The Origins Of Tintin: Hergé’s Masterpiece | Perspective

[Music] in 1929 aj created one of the most famous and loved characters of the 20th century tintin as a boy interested in aeroplanes and space rockets and things i was immediately taken by the just the beautiful illustrations of averages here was this fantastic draftsman those clean lines and the colors [Music] tintin became a reflection of ajay's boy scout ideals and his adventures created a graphic history of the 20th century he covers both angles the fantastic artwork and the the narrative so it's it's unique really nice to read the dandy and the bina of course you know comedy comic strips and it was really set apart from those it felt more real the worlds and characters he would create captivated a generation i'm still taken by the uh shady dealings the shenanigans you know the darkness the uh international espionage i was totally drawn into tintin's world and immersed myself in it it's 221b baker street it's ama's office and he has that quality of creating an entire world [Music] born in belgium 1907 erget saw the horrors of war as a boy europe had to be rebuilt from ruin the continent was crippled by recession and the rise of fascism was becoming notable the stench of war was everywhere that is the background you're heading out in the world and behind you is the wall it colors everything in belgium a young catholic boy scout called george remy would draw from these horrific experiences to create tintin so the stories i read in the comics were about destruction and war and they seem to be part of a part of the normal landscape remedy's close ties to the church particularly priest norbert wallace led him to work for ultra-conservative newspaper le petit vettien it was here that remy gave birth to both tintin and his pen name erjay well interesting i discovered that herje got his name by reversing his initials on his original name so i think there was a bit of the uh the espionage about him so i suppose in his own way he was a sort of a belgian john le carre under the influence of right wing newspaper leper t vertian airj began tintin's adventures and from the start he would be seen as a little controversial as a young man he was i think very heavily influenced by his kind of catholic patron and he was almost told that these were the politics that he had to adhere to i'm not sure i didn't think about her jay too much to begin with i mean the i think he speaks through his art and it was only later that i came to discover the origins of tinted and some of the controversies as a cartoonist you do sata so uh what you snarl at you know is is kind of a mirror image of yourself really um if you do a cartoon against the church for instance well it it indicates you may well be an atheist you know and political cartoonists of course have their hearts on their sieve the first adventure tintin in the land of the soviets was essentially a piece of propaganda depicting the soviet union shea did study as much as he could of the photographs coming out of the soviet union at the time of which there weren't many people didn't really know what was going on inside the soviet union at the time it's quite a coup for tintin the young reporter to actually get behind there and expose some of what genuinely was going on so here's a exposing something that genuinely went on in the soviet union so although the it's quite clear where the book is coming from there's also some worthwhile uh reporting going on in there what hershey taught us about these conflicts in in faraway places kind of simply resonated to some extent with us you know uh we just sensed that the world was i'd be complicated [Music] in the early 1930s ajay began tintin's second adventure and referenced belgium's disastrous attempt at the colonisation of congo at the turn of the 20th century there are those hence who've argued that he was a racist in the way that especially african people were depicted in those books i cannot mount a defense for it i mean you read the book and it's just flat out racist it's actually pretty disgusting and knowing some of the things that the belgians got up to in in the congo quite a perhaps of its time shall we say i think he is on very dodgy kind of political ground and you can see that you know he's he's kind of under orders and all of this stuff and he doesn't really know very much of what he's writing about he's going very much on received wisdom hey he's often criticized enough for you know being a bit of a well proto-fascist almost when he was young but he was young you know and and in in the early part of the century the prevalent mentality was still basically victorian i don't think there was an awful lot of malice in there to be honest and there are such fantastic life-affirming stories in the end that i can't believe that he was a man with hatred in his heart because i actually think tintin is full of love and full of humor and full of humanity [Music] for the third installment in the tintin series asia ventured into america his excitement and passion for a country he knew from films and adventure novels shone through tinted in america was always one of my favorites when i was a boy there's something about the cowboys in indian setting that really appealed i have a horse you can use for a few days uh i got just the one for you her name's beatrice hello beatrice you can see his love of cowboys and the wild west and all the adventures that in small town belgium must have just been an incredible idea and that's when i think you start to get the real love of adventure the love of this big wide world because in many respects throughout tintin is an innocent abroad that's kind of what it is tintin in america also included the ultimate baddies of the era the american gangster that's tintin's hotel room on the 37th floor just make sure you don't miss anger even featured the real-life kingpin al capone al capone's train is arriving from chicago and the crowd is rushing to get a glimpse of the x big shot a sedan is waiting to take him to prison and here he is still sporting his big white hat if you're a european and you're living in belgium then at the time who who are going to be the big big characters and big faces in american life other than politicians and film stars i suppose it would be the bad boys the al capone's gangsters always appeal to the small boys and having al capone in there and some of the gun fights that they have standing on the side of the sedan cars and or cadillacs and machine gunning each other is is terrifically exciting one of the things that's great and and timeless about tintin is that they are both of their time and and he brings in contemporary issues and characters and all of that but they are all also timeless it's good against evil it's it's you know it's eternal boy's stuff huh hands up you're under arrest thanks to you we've landed a very big fish it was um that whole idea of sharing the adventure with other other boys at school i mean there's been that big criticism that uh there are no girls in in tintin's world and was herjay a misogynist i don't think that's the case i think you know if you're writing boy scout drama then girls tend to not feature in that world these first three adventures showed an obvious progression for ajay and tintin although they're not his most acclaimed books they set the format for the future the early books the land of the soviets and congo and tinted in america were not so uh widely published in britain i don't think in the 60s and 70s when i started reading the books and they're not really the ones that i was focusing on it's it's prototintin it's it's still it it's still in the making they don't hold together they they they're episodic every page you have a new incident you know tintin bombs into a basin bombs into an indian there's no there's no coherence to it it's it's he's he's fanning out his feet and even graphically in some of the earlier stories there's a kind of awkwardness facial expressions for instance whether you can see that tintin's mouth i'm sure that gave him trouble he didn't know what to do with the mouth you can see the change and i think it happened in ferrous cigars actually the line becomes assured it's more it's more fluent hi i'm tintin reporter welcome the reporter the winds of fate have just blown the story of a lifetime your way oh i suffer gliese our coffee goose i'm about to unearth the lost tomb of the pharaoh kiosk after the rather dodgy tinted in the congo um and the anti-soviet propaganda of tintin in the land of the soviets he you can tell he's moving towards a more humane politics there's a fabulous bit where attention is actually fighting drug smugglers and you find out what the drugs grows are actually doing to this village one of the one of the leaders explains in quite a lot of detail about how the villagers are forced to grow opium poppies it is interesting that aj didn't have to do that it didn't have to explain it in that details but he did and there's a certain amount of that that sticks in the mind of a 10 year old i think it was difficult to travel and so ajay had to carefully research the places he was illustrating if herje didn't go to any of those places then fair play to him but of course if he didn't go to any of those places the way that he depicted them would be based on photographs or they'll also be based on kind of stereotypical ideas of how people act and who they are and his imagination just created those worlds based on whatever information he could garner if you haven't been there you would reach into your store of cliches in effect somebody was talking about references to japanese ancient paintings in the way that he draws the curves of the waves in the sea and the minute you start thinking like that you can see that there are those those references and your your reader might not be able to to be aware of it but it does register there is something that's what great art actually is made of you know this little manipulation that you are totally unaware of but it gets you in [Music] in 1934 japan occupied china air jay objected to the conflict and he used it as a background for his next tintin adventure the blue lotus [Music] i remember being terribly impressed by that i mean i was 10 years old i didn't know about the the international concession in shanghai uh-oh i think we're lost in the book it does look different you've never been to china you don't know what a chinese house looks like but i just trusted jesse i trusted him aj paid particular attention to oriental drawing style to bring authenticity to the story he had been introduced to the architect chang chong chen who made him pay more attention to oriental art asia decided that he if he was going to have tintin moving around the world he better get serious about researching so i believe he went into collaboration with uh chang and um collaborated with him on how to how to use the calligraphy and and how to depict chinese buildings aj became good friends with chang and his appreciation ended with him writing him in as a character in tintin's adventures my name is tintin and i'm changed okay chang off to who cow it's something that he would return to again and again always researching very meticulously traveling if he could in order to in order to put tintin's adventures in the most realistic possible setting [Music] this south american jungle this green hell a ghastly struggle is being waged between bolivia and paraguay these are the first pictures in the world meanwhile the second line moves up death on its way the wounded the dying everywhere the living must go on over the top ajay had a taste for illustrating conflict and controversy through tintin's adventures his next adventure tintin and the broken ear was a fictionalized version of the grand chakra war that was being fought between bolivia and paraguay over oil fields all was everything and tintin is already a seasoned international troubleshooter i think it's that fear of big business isn't it when big business influences uh be government then you can go to war on the premise of money you can go to war on the premise of oil there's a tintin story where two countries are set against each other with the promise of oil in another country and it's not there and so that whole idea of going to war on a tuppence um just just to turn a coin is very relevant isn't it once again the rattle of a german army on the march echoes in europe where that march may end no man can foretell least of all the man who gave the order but here before our eyes unfolds the drama of a nation dying you have seen the map change once again in europe take warning and offer yourself a national service is this the last attack upon a small state or is it to be followed by others is this in fact a step in the direction of an attempt to dominate the world by force just before world war ii broke out airj produced the black island and was inspired by one of the most popular films of the time the 39 steps directed by alfred hitchcock if you look at his works before the war you can see that he's no fascist [Music] [Laughter] that should keep him inside until the tide finishes him off there's never a good german character in tintin if there's one rule if there's a german it's likely to be dastardly finally a village maybe we can rent a car here snowy when he comes to england in the black island it's particularly interesting england is presented as a very calm and quiet and peaceful country and i believe there were some objections from the german occupying forces in belgium at the time that he presented england as such a positive and and kindly benign place [Music] by 1939 europe was racked with fear over the aggressive moves of adolf hitler and benito mussolini germany had a strong hold over belgium since world war one leaving them vulnerable to invasion a deserted town in belgium cleared for the action of two colossal armies before the savage onslaught of a mighty enemy belgian troops have been relieved by british after withstanding the most tremendous attack in the history of the world and along every road that leads south the refugees are passing in a weary stream that seems to have no beginning and no end only with more and still more planes can we drive this foul horror from the skies during this time aj produced king ottaka's scepter which was a clear response to the nazi invasions the tale featured pro-fascist group the iron guards headed by fictional leader musler which was a blend of the names hitler and mussolini these are very serious charges you make mr tintin it's set in the in the balkans you know the balkans then as now were a place of you know huge upheaval and unrest i will study this further and confer with our security police then it will join you with the king the story was dangerous and with the promise of war from germany it left airshay vulnerable and i written this story i would not have stayed so he was lucky i mean you know you have the uh the huge propaganda apparatus of the nazis looking at every single printed word and not just what what was going to be printed but what had been printed i mean fascists have long memories you know they highly sensitive people you know in 1940 belgium's worst fear came to life when german forces invaded this is the pathway of an invading army wreckage on all sides houses and shops churches and schools a like battered into unrecognizable heaps of rubbish and along every road that leads south the refugees are passing in a weary stream that seems to have no beginning and no end the nazis shut down their leper tivettienne newspaper and so to keep working airj accepted a job at the popular lesson newspaper but this was now under nazi control and tintin's appearance in such a paper would leave a huge stain on airgee's reputation during the occupation he stayed he could quite easily have left it's very difficult though 70 years hence to make judgments about what people had to do or didn't have to do at a time where there was such an evil group of people who had invaded your country and were running it [Music] creeps on towards every home in belgium like an oncoming time these families in feverish haste prepare to leave before the invader to join the march of refugees while enemy planes threaten from above a minute will pass and they will turn their backs upon a home which they will never see again during the second world war of course there wasn't much of anything in terms of fuel food light entertainment there was very little you could do so i'm sure just to keep body and soul together working and earning was the right thing to do in france i mean there's quite a number of uh entertainers you know maurice chevalier charles 20. they stayed there and at the end of the war people say you're a pretty collaborator because you just stayed i think quite often with these incredibly hard-working uh artists they're not necessarily political but it was obvious that if you wanted to carry on working in in occupied europe at that time you had to tear the line aj produced six stories during the war which avoided any controversy instead he offered escapism through the adventures of tintin the work that he did under the nazis actually pushed him away from the political storylines he had been exploring and towards rather sort of lovely escapist fantasies which are some of his most charming works i think they're the works that he produced in an extraordinary burst of creativity and actually the some of the most enduring hmm that's strange i've never noticed that star before i smell a story here come on snowy but what i love about it is it's tintin expanding his horizons and he's looking up to the stars and it is about meteorites falling and it it's it kind of goes beyond the the earthly confines and yet it's still just a classic great tinting adventure and it's got boats and it's got biplanes and it's got kind of what was would then have been the latest technology it's just a really really good story um that's pure escapism yeah and the uh the authorities must have like that wow look at this now we're getting somewhere crab with the golden claws it sounds like something from a bond film it's brilliant before i was even aware of james bond the war years also produced tintin's most famous sidekicks who would go on to become lifelong favorites the characters were just brilliant just brilliant everyone like snowy the dog and captain haddock they're all good because they've all got the essential elements you can't do tintin without tinting and and the quiff and the clothes and snowy with the bone in his mouth and captain haddock with you know all those wonderful alliterative kind of phrases and insults oh here we go my nose billions of blistering barnacles what a line and the great thing about uh what what hershey came up with is that he came up with a drunk to start with it's a it's a beauty you know haddock is marvelous the thompsons to some degree are kind of lestrade they're the bumbling cops that appear in you know in in crime fiction pretty much throughout and and calculus who's that great he's the you know the the the trust me i'm a scientist figure they're just such great stock characters that wherever they go in this world or out of it you know up into space or down into the seven seas they're just great characters [Music] tintin's sidekicks although a welcome addition to the series were unusual characters to have alongside the young belgian hero they all seem to be almost like surrogate parents to him how to calculus the the thompson they they're old enough to be to be his parents and it allows him to to move throughout the world without the encumbrances that adult characters have so there's a certain innocence there as well which is which is interesting today if haddock was tintin's dad tinting to be on the at-risk register because he'd be a terrible parent taking him on these adventures and drinking the way he does with the violence so he's not aspiring to be like these adults but he wants them in his world so pretty much it's a dysfunctional setup isn't it tintin's the only one really with any any real credibility you always get the sense that tintin is from a little place he wouldn't work if he were british which was the kind of dominant power of the time it works because he's plucky little tintin from plucky little belgium from this small place that doesn't have anybody famous except tintin and then again it's uh it could be a a metaphor for for belgian it's a small country a small young country and it's surrounded by older more powerful and and dangerous countries [Music] when the war ended ajay's very survival meant that he was once again accused of being a nazi collaborator at the end of the war you know you have a lot of patriots coming out of the woodwork they were in the resistance all along you know that sort of thing you know they want to find the guilty parties the uh the whiter than white you know self-righteous characters you know you emerge out of uh this dreadful thing with well actually no moral stunning at all hershey was one and he must have asked himself well could i have done this could i have done that but he's a cartoon it's not meant to be the real world and i think it's only because he's such a believable character that you even start to do that he's a line drawing with a quiff and you have to remind yourself of that he was banned from newspapers for two years although the charges were unfounded the stress pushed him to a nervous breakdown in 1947. tintin was put on ice [Music] when ajay returned he finished many of the books he had started during the war which was still grounded in fantastic escapist adventures featuring the new regulars of haddock and calculus a river this is our only chance snowy this is probably my favorite of them all partly because it's one of the ones that kind of acted almost like a travel brochure for me when i was younger i thought one day i'm gonna go to peru when i was young it gave me an interest in the world it's got that kind of yearning for new lands and it's got aztecs and mayans and it's got sacrifice and and it's a great adventure and it's got all the perfect cliffhangers in it and it's got spitting llamas and it's got lots of humor and i think this is one of the just the most terrific adventures that he has again it's the james bond thing the world is my office and i think the way that he moves around the world as a free agent and mixes in all these cultures he's always open-minded towards the cultures and he's never closed off towards them i think that's a a post second world war 20th century lifestyle so i think he's he's a modernizer and uh it certainly encouraged me to feel that i could move around the world with freedom for more than a year any weetak alone the pacific atoll has kept a secret which these pictures reveal for the first time this was operation greenhouse an atomic explosion designed to show the devastating effect of the blast on fighting equipment and all types of buildings by the 1950s the cold war had set in and the strained american and soviet relationship put the world on edge several months ago we saw and heard our president announce a pair of unusual events in this day of cold war tensions he as the leader of the west would exchange visits with the leader of the east premier crude shop the threat of nuclear war was at the forefront of people's minds and inspired ajay to produce the calculus affair which sees professor calculus develop a weapon of potential power over the years i have re-read calculus affair which is possibly my favorite i think hershey was great when when he did international politics and and i think that that beefs up his stories the americans and the soviets were also locked in a race to the moon and over a decade before anyone would make the landing airj transported tinting to the moon in espionage classics men had gone on to explore the realms beyond into the dizzy heights of space onward toward the planets there lies the new course for brave men with wings up there is the everlasting monument to wilbur and orville wright i was fascinated by the idea going to the moon and suddenly the soviets the communists are way ahead of us and the notion was that they they were technically technologically backwards and suddenly they're there they put the first man up in orbit they sent the first craft to hit the moon to go around the moon boy the americans were absolutely yeah and the rest of the the western world that's kind of uh so here she didn't have this as a trigger um i think he just that was almost a normal thing to do you know um sun thinking to the moon [Music] the stories came 16 years before the actual apollo moon landings and the technology was still being developed but again aj's research and attention to detail made the stories seem accurate for a long time the moon was just about everything it was at the limit of imagination so why bother with galaxies and stars you know you you could base a science fiction story uh within the moon's orbit and it satisfied everybody's imagination i think there's something about the illustrations in it that just really captured my imagination and something about the atmosphere of anticipation it appealed to the child's childish imagination i think i remember seeing the book on the shelves and they cost money they were not cheap at all and i remember seeing these two these two books and drooling you know and it was years before before i managed to read them and the covers the covers were really kind of mind-blowing you know this huge a souped-up german rocket yeah i think he based the rocket on the german v2 rocket didn't he um and he scrupulously researched it to get as much as he could ej was always scrupulously accurate about the machines that tintin encountered it was one of the ways that he must have retained the interests of the boys who were reading the comics and i think that's the stories that that really turned tintin into an international star because all young readers could could relate to that uh all young boys dreamt of going to the moon airj had created a brand in tintin his signature on the covers was as famous as tintin's face the adventures of tintin were selling millions all over the world although the success was well received it meant ajay had more pressure to mass produce the decades as tintin's popularity had grown ajay was under pressure to use assistance to help with production when you're working on your own which he mostly was you can become quite obsessed herja became like a brand in the way disney became a brand and most people assumed that uncle walt did all of the drawings and all the animations because hershey had a a team of people under him working and when people asked for a credit or their name mentioned on the artwork he always flatly refused he wanted just to be branded hershey i mean i think clearly was a man who would like to have been left alone all the stuff about collaboration and all of that i think he was a man who wanted to sit in his room and draw and create these these cartoons that he clearly loved so dearly his first collaboration dated back to king ottaka's scepter when he asked edgar p jacobs to help with the complicated costumes and landscapes jacob's graphic work was uh was very very striking the the archetype of the clear line technique with with a a great sense of of colors especially earth colors color schemes you know that that washed through series of of pages by the 1950s tintin was a recognized brand and airshay had spawned a team of artists to help produce tintin the art of the drawings had developed even more making the illustrations near perfect the technical side of the drawing became even more perfect i mean tanks were an actual model of tank i don't think he needed to i mean he had a perfectly a marvelous technique yeah that's even his his latest stories uh they look wonderful but i think he just kind of uh he became more involved in editing and possibly running the business by the late 1950s aj fell in love with fanny vlaming an assistant to his studios he had been married since 1932 and wrestled with the idea of divorce during this time he repeatedly had nightmares that he said showed the beauty and cruelty of white he eventually divorced his wife and this difficult period and the nightmares he suffered inspired tintin in tibet i just had the most awful dream it was about my friend chang he'd been in a plane crash and was calling out to me for help you find tintin in complete anguish because he's had a dream that his old friend chang from the blue lotus is dead and so he travels out to tibet and sets out to find him two decades had passed since aj had made contact with his friend chang but life would eventually imitate art as the two were reunited in 1981. who who's there changed is interesting and he talks about that being uh his own nightmares being a land of white and uh recreating that in tinted in japan there you have the start of the book and the colors are european and they're the classic colors of tintin and so you don't have to read a single word you know where you are and you know who it is but then later in the book when he gets you know to tibet on nepal look at the difference it's an icy world it's a scary one it's a dangerous world the blue hints at danger they're within that haunting white snow scape of the himalayas we have tinted wandering around in in some emotional distress i believe that ergo wrote it at a time where he had just divorced his wife and was in quite a bleak place himself and it's interesting how that is reflected in the in the text itself there's a real dignity as well to the way that the the local characters are portrayed in this i think you know here's tintin with a with a local tibetan guy and they're kind of equals they're similar it's kind of showing the fact that you know tintin is like similar people like him in another part of the world that's a massive change from the early ones in the congo it's almost as if herjay is kind of trying to to perhaps make up for the sins of his youth or the perceived sins of racism that kind of shows the journey that erjay makes i think as a as a person and as an artist three thousand screaming teenagers are at new york's kennedy airport to greet you guessed it the beatles this rock and roll group has taken over as the kingpins of musical appreciation among the younger elephants some of the fences hold others do a minor miracle is mounted by the fact that there are no injuries spread among the near hysterical crowd this truly is a social document for our titles please don't let me be misunderstood by the 1960s the world had changed pop culture and rock and roll would contest the world of comic books airshay's audience had evolved once more you know young people whose men concerned whether the length of their hair and the guitar and scoring with the girls became more difficult to to attract their attention art and literature was also in a state of transformation and the graphic novel was not immune to change actually knew that there would be an end to it you couldn't keep that young chap in his blue sweater and and plus fours just going around the world airj was slowing down with his books being released less frequently tintin's last three adventures were released over 13 years you find quite an interesting progression as we go through the books you know the first rewritten and the 30s the later ones are written sort of in the 60s and 70s but it's interesting now to come to the back to the books with that knowledge and there's another level on which you can read them i think by looking at them through ajay's own internal struggle in his own politics and how that how that changed over time [Music] aj was known for changing his stance on certain beliefs which he showed through the eyes of tintin with 22 adventures produced air jae's journey as an author can be mapped he has been questioned about his politics i think he's quite honest about it about changing his mind in certain periods of history you know you have to be open to change your opinions and it would be hard to comment in such a broad sweep about such many countries as he did in changing times without being wrong-footed by history a few times especially the uh the the 20th century which was the most murderous uh sanctuary ever i suppose when you know the the germans took over the the paper he was writing the comic strip before people saw him as a collaborator in fact he was again just fitting into the circumstance so you know catholicism to start with the nazis that followed next you know and then later on he sort of views kind of change from sort of right to left because i think to say he was easy influence makes him sound as if he was weak-minded so which he isn't he's clearly strong-minded but assimilating other people's views and trying on other people's shoes effectively maybe gave him a different perspective [Music] george remy the artist best known as aj died in march 1983 he had reflected a turbulent 20th century through the creation of tintin his early political misconceptions had been overcome and he was awarded honours at home in belgium and abroad whether or not there are all these dramatic themes that people have drawn out in the work later and the the art and the intensity of the research it's gateway literature and that's one of his real strengths there's a number of artists on the continent who still use the the clear line technique to do their stories so they are the children of herje so hershey's influence is still very strong and is part of this artistic continuum there's always been a degree in which kind of tin tin has sort of been on my shoulder when i first walked up in south america i couldn't but think of of tinting with the biggers or the first time i went to the himalayas and and all that stuff tintin was just with me a lot all along the ride ashay's legacy lives on in the adventures of tintin the characters appear in film and figurines but the books will always stay the same you

Channel: Perspective

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Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, Herge, herge tintin, herge cartoons, bande dessinée tintin, tintin, tintin movie, tintin theme, tintin in tibet, herge tintin documentary, herge biography, herges life, tintin creator, adventures of tintin credits, adventures of tintin, tintin documentary, tintin documentaire, tintin documental

Id: c2lne7nxWgk

Length: 43min 42sec (2622 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021

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[u/frevensakes]

This was fantastic, really enjoyed it.