Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

Monuments to World War's fallen now include dissenters

Ninety years after it ended, World War I still hangs over this small Flemish town, a focal point of slaughter during the Great War, as they called it when they thought it would be the last. Monuments to the war's fallen sprouted like mushrooms after the armistice, but it took nearly 85 years to erect a monument to a different group of dead: soldiers executed by their own side for refusing to continue the fight. About eight kilometers, or five miles, from Ypres, in a quiet courtyard

Never Forget. You’re Reminded.

THIS holiday season the multiplexes, the art houses and the glossy for-your-consideration ads in publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter will be overrun with Nazis. A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar-season tradition, but 2008 offers an abundance of peaked caps and riding breeches, lightning-bolt collar pins and swastika armbands, as an unusually large cadre of prominent actors assumes the burden of embodying the most profound and consequential evil of th

Libya enlists British architects for conflict museum

A Museum of Conflict in Libya? Not before time you might say. The London-based Metropolitan Workshop, a collective of architects founded in 2004 by Neil Deely, David Prichard and Tim Peake, all of whom used to work with Richard MacCormac, architect of the BBC's revamped Broadcasting House, has won a closed competition to design this very building close to the Hall of the People in Tripoli's west end. The proposed design takes the form of a sequence of origami-like, zigzag forms tha

St. Louis museum proud of its ancient mask purchase, but Egypt calls it a steal

More than half a century ago, a prominent Egyptian archaeologist unearthed a stunning ancient mummy mask at the Saqqara pyramids near Cairo - the golden image of a noblewoman's face. Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim deposited the 3,200-year-old relic in a warehouse at Saqqara, where he meticulously documented his discovery. Seven years later, in 1959, Egyptian records show it was still in the same storeroom. What happened to the burial mask of Ka Nefer Nefer in the four decades

Recreation of medieval tapestry unveiled at Stirling Castle

The tapestry entitled The Unicorn is Found was unveiled in Stirling Castle on Friday November 21st. It is the largest of a series of seven tapestries, which are being hand woven as part of project undertaken by Historic Scotland to recreate one of the world’s finest set of medieval tapestries. Inventories from 1539 have revealed that the Scottish Royal Collection in the sixteenth century included a set of tapestries entitled ‘the historie of the unicorne’. The tapestries are being c

History Channel covers Claus von Stauffenberg, the German who put a hit on Adolf Hitler

This compelling History Channel documentary on the abortive 1944 plot by dissident German military officers to kill Adolf Hitler may strike some viewersas the opening act for the forthcoming movie in which Tom Cruise plays plot leader Claus von Stauffenberg. It's a lot more than that. Built on extensive interviews with historians and surviving children of several plotters, "Valkyrie: The Plot to Kill Hitler" probes the real lives of the officers who gambled they cou

Go ghost-hunting with History TV -- Lee Harvey Oswald's ghost

How could someone as inconsequential as Lee Harvey Oswald have killed someone as consequential as John F. Kennedy? That thought-provoking question lies at the heart of Oswald's Ghost, documentary filmmaker Robert Stone's remarkable, painstakingly detailed account of that fateful day -- 45 years ago to this day -- when U.S. history changed forever and a new, more dangerous era was ushered in. "People are comforted by the idea, I think, that human affairs are not the

Is Historic Plymouth a New Movie-Making Mecca?

PLYMOUTH, Mass. — In this place sometimes known as America's hometown, schoolchildren and tourists flock to see Plymouth Rock, a replica of the Mayflower and the place where the Pilgrims and Mashpee Wampanoags Indians shared the first Thanksgiving meal. But the staid and historic image of Plymouth could soon be tempered by a decidedly modern attraction: a $488 million film and television studio, complete with 14 sound stages, a 10-acre back lot, a theater, a 300-room upscale hotel,

Doha museum stakes cultural claim

A few years ago, prices in London auction houses went through the roof - not for the classic modern or contemporary art, but for works from the Islamic world. Fabulous jewels, manuscripts and ceramics were fetching 10 times their estimate and more, and it soon emerged this was thanks to the al-Thani family, rulers of Qatar, the tiny gas-rich Gulf state. They had tempted the veteran architect I M Pei - the man behind the glass pyramid at the Louvre - to design one last s

Ethiopia demands stolen crown back

Ethiopia is demanding that Britain's museums return some of its most significant religious treasures. President Girma Wolde-Giorgis has personally intervened in a dispute to get the artefacts, including the Ethiopian royal crown, returned home 140 years after they were "looted" by marauding British troops. The President has written to the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Library and Cambridge University Library seeking the restitution of

A new exhibition of outfits worn by generations of Russian emperors in the UK

In the reign of Henry VIII, an insouciant English visitor to the court of Ivan the Terrible failed to doff his hat to the Tsar. Ivan had it nailed to his head. He also beat his pregnant daughter for being inappropriately dressed and caused her to miscarry. The etiquette of dress really mattered. It was just as important in the courts of the barbaric Slavs as in genteel England, with all our disembowellings, burnings and beheadings. For both the Tudors and the Tsars, wealth was powe

The spinning of Charles I: Van Dyck's idealistic portrayal of a reticent king

Like a combination of Mario Testino and Alastair Campbell, he was the chief projector of royal glamour, and chief political image maker, of Charles I. In the process Anthony van Dyck set the standard for the grand British regal portrait, and was emulated by later artists from Gainsborough to John Singer Sargent to the portraitists of the golden age of Hollywood. In February, Tate Britain promises to present the "sensation of the spring" when it brings togethe

War photography: Truth is the first casualty

Shakespeare hits the nail on the head on the subject of war when he has the jealous Othello bid his emotional farewell to “big wars that make ambition virtue!”. It is not ambition alone that gets turned into something else by war. Viewpoints become causes. Murderousness becomes strength of purpose. A pointless death becomes a national sacrifice. The most terrible thing about wars is not that they happen, but that in starting them, we alter the DNA of our values. I kept having dark

Dust covered painting in attic found to be a masterpiece

The 45 year old woman had been given the art work for her ninth birthday but had kept it in her loft for years and forgot about it until she put her house up for sale. An eagle-eyed auctioneer who was valuing her belongings spotted the oil painting and was stunned when he realised it was by 19th century artist John Everett Millais. As well as being worth thousands, the dusty painting has also shed light on a 150-year-old scandal of a love triangle involving Pre-Raphaeli

Why so many Holocaust films now, and for whose benefit?

This holiday season the multiplexes, the art houses and the glossy for-your-consideration ads in publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter will be overrun with Nazis. A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar season tradition, but 2008 offers an abundance of peaked caps and riding breeches, lightning-bolt collar pins and swastika armbands, as an unusually large cadre of prominent actors assumes the burden of embodying the most profound and consequential evil of th

Yugo hatchback car fades into history

One of the most enduring symbols of the old Yugoslavia will bow out this week when the Zastava car plant shuts down its assembly line. The maker of the Yugo car will stop production on Friday after sending the equally loved and hated symbol of Yugoslav socialism to the graveyard earlier this month alongside its East German cousin the Trabant. Tomislav Novicic spent nearly 40 years at the Serbian car producer assembling the Yugo, Zastava 101 and other models. Now he is p

Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. (The Met-Exhibit/Review)

Macroeconomically speaking, nations float or sink as one in a global age. Connectivity, we are learning, is the new history. But in fact this is nothing new. It has been true for some 4,000 years, and that is the subject of “Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.,” a big, prescient, concentration-taxing exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is the latest in the museum’s illustrious line of panoramic archaeological shows, and a direct sequel

Smithsonian Am History Museum: America’s Attic, Ready for a Second Act (Review/NYT)

When the National Museum of American History reopens on Friday after two years and $85 million of renovation, it may begin to shed its reputation as one of the more cramped and confounding corners of the Smithsonian Institution. The nickname “America’s Attic” may still come in handy now and then for describing the Smithsonian’s network of museums, with their squirreled-away treasures, but at the history museum a central five-story atrium now streams with daylight, promising other forms of illumi

Iranian businessman 'mutilated' priceless British Library books

A millionaire Iranian businessman faces jail for "mutilating" a number of priceless rare books, some almost 500 years old, to improve his own collection. Knightsbridge-based Farhad Hakimzadeh, chairman of the Iranian Heritage Foundation, cut out pages from manuscripts at the British Library and Oxford University's Bodleian Library. He removed the pages with a scalpel that he smuggled into the institutions' rare books reading rooms, hiding his actions from CCTV

Russia Returns Stained Glass Windows to Frankfurt Church

Russia has returned six medieval stained glass window panes looted by the Soviet Red Army in 1945 to a church in Frankfurt an der Oder, on the Polish border. The 700-year-old windows were thought vanished or destroyed until 2005, when they were discovered by a Russian art historian at a cloister outside Moscow, under the jurisdiction of the Pushkin Museum. The first 111 panels, which had been in the possession of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, were returned by