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Aladdin Sane: 50 Years Exhibition @ Festival Hall

This surprisingly extensive and greatly enjoyable exhibition on the ground floor of the Royal Festival Hall is premised on the notion that the cover to David Bowie’s 1973 album, ‘Aladdin Sane’ – the photo of Bowie’s face with the ‘lightning bolt’ drawn across it – was an epoch-making, benchmark-setting, game-changing, epochal work of art. On the wall labels and in the exhibition publicity the curators go so far as to claim that the cover photo is ‘the Mona Lisa of Pop’. Do you agree? This exhibition tries its damnedest to persuade you.

Cover of Aladdin Sane by David Bowie, released 19 April 1973

The album

‘Aladdin Sane’ was Bowie’s sixth studio album, released on 20 April 1973 on RCA Records. The previous albums had been:

  • David Bowie (1967)
  • David Bowie/Space Oddity (1969)
  • The Man Who Sold the World (1970)
  • Hunky Dory (1971)
  • The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

The concept album ‘Ziggy’, creating an elaborate mythology about an ill-fated, fictional rock musician, was Bowie’s breakthrough LP. It sold over 100,000 copies and catapulted him into the realm of real stardom. Concerts sold out, the music press started to treat him as a player, his fan base exploded. It established him as a leader of the more thoughtful, cerebral, art student end of Glam Rock, far more ambitious in his skilful deployment of a persona and concept than rivals like Marc Bolan, let alone the pure pop end of Glam such as Sweet or Slade.

The follow-up, ‘Aladdin’, is closely linked to ‘Ziggy’. Bowie recorded it with the same backing band (led by guitarist and arranger Mick Ronson) and it was recorded between gigs of his extensive Ziggy Stardust tour. The songs were mostly written on the road in the US between shows. This explains why the subject matter is often directly American (‘Panic in Detroit’) and also has a heavier, harder rock feel than Ziggy. The track listing is:

Side one:

Side two:

It contains one solid gold hit, ‘The Jean Genie’, which is a classic of a certain kind of style of repetitive, one-riff rock. It started with Mick Ronson fooling around with a Bo Diddley riff on the tour bus. Back in New York Bowie developed lyrics to entertain Andy Warhol acolyte, Cyrinda Foxe. In fact the way the lyrics describe a certain New York type is strongly reminiscent of Lou Reed, whose album Transformer, full of such portraits, Bowie had just finished producing and playing on. A cursory listen to both shows that Transformer is, quite obviously, much better than Aladdin, more varied, more interesting tunes (‘Perfect Day’, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’), has stood the test of time far better.

The bassist on the Jean Genie session later claimed it was recorded in an hour and a half flat. It went to number 2 in the UK chart (a chart which, one of the many entertaining and nostalgic wall labels tells us, had recently featured Sweet’s ‘Blockbuster’ and Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’). But I find most of the other tracks on the album boringly repetitive and too long. And the lyrics?

Crack, baby, crack, show me you’re real
Smack, baby, smack, is that all that you feel
Suck, baby, suck, give me your head
Before you start professing that you’re knocking me dead

It was ‘daring’ and ‘risqué’ at the time to describe blowjobs in a song, 50 years later…not so much. And ‘professing’?

It’s surprising that this contrived performer, this cracked actor, so keen to display a glammed-up, self-consciously theatrical character, should include a Rolling Stones track, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, on the album. He said in interviews it was a tribute to the Stones-inspired feel of many of the songs, but it’s dire, isn’t it? The main difference is Bowie swallowing or snatching the word ‘together’ in contrast to Mick Jagger’s lazy sexy drawl, which is definitely worse, and the spoken ad lib at the end:

They said we were too young
Our kind of love was too young
But our love comes from above
Let’s make love

This sounds like a blatantly commercial play for the adoration (and money) of pimply misunderstood 15-year-olds everywhere.

Who is Aladdin Sane? In interviews Bowie simply described him as ‘Ziggy Stardust goes to America’, where he discovered urban decay, drugs, sex and violence on a scale you couldn’t get in Britain. Critic Kevin Cann is quoted describing him as ‘a kind of shell-shocked remnant of his former self’.

Installation view of ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ at the Southbank Centre showing a contact sheet and blown-up images of Bowie dressed for his performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops. Note the red-and-blue colour scheme already much in evidence. Installation photo by Pete Woodhead. Bowie photo by Duffy © Duffy Archive & The David Bowie Archive ™

The album had 100,000 advance orders which meant it went ‘gold’ and to number 1 in the UK album charts, staying there for 5 weeks and in the top 10 for 27. It’s estimated to have sold 4.6 million copies in total, the kind of figures record companies, accountants, and rock music geeks adore.

The exhibition includes an area dominated by a fantastic old-style hi fi system comprising record player, amp and big speakers, on which the album was playing. (For techies, the deck is a Michell Transcriptor, with Celestion 66 loudspeakers and a Rotel RX-1203 amplifier.) Someone must have been continually turning it over or putting the needle back to the start of the side. There are bean bags to slump on. Tellingly I came across someone’s daughter, obviously not very interested in the exhibition, slumped on a bean bag with headphones on, and when I asked her what she was listening to, it wasn’t Bowie.

However, the thing about this exhibition is that it isn’t really about the music. The actual content of the album is barely discussed. The focus of the exhibition is the cover art for the album. This, we quickly discover, was shot by fashion photographer Brian Duffy, was the most expensive rock album cover made to date and, according to the curators, is one of the most iconic rock images of all time.

Brian Duffy

Thus an immense amount of time is devoted to the background and build-up to the famous cover image. I counted no fewer than 84 photos devoted to telling the story. First the context and key personnel. So there are photos of each of the band members with wall labels explaining who they are and their contribution, the largest number devoted to the extremely photogenic Mick Ronson in various rock star poses, but also shots of the bassist and drummer. (The curators speculate that some of these shots were meant to be used in the gatefold of the album sleeve, but the power of the final slash image swept them aside.) There’s photos of Bowie’s producer, Ken Scott, manager Tony Defries, two photos of Bowie’s wife, Angie.

So much for the music. More central to the story of the iconic cover is the extensive section devoted to the photographer of the iconic image, Brian Duffy. We learn about his career before the shoot, that he was one of a trio of young London photographers, what older photographer Norman Parkinson called ‘the Black Trinity’ – the others being David Bailey and Terence Donovan – with contemporary newspaper clippings to that effect.

We learn that Duffy, as he was universally known, was a leading fashion photographer, which is backed up by a wall of 27 of his very impressive fashion photos. These powerfully convey not only the style of the day as found in glossy mags such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan, Elle and the Sunday Times, but also indicate the fashion, rock and celebrity figures of the era, such as John Lennon, Michael Caine, politicians.

There’s a cornucopia of 1960s gossip: Duffy’s collaboration with Len Deighton on the 1969 movie ‘Oh What A Lovely War!’, technical influences such as the way graphic artist Philip Castle used an airbrushing technique on the poster for A Clockwork Orange, which Duffy was to ask him to repeat on the Aladdin cover, the way the cover of Hunky Dory was printed as black and white and then hand coloured by Terry Pastor, how the cover photo of Transformer was taken by ‘legendary’ rock photographer Mick Rock, was accidentally over-exposed but Reed liked it that way, and so on.

The shoot

But there’s more, lots more, as the exhibition zeroes in on the creation of the iconic image. We learn about Duffy’s studio manager Francis Newman, and designer Celia Philo. We are treated to photos of the interior and exterior of the Duffy’s studios at 151a King Henry’s Road, Swiss Cottage NW3. where the famous shoot took place.

We learn about the canny strategic thinking of Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries. They shared a vision of how the marketing of a pop performer could be transformed into high art – or at least a good impression of what pop music consumers thought of as art. One extremely practical and canny reason is that Defries knew that, the more they spent on the cover art, the more record label RCA would be forced to cough up to boost sales in order to recoup their investment. Hence he and Duffy agreed on using an extremely expensive seven-colour printing technique which was then only available in Switzerland.

In order to justify the process the image had to be simple and striking. It had to make maximum use of bold colour. Hence the development of a bright red (with some blue shading) against artificially pale bare skin.

This explains why nobody on the shoot saw the final version on the day because the negatives had to be sent away for commercial processing to achieve that hyper-real effect.

Then we’re on to the photo session itself. An immense amount of resources go to describing in great detail how the shoot was conducted and where the idea for the famous zigzag across Bowie’s face came from. Bowie was 26, had hit new peaks of fame, was deeply aware of the importance of image and media presentation. He wanted something striking and new but didn’t know what. The shoot was crammed in between dates on an international tour.

Duffy had never done a shoot for an album cover before. Both star and photographer were in new territory. So the most striking thing about the shoot this whole exhibition is making such a song and dance about is it was all over in an hour,

In fact, rather disappointingly, or maybe fittingly, right at the heart of the story is uncertainty/mystery. Turns out nobody really knows where the idea for the iconic red flash came from. There are several possible sources. Bowie shared his birthday with Elvis and the King had developed a motto, ‘Taking Care of Business – In A Flash’, and accompanying logo:

Elvis Presley’s Taking Care of Business logo

Rather more prosaically, Duffy’s studio had a National Rice cooker and their logo was a red flash. In 1970 the company had created the world’s largest neon sign depicting the logo on the side of an office building in Hong Kong. From some source, Duffy conjured up the idea of painting a flash across Bowie’s face. It took make-up artist Pierre Laroche to achieve a first draft, establishing a pale ground for his face and chest, and then the red flash.

Then the background was brightly lit in order to burn it out or render it invisible. Bowie was positioned against it wearing only his underpants and Duffy started snapping (as the curators carefully inform us) using his Hasselblad 500 EL camera, using a David Cecil ring flash unit on Ektachrome ASA 64 120-format film. Turn to the left, turn to the right, look straight ahead, two rolls, 24 images, all knocked off in well under an hour. Clean make-up, free to go.

The exhibition features a wall of contact prints of the ‘outtakes’ or unused images i.e. other almost identical shots of made-up Bowie which were rejected for various reasons. The decisive factor was the eyes. In all the rejected versions Bowie has his eyes open. Seeing the final version among all the rejected ones makes you realise that the one with his eyes shut is head and shoulders more powerful than the rest. Why?

Aladdin Sane contact sheet by Brian Duffy

The curators explain that using the image of Bowie with his eyes closed broke with all the conventions of portrait photography. Usually there’s some kind of eye contact with the viewer, the eyes establishing contact or rapport. Even if they’re looking away, we get a stronger sense of someone’s character if we can see their eyes. Thus choosing the eyes shut image immediately created an aloofness and mystery about Bowie, exactly the kind of androgynous, alien effect he and Defries were cultivating.

The second big artistic decision Duffy took was to add the blob of mercury on Bowie’s collarbone. It was added by graphic artist Philip Castle. The curators, like all modern art curators, obsessed with sex, describe this blob as ‘phalliform’ i.e. shaped like a penis*. Is it, though? If it’s the shape of anything, I’d pick up on Bowie’s obsession with aliens and interpret it as being a a ray gun. At the time, this kind of special graphic effect was relatively new, and so I think I interpreted it as a sort of science fiction detail, the kind of thing you might get on a Hawkwind or Emerson, Lake and Palmer album.

Anyway, it certainly emphasises the other-worldly, disembodied vibe of the whole image. For the curators, constricted by their framework of gender and sexual identity, the image emphasises Bowie’s gender fluidity. Not being so constrained, I see it as far more playing to Bowie’s alien from another world schtick.

Anyway, any interpretation is equally irrelevant to the actual music which I outlined above, grimy, gritty portraits of New York types, the Jean Genie or Lady Grinning Soul. You only have to listen to half the album to realise that the cover image is wildly misleading as to its contents.

Last word about the lettering. This is Rémy Peignot Cristal with a blue-white-red gradient. It was Duffy who changed the dot over the i of Aladdin into a small flame shape.

Why the fuss? Gender, obvz

Personally, I was never that particularly struck by this album cover because it came from an era overflowing with striking album cover art. At the time it seemed just one among many amazing, imaginative and striking images, so I don’t quite get the fuss.

What comes over with increasing insistence as the show progresses is that the arguable over-valuation of this one image is in part because it is also being considered and valued as an emblem of gender, queer and identity politics. Aha. This explains why the actual music – its composition, production and performance, its lyrics and its value – are more or less ignored by the exhibition. Nobody says whether the album is any good, probably because it isn’t really.

Instead, as you progress into the second half of the exhibition you realise the whole thing is being seen through the lens of contemporary concerns about gender and identity. Seen from this perspective you see its value in a completely different light, namely that Bowie’s poses in the early 1970s, as bisexual, asexual, strange and alien (the aspect of his persona which was foregrounded in Ziggy, Aladdin, Diamond Dogs, ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ and, maybe, ‘Low’) helped a lot of people who were struggling with their sexuality. It’s made pretty plain in the show’s press blurb:

With a focus on the photo session that gave us Bowie’s ‘lightning bolt’ portrait, this exhibition explores the continuous reshaping of Bowie’s image, and his part, along with Duffy’s, in a reimagining of sexual and gender identity.

It explains why in the last part of the show – once we’ve got past the 80 or so large photos of the band members, manager, wife, and all the contact images from the shoot itself, past the wall-sized blow-ups of Bowie in full glam pose, and past the room with the hi-fi system playing the album – we come to a space with sheets hanging from the ceiling bearing quotes from people who grew up in the 70s and 80s, who struggled with their sexuality and identity, and who found solace in Bowie’s confidence and unashamedness and bravura performance of alternative sexualities.

Personal testimony room in the ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ exhibition at the Southbank Centre. Installation photo by Pete Woodhead

In a world dominated by macho movie stars and football hooligans, Bowie offered an alternative, an imaginative way out, a refuge. He made a lot of troubled, embattled people realise they weren’t alone. Bowie showed that you could not only feel confused and uncertain and not fit into any of society’s categories, but become a star on your own terms, appear on the telly, pack out concert halls, and make a fortune.

As the curators out it, Bowie’s message for generations of outsiders, not just sexual outsiders but alienated, unhappy teenagers, was:

Ignore what society wants you to be. Be what you want to be – including how you look to the outside world.

This part of the show – and the first-person tributes from young people who Bowie, with his many-changing masks and fluid sexual identity, helped and reassured and inspired – was genuinely moving, but also a bit disorientating. It was weird walking from the world of trash glam throwaway pop hits into quite a more serious and troubled realm, a world of gender anxiety and liberation, freedom but worry, which seems to be with us more than ever.

I doubt if Bowie set out to be sex therapist to a generation but, this exhibition suggests, that was the impact he had, for a lot of people.

Nostalgia

For me, though, being neither troubled by my sexuality (no more than average, anyway) and no particular fan of Bowie’s early music, I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition because it is an absolute riot of nostalgia. The opening rooms set the scene for the Great Photoshoot by establishing the social and political and music context of 1973.

Probably younger visitors walked swiftly past the background panels describing Britain in the 1970s, the collage of newspaper headlines from the period, the oil crisis, the four day week, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath, the endless strikes, but I lingered long and lovingly, reliving the long-ago days of my boyhood.

Next to the politics was a similar size panel with a collage of contemporary music paper articles, giving an impressionistic sense of who was who in rock music, circa 1973, many of them, apparently about Elton John, whatever Paul McCartney and John Lennon were up to, a new young band named Queen, and so on.

Far more visually striking, though, was another collage establishing the context of classic rock album covers from the period. These included actual vintage copies of Sergeant Pepper, Abbey Road, Black Sabbath, King Crimson, Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin IV, Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye, Slider by T Rex, early Roxy Music, Music from Topographic Oceans by Yes and many more. This is what I meant by the Aladdin Sane cover image being just one among many. Surely the cover of Dark Side of The Moon is as, if not far more, iconic than Aladdin Sane, is far more widespread in the culture, you’re more likely to see it on t-shirts or spoofed in cultural references.

Album cover of ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ by Pink Floyd, released 1 March 1973, 6 weeks before Aladdin Sane (19 April 1973)

And indeed the exhibition confirms that the Music Week Sleeve Design Award 1973 gave first place to Dark Side (with Aladdin coming a very creditable second). Looking more broadly, a quick internet search for rock albums of 1973 turns up:

  1. Gram Parsons – GP (January 1, 1973)
  2. Little Feat – Dixie Chicken (January 25, 1973)
  3. John Martyn – Solid Air (February 1, 1973)
  4. Iggy & The Stooges – Raw Power (February 7, 1973)
  5. John Cale – Paris 1919 (March 1, 1973)
  6. Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon (March 1, 1973)
  7. King Crimson – Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (March 23, 1973)
  8. Roxy Music – For Your Pleasure (March 23, 1973)
  9. Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy (March 28, 1973)
  10. Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds of Fire (March 29, 1973)
  11. The Beatles – 1962-1966 (April 2, 1973)
  12.  The Beatles – 1967-1970 (April 2, 1973)
  13. David Bowie – Aladdin Sane (April 13, 1973)
  14. Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells (May 25, 1973)
  15. Steely Dan – Countdown to Ecstasy (July 1, 1973)
  16. Mott The Hoople – Mott (July 20, 1973)
  17. Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin – Love Devotion Surrender (July 20, 1973)
  18. New York Dolls – New York Dolls (July 27, 1973)
  19. Lynyrd Skynyrd – (Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd) (August 13, 1973)
  20. Faust – Faust IV (September 21, 1973)
  21. The Who – Quadrophenia (October 19, 1973)
  22. Paul McCartney & Wings – Band on the Run (December 5, 1973)

Of which you’d have thought the cover art for Dark Side, Raw Power, Houses of the Holy, Tubular Bells, the two Beatles compilation albums and Band on the Run are getting on for being as ‘iconic’ as Aladdin Sane.

And a quick Google also turns up Rolling Stone’s list of top ten rock album covers of all time which doesn’t even include Aladdin Sane.

Consideration of general album covers from the period then moves onto another section focusing on album covers specifically by or closely related to Bowie i.e. the covers of his previous albums, especially the androgynous or sexually ambivalent ones such as The Man Who Sold The World where he’s lying on a divan wearing a dress, or Hunky Dory; and the equally ambivalent, but in a different, far more butch way, cover art for Lou Reed’s Transformer, produced by Bowie, which he and Mick Ronson both played on, and released a few months before Aladdin, in November 1972.

Front and back cover of Transformer by Lou Reed

All this is great fun, to see the great album art and play in your mind all the great tracks from long ago. There’s also a guilty pleasure: off to one side of the ‘classics of rock’ album covers is a montage of ‘square’ albums from the period, to remind us older guys how dire most music and entertainment of the period was. So there are the covers of albums by The Black Watch, the TV show Opportunity Knocks, the musical Godspell, Break-Through, character-based albums by Alf Garnett, Benny Hill and Tony Hancock, by Ken Dodd and his Diddymen and, a bit more acceptably, by ‘pop sensation’ Gilbert O’Sullivan. Half a century ago.

Montage of retro 1970s album covers at the ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ exhibition at the Southbank Centre

*Camille Paglia

A little further on into the exhibition I discovered the curators’ use of the word ‘phalliform’ is lifted from one of the lengthy quotes from American feminist academic, social critic and renatagob, Camille Paglia which are printed on the walls.

I remember Paglia’s presence on the scene in 1980s TV and magazines, touring her leather-jacketed, spike-haired form of aggressive New York feminism, and churning out page after page of mashed-up, hot-wired Beat prose poetry. The exhibition relies very heavily on her for its central premise, namely that the Aladdin Sane photo:

with its red-and-blue lighting bolt across Bowie’s face, has become one of the most emblematic and influential art images of the past half century, reproduced and parodied in advertising, media and entertainment worldwide.

This is the premise of the entire exhibition. Here’s another slice of Paglia’s all-about-everything, showily eclectic, name-dropping prose:

It contains all of Romanticism, focused on the artist as mutilated victim of his own febrile imagination. Like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, whose body was scarred by lightning in his quest for the white whale, Bowie as Ziggy is a voyager who has defied ordinary human limits and paid the price.

‘…and paid the price’ – this is sentimental tripe, a facile, clichéd, pre-modern view of the artist as specially damned and cursed for his gift, the kind of thing that Byron invented in the 1810s, felt a little ridiculous when Baudelaire did it in the 1850s, lived on into the poets maudits (damned poets) of the late nineteenth century (Rimbaud bunking off to Africa, Verlaine crying into his absinthe); was a thorough-going cliché worthy of mockery a hundred years ago.

It’s superficial magazine writing, rewarded for being exaggerated, over-written, sentimental and stereotyped. But, like wearing a leather jacket and having a spiky haircut, it was enough to persuade many people that Paglia was cool and has something to say, back in the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s. If you like this kind of 6th form showing off, then it usefully underpins the exhibition; if you don’t (and you might have noticed that I don’t) then it undermines it.

Afterlife of an image

But back at the exhibition we haven’t finished yet. There’s more. This really is an exhibition for Aladdin Sane completists, because the exhibition goes on to chart further highlights of Bowie’s career after the album was released, and the long afterlife of the Aladdin image. For a start the curators aren’t backward in pointing out that Bowie himself had long links with the South Bank Centre, from his debut in 1969 in the recently opened Purcell Room, to his curation of Meltdown, their annual contemporary music festival, in 2002.

In the same year that the album came out, 1973, Radio 1 broadcast a series called ‘the Story of Pop’ in 26 episodes, and the cover of the first part of the associated part-work featured the Aladdin Sane image.

As to Duffy, he went on to work with Bowie on two further album covers, namely: Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters And Super Creeps (1980).

In 2002 Absolut Vodka ran an advertising campaign which used classic album covers, and one used the Aladdin Sane image.

In 2003 Kate Moss appeared on the front cover of Vogue sporting her version of the Aladdin Sane lightning to celebrate 30 years of its impact on culture and fashion (fourth photo down on this page).

After the 2008 financial crisis some parts of Britain issued their own local currency (news to me). Apparently a currency was issued local to just Brixton in south west London. Since Bowie was actually born in Brixton (at 40 Stansfield Road) the Aladdin Sane image featured on the Brixton £10 note.

In 2013 the Victoria and Albert Museum staged a huge exhibition about Bowie, titled David Bowie Is. it ‘set a new benchmark for immersive music exhibitions’ and was a sellout, going on tour round the UK and then abroad.

Bowie passed away on 10 January 2016. The following year Royal Mail issued a set of ten commemorative stamps for what would have been Bowie’s 70th birthday year. Six stamps featured album covers, including Aladdin Sane. The first day cover was franked with a copy of the lightning bolt logo.

All these occasions are lovingly recorded, with appropriate illustrations and detailed captions. Bowie has been turned into an institution. All images have to be licensed by ‘the David Bowie Archive’. To quote the Clash, ‘turning rebellion into money’.

Chris Duffy

Things fall into a place a bit more when you learn that the exhibition is curated by Duffy’s son, Chris Duffy, and accompanies a book of the same name. Ah. And that it was Chris who described his Dad’s work as ‘the Mona Lisa of Pop’. Ah. And that Chris Duffy has set up the Duffy Archive to preserve his father’s work and legacy. Ah.

I loved this exhibition. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a relaxing, easy-going wallow in 1970s rock and pop and social nostalgia, full of nuggets and gossip and factoids. It’s a broad walk down memory lane. Like everything, it’s capable of multiple meanings and interpretations. The curators go heavy on the gender liberation aspect, which I see and understand. I responded more fully to the nostalgia elements. But once I understood the lead involvement of Duffy’s son, I also came to see it as a rather touching act of filial respect.

Installation view of ‘Aladdin Sane 50 Years’ at the Southbank Centre showing Bowie posing in the flash make-up against a flash backdrop. Installation photo by Pete Woodhead. Bowie photo by Duffy © Duffy Archive & The David Bowie Archive ™

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Posted by Simon on May 3, 2023

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Real to Reel @ The Imperial War Museum

‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ (Dr Johnson)

This is a small but densely-packed, moving and very thought-provoking exhibition. It would only take a about a minute to walk straight through the half dozen or so small rooms, created using an interesting setting of metal warehouse shelving and wooden packing crates – maybe only 15 minutes or so to stroll past the display cases and the dozen or so screens giving the looped movie clips a cursory glance – but stopping to watch every clip and read all the display case labels took me an absorbing hour and 40 minutes, longer than I’ve spent at many art exhibitions, time enough to form all kinds of thoughts and impressions – about individual films, about war, about films as a medium for history.

The exhibition

The show opens with a welter of classic war movie posters – Lawrence of Arabia, Casablanca – and then about thirty display cases contain costumes and props, screenplays and set designs and storyboards, publicity stills, movie magazine articles and scale models of machines used in classic movies (a model of the Flying Fortress used in Memphis Belle, and of the U-boat used in the German movie Das Boot).

The exhibition mostly features American and British movies. Of the 40 or so films referenced, there are none from France, Spain, Italy or Russia, all of which have or had pretty thriving film industries. The only non-Anglo country represented is Germany, with the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of The Will, the TV-epic-turned movie Das Boot, and Downfall, the harrowing account of Hitler’s last days in the Berlin bunker.

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Film still of Jake Gyllenhaal in Jarhead (2005). A pair of the Santa hats worn in the movie are on display. © Universal City Studios LLLP, photographed by Francois Duhamel

Limitations

The exhibition’s sub-title is ‘A Century of War Movies’, which makes sense on one level, since ‘moving pictures’ were invented only a little over a century ago. But it is also taken to mean that the subject matter of the films themselves is limited to the last hundred years. Thus there are no movie representations of the countless wars from earlier in history – none of the Hollywood epics about ancient Rome (Cleopatra), the Greeks (The 300 Spartans, Troy), medieval wars (Henry V, Braveheart), the Spanish conquest of America (The Royal Hunt of The Sun), the English Civil Wars (Cromwell), the Seven Years War (The Last of The Mohicans), the Napoleonic Wars (Waterloo, The Duellists), or the countless wars of the British Empire (The Four Feathers, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Khartoum, Zulu, Breaker Morant) let alone the Americans’ very own Civil War (Birth of a Nation, The Red Badge of Courage, Gone With The Wind).

Even within its 20th century framework, there are surprising omissions – nothing about the Russian Revolution (Dr Zhivago, Reds), the Spanish Civil War (For Whom The Bell Tolls, Land and Freedom), the Korean War (Hell In Korea, Pork Chop Hill, M*A*S*H), Algeria (Battle for Algiers), the many wars of independence in European colonies, or the bloody post-independence conflicts in places like Biafra, Bangladesh, Angola, Mozambique, and so on.

No, only Anglo wars feature – the Great War, the Second World War, the Vietnam War and, in the last decade or so, Iraq-Afghanistan (the one possible exception, Yann Demange’s 2014 movie about Northern Ireland, ’71, is still firmly from the Anglosphere).

Colour storyboard artwork of the helicopter attack scene from Apocalypse Now © Courtesy of American Zoetrope

Colour storyboard artwork of the helicopter attack scene from Apocalypse Now (1979) © Courtesy of American Zoetrope

Clips

If you wait and watch every clip on every screen you will see excerpts from the following films (ones in bold are factual films):

Battle of the Somme (1916) Fascinating explanation of how the British government commission and distributed one of the first real depictions of warfare to bring home to the civilian population the reality of the trenches.

Triumph of the Will (1934) Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi masterpiece, which begs the fundamental question whether films always glamorise, no matter how evil their subject matter. (My answer is, Yes)

The Great Dictator (1940) Charlie Chaplin’s comic masterpiece, with production notes and stills, part of a larger section on the depiction of Hitler in films.

Dig for Victory (1941) Fascinating clip from an all-too-rare example of the British factual films produced during the war.

Hoch Der Lambeth Walk (1941) Short comedy setting Nazi goose-stepping troops to the popular Cockney tune.

Mrs Miniver (1942) Clip from the film’s moving patriotic climax.

Went The Day Well (1942) Scene where the vicar of a little English village stands up to the German invaders in Cavalcanti’s immensely moving British film, adapted from the Graham Greene short story.

Listen To Britain (1942) Fascinating depiction of Britain at war by the experimental documentary maker, Humphrey Jennings.

Donald Gets Drafted (1942) Comedy cartoon example of Disney supporting the war effort.

Victory Through Air Power (1943) An extended animated propaganda film from Disney – a display panel explains the surprising extent of the Disney studio’s involvement in war work.

The Cruel Sea (1953) A tearful Lieutenant Commander George Ericson (Jack Hawkins) remembers his decision to depth charge a German submarine, thus killing the British sailors in the sea above it.

The Colditz Story (1955) Pukka chaps plan escape, led by John Mills.

The Dam Busters (1955) Pukka chaps pull off a cunning stunt, led by Richard Todd.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) the finale where the dying Alec Guinness falls on the detonator which blows up the bridge.

Paths of Glory (1957) A display case gives plenty of background to this early work by Stanley Kubrick, a powerful anti-war film based on the true case of a mutiny in the French army during the Great War.

Ice Cold In Alex (1958) Pukka chaps escape through the desert, led by John Mills.

Carve Her Name With Pride (1958) A big display case gives a thorough background to the heroic feats of Violette Szabo, who volunteered to work for the SOE in occupied France, until caught, tortured and executed.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Fascinating display case on how the Lawrence cult was carefully created by an American journalist.

The Longest Day (1962) All-star cast depiction of D-Day.

Hell In The Pacific (1968) One of the new breed of unglamorous anti-war films, starring Lee Marvin.

Oh! What A Lovely War (1969) Poster and clips from the archetypal anti-war film, satirising the First World War through music hall songs.

Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973) Alec Guinness stars in what now seems a very dated, made-for-TV style.

Overlord (1975) an experimental black and white British film, which failed to get released in the States.

Das Boot (1981) The epic German TV series, edited down into a movie – a rare showing for a non-Anglo production. The show features one of the scale models of the German U-boat used in filming.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) Kubrick’s shiny Vietnam film, complete with predictable ‘shocking’ scenes.

Memphis Belle (1990) Happy ending for an all-star cast. The exhibition features one of the scale models of the Flying Fortress used in filming.

Schindler’s List (1993) Spielberg’s masterpiece. A display case shows the suit that Liam Neeson wears in the tear-jerking final scene.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) An extended sequence from the famous beach landing scene runs next to several display cases showing memorabilia from officers who landed that day, photos, maps, letters and uniforms, including from men who were killed in the landings.

Downfall (2005) Another rare non-Anglo production, with German actor Bruno Ganz giving a harrowing portrayal of the Fuhrer’s last days.

Atonement (2007) An extended display case includes production notes from the Dunkirk sequence of this love story gone wrong, and interview clips with the director and production designer which give insights into its creation.

The Hurt Locker (2008) The story of a US bomb disposal unit in Iraq. Clips and interview with the film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow.

Kajaki (2014) Clip and interviews with the film’s director, Paul Katis, and writer, Tom Williams.

’71 (2014) British troops in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Clip and interview with the director, Yann Demange.

Eye In the Sky (2016) Clip of a drone targeting ‘terrorists’ in Kenya, and an interview with the director, Gavin Hood.

The extensive interviews with writers and directors of the more recent films gives the last parts of the exhibition the feel of a bumper edition of ‘Film 2016’, and the suspicion that we are learning more and more about films we care less and less about.

Costumes

The show features a strong V&Aish, costume & design element. In various display cases we get to see:

  • the dress and shoes Marlene Dietrich used for her USO shows she gave to American troops during WW2
  • the RAF jacket worn by David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death
  • as mentioned, the tailored suit worn by Liam Neeson in Schindler’s List
  • the costume uniform worn by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan
  • the very robe given to Lawrence of Arabia by Emir Faisal
  • the costume uniform worn by the lead character in Warhorse
  • the cap and jacket worn by Clint Eastwood as Lieutenant Schaffer in Where Eagles Dare
  • the costume uniform worn by McAvoy in Atonement
  • the very helmet worn by the hero of Black Hawk Down
James McAvoy starring in Atonement - this uniform is on display © Universal City Studios LLLP, photographed by Alex Bailey

James McAvoy starring in Atonement (2007). This uniform is on display in the exhibition © Universal City Studios LLLP, photographed by Alex Bailey

Props

As well as the scale models of the U-boat used in Das Boot and the Flying Fortress used in Memphis Belle, there’s a cane chair from Rick’s Bar in Casablanca, the mandolin played by Nicholas Cage in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and a reconstructed version of the Triumph motorbike ridden by Steve McQueen in The Great Escape!

There is a host of other memorabilia, such as the clapperboard used in Full Metal Jacket, Alec Guinness’s diary when filming Hitler: The Last Ten Days, a storyboard for the classic dogfight sequence in Battle of Britain, design sketches for the set of Dr Strangelove, production notes and models for Hope and Glory, a script for The Third Man, as well as publicity stills and movie magazine articles for numerous other war films, and much more in the same vein.

There’s even a genuine Hollywood Oscar – in case anybody doesn’t know what they look like.

Movie buff stuff

There’s a section about the wartime career of British actor David Niven, who dropped acting to serve in the RAF (though he found time to appear in several training films). He’s here mainly because of his starring role in the wonderful Powell and Pressburger film, A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

The background information about Marlene Dietrich i.e. her flight from Germany just before the war and the wholehearted way she threw herself into Allied propaganda efforts is very enlightening. Similarly, there is no clip of him but there’s a display case devoted to the wartime career of Clark Gable, at the peak of his career when the war began, having just starred in Gone With The Wind (itself, of course, a war film and, apparently, much enjoyed by Chancellor Hitler).

The section devoted to Lawrence of Arabia explains how his legend was fostered by an American journalist and broadcaster, Lowell Thomas, who shot footage of Lawrence in the desert and then went on tour with a show which included dancing girls and exotic props before a showing of the main film itself, which Thomas narrated. The film made Lawrence a household name (and Thomas lots of money). The exhibition explains all this with stills and a programme from the show.

There’s a moving section about Violette Szabo, a young shop girl from Brixton who volunteered to join the Special Operations Executive, was trained and then dropped into occupied France, where she performed several missions before being captured by the Germans, tortured and executed at Ravensbrück concentration camp – a true-life story which inspired the film Carve Her Name with Pride (1958).

Violette Szabo, whose undercover work for the SOE in occupied France inspired the film Carve Her Name with Pride (1958). The show includes costume items worn by the star, Virginia McKenna, as well as historic documents about Szabo’s training, mission, then arrest and execution by the Nazis © IWM

Violette Szabo, whose undercover work for the SOE inspired the film Carve Her Name with Pride (1958). The show includes costume items worn by the star, Virginia McKenna, as well as historic documents about Szabo’s training and mission, including photos of her war hero husband and small daughter © IWM

Themes

The exhibition labels point out that war films provide an excellent vehicle for drama, for depictions of bravery, cowardice, love and passion etc.

Another label remarks that music provides an important element of war films, many war songs and themes going on to become patriotic and iconic tunes, or to be sung by soldiers in subsequent conflicts.

Another display comments that some war films were subject to censorship, citing Churchill’s exasperation at Powell and Pressburger’s classic Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) which portrayed the British officer class as ageing buffoons and which he tried – but failed – to get suppressed.

The exhibition mentions questions and ideas like these, but it doesn’t really address or explore them, not in any depth. They tend to be overshadowed by the sheer brainless pleasure of movie-watching which, I’m the first to admit, I am also prone to. A discussion of wartime censorship? Look, here’s a chair from Rick’s Bar! Exploring the role of music in shaping emotional responses? Who cares, here’s Steve McQueen’s motorbike!!

It’s a little like putting a few sentences about cholesterol and heart disease into a massive exhibition about ice cream with forty free samples. And that, for me, is the problem with film. Although I enjoyed seeing so many clips from so many beloved old war movies, and finding out a wealth of movie trivia and behind-the-scenes stories about their making, I couldn’t suppress a growing feeling that – no matter how realistic, harrowing or moving – there is something inescapably shallow about film as a medium. In films, thought is always trumped by emotional manipulation.

The weakness of film

Films are shallow entertainment

Films by their nature are intense but shallow. Customers pay to go into a darkened auditorium, where they stuff their faces with popcorn and Coca Cola, or to watch at home on a big Entertainment Centre while scoffing a Dominos pizza or takeaway curry. Films are crafted to be consumed in a deliberately infantilising and indulgent environment, designed to relax your rational mind and bring emotions to the surface. Who doesn’t cry when Humphrey Bogart makes his big speech at the end of Casablanca or when the survivors’ families get the letters that their loved ones have survived in In Which We Serve? But plenty of evil men have sent thousands to their deaths and then burst into tears at a Hollywood weepie. I always find it telling that both Hitler and Stalin were not just movie fans, they were massive movie fans, with their own private projection rooms in which they watched films again and again, and then shared their critical insights with their terrified associates. Being moved by a film doesn’t, ultimately, change anything.

Films are commercial products

All Hollywood films are designed to make money. It may employ many craftsmen, and plenty of people who want to think of themselves as ‘artists’, but cinema is a commercial business. Many of the movies featured here are shameless blockbusters – from The Battle of Britain to Saving Private Ryan (which made a stunning $481.8 million worldwide in 1998, the highest-grossing US film of the year). They are products designed and honed, whatever the actual content, to make a profit.

Films use stereotyped plots, characters and gestures

Film students are taught that their screenplays must have a structure in three acts. They have to have an inciting incident, a confrontation and resolution in a way that history, let alone real life, doesn’t.

As Virginia Woolf pointed out 100 years ago, movies don’t have much time to play with – generally between 1.5 and 3 hours – so they have to boil human behaviour, motivation and psychology down into stereotyped characters, plots and dialogue, all of which must be easy to grasp at one fleeting viewing. Each generation’s actors have used stylised gestures, attitudes and poses appropriate for their times. (Because I don’t like modern films, I particularly dislike the non-stop shouting which passes for acting with most modern American actors. One way to view the clips on show here is to note the way the amount of shouting and swearing steadily increases from the restrained 1940s through to the ‘fuck you asshole’ Noughties.)

Films are vehicles for films stars

Then there is the simple fact that movies are vehicles for movie stars. Right from the start a star-struck audience has gone ga-ga for gossip about Errol and Clark and Bette and Jean – nowadays, about Leonardo and Brad and Angelina and Scarlett. The studio ‘system’ of the 1930s and 40s was a machine to find profitable vehicles for bankable stars. Though the situation is more complex nowadays, it’s still about money, the money which buys the stars which drive the promotion and publicity machine. ‘Tom Hanks as you’ve never seen him before’, ‘Leonardo gives the performance of his career’, etc etc in thousands of variations.

The exhibition brings out the fashion in the 1960s and 1970s to cram as many stars into a movie as possible – creating an ‘all-star cast’ – to try and ensure profitability: think of The Great Escape (1963), Battle of the Bulge (1965), The Battle of Britain (1969), A Bridge Too Far (1977).

Cartoon characters

War films up to about 1970 featured generally clean-cut heroes – classic movie stars from the 40s and 50s like Clark Gable (b.1901), Gary Cooper (b.1901), John Wayne (b.1907) David Niven (b.1910) and Gregory Peck (b.1916), John Mills (b.1908), Jack Hawkins (b.1910) and Kenneth More (b.1914).

These were followed by the generation of movie stars I grew up watching in the 1960s – Richard Burton (b.1925), Clint Eastwood (b.1930), Steve McQueen (b.1930), Peter O’Toole (b.1932), Michael Caine (b.1933), David McCallum (b.1933).

So many times, watching these clips, you realise it’s the star, the lines they’re given, the scenes they’re placed in, the way they’re made up, lit and filmed, which give the viewer deep pleasure.

The 1960s was a transition decade in so many ways but watching the war movies you realise they had a distinctive style of Swinging ’60s heroism – 633 Squadron (1964) or The Battle of Britain (1969), The Heroes of Telemark (1965) or Where Eagles Dare (1968). The ‘characters’ in films like this are really animated versions of schoolboy comics, like the ‘Commando Action Comics’ which I devoured as a kid, target audience – 10-year-old boys.

The 1960s movies in particular are somehow not really serious. The Great Escape is more memorable for its comic than its ‘tragic’ moments – and although 50 Allied officers are murdered by the Nazis at the conclusion, the very end of the film features the imperishably supercool Steve McQueen returning to his solitary cell in undimmed triumph.

Cool, stylish, glamorous, ironic, smiling – unreal.

Since Private Ryan

A lot of war films from the 1970s and 80s are just too bad to be included (think Escape To Victory) so that this is the most under-represented period in the exhibition.

This is odd because the late ’70s saw a rash of major films about Vietnam which brought a new brutality and cynicism to the genre, led by The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979). A later wave of Vietnam films try but, in my opinion, fail to capture the shocking freshness of those 70s Vietnam movies – Stanley Kubrick’s over-studied Full Metal Jacket (1987), Oliver Stone’s over-schematic Platoon (1987) and unwieldy Born on the Fourth of July (1989), let alone the eccentric Good Morning Vietnam (1987). By this stage we all knew that war is hell and that US Marine training sergeants can be really mean.

Jacket and Platoon are referenced in the exhibition, but the general under-representation of war films from the 70s and 80s makes something else all the more obvious – which is the decisive change in tone and style which came over war films after the epoch-making Saving Private Ryan was released in 1998.

That film’s extended sequence of American troops landing on Omaha Beach (shown here on the only really big screen in the exhibition, so that you can sit and watch it with the sound on headphones) was a game changer. It pioneered new computer-generated special effects to give the viewer a much more visceral sense of the devastating impact of bullets and ordinance on the human body. All war films since Ryan have had to match its hyper-realism, so that cinema goers now see soldiers being eviscerated, dismembered, punctured and disintegrated in unprecedented detail.

Think of the scene in the cave in Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima (2006, not included here) which unflinchingly shows a group of Japanese soldiers committing harakiri with grenades, leaving them with half-removed faces and handless stumps of arms spouting arterial blood. Yuk.

This body-parts-in-your-face style is apparent in all the subsequent works in the genre. Similarly, the harrowing scene in Saving Private Ryan where the troop’s medic, Private Irwin Wade, takes a long time to bleed to death from a stomach wound which his comrades are unable to staunch, has also been replicated in the post-1998 depiction of war wounds, which are much more unflinchingly realistic.

Whether this anatomical hyper-realism which has been mandatory for all war films since Ryan has elevated any of them as ‘works of art’ is an open question, but it’s certainly the style of our time, the set of conventions – of gesture and sound and special effects – which we all take to be ‘true’ – at any rate, until the next stylistic revolution comes along…

Factual films

Seeing all these clips from classic movies is without doubt entertaining and the movie trivia in the display cases is often very interesting and informative. But it’s a shame that, in among all the Hollywood and Pinewood glamour, there isn’t more of an investigation of wartime factual films. There are some:

Nazi propaganda films

On the Nazi side there is a clip from Leni Riefenstahl’s classic propaganda piece, Triumph of the Will, a stunningly directed Modernist masterpiece celebrating the Nazis’ Nuremberg rally of 1934. The Nazis’ masterful use of propaganda films like this, and the steady output of Nazi-controlled film studios during the war, are a huge and fascinating topic, something I’d love to know more about – with relevant clips demonstrating Goebbels’ personal intervention in scripts and direction to bring out their Aryan values – but it was only referenced with this one clip and few panels about Triumph.

British propaganda films

Presumably the Imperial War Museum owns a significant archive of British newsreel and propaganda films from the war. In fact the show opens with several clips from the information film about the Battle of the Somme which was commissioned by the War Office in 1916, and shown widely in cinemas throughout Britain to publicise the reality of the trenches. I was hoping there’d be much more like this explaining how governments used the new medium to promote or justify their wars.

Staged scene from The Battle of the Somme film (1916) © IWM

Staged scene from The Battle of the Somme film (1916) © IWM

But, disappointingly, there were clips from only three other British factual war films in the exhibition. Obviously the tone, the subject matter and treatment, the look and duration of these films is completely different from the commercial products, and a world away from airbrushed Hollywood.

Maybe one comedy short was enough, but I’d like to have learned much more about the relationship between government-sponsored films and shorts and the output of commercial news organisations like Pathe. This is a vast subject only fleetingly touched on.

US propaganda films

A nearby case was devoted to the wartime output of the Disney studios. I’m not surprised that Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were dragooned into short comedy films about the silly side of becoming a soldier…

but it was fascinating to learn that the Disney studio also made some 170 factual information films during the war. And that it produced a feature-length animation, Victory Through Air Power, from which we see a powerful clip.

Either of these three – Nazi, British or American propaganda films – treated in depth, would make for a fascinating exhibition in their own right, and one well suited to the IMW’s archives and experts. Having them in the show gave us a sense of what we were missing, and tended to highlight the glossy shallowness of the commercial movies.

Conclusion

Shatteringly realistic, brutal and bloody though many are, commercial movies are not real and are of only limited use in understanding the past. The past wasn’t like this. All that films show us is what films from the past were like – subject to all the limitations of their era, to its visual styles and technical capacity, audience expectations and fashions. They offer insights into their times, not the times they depict and even then, severely hampered by commercial concerns.

Above all films are hamstrung by the fundamental requirement to give emotional closure: with a rousing comic ending (Kelly’s Heroes), an uplifting finale looking to a better future (like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator), or as a hard-bitten meditation on the futility of war (any war movie of the past 20 years).

The narrative limitations, the psychological stereotyping, the simplification of the complex, the lack of time or space to explain anything in depth, all of these make movies the complete opposite of books. A history book, of course, also has a structure and an ending – but it will also be packed with references, notes and bibliography which encourage further exploration and further understanding, which move you forward and deeper, and will present you with conflicting points of view and opinions which you have to exercise judgement about. And books require mental alertness and mental effort – precisely the opposite of films.

Movies shut down the mind. Books open the mind.

This is a very enjoyable, stimulating, and thought-provoking exhibition. These are the thoughts it provoked in me, but I’m sure every visitor will take away something different.

Related links

  • Real to Reel continues at the Imperial War Museum until 8 January 2017

More Imperial War Museum reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on December 23, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Great War, History, Second World War, War
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Posted by Simon on December 23, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/12/23/real-to-reel-the-imperial-war-museum/

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