2 hours ago
4
In a very personal and thoughtful documentary, film-maker David Wilkinson revives the great question of the restitution of the Parthenon marbles, that longstanding Hellenic enthusiasm and flagship cultural cause for the educated British left from Lord Byron in the 1810s to Christopher Hitchens in the 1980s (although Hitchens’ vehement advocacy is not mentioned here). For more than 200 years, the British Museum in London has proudly displayed themarbles – and done very decent educational and curatorial work while gradually registering awareness that this is stolen property. Lord Elgin effectively plundered these artefacts and his supposed purchase of them could hardly be seen as anything more than a bribe, especially as the permission document or “firman” from the then controlling Ottoman empire is missing and exists only in highly suspect manuscript translations. But no British politician wants to get involved, suspecting that it means nothing but trouble. Keir Starmer is very unlikely to hand his rightwing opponents a fresh new weapon in the culture war.
Wilkinson entertainingly recounts Elgin’s arrogance and also puts before us the new context of museum restitution where institutions are restoring contested items, especially in Scotland, which leads the way in this movement. Campaigner and actor Brian Cox tells Wilkinson that if the marbles had found their way to Edinburgh and not London they would have gone back to Athens a long time ago. He could be right. Furthermore, there are new imaginative avenues of thinking: digital and virtual reality displays of the marbles and how they would have looked in the Acropolis could in theory be mounted at the British Museum.
The director is also generous and open-minded in allowing the pro-British argument an airing: the suggestion that museum culture is international and it is regressive and nativist to bring the marbles over to Greece. Yet here is my one small complaint about this film; or rather, a question that isn’t asked or answered here. Given that the aesthetic point is so important, that these marbles were part of an artistic whole within the Acropolis, isn’t it disconcerting that they would not be reaffixed but simply placed in another museum near the Acropolis (and one that incidentally charges €20 a ticket, as opposed to free admission at the British Museum)? Well, for all that, this is a thoughtful, and considered case for their homecoming.
