Misleading Legacy: The Power Of Sculptures (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] that great french diplomat maurice de talairon admitted once that he was more afraid of an army of a hundred sheep led by a lion then of an army of a hundred lions led by a sheep because in matters of leadership lions are what you want and sheep are not [Applause] okay but what happens if inside here you're a lion but on the outside you look like a sheep what do you do then it's a problem that many great leaders have had to face not looking the part and their traditional solution has been to call in the sculptors because if there's one thing sculpture is really good at it's turning sheep into lions [Music] so how do you sculpt a leader someone you want to look up to and follow someone who'll guide you and inspire you it's one of sculpture's oldest problems if you look like him but you want to come across like him then it's no good relying on nature she's already let you down the only firm friend you have the best friend you have is sculpture it's something that all societies of all persuasions in all eras and all places have always known when you need to come up with a leader get sculpture in to do the job imagine you're a sculptor and you want your work to stand out what do you do if you're clever you might come up with some sophisticated attention-seeking strategy that gets your work noticed in subtle ways but if you're not very clever and you're in the midwest of the united states where people generally prefer the old-fashioned approach you might do what sculpture has traditionally done to get itself noticed you will grow very very very big in sculpture equality has never really caught on as you can see [Music] four great presidents of the united states carved into mount rushmore advertising their country's democratic values by being so much bigger than anyone else sculpturally speaking mountains are dangerous places not just because people fall off them but because their visions grow weird and grandiose when they get to the top you know hitler decided to found the nazi party while looking down on the rest of us from the top of a german mountain that's what happens to people on mountaintops they lose their sense of perspective the four presidents washington jefferson roosevelt and abe lincoln are said to represent the spirit of america and mount rushmore is seen by many as a sculptural shrine to american values but it was actually built to be a tourist attraction south dakota needed a landmark something big to bring paying visitors into the state so in 1924 they came up with this four extra extra extra large big brothers crammed onto one hill the great white fathers of america staring sternly down on their people like a band of rock gods on the cover of a heavy metal album the sculptor gutzon borglum was an unpleasant piece of work he came from a polygamous mormon family with two interchangeable mothers so my guess is that somewhere along the line borglum developed an oversized father complex but that's just my guess borglum is actually a member of the ku klux klan and he's on record of saying that the european politician he admires most because he got things done and he saw off the commies and the jews was mussolini which figures doesn't it [Music] the statues were originally going to be full length taking up the whole of the mountain but money was tight and people got realistic besides the four disembodied presidential heads seemed to do the job of representing america's past adequately enough which i suppose they do if this is your idea of america the actual carving or rather the dynamiting because most of this was created with dynamite was done between 1929 and 1941 so the story of mount rushmore coincides rather neatly with the rise of fascism in europe which i suppose could be a coincidence the local indians to whom the mountain actually belonged weren't overly enamored either of the sight of four white conquerors staring down at them so sternly it looks like a giant paperweight they complained correctly as they accused borglum of turning their sacred mountain into disneyland among the protests was a particularly effective one mounted by a group of lakota indians who took their lives in their hands and formed a human chain across the mountain where they proceeded to urinate in unison down the great presidential noses of the founding fathers i know the feeling when you gotta go you gotta go generally it's good to be tall individuals who are taller are afforded benefits throughout their life individuals who are shorter receive just the opposite we literally have to go back 120 years in american history covering 42 presidential elections to find a person shorter than the national average who was elected to be president if we go back those years we'd go back literally to 1888 benjamin harris at the time was an inch shorter than the national average that was the last time that we've elected a person shorter than the national average [Music] the most famous whopper of the ancient world and i'm sure you've heard of it was the colossus of rhodes it was a hundred and ten feet high a nude of the sun god helios put up in the harbour of rhodes to celebrate a great victory over alexander's generals this isn't it by the way this is about half the size the colossus of roads only lasted about 50 years then an earthquake took it out snapped it off at the knees and when it fell to the ground people could have a good look at it and according to pliny the elder the thumb was so big that most people couldn't get their arms around it and all the fingers were the size of an average statue [Music] going big was a popular international strategy in the ancient world the egyptians did it the chinese and oh my oh my the japanese but no one was quite as clean as the romans now you must be an intelligent and educated person otherwise you wouldn't be watching this film so i would like to ask you two questions first one is easy what's the name of that building over there it's the colosseum of course but the second question isn't so easy why is that thing called the colosseum not because it's colossal although it is but because right in front of it in this space here they're stood for over a thousand years a colossal statue of the emperor nero and nero as you know was not a modest man so he put up in front of his famous golden house this gigantic likeness of himself this thing was bigger than the colossus of rhodes it was 130 feet tall you couldn't miss nero's colossus so after his death his successors found an excellent new use for it by swapping its head around they found they could give it a new identity by the time it ended up here it had become a sun god again apollo nero's colossus was supposed to have magic powers there was a famous prediction about it by the venerable bead as long as the colossus stands predicted bede so rome shall stand when the colossus falls so rome shall fall and when rome falls so falls the world that turned out to be wrong because sometime in the middle ages the colossus by the coliseum was indeed pulled down and melted but at least it had awakened inside the italians their huge appetite for big sculptures look at samuel 117 and they came out of the camp of the philistines a champion called goliath and his height was six cubits and a span six cubits and a span that's more than ten feet florence the duomo many people's idea of the perfect renaissance building but the florentines themselves weren't satisfied with the way it looked [Music] see that parapet up there where the buttresses are that hold up brunelleschi's dome does that look empty to you because it did to the florentines and for much of the 15th century they wanted to put something up there to complete the apps the original idea was for a group of great big prophets to go all the way around the church that didn't work out so somebody came up with a notion of putting a great big david up there instead [Music] and saul said unto david thou art not able to go against this philistine for thou art but a boy and he has been a warrior from his youth david was the unofficial patron of florence the idea of this little shepherd slaying the giant goliath with a rock appealed mightily to the florentines they identified with it and in around 1500 when the famously wicked cesare borgia turned up at the city gates and menaced florence the florentines did what every human society has done since the beginning of time they roped in sculpture to work some magic for them and to sweeten the gods and david took five stones out of the brook and put them in his shepherd's bag and he took his sling in his hand and he drew near to the philistine the marble block for a giant david had been lying around in the cathedral gardens for most of the 15th century various sculptors had tinkered with it no one quite knew how to finish it so the florentines finally summoned a man who could michelangelo and commissioned him to carve the first colossus seen in italy since roman times it might be the most famous statue in the world but there are three things wrong with david one he's naked look at him but if you were going into battle would you go into battle like that two he's not circumcised look at him and he's supposed to be the bible is very specific on this topic david was circumcised goliath wasn't but it's the third thing that's most wrong with him he's just too big david is supposed to be a little man who slays a giant that's how everyone else portrayed him people often say that his proportions are wrong the head is too big look at that huge right hand but remember he was originally meant to have gone on the parapet at the top of the cathedral much much higher than this so michelangelo has cunningly adapted his proportions there's no real need for all the detail up there either look at the tendons standing up on his neck the veins on his right hand and that strange frown on his face is he puzzled is he angry i can never tell when david was finished the decision had to be made where to put him everyone saw at once that he was much too fine a sculpture to hide away on a church roof but where should he go leonardo da vinci said put him here botticelli wanted him here gillandayo somewhere over there and yet he ended up here in the single most symbolic spot available in florence right in front of the palazzo vecchio the town hall from where florence was ruled [Music] they had to move a donatello statue that was already standing there because the donatello was thought to have had a bad influence on florentine history whereas this david where he could see off any invaders and he could certainly see off cesare borgia so here we have some of the most developed minds in the renaissance world fretting over the power the magic of sculpture and its ability to influence history because you don't have to be an african tribalist to imagine that sculpture has all this potency you just have to be human people who see something bigger assume it to be more valuable more powerful something that they want more so than something that's smaller if we go back through history we have always people around the world have always viewed people taller to be more powerful to be more valuable if we go back further to the evolutionary process and we see how we've evolved well certainly individuals of taller height were able to defend better were able to bring prey in they were able to sustain or survive more so we value that we value that height we equate with that height so it's an evolutionary process [Music] there are around two and a half million islands in the world and many of them are of course very beautiful but only one that i know of sends a shiver at my spine when i hear its mysterious name and envisage its mighty ghosts [Music] i think you know where i mean easter island there's nowhere else like easter island it's terrifyingly remote go east and eventually you get to south america go west and eventually you get to tahiti but only eventually so the first people who managed somehow to arrive here the original polynesian settlers must have been seriously reckless and brave travellers and they must have liked what they found here a lot because they stayed and they thrived and they multiplied boy did they multiply in those days the entire island was covered with trees and the surrounding seas were packed with fish there was plenty to eat plenty to drink plenty to celebrate and to thank their gods for bringing them here and for looking after them so well the easter islanders began mass producing their unforgettable [Music] sculptures [Music] they're called moai haunting things aren't they with those sunken eyes and that determined thrust of the chin they're scattered right around the island there are places here where there's another moai on every hill [Music] the theory is that these things began life as portraits of actual people important tribal chiefs great ancestors and leaders but one of the things that makes sculpture so potent is its ability to turn a likeness of someone just like that into an idol something to worship a god figure and that's what happened here the leaders became gods [Music] i don't know if i've ever been to an artistic site quite as wacky as this one it's the quarry where all the stone for the moai was mind and every crevice every overhang seems to contain another statue in a different stage of completion i mean look here nose mouth chid it's a and up here the belly chin nose they're everywhere this one here el gigante is the largest statue ever started he would have weighed over 150 tons when he was finished so perhaps it's best if we don't wake him [Music] the statues were carved up there at the top of the mountain then pushed down the side so they slid to the bottom down here where they were finished and then transported to all corners of the island where they stare so fiercely into eternity and keep their divine mission so close to their chests [Music] they're so mysterious that various crackpots have proposed ever more silly explanations for them some say they were made by visiting aliens another theory is that they came out of the center of the earth in a giant earthquake [Music] here's another easter island mystery a real one when the first europeans set foot on the island in the 1720s most of the moai weren't standing up as they are now but lying on the ground like this one some with their face up some with their face down everyone assumed that the statues had been toppled by a natural disaster a tsunami or an earthquake but then they began to notice a pattern to the destruction and it slowly dawned on them that the moai had been knocked over by the easter islanders themselves deliberately there'd been some sort of revolution and the statues were at the center of it what on earth have gone on here i'm not sure you'll believe me [Music] it was all down to wood making them moai and transporting them used up lots of wood sledges scaffolds rollers it wasn't a problem when the island was covered with trees but as more and more trees got chopped down the forests shrank no wood meant no canoes no canoes meant no fish and no escape thus the islanders found themselves trapped on their ex paradise with nothing to eat and no way of getting out so they took it out on the gods who had betrayed them they took it out on the statues [Applause] [Music] i don't know if you can make out these paintings up here weird figures half man half bird because this cave is one of the key sights associated with the strange cult that took over from the statue builders it was called the birdman cult and its story is as wacky a tribal turn up as you're ever likely to hear about [Music] [Applause] easter island society was divided into two main classes the privileged who built the statues and who were known as the long ears and everyone else the short ears who worked for them what seems to have happened is that all the resources and attention lavished on the statues by the long ears fermented these huge angers among the short ears when food was plentiful and the going was good the short ears were happy enough to listen to the long ears but as the population grew and the forests shrank so the resentment of the shore tears exploded into a remarkable revolution the birdman cult that took over the island the cult of the shorties had little time for sculpture they were too busy thinking up strange new rituals by which to run their society it was like the bolshevik revolution tribal style [Music] the cult was centered on this lost world of a volcano up on the island's rim rano cow it's on the other side of the island from the quarry and over here see the rocks up ahead they are covered with strange ritualistic drawings bird men half bird half man you can't really see them very well now the light's wrong just to look really carefully there's three here see upside down with their heads down one two and over there three and out there see the large island at the end that's motta nui that was the cult's most important destination every spring large numbers of nesting birds turns would arrive on motonui to lay their eggs the islanders used to harvest them and eat them gratefully and it was around this annual arrival of the birds that the birdman cult evolved its nutty rituals [Music] when the birds were due the young men of the island the warriors would swim across to motonui and they'd race themselves to see who could come back with the first bird's egg now you can see the waters out there no one would like to swim through that it's about a mile there and back and there are a lot of sharks in there but these warriors the birdman cultists they did it because the reward for the warrior who came back with the first egg was enormous because they got to rule the whole of the island for a year but only a year and when their reign of one year was up someone else had to be chosen and they all went through the same thing again [Music] the bird men have left us some interesting scratchings on their stone eerie and kevin costner liked their story so much he turned it into a hollywood blockbuster that plays in town twice a week but that's hardly a legacy to compare with the astonishing achievements of the statue builders quite a story eh an isolated society makes sculpture the center of its existence devotes everything to it and as a result it perishes that's sculpture for you [Music] and the lord said unto them blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth [Music] not everyone is as good as the easter islanders were at turning men into guards and then enlarging them some societies are really bad at it but it's a powerful urge and it seems it can't be stopped rising out of the water in front of the solid rock mega church in monroe ohio is the biggest jesus in america he's 62 feet tall weighs 16 000 and is indisputably a difficult jesus to miss [Applause] so he'd be visible from the interstate the colossus of ohio a giant advert for salvation beckoning all passing drivers unfortunately you get a lot of heathens driving up and down here who've completely misunderstood jesus's big gesture of salvation and they've nicknamed him cruelly the drowning jesus or sometimes and i think this is even worse the touchdown of jesus [Applause] the big j is the brainchild of pastor lawrence bishop and his wife darlene bishop have been pastors here since 1978. this is their mega church and from here they spread the bishop word straight through the heart of them righteous uprights drop kick me jesus to the gold coast of light yeah drop kick me jesus this ohio mega christ is the work of a sculptor called james lynch now i've never heard of him before but apparently he's worked at disneyland and he made that huge neptune at caesar's palace in las vegas so he knows a thing or two about sculpting gods and what size they should be well for me personally i think christ is big he's a big thing to my life and uh i think a 62-foot tall sculpture of christ reflects how big god is and from a practical standpoint if we made him much smaller it would not have been much of a witness to the people on the highway which is who we're wanting to witness to but again i think it it represents how big christ is [Music] so the best view of the big jesus is from the garage across the interstate i'm just looking for some people to ask about it now we're just asking questions about the uh the big statue of jesus out there i don't believe himself you don't believe in statues we're here from british television we're just making a film about big statues yeah and you've got a very big one out there how do you how do you like the big jesus uh it's a great place for us to tell people where we're located everybody in the state of ohio knows where the statue of jesus is at you know you know it stops people on the highway it looks cool dude yeah pretty big pretty big is that a good thing a fake jesus yeah that's pretty good don't matter what size it is we're back in the black hills of south dakota eight miles from mount rushmore although you've probably heard of mount rushmore and its giant presidential heads this statue here might possibly have slipped you by the god knows how will you look at the size of that [Music] where does it come from this mad american compulsion to carve up entire mountains anyone would think they were ridiculously competitive as a nation or something [Music] when it's finished this entire sculpture will be the height of two football pitches piled one on top of the other it's going to be the biggest sculpture in the world you know that head is 90 feet tall this whole thing is going to be bigger than the pyramids it shows crazy horse the great lakota indian warrior best known perhaps for whopping general custer at the battle of the little bighorn in 1876 he was carved as a deliberate alternative to mount rushmore by a compatriot of mine called korchak zhukovsky or as they call him around here kozak zukowski zukowski was actually at work on mount rushmore with gutzon borglum when he was contacted by an indian chief called standing bear standing bear had a very american dream my fellow chiefs and i he wrote to zhulkowski want the white man to know that the red man has great heroes too that was in 1939 and as you can see it's still not finished zhukovsky spent the entire second half of his life from 1949 until 1982 carving crazy horse never took a salary and received no government help it was a labor of love or perhaps a national duty since his death his family has kept the carving going and no less than seven of the ten zukovsky children are still involved in this great project [Music] this is what it'll look like when it's finished if it's [Music] finished crazy horse didn't like having his picture taken he didn't approve of the white man's camera stealing his face so there are no actual photographs of him just this vague likeness of any old indian and there are plenty of sioux indians around today who are as offended by this as they are by mount rushmore the whole idea of making a beautiful wild mountain into a statue is a pollution of the landscape wrote to the angry sioux protester lame deer it is against the spirit of crazy horse that's the downside of putting up great big statues of people if your supporters can't miss them then neither can your enemies it's not a problem when you're in charge but what happens when you're not i'm in lithuania and this is the world's most notorious collection of soviet statuary its proper name is the grutas park but around here everyone calls it stalin's world this grotesque theme park was created by one of lithuania's richest men a former wrestler turned mushroom magnet villumas malinowskas the statues were bought from the lithuanian government and then dotted about this fake concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire and pretend guard posts [Music] the original plan was to bring tourists here from vilnius in cattle trucks modeled on the ones that took political prisoners to the gulags but mercifully that idea was dropped it's all in appallingly bad taste but it serves a purpose because it reminds us of the extraordinary lengths to which the communists went to blur the divide between their leaders and their gods [Music] lenin was small and spotty but you'd never know it from the surviving statues of him this one is the size of a seated egyptian pharaoh and some of them were much bigger 20 meters tall there was an old soviet saying the bigger the city the bigger the lenin and they were everywhere there was even one outside the soviet ice station at the south pole the irony is that lennon himself didn't want any of this his deathbed wish was that there should be no monuments to him but nobody was listening particularly not dr constantinis bogdanus a veritable churner out of lenin's who were single-handedly responsible for dozens of them [Music] dr bogdanos is now 75 and rather sick of the subject but i've tracked him down to his studio in vilnius and i'm going to get him to talk about lenin whatever it takes hello hello hello valdemar from london london this is the film crew ah ah studio studio but when you were doing um the linen and the soviet statues how how did you do them because obviously lenin had been dead for uh a long time before you were born in leningrad i came across a death mask so i bought and there were lots of films about lenin so i could watch his movements at the time lenin was worshipped like a god but actually we didn't know much about him could you portray lenin uh in any way you wanted or was there very close control of how he was presented of course there was censorship one of my friends they deported of lenin and on his hands were some big visible veins that could only mean that lenin belonged to the labor classes so the committee told my friend to change his portrait this is the statue of stalin that used to stand outside the railway station in vilnius imagine getting off your commuter train on a cold monday morning and being greeted by him actually statues of stalin are rare because the moment he was dead the relatives of the two million or so people he murdered began pulling them down and replacing him with lennon and then of course when the soviet empire crumbled the lenins were attacked too and only a lucky few survive thanks to the generosity [Music] so the moral to the story is if you are going to put up big statues of yourself make sure you live forever and are always around to protect them because big statues wind up your enemies something awful and the urge to knock them down is every bit as powerful as the urge to put them up there are a million stories in the world of sculpture this has been a few of them

Channel: Perspective

Views: 151,838

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, waldemar januszczak, waldemar januszczak documentary, sculpting, famous statues, mount rushmore, mount rushmore documentary, art history, art, the arts, history documentary, history, waldemar, native american, native american history

Id: nLYT71te6Yg

Length: 48min 17sec (2897 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020