Agatha Christie and Archaeology - British Museum Exhibition, 15-Mar-02
Tuesday, March 19th, 2002 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthCultural CompanionTM ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
swisstone persuaded me to this - how useful to know a Friend of the museum!
It gave a strong sense of 'a better time', when it took four days by train to get to Buda-Pest, but one travelled in luxury with a clutch of Louis Vuitton luggage. Can't help thinking that travel must have been rather more of an adventure for a single woman in those days, too.
I hadn't realised Christie was a prolific photographer - her colour photos of the Middle East in the 1950s feel like slices of another world - or that she made films of the various excavations on which she and husband Max Mallowan worked. The films are intriguing: very much of their time, with that slightly patronising, colonial view of 'the natives', and rather ponderously witty. She was keen on showing how the past intrudes into the present in ancient, still-thriving cities like Nineveh. I'm sure by now that timelessness has been swallowed up, not least by the tourist trade.
What bothered me was how much was missing. It felt as though the 'script' for the exhibition had been dramatically cut, like an overlong essay, and not re-edited to make sense. There wasn't a clear explanation of how she and Max Mallowan - then a young archaeologist on Leonard Woolley's Ur dig - met. Huge gaps in the interpersonal explanations, too. (Woolley was apparently happy to have Agatha Christie as a guest, but not at all happy to have her around once she'd married Max: Max resigned.) Barbara Parker appeared in many of the photographs, but not until the last plaque was it revealed that Max married her after Agatha's death.
It was like looking at old family photos, where you ask "who's that?" and everyone exchanges meaningful looks before they say, "Oh, nobody. Just some ... friend ... of your father's."
swisstone persuaded me to this - how useful to know a Friend of the museum! It gave a strong sense of 'a better time', when it took four days by train to get to Buda-Pest, but one travelled in luxury with a clutch of Louis Vuitton luggage. Can't help thinking that travel must have been rather more of an adventure for a single woman in those days, too.
I hadn't realised Christie was a prolific photographer - her colour photos of the Middle East in the 1950s feel like slices of another world - or that she made films of the various excavations on which she and husband Max Mallowan worked. The films are intriguing: very much of their time, with that slightly patronising, colonial view of 'the natives', and rather ponderously witty. She was keen on showing how the past intrudes into the present in ancient, still-thriving cities like Nineveh. I'm sure by now that timelessness has been swallowed up, not least by the tourist trade.
What bothered me was how much was missing. It felt as though the 'script' for the exhibition had been dramatically cut, like an overlong essay, and not re-edited to make sense. There wasn't a clear explanation of how she and Max Mallowan - then a young archaeologist on Leonard Woolley's Ur dig - met. Huge gaps in the interpersonal explanations, too. (Woolley was apparently happy to have Agatha Christie as a guest, but not at all happy to have her around once she'd married Max: Max resigned.) Barbara Parker appeared in many of the photographs, but not until the last plaque was it revealed that Max married her after Agatha's death.
It was like looking at old family photos, where you ask "who's that?" and everyone exchanges meaningful looks before they say, "Oh, nobody. Just some ... friend ... of your father's."
