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This is where it all started. The pop icon just died at the age of 50. We have compiled some of his songs here. We will always remember as the best singer, musician and dancer to hit the floor.

July 2009 Comeback

This is where all started.

Who’s Loving You

Earth Song

They Don’t Care About Us

Black or White – Live

Black or White

Beat It

Moon Walk

Billy Jeans

Dangerous – Music

Jam

Remember The Time

Bad

Who Is It

Thrillers

Dangerous – Live

In The Closet

Legendary pop star had been preparing for London comeback tour.

Michael Jackson, the sensationally gifted child star who rose to become the “King of Pop” and the biggest celebrity in the world only to fall from his throne in a freakish series of scandals, died Thursday. He was 50.

Jackson died at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Ed Winter, the assistant chief coroner for Los Angeles County, confirmed his office had been notified of the death and would handle the investigation.

The circumstances of Jackson’s death were not immediately clear. Jackson was not breathing when Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics responded to a call at his Los Angeles home about 12:30 p.m., Capt. Steve Ruda told the Los Angeles Times. The paramedics performed CPR and took him to the hospital, Ruda told the newspaper.

Jackson’s death brought a tragic end to a long, bizarre, sometimes farcical decline from his peak in the 1980s, when he was popular music’s premier all-around performer, a uniter of black and white music who shattered the race barrier on MTV, dominated the charts and dazzled even more on stage.

His 1982 album “Thriller” — which included the blockbuster hits “Beat It,” “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” — is the best-selling album of all time, with an estimated 50 million copies sold worldwide.

The public first knew him in the late 1960s, when as a boy he was the precocious, spinning lead singer of the Jackson 5, the music group he formed with his four older brothers. Among their No. 1 hits were “I Want You Back,” “ABC” and “I’ll Be There.”

Ranked with Elvis, Beatles
He was perhaps the most exciting performer of his generation, known for his feverish, crotch-grabbing dance moves and his high-pitched voice punctuated with squeals and titters. His single sequined glove, tight military-style jacket and aviator sunglasses were trademarks second only to his ever-changing, surgically altered appearance.

“For Michael to be taken away from us so suddenly at such a young age, I just don’t have the words,” said Quincy Jones, who produced “Thriller.” “He was the consummate entertainer and his contributions and legacy will be felt upon the world forever. I’ve lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him.”

Jackson ranked alongside Elvis Presley and the Beatles as the biggest pop sensations of all time. He united two of music’s biggest names when he was briefly married to Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie, and Jackson’s death immediately evoked that of Presley himself, who died at age 42 in 1977.

Though legal action stopped the auction, you can still get a look at Jackson’s crystal gloves and his life-sized stature of Darth Vader made entirely of LEGOs.

As years went by, Jackson became an increasingly freakish figure — a middle-aged man-child weirdly out of touch with grown-up life. His skin became lighter, his nose narrower, and he spoke in a breathy, girlish voice. He surrounded himself with children at his Neverland Ranch, often wore a germ mask while traveling and kept a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles as one of his closest companions.

“It seemed to me that his internal essence was at war with the norms of the world. It’s as if he was trying to defy gravity,” said Michael Levine, a Hollywood publicist who represented Jackson in the early 1990s. He called Jackson a “disciple of P.T. Barnum” and said the star appeared fragile at the time but was “much more cunning and shrewd about the industry than anyone knew.”

Jackson caused a furor in 2002 when he playfully dangled his infant son, Prince Michael II, over a hotel balcony in Berlin while a throng of fans watched from below.

A lifetime of music
Timeline of singer’s life, from Jackson 5 to ‘Thriller’ to Neverland.
In 2005, he was cleared of charges he molested a 13-year-old cancer survivor at Neverland in 2003. He had been accused of plying the boy with alcohol and groping him, and of engaging in strange and inappropriate behavior with other children.

The case followed years of rumors about Jackson and young boys. In a TV documentary, he had acknowledged sharing his bed with children, a practice he described as sweet and not at all sexual.

Despite the acquittal, the lurid allegations that came out in court took a fearsome toll on his career and image, and he fell into serious financial trouble.

Comeback had been planned
Jackson was preparing for what was to be his greatest comeback: He was scheduled for an unprecedented 50 shows at a London arena, with the first set for July 13. He was in rehearsals in Los Angeles for the concert, an extravaganza that was to capture the classic Jackson magic: showstopping dance moves, elaborate staging and throbbing dance beats.

Singer Dionne Warwick said: “Michael was a friend and undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest entertainers that I fortunately had the pleasure of working with. … We have lost an icon in our industry.”

Hundreds of people gathered outside the hospital as word of his death spread. The emergency entrance at the UCLA Medical Center, which is near Jackson’s rented home, was roped off with police tape.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Jackson has just died,” a woman boarding a Manhattan bus called out shortly after the news was announced. Immediately many riders reached for their cell phones.

So many people wanted to verify the early reports of Jackson’s death that the computers running Google’s news section interpreted the fusillade of “Michael Jackson” requests as an automated attack for about half an hour Thursday evening.

In New York’s Times Square, a low groan went up in the crowd when a screen flashed that Jackson had died, and people began relaying the news to friends by cell phone.

“No joke. King of Pop is no more. Wow,” Michael Harris, 36, of New York City, read from a text message a friend sent to his telephone. “It’s like when Kennedy was assassinated. I will always remember being in Times Square when Michael Jackson died.”

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen shattered the Wednesday record, raking in $60.6 million on approximately 9,700 screens at 4,234 sites (including a record 169 IMAX venues) in its first day. The former Wednesday champ, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, had mustered $44.2 million in its 2007 debut.

Among all opening days, the Transformers sequel ranks second behind The Dark Knight, which boasted $67.2 million in its first day on over 9,000 screens at 4,366 sites. Adjusted for ticket price inflation, though, Revenge of the Fallen would slot in fourth place, behind Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

The previous Transformers movie holds the record for biggest Tuesday gross. It made $27.9 million in its Tuesday opening on around 7,600 screens at 4,011 sites (not including $8.8 million from Monday night previews), followed by $29.1 million on its first Wednesday, which was its single day peak. In two and a half days, it had generated $65.7 million, which the sequel has nearly matched in only one day. However, with such a massive start and lacking the Independence Day holiday boost of the first movie, it would be unrealistic to expect Revenge of the Fallen to come close to its massive Wednesday haul on Thursday and beyond.

Revenge of the Fallen’s first day included an estimated $16 million from its midnight opening at around 3,000 sites. Only The Dark Knight and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith had bigger midnight debuts, pulling in $18.5 million and $16.5 million, respectively.

Shah Rukh Khan is no stranger to being in the limelight, but it seems that sometimes he is talked about for all the wrong reasons. Rumors have been circulating that in a recent magazine interview, SRK compared the Prophet Mohammad to negative figures in history, such as Hitler. Obviously, these comments have offended many people in the Muslim community.

According to the rumors, the Mumbai Aman Committee has issued a complaint against Shahrukh Khan to the Bandra Police Station. They claim that SRK has offended the attitudes of their community and a clarification from the actor is in order.

According to reports, the interview, which was printed in “Time’n Style Luxury” magazine, reads as follows:

“According to you who is the most impressive figure in history?
‘There are lots of them, some negative ones like Hitler, then Napoleon, Winston Churchill and if I can call it history, then Prophet Mohammed and from recent time – Nelson Mandela. And there are the nice ones like Gandhiji and Mother Teresa.’”

However, in an attempt to cover their tracks, the magazine published a clarification of the interview in a tabloid. The Magazine claims that the answer to the question should have appeared in the following way:

”There are lots of them, some negative ones like Hitler. Then Napoleon, Winston Churchill were impressive. If I can call it history, then most impressive positive figure is Prophet Mohammed. And from recent time – there are nice ones like Nelson Mandela, Gandhiji and Mother Teresa”.

Iran’s supreme leader warned on Wednesday that the regime would not back down in the face of opposition protests over the disputed presidential vote, amid soaring tensions between Tehran and the West.

“In the recent incidents concerning the election, I have been insisting on the implementation of the law and I will be (insisting). Neither the system, nor the people will back down under force,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said.

It was the latest indication that the clerical regime will not brook dissent over the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad despite a wave of public demonstrations and complaints that the June 12 vote was rigged.

And in a sign security forces are wasting no time to put down protests, a large presence of riot police and Islamist Basij militiamen stopped a crowd of several hundred people trying to gather outside parliament in Tehran, a witness said.

In the latest diplomatic backlash over what Iran has branded Western meddling, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Tehran is considering whether to downgrade ties with Britain.

His comments came after the two governments expelled diplomats in a tit-for-tat move, with Tehran increasingly pointing the finger at London over the street violence that erupted in the aftermath of the election.

Tehran has accused Britain — described by Khameini as the “most evil” of Iran’s enemies — of plotting against the election and seeking to stabilise the country.

It has expelled the BBC correspondent in Tehran and arrested a British-Greek journalist working for a US newspaper, one of at least two foreign reporters detained by the authorities.

Iran’s interior minister also took aim at the United States, saying rioters were being funded by the CIA and the exiled opposition group the People’s Mujahedeen.

US President Barack Obama, in his strongest comments yet, on Tuesday raised questions about the legitimacy of the election and expressed outrage over the violence against on opposition protesters.

Iran has refused to overturn the results of the poll but Khamenei — who has ruled over the Islamic republic for 20 years — has extended by five days a Wednesday deadline to examine vote complaints.

The authorities have also intensified a crackdown on opposition leader and defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, with the arrest of staff at his newspaper and vitriolic attacks from the hardline press.

Another defeated candidate, former Revolutionary Guards chief Mohsen Rezai, has withdrawn his protest about election irregularities, in a blow to the opposition.

“(Iran’s) political, social and security situation has entered a sensitive and decisive phase, which is more important than the election,” Rezai said in a letter to the Guardians Council, the top election body.

Mousavi, who was premier in the post-revolution era, has urged supporters to keep demonstrating but to use “self-restraint” to avoid further bloodshed while another defeated candidate Mehdi Karroubi called for a mourning ceremony on Thursday for slain protesters.

Police have arrested 25 journalists and other staff at Mousavi’s Kalemeh Sabz (Green Word) newspaper — which was shut down about 10 days ago — one of its editors said.

Intelligence police said they had found “evidence of a plot against national security” at a candidate’s campaign office used for “psychological warfare,” the official IRNA news agency said, without identifying the candidate.

The Revolutionary Guards, the elite force set up to protect the Islamic republic, has warned of a “decisive and revolutionary” riposte to any further protests.

The last opposition rally on Monday was crushed by hundreds of riot police armed with steel clubs and firing tear gas.

The foreign media is banned from reporting from the streets under tight restrictions imposed since the unrest was unleashed, but images of police brutality have spread worldwide via amateur video over the Internet.

At least 17 people have been killed and many more wounded in the worst unrest since the Islamic revolution 30 years ago which has jolted the pillars of the clerical regime.

Obama, who has called for dialogue with Iran after three decades of severed ties, said on Tuesday there were “significant questions about the legitimacy” of the poll but insisted Washington was not interfering.

“The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings, and imprisonments of the last few days.”

Obama described as “heartbreaking” the shooting on a Tehran street of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, whose death featured on an Internet video seen around the world and has become a poignant symbol for the opposition.

Many hundreds of protesters, prominent reformists and journalists have also been rounded up by the authorities, including some people close to top regime officials such as former president Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

The Guardians Council, a 12-member unelected body of Islamic clerics and jurists, insisted on Tuesday the election results would stand.

“We witnessed no major fraud or breach,” spokesman Abbasali Kadkhodai said. “Therefore, there is no possibility of an annulment taking place.”

However, Mousavi’s campaign office released a report listing “electoral fraud and irregularities” in the poll that gave him just 34 percent of the vote to 63 percent for Ahmadinejad.

It denounced what it said was “large-scale” official support for Ahmadinejad and spoke of ballot papers being printed on polling day without serial numbers, doubts about whether ballot boxes were empty when they arrived at polling stations and candidates’ representatives being banned from vote centres.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford returned to the United States on Wednesday from a secret private trip to Argentina, ending days of speculation over his whereabouts and raising questions about his judgment.

Sanford is the chairman of the Republican Governors’ Association and a prominent fiscal conservative who has been talked about as a potential Republican candidate for the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

Analysts said his mystery retreat to South America could damage his political career if he has presidential aspirations.

When media reported Sanford’s whereabouts were unknown since last Thursday and that even his wife did not know where he was, his aides said he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the eastern United States to get away for a break after a tough state legislative session.

During his absence, some South Carolina politicians accused him of abdicating responsibility for state affairs by leaving without giving details of where he was going and remaining out of contact.

Sanford flew to Atlanta early on Wednesday and told reporters for The State, South Carolina’s biggest newspaper, he had decided at the last minute to go to Argentina and drive along its coastline.

“I wanted to do something exotic … to get out of the bubble I am in,” he told the paper, adding he had traveled alone.

CONCERNS FOR 2012

Sanford gained prominence this year by opposing Democratic President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill and rejecting $700 million of South Carolina’s portion of the funds on grounds that the law was reckless and would undermine the state’s fiscal stability.

The state’s Supreme Court ruled this month that the federal cash must be accepted.

Interest in Sanford’s mystery absence will blow over in the short term but could hurt him if he has his eye on the White House, said Robert Oldendick, professor of political science at the University of South Carolina.

“He has gotten publicity as a true conservative spokesman who was ideologically driven to resist the stimulus money with an eye on the presidency in 2012,” said Oldendick.

“If he disappeared … without telling staff or his family, then that raises a question of ‘Is this the type of person we want with the responsibility for being in charge of nuclear weapons or in crisis situations?’”

Last week, Senator John Ensign, another potential Republican presidential contender in 2012, announced he had an affair with a woman who was a close family friend and resigned his position as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee.

The eastern seaboard state of South Carolina has a population of 4 million. Its production includes chemical and paper products, textiles, tobacco, soybeans and cotton. Military bases and nuclear facilities are important to its economy, while tourism is also a major source of revenue.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — On the edge of a noisy Tehran rally for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad early last week, a middle-aged woman in a chador was cursing the opposition protesters who say the Iranian election was a fraud. “They are traitors, they are not even related to this country,” she said. “We all support Ahmadinejad and his policies.”

But even there, in a government-organized crowd watched over by riot police and Basij militiamen, dissenting voices could be heard.

“Not everyone here is for Ahmadinejad,” whispered a woman in a gray headscarf who spotted my reporter’s notebook. “Most of them are for the opposition, they just came here to see what is happening.” She scurried away into the crowd, but another came up — “the election was stolen!” — and another, and another, until I lost count and began to wonder if I was dreaming:

“It is all cheating and lies.” “Don’t believe them.” “This is not the true Iran.”

Ascertaining what the true Iran is has never been harder. What is clear, though, is that the electoral dispute has exposed a deep rift in Iranian society, one that cannot be measured or healed by vote counts. On each side, faith merges with perception, making the partisans believe with fierce certainty that they represent the country’s true majority.

The difference is sometimes caricatured as one between a Westernized urban elite and the pious lower classes. In fact, it is not that simple, even if there is little doubt about who all those fashionable Tehrani women in jeans and loose head scarves voted for. A vast opposition rally on Monday — in which more than a million people are believed to have taken part — was also full of people who looked more like Ahmadinejad supporters: women in traditional Islamic garb, and working-class men.

In essence, the core of the struggle is between two competing views of what this country’s Islamic revolution sought to achieve.

“One side wants a gradual evolution of democratic institutions and a more democratic reading of Islamic institutions,” said Kavous Seyed-Emami, a political science professor at Imam Sadeq University in Tehran. “The other side is for a populist and more or less authoritarian reading of Islam.”

Over the past week, those differences have often been boiled down to slogans. “Death to the dictator!” chanted supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the lead opposition candidate. “Death to those who oppose the rule of the clerics!” was the refrain on the other side.

And more than a week after the election, no one can yet say for certain whether the official count of a 62 percent victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad represents the way Iranians really voted. Many supporters of Mr. Moussavi believe firmly that he won by the same crushing margin.

“Look who supports Ahmadinejad, it’s just sectarian groups, a minority,” said Parisa, a 26-year-old woman at a rally for Mr. Moussavi last week. At a rally the next day for Mr. Ahmadinejad, Muhammad Ali, a 49-year-old English teacher, said with equal sincerity: “Ahmadinejad belongs to all the people, not just one group. But Moussavi and the others, they are just from a narrow sector.”

Even on the economy, the most important issue for most voters, perceptions were starkly at odds. A refrain for opposition voters was the need to bring Iran’s high unemployment and inflation under control. Yet many Ahmadinejad supporters echoed their candidate’s claims that prices were going down, that jobs had been created, that life was getting easier.

In part, the split revolves around opposed understandings of Iran’s political evolution since the 1979 revolution. For the opposition, a defining moment came in 1997, when the reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami won the presidency in a landslide. Many in the opposition see that as a natural growth from the incendiary radicalism that founded the Islamic Republic to a more mature and democratic style of governance. Mr. Khatami’s broad victory margin — which was repeated in 2001 — still feeds their sense that they are the country’s true majority.

On the other side, many people see the same years as a gradual falling away from the zeal of the republic’s early years. Even those who admire Mr. Khatami often complain about corruption among leading officials, especially former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

For them, Mr. Ahmadinejad was the first president who seemed to understand Iran’s poor and working class, and who seemed capable of fulfilling the revolution’s promises of economic and social justice. They also respond to his aggressive nationalist rhetoric, which is rooted in a longstanding fear that Iran has been bullied, politically and culturally, by the West. By contrast, many younger and more cosmopolitan Iranians would like firmer connections to the outside world.

The past few weeks have helped widen the gulf. After years in which they felt downcast and helpless, opposition partisans saw the sudden birth of a popular movement in support of Mr. Moussavi that exceeded their hopes. Rallies began drawing tens of thousands of cheering people. The streets of Tehran and other major cities began exploding after dark with carnivalesque street celebrations, in which young people danced and dressed in the signature bright-green color of the Moussavi campaign. Word of the events spread by Facebook, which — like other new Internet technologies — proved a challenge for the authorities to control. Women became a driving force, emboldened by Mr. Moussavi’s ground-breaking decision to campaign alongside his wife, the distinguished political scientist Zahra Rahnavard.

As the rallies gathered force in Tehran and elsewhere, a conviction began to ripen: the country belonged, once again, to the partisans of democratic reform. Large numbers of Iranians who had voted for Mr. Khatami, and who — frustrated by his failure to put his ideas into practice — had sat out the vote in 2005, said they would return to the polls. The result seemed inevitable. A number of polls by opposition researchers suggested that Mr. Moussavi would not only survive to the second round; he would win in the first, by a decisive margin.

“They thought they could do anything to this country, that we were like clay,” said Saeed Leylaz, an economist who supported the Moussavi campaign, a few days before the election. “But we have proved this civilization is much bigger than that. They realized they are riding the back of a whale, a very big whale.”

Many Moussavi supporters began to warn darkly that any result other than their victory would be proof of electoral fraud. At the same time, they believed that their massive street presence would make rigging the election impossible: how could the incumbent even pretend to win in the face of such numbers?

But on the other side, there was no lack of confidence. Many Iranians said they thought Mr. Ahmadinejad had won the nationally televised debates, despite the criticism he received for his aggressive style. He had spent much of the previous four years traveling around Iran, visiting big cities and small towns in a way that no previous president had done. He produced two campaign videos, shown on national television, that brilliantly highlighted his common touch and simple lifestyle. In one, he is tied up in traffic with aides when the driver asks if he should take the breakdown lane. “No,” the president replies, “that’s for the fancy people.”

The other candidates produced their own videos, but even opposition partisans conceded that they were much less effective.

A few days before the election, Hossein Shariatmadari, the general director of the hard-line government newspaper Kayhan and a close confidant of Iran’s supreme leader, offered his own serenely confident prediction. Mr. Ahmadinejad would win easily.

“President Ahmadinejad is well-embraced by all the people,” said Mr. Shariatmadari, a courtly man who has links to the intelligence services and is widely feared in Iran. “He has special characteristics that people want in an ideal president.”

In retrospect, many Iranians now read such predictions as a wink from the clerical elite. They did not just want Mr. Ahmadinejad to win, it is said. They wanted him to win big, so as to persuade the reformers that they were a minority, and to erase the stain of Mr. Khatami’s reformist landslides.

Instead, the election and the dispute that followed had an entirely different and unexpected result: Both sides now view themselves as the true Iranian majority. It is not yet clear how any future vote count might persuade either side otherwise.

THE take on Kathryn Bigelow is that she is a great female director of muscular action movies, the kind with big guns, scenes, themes and camera movements as well as an occasional fist in the face, a knee to the groin. Sometimes, more simply, she’s called a great female director. But here’s a radical thought: She is, simply, a great filmmaker. Because while it is marginally interesting that she calls “action” and “cut” while in the possession of two X chromosomes, gender is the least remarkable thing about her kinetic filmmaking, which gets in your head even as it sends shock waves through your body.

Her latest is “The Hurt Locker,” a film about men and war. Set in Iraq in 2004 and shot just over the border in Jordan, it centers on a three-man American bomb squad that sifts through the sand day and night disabling explosives. It was first shown at the Venice Film Festival in September 2008 (it opens Friday), where it was greeted with rapturous praise and some misapprehension. Mostly, it seems, because its extraordinary filmmaking, which transmits the sickening addiction to war as well as its horrors in largely formal terms, doesn’t come wedded to a sufficiently obvious antiwar position. One British critic went so far as to say that while the film had “excellent acting, camerawork and editing, it could pass for propaganda.”

“The Hurt Locker” doesn’t traffic in the armchair militarism of Hollywood products like “Top Gun” and “Transformers,” but neither is it an antiwar screed. It’s diagnostic, not prescriptive: it takes an analytical if visceral look at how the experience of war can change a man, how it eats into his brain so badly he ends up hooked on it. And, like all seven of Ms. Bigelow’s previous feature films, this new one is also as informed by the radical aspirations of conceptual art as it is by the techniques of classical Hollywood cinema.

She might live and sometimes shoot within driving distance of the major studios that have distributed if not financed her films. But in many respects she remains an industry outsider.

“I’ve never made a studio film,” Ms. Bigelow gently reminded me during a leisurely conversation here not long ago. Although most of her movies have been released by studios, they have been bankrolled by independent companies, which nonetheless don’t necessarily grant the autonomy any artist seeks. The experience of making “The Hurt Locker” — the “purity” of it, as she puts it — marks her return to liberating conditions under which she thrives. She hasn’t had this kind of freedom since her 1987 breakthrough, “Near Dark,” an erotically charged vampire movie made on the cheap, or her 1995 science-fiction thriller “Strange Days,” which came with some heavy protection courtesy of one of its producers: her former husband, James Cameron.

It’s hard to imagine Ms. Bigelow letting anyone push her around. She’s unfailingly gracious — and tends to speak in the second person, preferring “you” over “I” — but there’s a ferocious undercurrent there too, as might be expected. She works to put you at ease, but even her looks inspire shock and awe. Because she was early for our interview and already tucked into a booth, I didn’t realize how tall she was until we both stood up, and I watched, from a rather lower vantage, her unfurl her slender six-foot frame. It was like watching a time lapse of a growing tree. Like a lot of tall women she describes herself as shy, but she has learned to take up space.

At first that space wasn’t on screen but on a canvas. An only child, she was born in 1951 and raised in a town, San Carlos, 25 miles south of San Francisco, where she first nurtured a lifelong love of art and horses. (When we meet again her arms are flecked with bruises after a perilous ride on her mare.) She was a student painter at the Art Institute of San Francisco and later the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, where she studied with Vito Acconci and Susan Sontag. She joined a conceptual art group, appeared in the feminist movie “Born in Flames” and earned her master’s in the film division of the Columbia University School of the Arts, where she immersed herself in theories about signs and meaning and the cinematic spectacle.

“Film,” she says, “became the interchange where all these ideas were intersecting.”

As she moved between uptown and down, she also made her first film, “The Set-Up” (1978), a short in which two men (Gary Busey included) fight each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over. Although she now plays down the film, it seems like a template for much of her later work, with its emphasis on men, masculinity, violence and power. A few years ago she elaborated on its themes: “The piece ends with Sylvère talking about the fact that in the 1960s you think of the enemy as outside yourself, in other words, a police officer, the government, the system, but that’s not really the case at all, fascism is very insidious, we reproduce it all the time.”

That enemy lurks in the anomie of the motorcycle biker (Willem Dafoe in his screen debut) who motors through her 1982 debut feature “The Loveless” (made with Monty Montgomery) and in the bloodstream of the young cowboy initiated into a gang of vampires in “Near Dark,” the western-horror hybrid that made her a cult favorite. It sneaks into the head of the undercover F.B.I. agent in “Point Break” (1991) who’s philosophically seduced by the koan-spouting leader of some bank-robbing surfers. And it slips into the rigid body of a devout 19th-century immigrant wife in “The Weight of Water” (2000), who, after sharing a chaste bed with another woman, responds to her awakened sexual desire with a murderous swing of an ax.

Much as she does in her far-out 1990 feminist freak-out “Blue Steel,” about a female cop (Jamie Lee Curtis) literally seduced by a male killer who fondles her gun with lethal results, Ms. Bigelow isn’t just playing with genre. She’s having her unruly way with gender, sometimes by inverting traditional masculine and feminine roles, as in “Strange Days,” a future shock love story that also explores voyeurism and the pleasures of violent spectacle. Shot in a Los Angeles still hurting from its 1992 civil unrest, it features Angela Bassett (whose bare, sculptured arms outmuscle those of Michelle Obama) rescuing a hapless white man (Ralph Fiennes) who, despite being the narrative’s center, never becomes its hero.

“Strange Days” originated with Mr. Cameron, who wrote the first draft before handing it over to her. With Jay Cocks, she finished the script and made the film her own. (She and Mr. Cameron divorced in 1991; she’s now in a relationship she prefers to keep private.) It was poorly released by its studio, which seemed unsure of how to sell it (kinky sex? millennial meltdown?), and it flopped. “The Weight of Water,” a trickily plotted drama that toggles between two bad marriages in separate time periods, and notably her only movie to touch on matrimonial life, followed and disappeared on impact. Two years later, in 2002, she returned to blockbuster form with “K-19: The Widowmaker,” an unnerving, very human thriller about the first Soviet nuclear submarine. It too died a quick box-office death.

She had to scale back for the next one. “I definitely wanted to have full creative control and final cut,” she says of “The Hurt Locker,” which was written by Mark Boal and based on his experience working as an embedded journalist in Iraq. She wanted up-and-coming actors who weren’t so famous that their characters couldn’t die, even if their names wouldn’t mean much in the ads. She also wanted to shoot in the Middle East. Her security detail talked her out of filming in Iraq, though she inched close to the border. Given her demands and the scant interest that American audiences have expressed in fiction films about the war, she looked outside the country for financing. The French company Voltage Pictures gave her money and control.

“It was a no-note experience,” she says, referring to the suggestions that movie executives like to issue — and enforce — “absolutely zero interference.” She laughs when I ask if she might become addicted to the freedom, much as the bomb tech played by Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker” becomes hopped up on war. It’s a ludicrous comparison, granted. But moviemaking is littered with broken spirits, and there’s something improbable about the longevity of her career in the mainstream. Partly because, yes, she’s working in an sexist field where even female studio chiefs are loath to hire female directors, but also because of the stubborn persistence of her artistic vision and intellectualism. She’s still investigating signs and meaning, but now through genres she deconstructs and sometimes immolates.

It’s telling, then, that after she made “The Loveless” a postmodern motorcycle movie in which she stretched narrative to the limit, she started receiving scripts for high school comedies, which she quickly realized was considered a suitable subject for her gender. “It was an intersection of absolutely inappropriate sensibilities,” she said, though I would love to see what havoc she could wreak on that genre. She was living in New York in a condemned building without heat and electricity. A juvenile comedy might have paid the bills, but instead she accepted an offer from her friend, the artist John Baldessari, to teach at the California Institute of the Arts, just north of Los Angeles. Hollywood was the inevitable next step. Through the director Walter Hill, she landed a deal at a studio, but it led to nowhere.

It was at this point, she said, that she understood “if I had a prayer of shooting something that intrigued me, I was going to have to be the architect of my own fate.” She went off and made “Near Dark,” a vampire film steeped in the kind of hot, sticky, shocking violence that’s alternately exciting and appalling. It was the perfect vehicle for a director discovering that we go to movies for what they do to our bodies and not just the ideas they plant in our heads. She wants to take you on a mental journey: “To transport you to an event or a physicality or a location or an experience or an emotional odyssey that is purely experiential.” Her use of the word odyssey seems significant. I can’t imagine her sitting at home and weaving.

If anything, her refusal to make the types of movies most associated with women suggests that in American movies, at least, genre is destiny, to repurpose a familiar Freud maxim about gender. She’s steered clear of the industry ghetto to which female directors are usually consigned, bypassing the dreaded chick flick for stories and archetypes traditionally if reductively seen as the province of men. She still makes relationship movies, but the relationships evolve both through the chatter at which women are supposed to excel and the contact of bodies, often male, sometimes female, running, surfing, parachuting, living and dying out in the world. She learned from the masters — De Kooning, Peckinpah, Goya, Pasolini, Rembrandt and on and on — in order to become her own woman.

The number of male mentors and aesthetic influences seems instructive as does her seeming discomfort when I ask why she likes to make movies about men. It’s one of the few times when she searches for her words. She mentions Richard Serra, whom she’s known for years, and “Torqued Ellipses,” his curvilinear steel sculptures that weigh about 40 tons apiece and which she describes as “real statements of power.” Suddenly I’m reminded of the moment in “K-19” when the camera glides between two submarines sitting parallel on the surface of the water, a glorious image of heavy metal that is itself a statement of power. When she was painting, she says, she loved “big, gestural, visceral, raw, immediate pieces.” She starts to move her fingers, as if she were sewing.

“Nothing really struck me,” she says, of the art she first loved, “that was tight and precise and patient and careful and perhaps more introspective. Perhaps,” she laughs, “it’s just a sensibility defect.”

TEHRAN — Locked in a bitter contest with Iranians who say the presidential elections were rigged, the authorities have acknowledged that the number of votes cast in 50 cities exceeded the actual number of voters, state television reported Monday following assertions by the country’s supreme leader that the ballot was fair.

But the authorities insisted that discrepancies, which could affect three million votes, did not violate Iranian law and the country’s influential Guardian Council said it was not clear whether they would decisively change the election result.

The news emerged on the English-language Press TV as a bitter rift among Iran’s ruling clerics deepened over the disputed election. The outcome of the vote, awarding a lopsided victory to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has convulsed Tehran in the worst violence in 30 years, with the government trying to link the defiant loser to terrorists and detaining relatives of his powerful backer, a founder of the Islamic republic.

The loser, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the moderate reform candidate who contends that the June 12 election was stolen from him, fired back at his accusers on Sunday night in a posting on his Web site, calling on his own supporters to demonstrate peacefully despite stern warnings from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that no protests of the vote would be allowed. “Protesting to lies and fraud is your right,” Mr. Moussavi said in a challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei’s authority.

The official result gave Mr. Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the ballot — an 11-million vote advantage — to Mr. Moussavi’s 34 percent.

In remarks Sunday that were broadcast on Press TV Monday, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesman for the authoritative Guardian Council — a 12-member panel of clerics charged with certifying the vote — denied claims by another losing candidate, Mohsen Rezai that irregularities had occurred in up to 170 voting districts.

“Statistics provided by the candidates, who claim more than 100 percent of those eligible have cast their ballot in 80 to 170 cities are not accurate — the incident has happened in only 50 cities,” Mr. Kadkhodaei said in what seemed a remarkable admission.

But he said that a voter turnout in excess of the registered voting list was a “normal phenomenon” because people could legally vote in areas other than those in which they were registered.

As increasingly violent protests have swirled through Tehran since the elections, Ayatollah Khamenei has ordered the Guardian Council to investigate the opposition’s allegations of electoral fraud. The council itself has offered a random partial recount of 10 percent of the ballot.

Mr. Kadkhodaei said the Guardian Council could recount votes in areas where irregularities were said by the opposition to have occurred. But “it has yet to be determined whether the possible change in the tally is decisive in the election results.”

The opposition has alleged a total of 646 electoral irregularities and is demanding that the vote be annulled.

But in a sermon at Friday prayers last week Ayatollah Khamenei mocked the idea that the 11-million-vote margin of victory which the official count said was secured by Mr. Ahmadinejad could have been won through fraud.

On Sunday, the police detained five relatives of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who leads two influential councils and openly supported Mr. Moussavi’s election. The relatives, including Mr. Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, were released after several hours.

The developments, coming one day after protests here in the capital and elsewhere were crushed by police officers and militia members using guns, clubs, tear gas and water cannons, suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei was facing entrenched resistance among some members of the elite. Though rivalries have been part of Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, analysts said that open factional competition amid a major political crisis could hinder Ayatollah Khamenei’s ability to restore order.

There was no verifiable accounting of the death toll from the mayhem on Saturday, partly because the government has imposed severe restrictions on news coverage and warned foreign reporters who remained in the country to stay off the streets.

It also ordered the BBC’s longtime correspondent expelled and Newsweek’s correspondent detained.

State television said that 10 people had died in clashes, while radio reports said 19. The news agency ISNA said 457 people had been arrested.

Vowing not to allow a repeat of Saturday’s clashes, the government on Sunday saturated major streets and squares of Tehran with police and Basij militia forces. There were reports of scattered confrontations but no confirmation of any new injuries by evening. But as they had on previous nights, many residents of Tehran clambered to their rooftops and could be heard shouting “Death to the dictator!” and “God is great,” their rallying cries since the crisis began.

Vowing not to allow a repeat of Saturday’s clashes, the government on Sunday saturated major streets and squares of Tehran with police and Basij militia forces. There were reports of scattered confrontations but no confirmation of any new injuries by evening. But as they had on previous nights, many residents of Tehran clambered to their rooftops and could be heard shouting “Death to the dictator!” and “God is great,” their rallying cries since the crisis began.

It was unclear whether protests, which began after the government declared that the conservative president, Mr. Ahmadinejad, had won re-election in a landslide against Mr. Moussavi, would be sustained in the face of the clampdown.

Amateur video accounts showed at least one large protest gathering, on Shirazi Street, though it was unclear how long it lasted.

But in the network of Internet postings and Twitter messages that has become the opposition’s major tool for organizing and sharing information, a powerful and vivid new image emerged: a video posted on several Web sites that showed a young woman, called Neda, her face covered in blood. Text posted with the video said she had been shot. It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the video.

The Web site of another reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, referred to her as a martyr who did not “have a weapon in her soft hands or a grenade in her pocket but became a victim by thugs who are supported by a horrifying security apparatus.”

Accounts of the election’s aftermath in the state-run press suggested that the government might be laying the groundwork for discrediting and arresting Mr. Moussavi. IRNA, the official news agency, quoted Alireza Zahedi, a member of the Basij militia, as saying Mr. Moussavi had provoked the violence, sought help from outside the country to do so and should be put on trial. The Fars news agency quoted a Tehran University law professor as saying that Mr. Moussavi had acted against “the security of the nation.” State television suggested that at least some of the unrest was instigated by an outlawed terrorist group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, which does not have a strong following in Iran.

Mr. Moussavi was not seen in public on Sunday but showed no sign of yielding. In his Web posting, he urged followers to “avoid violence in your protest and behave as though you are the parents that have to tolerate your children’s misbehavior at the security forces.”

He also warned the government to “avoid mass arrests, which will only create distance between society and the security forces.”

The moves against members of Mr. Rafsanjani’s family were seen as an attempt to pressure him to drop his challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei — pressure that Mr. Rafsanjani’s son, Mehdi Rafsanjani, said he would reject.

“My father was in jail for five years when we were young,” he said.

Mr. Rafsanjani was deeply critical of Mr. Ahmadinejad during the presidential campaign, and is thought to have had a strained relationship with Ayatollah Khamenei for many years.

But he remains a major establishment figure, and the detention of his daughter, albeit briefly, was a surprise. In Ayatollah Khamenei’s sermon on Friday, in which he backed Mr. Ahmadinejad and threatened a crackdown on further protests, he praised Mr. Rafsanjani as a pillar of the revolution while acknowledging that the two have had “many differences of opinion.”

Mr. Rafsanjani, 75, heads two powerful institutions. One, the Assembly of Experts, is a body of clerics that has the authority to oversee and theoretically replace the country’s supreme leader. He also runs the Expediency Council, empowered to settle disagreements between the elected Parliament and the unelected Guardian Council.

The Assembly of Experts has never publicly exercised its power over Ayatollah Khamenei since he succeeded the Islamic Revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989. But the increasingly bitter confrontation between Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr. Rafsanjani has raised the prospect of a contest of political wills between the two revolutionary veterans.

In a sign that the crisis in Iran threatened to spill far beyond the nation’s borders, the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, on Sunday called for reconsidering relations with Britain, France and Germany after their “shameful” statements about the election.