“unsewing the bayeux tapestry: science/fictions of what lies behind the screens” richard burt...

“Unsewing the Bayeux Tapestry: Science/Fictions of

What Lies Behind the Screens”

Richard Burt Burt, Richard

• Richard Burt is Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. His third and most recent book, Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media, is now in production and will be published August 19 by Palgrave Macmillan. Burt held a Fulbright Scholarship in Berlin from 1995 to 1996 where he worked on the musealization of modern German history.

The Flat Screen

• In 2009, television will be broadcast digitally (in high definition). The latest flat screen monitors allow to the viewer to toggle on a remote between the Internet and Blu-ray DVD (high definition) discs, and PS3 videogames. The default screen looks like this:

This flat screen is large enough to show the Bayeux Tapestry in

in full scale size.

Picture in Picture (PiP) “making of” documentary / audiovisual

commentary in HD DVD

(Imagine the BT online with a pop up menu option to see the

reverse side of the panel.)

Digital media as the master media / code of audiovisual reproduction

• What happens to word and image?• Interactive exhibits (in movie theaters,

museums, classrooms, and related websites) • Post-analog film: Cinetextuality• How do debates over art and film restoration and

preservation play out?• How do we historicize works of art / the archive? • How do we read gender differences in relation to

the (re)making of new and old media?

The Other Side of the

Bayeux Tapestry

Wanting to See, Wanting Not to See

Theological, Political, and Erotic Revelation

Reading / Viewing from Left to Right

What “lies” beneath—pun on “lies” the unseen as betrayal, repressed, possibly a lie.

Detail of reverse side of the BT at in the margins of David

Wilson’s The Bayeux Tapestry

Image placed the end and noted on the copyright page

The Reverse Side as the Perverse Off-Side

• The priapic horse in the center of the enlarged image (pun intended).

• The reverse side as a detail, fragment of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Toggling from front to back side in Martin Foys’s CD-ROM

edition• The reverse image as fragment of a

fragment. Size matters.

• The reverse side as an image at the edge.

The “Making of” Bayeux Tapestry in Film

• Film adaptations and historical fiction films show both sides of the Tapestry as it is made.

• Film and television documentaries show only the front side.

• Women are always embroiders and weavers in these films (and others set in the Middle Ages.)

Three film adaptations and historical fiction films with

making of scenes.

El Cid

• dir. Anthony Mann, 1961

Hamlet

• dir. Franco Zeffirelli, 1990

Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves

• dir. Kevin Reynolds, 1991

Documentaries using the Bayeux Tapestry

A History of Britain

• Historian Simon Schama as narrator

William the Conqueror

• History Channel, 2005

• Marine Dale Dyer the narrator

Guillame le Conquerant

• dir. Jean Michel Barjol, 1986

• Historienne Lucienne Guillot the narrator

The History Makers: William the Conqueror

dir. Jeremy Freeston, 1996

Earlier panoramic installation at the Centre Guillame le

Conquerant

• Family on the phone in contact with the Bayeux Tapestry. Dad is off the hook. Calling Dr. Freud.

1. There are two kinds of reversibility at play here, in film and in scholarship: one involves the spatialization of vision—we turn from seeing behind and the front to what’s behind, and the other involves the temporalization of vision—we move backwards from the finished BT to its making.

2. The fusion or confusion of looking at the back with looking back at the BT delivers a genetic narrative that allows for a fantasy of total visibility, total access to the empirical work of art. But this fantasy of vision involves a blindness to the history of the BT’s restoration.

3. Restored elements of the BT are mentioned only in passing or bear only in debates over micro-details like the “arrow” in Harold’s eye. Scholarship focuses on when, where, and who made the BT, but has ignored who remade it, when, and why in the middle of the nineteenth century and why it was “cleaned” in 1981-82.

The Big Screens

• Beyond the Bayeux Tapestry

• Similar desire to see the reverse side shows up in film and in the use of science in art history and museum exhibitions.

• New flat screens have a kind of 3D effect explored in immersive websites and Blu-ray DVDs.

Text becomes a 3D space, or special effect, with reversible sides in films about codes.

National Treasure

• Dir. John Turtletraub, 2003

The Declaration of Independence in the end title sequence as 3D palimpsest.

The Declaration of Independence viewed from the side.

The Declaration of Independence viewed from the behind.

The Declaration of Independence as Declaration of Disneydependence.

Zodiac

• Dir. David Fincher, 2006

• At the end of a montage sequence involving letters from the Zodiac killer, a large coded letter is superimposed and seen from both sides as the film’s protagonists appear to walk through it.

Superimposed text in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper office

Richard Burt, Part Deux

I’m skipping The Da Vinci Code

3D effect in panoramic websites

• Example of Tom Tykwer’s Perfume official website navigable with 360 panorama

Scientific Art History:Same Desire to See What Lies Behind or Beneath the Surface

• Infrared reflectography• Dendochronography• Radiocarbon dating• Macrography• Digital infraredmoacrography• X-ray• Two recent Renaissance art exhibitions built in a

collaboration of technical study using with criticism.

Rubens and Brueghel: A Working Friendship

Getty Museum July 5-September 24, 2006

• Captures from the website.

• The exhibition installation devoted a room to the technical study of the paintings.