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Associated Press
09-07-2025
- General
- Associated Press
What to know about the Bayeux Tapestry, an 11th century masterpiece of historical record
LONDON (AP) — The Bayeux Tapestry, a 70-meter- (229 foot)-long medieval artwork that depicts the Norman conquest of England, will be displayed in Britain next year for the first time in 900 years. It will be exhibited at the British Museum in London from September 2026 to July 2027 as part of a bilateral celebration of the 1,000th anniversary of the birth of William the Conqueror, the French nobleman who led the invasion. The loan was announced during French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit to the UK this week. Millions of Britons and people from around the world are expected to view this slice of English history — which is normally housed in France at a dedicated museum in Bayeux, in Normandy — while it is on loan to the British Museum. The Bayeux Tapestry Museum will close later this year until 2027 for the construction of new facilities. Here is a brief history of the Bayeux Tapestry, which shines a light on the long and sometimes bloody links between Britain and France. Art, propaganda and history Stitched in wool thread on linen cloth, the tapestry tells the story of the events surrounding the Norman invasion of England. The story begins in 1064 when Edward the Confessor, the king of England, sends his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson to offer his cousin William, the Duke of Normandy, the succession to the English throne. When Edward died, however, Harold has himself crowned king and William set sail for England to reclaim the throne. The tapestry ends with the epic Battle of Hastings on Oct. 14, 1066, where William's Normans rout the Anglo-Saxon forces. Historians suggest the events leading to the invasion were a bit messier. But the artwork in thread tells the story of the victor. There are banquets, fleets of Viking-style ships, and battles between armored knights wielding swords and spears. The bodies of the dead and wounded are strewn about the battlefield, and one scene depicts Harold pulling an arrow from his eye. The story is told in 58 scenes that include 626 characters and 202 horses. While the tapestry is a work of art, it is also considered an accurate account of 11th century life, offering clues about architecture, armor and ships. Kept in a box for 700 years Historian's believe the tapestry was commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William's half-brother, shortly after the events it depicts. Exactly who crafted it is unknown, though evidence suggests the artisans were Anglo-Saxons, according to the Bayeux Tapestry Museum. For the first 700 years of its existence, the tapestry was a little known church artifact that was hung in Bayeux Cathedral once a year and stored in a wooden chest at other times. According to local lore, it was almost cut up in 1792 during the French Revolution, but was saved by a local lawyer. The first public displays of the tapestry took place at Bayeux city hall in 1812. Studied by the Nazis At the start of World War II the tapestry was placed in an underground shelter in Bayeux for safekeeping. But by 1941 it had attracted the attention of the Nazi's pseudoscientific ancestral heritage unit, which removed it for study. By the end of the war, the tapestry was at the Louvre in Paris. After the Allied invasion of Normandy in June of 1944, The New Yorker magazine played off the parallel between those events and the Norman invasion of England nine centuries earlier. The cover of the magazine's July 15, 1944, edition showed Britain's King George VI, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a cartoon version of the tapestry alongside Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, and British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. British authorities highlighted the connection when they built a memorial in Bayeux to honor U.K. and Commonwealth soldiers who died in Normandy. 'We, once conquered by William, have now set free the Conqueror's native land,' reads the inscription on the memorial. 'It reeks of male hormones!' For those who can't wait until next year, the Reading Museum, 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of London, has a full-size replica of the Bayeux Tapestry. The 'faithful replica' was created in 1885 by 35 skilled female embroiders, according to the museum's website, though one thing you won't see in the Reading Museum's tapestry is genitalia. The Victorian artisans who created the replica worked off glass photographic plates that obscured the spicy details that were included in the original. 'Although a faithful copy, it's not quite exactly the same,″ said Brendan Carr, the community engagement curator at the Reading Museum. 'There are differences that you can spot. So if any visitors to the museum might be shocked by, you know, body parts, then they're protected if they come to Reading.' Such niceties didn't stop an Oxford University historian from counting 93 penises, 88 belonging to horses and five to men, in the original. But earlier this year Dr. Chris Monk, a consultant on medieval history, argued that that an appendage previously thought to be a scabbard was actually another example of male genitalia, pushing the number to 94. Male genitals are a 'mode of emphasis' that articulate machismo, Monk wrote in a blog post. 'A more testosterone-soaked scene is hard to find,' he wrote. 'Well, truthfully, there are plenty of scenes of political aggression and posturing in the Bayeux Tapestry: it reeks of male hormones!'
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Marcel Ophuls, filmmaker who forced France to face wartime past, dies aged 97
Marcel Ophuls, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker whose landmark 1969 documentary The Sorrow And The Pity shattered the comforting myth that most of France had resisted the Nazis during the Second World War, has died aged 97. The German-born filmmaker, who was the son of legendary filmmaker Max Ophuls, died on Saturday at his home in southwest France of natural causes, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert told The Hollywood Reporter. Though Ophuls would later win an Oscar for Hotel Terminus, (1988), his searing portrait of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, it was The Sorrow And The Pity that marked a turning point, not only in his career, but in the way France confronted its past. Deemed too provocative, too divisive, it was banned from French television for more than a decade. French broadcast executives said it 'destroyed the myths the French still need'. It would not air nationally until 1981. Simone Veil, Holocaust survivor and moral conscience of postwar France, refused to support it. But for a younger generation in a country still recovering physically and psychologically from the aftermath of the atrocities, the movie was a revelation, an unflinching historical reckoning that challenged both national memory and national identity. The myth it punctured had been carefully constructed by Charles de Gaulle, the wartime general who led Free French forces from exile and later became president. In the aftermath of France's liberation in 1944, de Gaulle promoted a version of events in which the French had resisted Nazi occupation as one people, united in dignity and defiance. Collaboration was portrayed as the work of a few traitors. The French Republic, he insisted, had never ceased to exist. The Sorrow And The Pity, which was nominated for the 1972 Oscar for Best Documentary, told a different story. Filmed in stark black and white and stretching over four and a half hours, the documentary turned its lens on Clermont-Ferrand, a provincial town at the heart of France. Through long, unvarnished interviews with farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, collaborators, members of the French Resistance, even the town's former Nazi commander, Ophuls laid bare the moral ambiguities of life under occupation. There was no narrator, no music, no guiding hand to shape the audience's emotions. Just people, speaking plainly, awkwardly, sometimes defensively. They remembered, justified and hesitated. And in those silences and contradictions, the film delivered its most devastating message: that France's wartime story was not one of widespread resistance, but of ordinary compromise, driven by fear, self-preservation, opportunism and, at times, quiet complicity. The film revealed how French police had aided in the deportation of Jews. How neighbours stayed silent. How teachers claimed not to recall missing colleagues. How many had simply got by. Resistance, The Sorrow And The Pity seemed to say, was the exception not the rule. It was, in effect, the cinematic undoing of de Gaulle's patriotic myth, that France had resisted as one, and that collaboration was the betrayal of a few. Ophuls showed instead a nation morally divided and unready to confront its own reflection. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Ophuls bristled at the charge that he had made the film to accuse. 'It doesn't attempt to prosecute the French,' he said. 'Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?' Born in Frankfurt on November 1, 1927, Marcel Ophuls was the son of legendary German-Jewish filmmaker Max Ophuls, director of La Ronde, Letter From An Unknown Woman, and Lola Montes. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the family fled Germany for France. In 1940, as Nazi troops approached Paris, they fled again, across the Pyrenees into Spain, and on to the United States. Marcel became an American citizen and later served as a US army GI in occupied Japan. But it was his father's towering legacy that shaped his early path. 'I was born under the shadow of a genius,' Ophuls said in 2004. 'I don't have an inferiority complex, I am inferior.' He returned to France in the 1950s hoping to direct fiction, like his father. But after several poorly received features, including Banana Peel (1963), an Ernst Lubitsch-style caper starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, his path shifted. 'I didn't choose to make documentaries,' he told The Guardian. 'There was no vocation. Each one was an assignment.' That reluctant shift changed cinema. After The Sorrow And The Pity, Ophuls followed with The Memory Of Justice (1976), a sweeping meditation on war crimes that examined Nuremberg but also drew uncomfortable parallels with atrocities in Algeria and Vietnam. In Hotel Terminus (1988), he spent five years tracking the life of Klaus Barbie, the so-called 'Butcher of Lyon', exposing not just his Nazi crimes but the role western governments played in protecting him after the war. The film won him his Academy Award for Best Documentary but, overwhelmed by its darkness, French media reported that he attempted suicide during production. In The Troubles We've Seen (1994), he turned his camera on journalists covering the war in Bosnia, and on the media's uneasy relationship with suffering and spectacle. Despite living in France for most of his life, he often felt like an outsider. 'Most of them still think of me as a German Jew,' he said in 2004, 'an obsessive German Jew who wants to bash France.' He was a man of contradictions: a Jewish exile married to a German woman who had once belonged to the Hitler Youth; a French citizen never fully embraced; a filmmaker who adored Hollywood, but changed European cinema by telling truths others would not. He is survived by his wife, Regine, their three daughters and three grandchildren.
