a local building firm that complained its bills for carpentry, electrical and plumbing jobs, and the laying of a basketball court, also went unpaid.

Yesterday Arbuthnot Latham's barrister Matthew Abraham argued there was a lack of evidence backing up Becker's claims that the remortgaging of his current Majorcan property would shortly go ahead and enable him to pay his debts.

Ms Registrar Derrett concluded, "with a degree of regret", that there was a lack of credible evidence that his "substantial" debt would be paid soon and she refused to adjourn the case for a further 28 days.

Agreeing to make an immediate bankruptcy order, the judge said: "I am not persuaded on the evidence before me that it can be described as credible evidence."

"It is not often the case that a professional person has a judgment (debt) outstanding against them since October 2015.

Ms Derrett added of the former champion: "One has the impression of a man with his head in the sand."

When she was told during the hearing that Becker was now a television commentator, Ms Derrett replied that she knew perfectly who he was, adding: "I remember watching him play on Centre Court, which probably shows my age."

But even her memories of seeing Becker in his prime were not enough for her to allow for what his lawyers described as "a last chance" to pay the debt.

When Mr Briggs argued that someone in Becker's position would not benefit from being declared bankrupt, as it would have a detrimental impact on his professional image, she commented: "He should have thought about that a long time ago."

Becker himself questioned why Arbuthnot Latham were pursuing the claim against him, saying he would have paid the debt next month.

In a statement he said: "My earnings are well publicised and it is clear that I have the means to repay this debt.

The value of the asset in question far exceeds the debt owed to Arbuthnot Latham.

"I intend to make an application to have this order set aside immediately.

In the meantime, I will concentrate on my work and in particular my presenting duties at Wimbledon for the BBC and other international outlets.

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The court that declared Becker bankrupt was the Bankruptcy and Companies Court.

(meta data) TITLE: Tennis champion Boris Becker declared bankrupt

(meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2019-08-19T08:00:00

# Tennis champion Boris Becker declared bankrupt

To a generation of tennis fans he will always be 'Boom Boom' Becker, the explosive young German who won the men's singles title at Wimbledon three times - the first in 1985 as a mere 17-year-old.

But after a sparkling tennis career, followed by one as a TV pundit for the sport, he has now added a rather less than glorious chapter to his CV, that of bankrupt.

Becker, now 49, was declared bankrupt on Wednesday over undisclosed sums of money he has owed to the London-based private bankers Arbuthnot Latham & Co, since October 2015.

And it must have come as little comfort to him that the judge who handed down the ruling reminisced over seeing him in action on Wimbledon's Centre Court.

Boris Becker stretches to make a diving backhand return during the Men's singles semi final at Wimbledon in July 1985

Following the bankruptcy declaration Becker's remaining assets and property will be disposed of to pay his creditors.

There is also the possibility they will seek any earnings he makes as a commentator at next month's Wimbledon Championships to be used as payment towards his debts.

The Bankruptcy and Companies Court heard that Becker, who has a home in Wimbledon, had offered to remortgage his €6 million property (£5.2m) in Majorca as part of a deal to pay off the debt.

John Briggs, Becker's advocate, told the bankruptcy judge, Christine Derrett, that it was expected the deal would be approved by a Spanish bank in around a month.

It is clearly in the interests (of Arbuthnot Latham) for there to be refinancing," said Mr Briggs.

Becker, who was the youngest player to win the men's singles championship and went on to win it again in 1986 and 1989, was once estimated to be worth upwards of £100 million.

But Mr Briggs conceded: "He is not a sophisticated individual when it comes to finances."

Indeed Becker's abilities when it comes to financial matters have not been on a par with his skill on the court.

Boris Becker, the German former tennis player

In 2001 he was landed with divorce and paternity settlements totalling more than £20 million to his first wife, Barbara, and Angela Ermakova, the Russian model who had his baby following an encounter in the broom cupboard of a London restaurant.

The following year Becker received a two-year suspended sentence for tax evasion and was ordered to pay £2.5 million in back tax, fines, and costs after claiming Monaco as his main residence while spending much of his time in Munich.

Then in 2011 the Dubai property development to which he had lent his name, the Boris Becker Business Tower, went bust.

And in 2012 a Spanish court judge ordered a house Becker had built for him in Majorca should be auctioned to pay a debt of £225,000 he owed a local landscape gardening company.

In a separate civil court hearing, also in Palma, a judge ordered him to hand a further £345,000 to a local building firm that complained its bills for carpentry, electrical and plumbing jobs, and the laying of a basketball court, also went unpaid.

Yesterday Arbuthnot Latham's barrister Matthew Abraham argued there was a lack of evidence backing up Becker's claims that the remortgaging of his current Majorcan property would shortly go ahead and enable him to pay his debts.

Ms Registrar Derrett concluded, "with a degree of regret", that there was a lack of credible evidence that his "substantial" debt would be paid soon and she refused to adjourn the case for a further 28 days.

Agreeing to make an immediate bankruptcy order, the judge said: "I am not persuaded on the evidence before me that it can be described as credible evidence."

"It is not often the case that a professional person has a judgment (debt) outstanding against them since October 2015.

Ms Derrett added of the former champion: "One has the impression of a man with his head in the sand."

When she was told during the hearing that Becker was now a television commentator, Ms Derrett replied that she knew perfectly who he was, adding: "I remember watching him play on Centre Court, which probably shows my age."

But even her memories of seeing Becker in his prime were not enough for her to allow for what his lawyers described as "a last chance" to pay the debt.

When Mr Briggs argued that someone in Becker's position would not benefit from being declared bankrupt, as it would have a detrimental impact on his professional image, she commented: "He should have thought about that a long time ago."

Becker himself questioned why Arbuthnot Latham were pursuing the claim against him, saying he would have paid the debt next month.

In a statement he said: "My earnings are well publicised and it is clear that I have the means to repay this debt.

The value of the asset in question far exceeds the debt owed to Arbuthnot Latham.

"I intend to make an application to have this order set aside immediately.

In the meantime, I will concentrate on my work and in particular my presenting duties at Wimbledon for the BBC and other international outlets.

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On 21 June 2017, Becker was declared bankrupt.