(CHEERING)
Always wanted to stand on the red carpet and now I'm here.
But what's brought me and hundreds of others here
to the premiére of a Hollywood blockbuster in London's Leicester Square?
The answer is the extraordinary power of feature film to tell a story.
Stories that terrify us,
Stories that enchant us,
And stories that inspire us,
But the power of visual storytelling is not a modern phenomenon,
Feature films today are using techniques developed way back in the distant past,
For thousands of years, artists grappled with ways to bring their stories alive,
to engage their audience,
This is the story of how our ancient ancestors made the discoveries
that have given film such a hold over our imaginations.
Every year, seven billion people throughout the world pay money to do this,
Sit down in front of a large screen and watch pictures tell a story,
Ma! 0h, Ma!
You'll be all right. You'll be all right!
Ma!
Ma-a-a-a!
When we watch a really good film, something extraordinary happens,
We become so involved with what's going on
we feel as though we're living in the story ourselves,
Visual storytelling has a unique power over our imaginations,
It captivates us,
Home, pig.
This is George Miller, the man responsible for a series of box office hits
including ''Babe'',
It's the Job of the storyteller to engage an audience as much as you can.
You bring to bear all your techniques and knowledge of film-making
in order to enchant the audience,
to have them suspend their disbelief, to actually believe what's happening before them,
But storytelling was not invented with film, which is only 100 years old,
and television, which is only half a century,
It goes right back to the beginning of human engagement, really,
So, how did film get its ability to transport us to other worlds?
Where did the ingredients come from that give it such a compelling hold over us?
To find out, we need to trace the art of visual storytelling right back to its ancient origins,
and what better place to start than at the very dawn of civilisation?
This is Mesopotamia,
in the desert sands of the Middle East,
So many of the things we take for granted today originated here,
Farming, mathematics, writing,
they all started between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates,
But the reason we've come to Mesopotamia
is because it was here in the 19th century
that a British archaeologist made a revelatory discovery,
His name was Austin Henry Layard,
Layard and his team were excavating ancient sites throughout Mesopotamia
and found many treasures,
But far and away the most intriguing of these
was a cache of 25,000 broken clay tablets covered with unreadable markings,
The tablets were brought back to London and painstakingly reassembled,
The markings were found to be the world's first written language,
cuneiform,
Scholars originally assumed that the tablets were just court records or accounts,
but then, after years of study, their code was finally cracked,
Some of these tablets actually told a story,
It was the first story ever written,
It was a story that began and ended in the first city ever built,
a city in what is now southern Iraq, called Uruk,
Built 6,000 years ago, Uruk was for many centuries the world's largest city,
with walls that ran for more than five miles and a population of almost half a million,
Today, sadly, war and the encroaching desert
have all but destroyed this wonder of the ancient world,
But what has survived is the story that this city inspired,
The city of Uruk lives on through the fame of the legendary king who built its walls.
His name was Gilgamesh and he was the world's first great hero.
The story of Gilgamesh tells of one man's search for eternal life,
In a series of daring adventures, Gilgamesh defeats monsters and challenges the gods
before returning home to his beloved Uruk,
So compelling was this story of an action hero that it was passed down for generations
and 4,000 years after it was first told it's still popular today here in the Middle East,
I found a copy of this ancient bestseller in a bookshop in Kuwait City,
The story of Gilgamesh had exploited the universal human desire for a hero,
(MUSIC, THEME T0 ''STAR WARS'')
(MILLER) Most great stories have a hero,
The Star Wars trilogy had a number of heroic characters,
but Luke Skywalker in the first part of it,
But I don't think a person can declare themselves to be the hero.
A hero is defined by the actions that they undergo.
A hero is defined by the events that happen to them and, indeed, the response,
the spiritual and moral response to those events.
(SPIVEY) For Gilgamesh there was one event above all that symbolised his heroism,
when he single-handedly attacked and killed a pride of lions,
The story of Gilgamesh as a heroic figure spread across the Middle East,
Kings and princes from Persia to ancient Egypt, they were all eager to exploit his fame,
0ne king in particular sought to promote himself by capitalising on the hero's power and glamour.
This was Ashurbanipal, the King of Assyria, what's now northern Iraq.
We know that Ashurbanipal liked the story of Gilgamesh,
he had several copies of it in his library,
but Ashurbanipal had one big problem.
In 645 B,C, hardly anyone could read a script like cuneiform,
so how could Ashurbanipal use the heroic qualities of Gilgamesh
to promote himself in the minds of his people?
Ashurbanipal's solution was ground-breaking.
He departed from a story told in words
and devised instead a story told through pictures,
with himself, not Gilgamesh, playing the lead role.
In a series of carved images,
Ashurbanipal shows himself, like Gilgamesh before him, as a supreme lion-slayer,
The frieze is made up of four images,
In the first, a servant lifts the gate on a cage, releasing a lion,
The lion springs out and runs towards Ashurbanipal,
As it leaps into mid-air, it's struck by an arrow,
In a final image, Ashurbanipal finishes off the lion with a sword stabbed through its body,
The sculptors want us to share the thrill of the action,
They've created a series of freeze-frames capturing the excitement of the moment,
and dominating the frieze is its hero, Ashurbanipal,
0riginally, these magnificent friezes would have been painted in bright vivid colours,
Ashurbanipal had them prominently displayed
on the walls of the throne room of his great palace at Nineveh,
Although the palace no longer exists,
using the archaeological remains, we've reconstructed what it might once have looked like,
Ashurbanipal's story could be appreciated not just by those select few who could read,
but by everyone who could see,
But in itself that wasn't enough.
Imagine watching a film in which the hero only appears in one scene.
So what we need to find next is a story that develops,
a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
In short, a gripping yarn.
Ashurbanipal himself seems to have understood this,
because it was he who created what's probably the world's first really complete visual story,
Ashurbanipal had a new series of reliefs made for his palace,
They told the story of his war with his enemies the Elamites,
It's like a storyboard for an epic blockbuster,,,
,,with a cast of thousands,
The story begins with the Elamites, identified by their headbands, being driven from their camp
by King Ashurbanipal's troops,
During a mighty battle, the Battle of Til Tuba, the Elamites are forced to retreat into the river,
Soon it's running red with their blood,
According to Ashurbanipal, the river was choked with corpses for three long days,
These graphic images are as explicit as any you would see in a contemporary feature film,
A bird is tearing out a soldier's eye,
And here one of Ashurbanipal's henchmen is holding the hair of the Elamite king Teumman,
severing his head from his body,
The head is carried as a trophy through the enemy lines,
After the battle, King Ashurbanipal and his queen celebrate their victory in an idyllic garden scene
surrounded by their courtiers,
But this story has a final gory twist,
Fastened to one of the trees is the bloody head of Teumman,
It's a grim reminder of the fate that would befall others
who challenged the mighty Ashurpanipal's rule,
The Battle of Til Tuba was shown
using visual storytelling techniques that had never been seen before.
What we've got here is a complex tale unfolding over many scenes.
But not only does it have a beginning, middle and end,
it's got these subplots which make the whole story more intriguing.
As the battle with the Elamites rages, something else is happening,
A group of prisoners are being forced to grind down the bones of their ancestors
to make bread,
Imagine what it would have been like
for visitors to see this story on the wall of the great hall in Nineveh,
You wouldn't have had to speak the Assyrian language to get the point,
The Assyrians laid the foundations of visual storytelling.
They established two key elements, a hero and a plot,
but, as any movie mogul today would be able to tell us,
there's something critical missing here.
Look again at these reliefs.
While there's lots of blood and violence,
here Teumman is having his head lopped off,
no one seems to mind,
There's no rage,
no tears, no emotion,
and as a result it's hard to be involved in the story, let alone to care what happens next,
We Just don't feel engaged with these characters,
let alone suspend our disbelief and enter into their world in our imaginations.
So, when and how did ancient artists make us care?
To find our answer, we have to leave the Middle East,
We need to come to the northern shores of the Mediterranean,,,
..because here there was another ancient civilisation
with a rich tradition of vivid, evocative storytelling.
It's a civilisation that's left us
with some of the most exciting and visually arresting stories that have ever been told.
Who else but the Greeks?
If any civilisation could find a way to create characters people could believe in and care about,
then the Greeks could,
The Greeks were obsessed with their epic stories, their myths,
and there was one myth above all that the Greeks liked to visualise, Homer's tale of 0dysseus,
Here on the coastline of Sperlonga in southern Italy,
Greek artists converted this enormous cave into a dining room
where guests were lavishly fed and entertained,
Today the cave is empty
but in the first century B,C, diners would have been surrounded by marble sculptures
depicting key scenes from the story of 0dysseus,
They'd be seen at their best not during the day but at night-time
by the light of flickering torches.
The statues are now in a museum,
but with the aid of computer graphics we can reunite them with their original location
in the exact positions they were placed in over 2,000 years ago,
This monumental sculpture
illustrates an incident in the dramatic story of 0dysseus's encounter with the giant Cyclops,
But how do these sculptures advance visual storytelling?
Well, first you need to know the story,
The Cyclops, a giant one-eyed cannibal, traps 0dysseus and his shipmates in a cave,
Although they fear for their lives, they have an escape plan,
0dysseus cunningly offers the monster some wine.
It's a new drink for the Cyclops. He likes it and asks for some more.
Then he asks 0dysseus what his name is.
''They call me Nobody,'' replies 0dysseus.
''Well, Nobody,'' grunts the Cyclops,
''I shall eat you last of all.
''That shall be your reward.''
The Cyclops soon becomes drowsy with drink and slumps to the floor of the cave,
0dysseus and his companions seize their chance,
They drive a stake into the single eye of the giant,
What the sculptors have chosen to show us
is the moment of maximum tension just before the climax,
But why?
Because it's at this moment the characters' emotions are at their most revealing,
We know what they're thinking
and feeling,
By depicting realistic emotions
Greek artists had found a way to bring their stories alive,
This is no longer a story that Just tells you what happens,
but how it happened.
It's got psychological credibility. It wants to show you how people are feeling.
As such, it marks a crucial development in the history of visual storytelling
and, of course, if you care about what's happening to the characters
you'll want to know what happens next.
The blind Cyclops staggers around the cave shrieking with pain
and shouting for help from the other giants,
They want to know who's attacking him,
His reply is, ''Nobody!
''Nobody's attacking me!''
And this allows our quick-witted hero to escape,
Bringing characters alive so that we can relate to them and identify with their predicaments
is a crucial element in any visual story,
even if the character involved is a pig,
Come, pig.
(MILLER) In order to tell a story,
obviously you need a character or characters with whom the audience can engage.
It's one of the reasons why actors who have a degree of charisma are so important to a story.
In the case of a talking-animal picture,
you need a way of taking your central characters and humanising them to some degree
so that the audience can engage even more,
- (PIG GRUNTS) - (D0G BARKS)
With the lion-killing exploits of King Ashurbanipal
artists discovered a strong heroic lead,
With his battle scenes they invented a gripping story-line,
and in the cave of Sperlonga
the Greeks showed how to create characters an audience could begin to identify with emotionally,
But so far, none of them had combined all these ingredients into a single visual narrative.
Well, not, that is, until about a hundred years after the birth of Christ
when the Romans constructed the world's most ambitious storytelling monument.
Welcome to TraJan's Column in the heart of Rome.
It's a towering achievement and, quite literally, the highest form of storytelling that there is.
At 35 metres high, the marble column stood above all other buildings in ancient Rome,
The Column was built by the Emperor Trajan,
It commemorates his victory in the war against his enemies the Dacians
in what is today modern Romania,
The spoils of these wars paid not just for the Column
but also for the surrounding complex of markets, libraries, squares
and public monuments of Trajan's Forum,
Alas, today the Forum is little more than rubble,
TraJan's Column alone has survived
because for almost 2,000 years
it's held a fascination for some of the most powerful men in history.
Napoléon Bonaparte admired the Column so much
he wanted it dismantled and brought to Paris,
He was only dissuaded when told it wouldn't survive the journey,
The Column was also special to the Italian dictator Mussolini,
When the Second World War broke out, he had it protected by bombproof cladding,
So, what was it about the Column that so impressed Roman citizens, foreign emperors,
fascist dictators and modern tourists alike?
Well, it was here that all the visual storytelling discoveries of the ancient world came together.
0ver a continuous 200-metre-long frieze, we've got a complex tale,
It spirals around the monument 23 times
and tells the detailed story of Trajan's campaign against the Dacians,
It's been called a movie epic frozen in stone,
In Emperor Trajan we have an undisputed hero,
He appears as a powerful and dignified leader in almost every scene,
0ver the monument as a whole, he appears 59 times,
We've also got our villain, the Dacian leader Decebalus,
crafty, scheming, convincingly evil,
And we've got an epic supporting cast of two and a half thousand extras,
whose emotions and feelings are made individually apparent,
But that's Just the start.
As a masterpiece of visual storytelling, TraJan's Column has so much more.
It was even anticipating certain film techniques that directors today would be familiar with.
Here the sculptor has depicted a tree, but this isn't just to adorn the landscape,
This tree has a more important role,
The sculptors used it to divide two distinct scenes,,,
,,just as today a film director would use a visual cut,
Elsewhere the sculptors have used another visual device that's familiar to film-makers today,
They've chosen to show the Roman army buried under their shields, from above,
It's called a bird's-eye view,
They've also chosen to show other soldiers involved in the same scene
with a different viewpoint, from a lower angle,
What the sculptors realised
is that by offering multiple viewpoints they could make the battle more dramatic,
There isn't a film-maker today
who does not exploit these same visual techniques,
Cinema is a kind of visual music that you play, with the colours and instrumentations,
as you would in an orchestra, so with various shots.
So there is a difference between the close-up and the wide shot and so on.
(SPIVEY) But the creators of Trajan's Column had yet another trick up their sleeves,
They found a way of summarising the most dramatic moments of their story,
By looking up the northwest vertical axis,
the viewer could see at a glance a highlighted version of this epic,
It goes something like this,
(AMERICAN ACCENT) 0ne emperor wants to conquer the world,
No one stands in his way,
Except one man who is prepared to sacrifice all to save his people,
War is inevitable,
Torture,
Arson,
Betrayal,
But only one side has the support of the gods,
0nly one side can win ultimate victory,
(SPIVEY) There you go, the world's first ever trailer,
Trajan's Column seems to have everything,
It's the culmination of thousands of years of discoveries
in the art of telling stories with pictures,
I would love to say that, looking at it, I feel deeply moved,
But I've got to confess that I don't,
It may have grabbed the imaginations of ancient Romans
but I don't think it does very much for us today,
It's hard to believe, even when you're standing close to this monument,
that you've been taken on a virtual Journey to the killing fields of Romania.
It Just doesn't do it.
Even though it uses so many of the storytelling devices of modern-day films,
it hasn't got the power to captivate us,,,
,,and that's not just because the pictures aren't in motion,
Trajan's Column seems to be missing a final element,
But perhaps we've been looking in the wrong places,
We wouldn't be the first to do so,
This is Cambridge University, where I work,
For centuries, the great centres of learning had looked exclusively to the West
for the answers to their questions,
Scholars believed that it was the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome
that had made the great breakthroughs in the ancient world,
But, Just like us on our quest,
they began to realise that maybe the classical civilisations didn't hold all of the answers.
Yes, what the Greeks and Romans had achieved was truly astonishing
but it wasn't the true story
and so researchers began to look elsewhere.
Researchers began to explore parts of the world much further afield,
They started to investigate cultures that until then had been totally ignored,
What they discovered will give us the final piece of our jigsaw,
a way of telling stories with pictures that is truly captivating,
and this same technique is one that has proved crucial
to the success of every feature film made today,
That discovery was made on a continent thousands of miles from Europe
on the other side of the world,
Australia,
When the first Europeans arrived here back in the 18th century,
they found themselves in a severe and hostile landscape,
As the Europeans began to explore this landscape, they found something that baffled them,
In many of the caves and rock shelters, they came across strange and mysterious images,
Here in Arnhemland in the north of Australia
are some of the oldest painted images found anywhere on the planet,
Recent research has shown that some of them date back over 40,000 years,
These are the world's first art galleries,
The first European settlers had a sense that these were very old images,
but they hadn't a clue what they meant and not much interest in finding out.
They'd look at something like this and they'd dismiss it, childish doodle.
And for the settlers for the next 200 years these paintings remained just that, doodles,
Then, at the beginning of the 20th century,
an Englishman arrived in the small community of 0enpelli in Arnhemland,
He was a biologist by training and his name was Baldwin Spencer,
During his stay in 0enpelli Spencer lived among the Aboriginal people,
Although he'd spent time with other Aboriginal communities,
he found something here that he'd never seen before,
The Aboriginal people of 0enpelli were obsessed by painting,
Wherever he went, he found artists at work
either painting on bits of stringy bark from the eucalyptus tree
or on the cave walls,
It's the same even today,
Spencer became more and more intrigued by these paintings,
It was this curiosity that led to his breakthrough,
He noticed how Aboriginal artists were painting the same images over and over again,
The image of the barramundi fish,
The image of the earth mother Eingana,
0r the lightning man,
While watching these artists,
Spencer noticed that the images they were painting on their pieces of bark
seemed strangely familiar.
Then he had his revelation.
These images were the same as those that he'd seen painted on the rocks and the hills
around here and behind us now.
Those images had been painted thousands and thousands of years earlier.
This, for instance, is a group of barramundi fish
painted by a modern Aboriginal artist,,,
,,and this is the same subject painted thousands of years before,
This is Eingana the earth mother as painted today,,,
,,and this is Eingana from the ancient past,
The same is true of many of the important Aboriginal images,
What this meant was that here in Arnhemland, uniquely in the world,
there is a continuous artistic link
from the ancient past to the present day,
Spencer realised he now had a rare opportunity,
If he could only discover the inspiration behind 20th-century Aboriginal art
he could then unlock the secrets of the ancient painting in the caves and the rock shelters,
What Spencer discovered next is crucial to our quest,
because when he got to talking to the Aboriginal people about their art
they told him that their paintings were anything but doodles.
Their paintings were telling stories.
When you look at them it's hard to believe that these single images can tell a whole story,
so how do they work?
I met up with the most famous Aboriginal artist in the area,
Thompson Yulidjirri,
He took me to a sacred site,
So you call him up, that rainbow serpent.
As he painted an image, Thompson began to tell me the story,
0nce upon a time, a little orphan boy was playing with his brother
when he became hungry,
But when he found out that his favourite food, which were yams, had been eaten by his family,
he began to cry,
His kindly brother called up an ancestral spirit,
the rainbow serpent,
and asked for his help
and the family were punished for being so greedy,
Aboriginal artists don't paint a sequence of images to tell their stories,
Instead they use single stylised images
to trigger in the mind of the onlooker stories they would already know,
It's these painted stories, told in a single image,
that have endured for thousands of years,
so what was it that gave them the power to captivate the minds of Aboriginal people
and be passed on through countless generations?
This wouldn't be revealed to a worldwide audience until the 1960s,
It was then that a young British television presenter came with his crew
to this remote region,
His name? David Attenborough,
(ATTENB0R0UGH) I have vivid memories
of squeezing through cracks and coming up
and looking up and seeing the surface of the...of the crack that I'm in
only a few inches from my head
and suddenly being aware there were huge barramundi fish on the ceiling,
and kangaroos,
And then spirit figures,
little sticklike figures that were hunting.
It was unforgettable.
(SPIVEY) David Attenborough was fascinated by the stories told through these single images,
Like Spencer, he too realised that the key to the past lay in understanding the present,
This is a sacred place, a cave sacred to the Aborigines of this part of northern Australia.
The Aborigines still paint,
From them, therefore, we may be able to get some insight into the very origins of art,
(SPIVEY) So, David Attenborough began to spend time with modern Aboriginal painters
to try to understand why their stories had lasted so long,
He met an Aboriginal painter called Mugane,
(ATTENB0R0UGH) I didn't know what to expect,
I used to sit with him, and he had a brush that was made by chewing the end of a little stick
and he would put these marks on them and I'd watch him,
Anyway, so we got to know one another
and so I was able to ask him...
Not directly, ''Why are you painting?''
You'd say, ''What name this fellow? What is that?''
Tell me about this place here. What's that?
Dog.
(ATTENB0R0UGH) And then on one painting there was this long, long rectangular shape,
I said, ''What's that?''
and Mugane leaned forward and said rather hoarsely, ''Secret.''
Why you talk so...so soft?
If you're no good... If we talk hard, might be hear Mirrimi.
- If we talk hard, who might hear? - Mirrimi.
So I said, ''Well, could you tell me what it was?''
0ld Mugane thought about it a bit
and he said ''0K, tomorrow time. You come tomorrow time.''
We walked for,,,well, I suppose about 20 minutes
and there was another little encampment
and inside this encampment, covered in leaves, very secret and very lonely,
there was this huge pipe.
Didgeridoo, I mean like four and a half, five feet long,
This was what was represented in the painting,
Then we entered the bush
where a big ceremony was going to take place
in which the trumpet with the designs that it carried was an essential element.
(SPIVEY) The stories painted by Aboriginal artists had gained their power
because they'd been combined with music,
They were designed to stimulate two senses, the eyes and the ears,
and it was this that had made them so enduring,
The Aboriginal community at 0enpelli still perform storytelling ceremonies to this day,
Just like David Attenborough 50 years before me, I would be lucky enough to experience one,
(MAN CHANTS)
(ATTENB0R0UGH) People assembled in the morning,
Someone sang with click sticks, more men came
and then they started painting themselves with totemic designs on their chests.
It was a sense of privilege and there's a holding of the breath, really,
because you were in the presence of something very meaningful,
It's a highly emotionally charged moment,
(SPIVEY) As night fell, my own anticipation was rising,
The dancers were assembling beneath a rock canopy
that was covered in ancient painted stories,
- (DIDGERID00 ) - And then these stories began to come alive,
(SINGING)
In the ancient past,
long before the classical civilisations of the West had made their storytelling discoveries,
Aboriginal artists had found a way to captivate their audience
and transport them to imaginary worlds,
(ATTENB0R0UGH) To try and identify the truth of which those paintings were a part,
you have to recognise that they are only a part,
They don't exist by themselves,
They are accompanied by music,
by singing, by didgeridoo, by click sticks,
and they are accompanied by narrative, in song, of immensely complex stories,
So the music is an integral element from all kinds of points of view
and to abstract that from a piece of painting
is to...
..impoverish the painting.
(SPIVEY) This, then, is the key to Aboriginal storytelling,
It's this soundtrack that's given their stories the power to survive for thousands of years
and it's the same element that lifts our imaginations when we sit down to watch a film.
Images pulsing with sound.
Aboriginal storytellers understood the power of combining sound with pictures
thousands of years ago,
but the rest of the world wouldn't come to exploit this technique until much, much later,
long after the classical civilisations had been and gone,
It wasn't until the great religions began to realise the full potential of the soundtrack
that its use began to spread across the world,
When it did, the result was explosive,
(MUSIC: HANDEL'S ''HALLELUJAH CH0RUS'')
# HalleluJah! HalleluJah!
# HalleluJah! #
Now, religious storytellers could use the captivating power of pictures combined with music
to reinforce their spiritual message,
# For the Lord 0mnipotent reigneth
# HalleluJah! HalleluJah!
# HalleluJah! #
(SPIVEY) Then, in 1894, a new visual storytelling medium was invented,
Moving pictures,
This is the first feature film in history,
It too comes from Australia, and tells the story of the outlaw Ned Kelly,
Here is a hero, a plot and characters with emotions, but it lacks that crucial ingredient,
(MUSIC: THEME T0 ''PSYCH0'')
As soon as film-makers discovered how to put sound into their films,,,
- (MUSIC: THEME T0 ''E.T.'') ,,cinema really took off,
(MUSIC: THEME T0 ''STAR WARS'')
Finally directors could unlock the full potential of moving pictures,
They'd found a way to move an audience so much
they felt as though they'd been transported to another world,
0ne cannot underestimate the power of sound effects and music
in modern-day filming and storytelling.
So that when you come to ''Lorenzo's 0il'',
we have the scene where the parents,
having learnt of the terrible diagnosis and prognosis of their son,
make the long walk out of the doctor's office.
(F00TSTEPS ECH0 )
We enhance their demeanour, their mood, their anguish,,,
- (MUSIC: BARBER'S ''ADAGI0 F0R STRINGS'') ,,,by the sound of their footsteps,
(GIRL GIGGLES)
By the laughter of the little girl,
And with the music,
- (MUSIC: BARBER'S ''ADAGI0 F0R STRINGS'') - (M0THER CLEARS HER THR0AT)
They're hiding their emotions because they don't want their son to know how they're feeling
yet the music is telling us how they're feeling,
(B0Y SIGHS)
When we get home can you read a story?
(WHISPERS) 0f course, my darling.
Lorenzino, let's go home.
You know what it's like when you've watched a really good film
and rather than leave the cinema you stay in your seat, almost unable to move,
listening to the music and watching the end credits roll by.
Well, it's because you've been transported to another world
and it's been such a powerful experience you Just can't bear for the magic to end.
(MUSIC: BARBER'S ''ADAGI0 F0R STRINGS'')
(SPIVEY) Every day of our lives,
we are bombarded by thousands of different images,
images which affect us in countless different ways,
But of all these there's one particular kind of image whose power is uniquely mesmerising,
because while it terrifies us somehow it also comforts,
But although it can manipulate us, it also reassures,
It's the image of death.
Even though these young people have probably never seen a dead body in their lives,,,
they are captivated by these pictures,
And they're not alone,,,
because, whether we realise it or not, we are all drawn to images of death,
whether we're on our own,,,
or with others,
We build graveyards and monuments to the dead
and their photographs fill our homes,,,
,,but why?
What makes us surround ourselves with constant reminders of death?
The answer lies not in the modern world but thousands of years ago,
when human beings first created images of death,
This is the story of how death captured the human mind...
..and how that drove us to create some of the most powerful images in the world.
Like most people, I've got images of my ancestors scattered around the family home.
I've always loved this one of my Grandpa Fred.
He was a self-made man from the East End of London,
lived through two world wars and died about fifteen years ago.
Naturally, we want to surround ourselves with pictures of people who've died
because we loved them, we want to preserve their memory,
but I wonder if there's something else going on with these pictures,
What if they triggered a range of emotions that I wasn't aware of,
subconscious emotions, more to do with my death than Grandpa's?
Could my desire to surround myself with images like these
be somehow helping to overcome my fear of death?
Well, to try and find an answer, what if we went back in time?
What if we tried to discover
what compelled people to surround themselves with images of death for the very first time?
0ur journey starts at a place
where people have been living continuously for longer than anywhere else on earth,
This is the Jordan Valley in the Middle East,
Here there's a town called Jericho,
Jericho is famous for the biblical story
of how Joshua and his trumpets brought the walls tumbling down,
The collapse of these walls is believed to have happened about 3,000 years ago,
But Jericho the city is much older than that.
It's something like 9,000 years old,
and it was in order to investigate what was happening behind these walls
that a team of archaeologists arrived here from Cambridge in the mid 1950s.
(LIVELYMUSIC)
The archaeologists wanted to reach right back into Jericho's past,
They dug deep trenches into where the ancient town had stood
to try to find evidence of how these earliest inhabitants had lived,
As a young woman, Cecil Western was one of the Cambridge archaeologists,
(WESTERN) It was a jolly good dig,
There was an enormous lot to do so we were working all the hours there were,
because they were finding so much stuff,
(SPIVEY) By the end of the expedition the team had uncovered pots and tools,
They'd even found the remains of some of Jericho's ancient walls,
But what they were about to uncover
would make everything, including the legendary walls, pale into insignificance.
It happened on the very last day of the dig,
(WESTERN) Everything had been packed up, We were all preparing to go the next day,
That's when it often happens,
at the most inconvenient moment,
that you find something that you've got to pay attention to.
(SPIVEY) The team had noticed something sticking out from the side of the trench,
This was in one of the oldest parts of the site, an area that was 9,000 years old,
(WESTERN) We didn't want to leave it there because we thought the children would get it out,
And they would make a nasty hole in the section anyhow
so we might as well make it ourselves and see what we'd got.
(SPIVEY) With great care, one of the team began to dig the object out,
but they were completely unprepared for what they would find,
(WESTERN) Everybody got very excited,
When it's something unusual that you think nobody's ever seen the like before
it's very exciting.
And the cause of all this excitement was this, a human skull,
but a skull quite unlike any other they'd so far found on the expedition,
in fact a skull quite unlike any other known to archaeology
because its nose had been reconstructed in plaster
and where two vacant sockets should have met our gaze, a pair of eyes made out of shells.
This wasn't an ordinary skull taken from a skeleton,
An ancient artist had separated it from its body and then decorated it,
Using plaster, the artist had rebuilt the front of the skull to create a delicate face,
Where the eyes had once been he'd placed two highly precious objects,
shells from the Red Sea, many days' walk away,
So, 9,000 years ago, the people living in Jericho had made artistic representations of the dead,
the earliest ever created,
But there wasn't just one,
As they dug further, the archaeologists at Jericho found another and then another,
In all, the team discovered nine decorated skulls at the site
and they immediately began to ask the question,,,
what were they for?
(WESTERN) They were obviously portraits,
We speculated as to whether they were enemies
or whether they were ancestors or what they were, or family portraits.
But they were strange because, so far as we knew at that point,
nobody had ever discovered this sort of portraiture on the actual skull,
so they were quite unusual,
None of us had ever seen such a thing before,
(SPIVEY) But there was far more to it than that,
By looking at the layers of earth ancient objects are buried in,
archaeologists can tell what they were used for,
In the past when archaeologists had found buried bodies,
the layers had always shown that they were in special burial grounds,
But when they came to look at the layer where the skulls had been found,
they discovered something that astounded them.
The layer clearly showed that the skulls hadn't been tucked away in some sort of cemetery
but lodged above the floor of someone's home, someone's living space.
Nine thousand years ago, decorated skulls would have been kept in people's houses,
and just as the experts began to wonder what this meant, they noticed something else,
Take a look at the underside of this skull. It's smooth and flat.
''So what?'' you might think.
Well, that's the crucial key to unlocking the mystery of these skulls,
because they weren't intended Just to lie flat.
They were specially designed to stand upright,
perhaps on the floor of someone's house
or, more likely, in some special alcove or niche.
It was an astonishing revelation
because it meant that these skulls, the earliest images ever of dead people,
had been made to be seen by the living.
But archaeologists were to discover
that Jericho wasn't the only place where there were skulls like these,
0ver the decades that followed, as archaeologists excavated elsewhere in the Middle East,
they discovered more decorated skulls at other sites,
and it wasn't just the Middle East,
Thousands of years ago, ancient artists had also created decorated skulls
in what's now the Ukraine,
And it wasn't all in the past, either,
because indigenous people in modern-day Southeast Asia
were also decorating the skulls of their dead,
Archaeologists realised that this seemed to be a sort of biological instinct,
a human predisposition to decorate the skulls of those who'd already died.
What had driven people so far apart in time and place to do this?
What had compelled them, just like us,
to decorate their homes with images of their dead ancestors?
Compared to all other creatures on earth,
there is something unique about human beings that may provide an answer,
It's to do with the way that our mind works,
All animals take action to avoid their own deaths.
It's something that we humans share with even the smallest creatures.
But this is just the basic evolutionary instinct to survive, to try to avoid being killed,
Human beings have got something else.
We humans are the only creatures who understand the inevitability of our own death,
the fact that we Just can't escape it,
and unlike other animals
we've got a brain that's powerful enough to imagine a world in which we're no longer alive.
And there is a group of experts
who believe that this helps explain why humans surround themselves with images of death,
They aren't archaeologists but psychologists, based in Arizona,
I remember being eight or nine years old and my grandmother dying
and my mom saying ''0h, come say goodbye to Grandma, because you'll never see her again.''
When I thought about why that was so difficult to bear
it was because I realised by inference that that would be me at some point,
0nly human beings are explicitly aware of the fact that they some day die.
It's a powerful problem that humans have to face,
their knowledge of their own inevitable death
and how that violates so much of what we're doing day to day.
We're trying to stay alive, we're trying to thrive and yet we know, inevitably, it'll be thwarted.
(SPIVEY) It's a terrifying thought,
that the one certainty in life is that we're all going to die
and there's nothing we can do about it,
But these psychologists believe there is a way of easing this fear,
a way of trying to come to terms with our own death,
The first uniquely human way of accomplishing this is art.
What art does is to take the natural world and to give us some control over it.
(SPIVEY) So, by creating images of our ancestors,
we're reassuring ourselves that death isn't so bad after all,
(S0L0M0N) That is the psychological impetus for its creation,
your father and your grandfather and your mom and your grandmother are still very much with you
even though they aren't moving around as much as they did in the past,
(SPIVEY) It's an interesting theory, but could it be true?
Professors Solomon and Greenberg decided to run an experiment
to try to discover what's happening in our minds when we see images of death,
They began by taking two groups of American students,
The psychologists made one of these groups think about death, but without them knowing it,
and they did it by showing them these words,
See anything else?
Well, you wouldn't, because it was too quick for television to pick up,
Let's slow it down,
Between the words, the psychologists flashed the word ''dead'',
Each subliminal image lasted just a fraction of a second
but long enough to put the idea of death into the subconscious minds of the subjects,
The psychologists then showed both groups of people a series of pictures,
They were images of famous dead Americans,
icons who would have emotional value for the subjects,
Like past presidents, George Washington and JFK,
0r screen stars,
The subjects then chose how long they wanted to look at the pictures,,,
,,time which was measured,
What the psychologists found was remarkable,
The group who'd been made to think about death
wanted to look at the pictures for significantly longer than the group who hadn't,
It seems to show that if we're thinking about our own death, we gain reassurance
by looking at images of those who've already died,
So, how does this help to explain the decorated skulls?
Well, 9,000 years ago, Jericho was a death-ridden place,
Average life expectancy was just 24,
Thoughts of death would have dominated the minds of the inhabitants
and would have terrified them,
So, to try to reassure themselves,
the Jerichoans created artistic representations of their dead,
(GREENBERG) The skulls from Jericho are a striking example
of the people of that time trying to keep their dead alive and to keep them present,
and if they're still present then they still exist and thus they exist after death.
That's what we're all looking for.
That would be the most, you know, comforting thing
that would really assuage this potential terror.
(SPIVEY) What motivated the Jerichoans was a universal human instinct,
The fear of our own death is so great
we surround ourselves with pictures of people who've already died
in order to reassure ourselves,
But reassurance is only part of the story,,,
because there are other images of death that are very different,
These seem to have the very opposite effect,
Far from reassuring us,
they exploit our fear of death and seem to make it worse.
Take a look at this.
This unsettling painting from the 18th century
depicts a leader of the French Revolution who's been murdered,
while this 19th-century picture shows a massacre of Spanish civilians,
This etching shows a hanging,,,
,,and in the 20th century
Himmler's SS chose to use as its regimental symbol a skull and crossbones,
Images of death like these aren't reassuring,
They're upsetting, Terrifying, even,
Why do human beings create images that are so deeply disturbing?
What we need to find is a civilisation that's taken images like these
and pushed them to the limit.
If we can understand what motivated them, then we might understand what motivates us.
This is the coast of northern Peru
in South America,
Between 100 and 700 AD, a powerful civilisation dominated this area,
It was called the Moche,
Ten years ago, an archaeologist came here to study the Moche,
His name is Steve Bourget,
Borge began his excavations at the foot of this building,
the Temple of the Moon, or Huaca de la Luna,
It was built almost 2,000 years ago,
Today, the images on its mud walls have faded and seem to have little significance,
But this is what they would once have looked like,
0n these walls are some of the most grotesque images of death one can imagine,
These, for instance, are spiders,,,
,,but they are no ordinary spiders,
Each one is carrying a knife,,,
,,and on their backs they have a human face with fangs,
Here's a row of lizard beasts,,,
,,all carrying a decapitated human head,
And scattered around the site was Moche pottery showing other disturbing acts,
(MAN) These images look terrifying, for example people being literally eaten alive by birds,
Having their face taken off. This crude facelift.
Things like that,
(SPIVEY) What kind of dark mythology produced these images?
Were they simply the product of a lurid violent fantasy?
(B0URGET) We see what appears to be supernatural beings, people with fangs,
so it looks unreal.
(SPIVEY) But there were no clues as to why the Moche had created such art,
What had compelled them, Bourget wondered, to create such disturbing images of death?
Then, one day, walking near the temple, he noticed something strange,
It was a large rock formation,
But what was so unusual was that it had an almost identical shape to the mountain behind it,
Bourget began to wonder if that had given it a special significance,
I believe that there was a connection
between this rock and the mountain behind it
but that this rock was in fact a sacred rock, a sacred outcrop,
in fact a copy, a small copy of the mountain behind it.
(SPIVEY) Bourget and his team began to excavate the area, and what they found astonished them,
(B0URGET) At the beginning, all we had there was sand, clay, rubbles, bricks, nothing else,
So we start digging there
and a metre, a metre and a half
inside this rubble we located...human remains.
(SPIVEY) Not just one skeleton but seventy, and these bodies hadn't died naturally,
(B0URGET) As soon as we encounter the human remains,
we found for example a cranium with a large opening in the back of the head.
We found another man resting on his back with a gash,
a wound Just alongside the head, Just right there, probably made with a copper knife.
(SPIVEY) There was something else about these skeletons, Many of them weren't intact,
What we have there is a human cranium
and you can see that this head is literally standing alone.
The body has been removed from the corpse itself.
So it indicates that not only they killed people there, but also dismantled the corpses.
Took them apart, so to speak.
(SPIVEY) Next to a prominent rock, people had been killed
and their bodies had been dismembered,
For Bourget, it could mean only one thing,
(B0URGET) This rocky outcrop was a sacred altar,
In fact a sacred mountain, a small microcosm of the big mountain behind it,
and in front of this altar, this would have been the best place for performing human sacrifice.
(SPIVEY) Bourget had discovered that this was a site of ritual sacrifice,
but that was just the start, because then he noticed something else,
Dismembering, skeletons, severed heads,
these sacrificial remains
bore a remarkable resemblance to many of the artistic images created by the Moche,
(B0URGET) What we are looking at,
these are illustrations of sacrifice at the same time that they are the real thing,
They are the real McCoy, so to speak,
Time and again, the Moche had performed horrific acts of sacrifice and then created images of it,
This wasn't art as fantasy,
it was art as documentary,
And the Moche weren't alone,
For thousands of years, Latin America had been dominated by a series of ancient civilisations,
including the Inca, the 0lmecs and the Maya,
and they had all created terrifying images of death,
skulls,
flayed bodies
and bound captives,
Archaeologists had long wondered why this was,
The Moche discovery finally confirmed their suspicions,
In all these civilisations sacrifice had been a way of life
and artists had celebrated these grotesque acts by creating images of them,
But there was one civilisation that was doing all of this on a simply colossal scale,
They were the people who ruled here in Mexico City 500 years ago,
the Aztecs,
And these are their descendants,
Today they're here to see a modern-day blood ritual,
a bullfight,
Here in the stadium, the deaths of some half a dozen bulls will be watched by a huge crowd,
0ver the next few hours, 40,000 people will witness and enjoy this killing,
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
What if the situation were reversed?
What if all of us here were lined up to be sacrificial victims over four days, one by one?
Well, that's what happened here about 500 years ago.
(CHEERING)
It's almost impossible for us to comprehend the scale of such bloodletting,
but Aztec historians record that in 1487 at the great pyramid of Tenochtitlán
executioners sacrificed four lines of prisoners,,,
,,each two miles long,
Victims were forced to climb to their deaths
up the pyramid's 114 steep steps,
And at the top, two killing rooms.
(EERIE WHISPERING)
Here they were met by priests wearing masks made of human skulls,,,
,,and wielding sacrificial knives,
While still alive, the victims had their hearts hacked from their chests,
Their heads were then removed,,,
,,and placed on this stone rack,
It was killing on a truly industrial scale,
at least forty thousand deaths over four days,
But that's not all, because the Aztecs then meticulously documented this slaughter
with their art,
Images like the giant statue of Chalchiuhtlicue,,,
,,with her necklace of hands, hearts and skulls,
And Michtlantecuhtle,
the god of sacrifice, with his flayed body,
And the wall of skulls itself,
Here's an entire society that wanted to record the horrific slaughter it was perpetrating,
The question you keep coming back to with the Aztecs is ''Why?''
Why the killing on such a horrific scale?
And, more importantly for our story,
why would you want to fill your world with images of this wholesale human butchery,
as if you were proud of what you were doing?
A clue to the answer lies on one of the Aztecs' most sacred objects,
Three and a half metres across, it's the Stone of the Sun,
To the Aztecs, the sun god was the giver of life, but this was a gift that didn't come cheap,,,
,,and the Sun Stone reveals why,
At its centre is the sun god
and in his outstretched hands he's got two obJects.
They're human hearts
and in his mouth he has a knife,
This is one vast sacrificial altar,
The sun god created the earth by sacrificing his own blood,
This meant the people were forever in his debt
and now they must repay him with the most precious commodity that they had,
their own lives,
If the debt wasn't repaid,
then the sun would go out, the crops would fail and all life would perish.
By constantly reminding people of the debt they owed,
images like these instilled loyalty and obedience to the state,
The Aztec leaders were using art to bolster the whole structure of their civilisation,
Aztec society was based on a rigid hierarchical structure
and sacrifice was carefully integrated into each tier,
At the bottom were half a million law-abiding citizens,
This was the audience for the ritual,
Above them was the elite warrior class,
These were the people who fought neighbouring states to capture victims for ritual sacrifice,
Then came the priesthood, who turned killing into a form of gruesome theatre,
And at the very top the Aztec court and its king reigned supreme,,,
,,safe in the knowledge that no one dared challenge them,
So, the winners in this orgy of death imagery
were the powerful elite who stood at the top of Aztec society,,,
,,perhaps the most successful regime of terror the world had ever seen,
Through this art, they gained a powerful grip over the hearts and minds of their people,,,
,,and that wasn't just because these images made people fearful of being killed,
The psychologists believe
they were having another even more powerful effect on the minds of the Aztec population,
driving them towards the values of the state,
If you were an Aztec you could say, ''This is brutal. What the hell's going on?'' Maybe some did that.
But most would be better psychologically served
by identifying with the powers that are dispensing death
and feeling that, ''Hey, we're on the side that has control over death.''
(SPIVEY) Professors Solomon and Greenberg wondered
if thinking about death would manipulate the minds of people in a similar way today,
So they conducted an unusual experiment to find out,
They started by dividing a group of American students according to their political allegiance,
Half were strong Democrat Party supporters,
The other half supported the Republicans,
The students were asked to dole out a portion of foul-tasting hot spicy sauce for someone to eat,
First they were told to do it for a supporter of their favoured political party
and then for a supporter of the party they opposed,
The students served on average the same amount of spicy sauce
regardless of whether it was for political friends or adversaries,
The psychologists then took another group of students,
but they asked them to read
a series of questions designed to make them think about their own death,
(W0MAN) Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your death arouses in you,
Jot down as specifically as you can what you think will happen to you as you physically die,
(SPIVEY) When these students measured out the sauce for their political allies, nothing changed,
0nce again, the portion averaged 12 grams,
But when they doled out the sauce for their political opponents, something happened,
This time they measured out an average of 27 grams of sauce,
more than twice the previous amount,
So, reminding people of their own deaths
seems to drive them towards supporting those who share their values
and opposing those who don't,
And the experiment suggested this was a universal human instinct,
as relevant to modern-day students as to 15th-century Aztecs,
(GREENBERG) These results suggest
when people are reminded of their own mortality
they are going to lash out at those who have a different belief system than their own,
the idea being that
when we think about our own death we become more invested in our own belief system
and someone with a different belief system becomes psychologically threatening,
so we're gonna lash out at them, oft-times with violence.
(SPIVEY) This psychological explanation would also account for unsettling images like these,
This was painted to inspire loyalty to French revolutionary values,
Here a painting celebrates the sacrifices that were made for Spanish independence,
This etching was created to provoke revulsion towards slavery,
And in Nazi Germany the skull and crossbones was used by the SS to instil obedience,
In each case, disturbing images of death were being used to bind people to a cause,
So, we seem to surround ourselves with two very different types of images of death,
Some reassure us,,,
whereas others terrify,
Each has a powerful hold over the human mind,
but just imagine the power of an image that could do both,
Because there seems to be another kind of image of death,
strangely, one that terrifies and reassures us both at the same time.
In the Western world, this is one of the most familiar images that we ever see.
It's used to reassure people,
and even if you're not a Christian there are plenty of people who take great comfort from it,
But, just for a moment,
look at the cross simply as an image.
It's the figure of a man oozing blood, dying an agonising death,
It should terrify us,
Is this really so far from the images of sacrifice created by the Aztecs?
So, why create an image that both terrifies and reassures at the same time?
What's going on psychologically
that makes this image such a comfort to countless millions of people?
Well, now we may be able to find the answer
because we now know the moment
at which human beings first brought together images of death which both reassure and terrify,
It happened here in Italy,
Two and a half thousand years ago, a great civilisation ruled this land,
It had cities, wealth and beautiful art,
No, not the Romans,
These people were the Etruscans,
Who laid the foundations of Rome?
Not the Romans. The Etruscans.
You thought gladiators were Roman?
You're wrong, because they were Etruscan, too,
Think straight roads were a Roman idea? No, they were Etruscan.
Bridge building, irrigation systems,
the Etruscans were superb engineers.
They gave Rome the tools to build an empire.
Despite this,
for a long time it was believed that little remained of this once-great civilisation,
Then, in the 19th century, archaeologists began to prove otherwise
with a series of discoveries that would give us the final chapter of our story,
They lay buried underground,,,
,,because down here are thousands upon thousands of Etruscan tombs,
This is where the Etruscans buried their dead
and they're some of the most reassuring visions of the afterlife ever created,
I'm in the tomb of the Matuna family,
who lived in Cerveteri about two and a half thousand years ago,
and although this was designed for them in their death, it's got a very cosy feel about it.
The Matunas were given tools for farming, livestock,
cooking utensils, a flagon of wine, beds
and even little luxuries such as a pair of slippers for those cold winter mornings,
With all this food, the only problem the Matunas may have faced in the afterlife is mice
but, thoughtfully, the artist has created a cat,
Etruscan tombs were designed
as houses for the dead,
so they've got all the features that you'd expect from a house.
We've got doorways leading into bedrooms, en suite of course,
windows,
really sturdy roof beams.
They made them to last,
Thousands of years after the wooden houses of the living have disappeared,
the stone cities of the dead still stand,
For the Etruscans, death seemed to be simply a joyful continuation of life,
(WHISPERS) If I were an Etruscan, I'd be looking forward to my death,
But it wasn't the whole story. There was a dark side to the Etruscan view of the afterlife.
And it was dramatically revealed to the world 20 years ago,
In 1985 Italian workers were digging a trench for a new pipeline
to supply the town of Tarquinia with water,
They came across yet another buried Etruscan tomb and called in the archaeologists,
The archaeologists pushed a tiny camera through the earth to investigate,
What they first saw was what they expected to see,
Covering one wall of the tomb
were the kind of enchanting images for which the Etruscans were famous,
Anyone buried here would be surrounded by paintings of a reassuring afterlife,
Then the archaeologists turned their camera around,
and what they saw on the opposite wall shocked them,
Here were paintings of disturbing and unsettling creatures,
images intended not to reassure but to terrify,
This is the blue demon,
the hook-nosed creature from the Etruscan underworld.
The demon's skin is the colour of rotting human flesh,
He has a snake coiled around his arms,
Beside him is a winged devil, ready to drag the dead off to an underworld of pain and suffering,
An Etruscan artist devised this vision of a terrifying afterlife
around 420 BC,
making it perhaps our oldest surviving image of hell.
It's not intended to reassure, quite the opposite,
When they dated this tomb, archaeologists realised it marked a watershed,
For the previous 200 years,
Etruscans had created tombs full of images promising only a happy afterlife,
but then something had changed,
By 400 BC,
the Etruscans were combining, in a single work of art,
images of death that were both reassuring...
..and terrifying,
rather as we do today.
So, what had happened?
At this time,
the Etruscans were being threatened by the rise of another Italian civilisation,
a greedy and aggressive people
who would steal their land and destroy their culture,
Who else but the Romans?
The Etruscans knew the Romans were coming
and they knew they needed to resist them at all costs,
Their tombs became a resonant call to arms because they offered a stark choice,
Would you be damned or saved?
These images of hell reminded the Etruscans
of the gruesome fate that awaited them if they failed in their duty and surrendered,
But these images of a reassuring afterlife
promised the Etruscans their reward if they stood up to the imminent threat,
For the first time in history, these conflicting images had been brought together,
The Etruscans gave us the earliest images of hell
and in doing so they created the first ever images of what we today would call redemption,
This is the place where the Etruscans built their capital,
Today it's the Italian city of 0rvieto,
Around 1500 AD, almost 2,000 years after the Etruscans had disappeared,
Christians built a cathedral here,
0n its walls are two huge frescos,,,
one showing the damned suffering in hell,,,
and here those who have been saved rising up to heaven,
(CH0RAL SINGING)
Notice anything?
Well, again, we've got a vision of the happy afterlife
contrasted with an intense depiction of suffering and pain in the other world
meted out by blue-green demons,
These frescos offer the same mix of terror and reassurance
as the Etruscans' tombs 2,000 years earlier,
This, if you like, was their legacy.
The artist who painted these images
knew only too well the powerful effect that combining them had over the human mind,
(GREENBERG) The cleverness of the idea of redemption is that
it can lead people to actually look forward to death, rather than dreading it,
The idea of sacrifice for the greater good is widespread,
the idea of falling on a grenade for one's buddies,
Then what we do is we memorialise such people, They're remembered more than the rest of us,
So the idea of giving up one's life for the greater good
and then getting something from that, getting redemption, and being in a better place
by dying in a heroic manner,
And that's why the cross is unique.
It's the one single image that's working on the human mind in two opposing ways.
It's a terrifying image, representing pain, loss and suffering,
and yet at the same time it's an image that reassures, one that holds out hope.
This combination has made the cross one of the most powerful symbols ever
and it explains why so often it's been used to try to give meaning
in the face of the incomprehensible loss of life.
(CH0RAL SINGING)