BBC TV. How Art Made The World. Episode Four: Once Upon a Time (original) (raw)

Each year over seven billion people across the world are drawn to see the latest feature films at the cinema. This episode reveals how the most powerful storytelling medium ever created exploits visual techniques invented by artists in the ancient world. The investigation starts with the oldest recorded story, that of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. The story tells the tales (and adventures) of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. One scene from the story, in particular, captured the imagination of Bronze Age people, and that was the slaying of a pride of lions. The story inspired the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, in around 645BC, to cast himself in the leading role of Gilgamesh in a series of carved friezes for his throne room. The success of these lead Ashurbanipal to depict the battle against the Elamites and in particular visualised the prisoners grinding their ancestors bones to make their bread. Although mankind had discovered the power of the protagonist, in particular that of a hero, Ashurbanipal’s stories lacked emotion and so are hard to engage with. Jumping forward several hundred years to the Ancient Greeks, we find the next missing element crucial to storing telling. In the grotto of the Villa de Tiberius in Spurlonga, Italy, a collection of sculptures were found that depict Odysseus‘s encounter with the cyclops. The statues show Odysseus getting the cyclops drunk and then tricking him, and driving a stake though his eye. By depicting the emotions in the scene we, as the viewer, get a greater connection with the story. If we care about the characters, we care about what happens next. The Romans refined this process more when Emperor Trajan, celebrated his conquest of the Dacians, and created Trajan’s column in the heart of Rome. The 35m high marble column has the story of the event, spiraling around the column, from the base, right to the very top. Admired by Napoleon and Mussolini, it depicts an Epic with Trajan as the protagonist hero and the Dacian king Decebalus as the antagonist. The sculptors used many visual techniques still used today such as cut scenes, and birds eye and low views to add drama. The whole story can be summarised by looking up the western axis of the column. Although this captivated viewers there was still something missing. The final piece in the jigsaw can be found in Australia which has some of oldest known painted images, some known to be over 40k years old. The aborigines still draw gods and spirits the same way their early ancestors did, for example images of barramundi fish. This consistency has lead to these images becoming symbols, triggering the viewer to recall well known stories passed down generation to generation. The real magic happened when the Aborigines came together to celebrate these stories, they recounted them adding drum beats, rhythm and chanting. Now two senses were being stimulated, the eyes and the ears. When the pioneers of the nineteenth century created the first moving images, they were silent, but as soon as cinematographers added sound, cinema as we know it today took off.