All right. Rather than hold you almost two steps. He's walking again.
Let's show you the second part of your lectures.
We're grateful that his people, art department and the terrorist operation respond to these soldiers who were here last week.
You heard me give a lecture about America's finest working a way to set a debate for tomorrow, not a Vietnam War Memorial,
which is clearly one of the great stuff, the Shaw Memorial in Boston, to provide you with a job to do for the Massachusetts students.
So I will ask you a very sort of sombre laughter, as you might expect from that topic.
Today's lecture is about somebody new power paida, who many of you here never heard of.
He is the most important American, said a popular American will.
So when we talk about how high his superiors, the machinery of his death was in 2011 and he has come down where a RUC is having wires there,
he said that the show is art and it asked me if I could hear the last word to kick off the proceedings so that a celebrity could be here today.
It's much more personal than last Friday. And last week you said you'll find out soon enough that it's very much about my
response as a kid to how the Potapov leaders and thinking what all so that.
When I was growing up, we didn't have Internet smartphones or video games or TV sets were small, black and white devices with only three channels.
We're a fourth. If you counted the education station, don't pity me.
We got along with what we had. We played in the streets until we were called in for supper.
We rode our bikes in packs. When friends weren't around to share the thrill of mobility with us, we happily did so on our own.
And when we were on our own and there was nothing good on TV,
which was this often the case then as it is now, we happily resorted to books and comic books.
At least I did. That's when I discovered Howard Pyle.
I did so via classics. It was the Classics Illustrated version of Men of Iron, a novel he wrote and illustrated back in 1892.
This dynamic cover image of a jousting night was by an artist named Alex Bloom, and it originally appeared in 1951.
I acquired my copy, which you see here in January 1964.
I know because stamped on it, I bought it at my local soda shop, Linzess Pharmacy on Main Street in Bexley, Ohio,
and enjoyed reading it cover to cover while sitting at the counter and savouring a cherry flavoured coke or a strawberry phosphate.
January 1964 was only a month or so after the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas at a time when the term Camelot was on everyone's lips.
Action filled comic books examining the brutal clashes and power struggles of knights in armour or anything
but irrelevant to the broader political climate of the day in which two superpowers were poised to collide.
I was also aware of Pyle through the reprinting of his books in inexpensive but sturdy paperback editions.
At that time, Dover Press began issuing its line of children's books, and Pyle, long deceased, became one of its best selling authors.
Dover reprinted The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, first published in 1883.
The Story of King Arthur and his Knights, originally published in 1983 and its 1985 sequel.
The Story of the Champions of the Round Table, all books written by Pyle as well as illustrated by him.
There are also several folktale collections in the strange juvenile novel Otto of the Silver Hand,
about a mediaeval German boy whose hand is hacked off by an evil baron and eventually replaced by a silver prostheses.
Sometimes I encountered piles work as I wandered through the stacks of my local public library looking for exciting reading material,
which for me often amounted to exciting viewing material.
I found the diction of old fashioned books ponderous and the stories too clogged with description to hold my attention.
But Pile's illustrations and those of similar artists thrilled me with their Proteau cinematic depictions of romance and adventure.
Here I show you the cover of a posthumous compilation by volume entitled Howard Pyles Book of Pirates,
which was published in 1921, 10 years after his death.
The picture beside it shows a Spanish galleon about to be raided by pirates as the father of American book illustration,
Howard Pyle, with his easily identifiable visual flair, provided boys like me endless fodder for the imagination.
Such books made me imagine myself as a fearsome pirate, a bone crushing mediaeval knight, a couple of swinging Revolutionary War patriot,
or some other type of heroic individualist garbed an all time clothing, anything, in fact,
other than when I was a skinny adolescent boy who wished the girls noticed him half as much as he noticed them.
So as you can see, Howard Pyle registered warming with For Assorted Reasons,
the Classics Illustrated version of Men of Iron, which provided prose biography of the author.
The Dover editions of Robin Hood and King Arthur.
And those must be old library books with a rousing colour or black and white illustrations of epic adventure.
I also knew of indirectly by way of old movies on TV.
Many of these films, as you will see in the course of my presentation, were inspired by Pyle and his invasions of the past.
Let me give an example now with more to come later. The 1935.
Errol Flynn, swashbuckler, Captain Blood, was based on a 1922 novel by the popular adventure writer Rafael Sabattini.
The look of the film, however, is pure pile,
as in the famous duel on the beach between Flynn is a pirate captain and his nemesis, played by Basil Rathbone.
What you're looking at is a drawing by playing in a still from the film.
The first time I saw this movie was on a Saturday night in the mid 1960s when my parents were going out for the evening.
My dad spotted it on the TV listings, told me it had been his favourite film as a boy in the mid 1930s.
It immediately became my favourite film, too.
Looking back decades later, I can see how the movie might have meant one thing to viewers in the Great Depression,
such as my dad and another two young viewers such as me.
During a period of national prosperity, a tale of wealth, circulation and global trade routes,
and an allegory of good leadership as embodied by Flynn versus bad leadership as embodied by Rathbone,
the movie would have been had one sort of meaning during the Build-Up to the Second World War and another different meaning.
At the height of Cold War, Flynn and his pirates were essentially democratic, freedom loving,
good guides who plundered the ill gotten gains of desperates and redistributed them equitably.
A few years later, at the turbulent clothes of the 1960s, they still regarded Captain Blood as one of my favourite movies.
Only now I tended to view Flynn and his men as rebellious hippies with swords, whereas the 17th century equivalent of rock and rollers with guitars.
Here's Captain Blood and the riggings of his pirate ship and the protest singer songwriter country Joe McDonald on stage at Woodstock.
Pyles greatest influence on popular American popular culture may have been in the imaginary realm of pirates and piracy.
But he also said his stamp on the way we have come to think of legendary figures such as Robin Hood, King Arthur and Mediaeval Knights.
In each case, these figures are cultural archetypes that, for better or worse,
encourage us to imagine our collective past in ways that shape our collective future.
Let's see how this works. First with Robin and then with pirates.
Robinhood balance of various types of shapes had been around for centuries, long before Howard Powell gathered them into a single unified prose hole.
The Robinhood of English folklore had been a wildly and violent thief, but Pile,
amongst other modernisers, converted him into a 12th century hero and do gooder, still widely.
But now violent only in his fight against injustice. And even then, pile writing for children kept the violence minimal, thanks largely to pile.
Robin Hood became a literary creation. A staple became a beloved literary creation, a staple of Victorian and Edwardian nursery and finance.
He leapt onto the stage of American mass culture in 1922.
Douglas Fairbanks, Hollywood's most popular leading man,
loosely adapted Pyles novelist telling of the legend as well as other accounts to bring Robin Hood to the silent screen.
A trip to Fairbanks, his speciality is a phenomenal acrobat.
Robin Hood in this movie accomplishes amazing feats of gravity, defiance.
As, for example, in a scene in which he or his stunt double leaps onto a closing drawbridge and scalper's up
an immense height to gain entrance to the castle in which Marian is imprisoned and puts.
Yeah, that's true. Could you show it again?
We didn't have these things when I was a boy. Desplechin.
I think this is an awesome piece of set design. All right.
Here in an earlier scene in the film, Robin provides welfare for the poor and needy.
This is surprisingly liberal behaviour to find a movie made shortly after the red scares of the early 1920s during the Conservative Party era,
when the gap between rich and poor in America was the greatest it had been in decades.
And the notion of Social Security lay far in the future. Of course, Fairbanks as Robin, is rather naive in his approach to economic distribution.
He flings coins at people and hands infants bags of gold.
Fairbanks is rather good, however, animated offers little in the way of personality.
He smiles and grins upon. But that's not enough to bring the legend to life.
The next screen, Robinho, did a far better job. In 1938, the hero of short Sherwood Forest was incarnated by the devilishly handsome Errol Flynn,
who, in addition to being a superb swordsman, lit up the screen with charisma.
He epitomises the Mary in Mary, and then his smile is dazzling, his laugh captivating compared to fair break.
Thanks. He radiates warmth and humanity. No matter how serious escaped Flins, Robin Hood finds himself in.
He meets joy when Warner Brothers produced The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Americans were still in the throes of the Great Depression. Another world war was on the horizon.
And here was Flynn's unstoppable Robin Hood taking in, giving enormous pleasure in his acts of death defiance.
A generation or two later, when I millions of other young Americans were watching old Flynn movies on TV,
his jolly good nature had a wonderfully bracing effect on us,
offsetting our worries about nuclear war, juvenile delinquency and the onset of acne piles.
Robin Hood is not nearly so jaunty and happy. Go look luckiest, Flins.
Nonetheless, Pyles Robin is indeed married, as are the good stout fighting men with whom he surrounds himself.
This Pilar's verbal description of Friar Tuck quote, beneath his bushy black eyebrows dance a pair of little grey eyes who could not stand still.
The very drollery of humour. No man could look into his face and not feel his heart strings tickled by the merriment of their look.
Now, here's the pilot's pen and ink drawing Robinhood crossing a stream on the Fryer's back with its beautiful decorative border.
It calls to mind illuminated manuscripts, but also the neo mediaevalist aesthetic of the pre Rafeal White artists who preceded
Pile by a generation and the arts and crafts designers such as William Morris,
who were his contemporaries. Here is the 1957 Classics Illustrated adaptation of Pyle, which I acquired in the early 1960s, placing its Friar Tuck.
Besides piles, we can see how the comic book artist, true to his medium,
adds colour and subtracts one texture in detail to make the visual information easier to grasp.
I suspect that the comic book artist was as much influenced by Flynn as possible.
Here's the corresponding scene from the Flynn film.
I particularly like Pyles drawn Robin Hooks first encounter with Little John, who is not his young adversary, into the water.
An iris with a dragonfly it in space fills the decorative outer panel in the inner panel.
The tall yeomen with a plume cap peers down from a log bridge into the pond where bedraggled and bemused Robin float SAMID waterlilies.
This is a delicious illustration full of rhythmic visual echoes.
A palpable breeze, stirs the water, bends the reeds at the water's edge and activates the windmill.
The tall trees and the billowing clouds in the foreground.
The neuro plume and Little John's cap reaches out in the direction of the curling iris leaf in the outer panel,
joining together to separate sections of the image in organic harmony.
Now for Flins, take on the famous encounter. They.
Oh. Ha ha.
And here's the Classics Illustrated version, no. How cinematic it is in a cell on the upper left position from below.
Looking up at the two fighters as if with a low camera, low angle camera shot.
The text reads. He gave the stranger a blow that could have felt.
Three men in the next cell is a close up of little John who laughingly types Robin.
Now does tickle me with my playing. The bottom cell is a wide-angle reaction shot with the camera, so to speak.
Half submerged in the water to catch Robin as he hurls backward into outer space.
It's straight out of Cinerama, the three projector overlapping image widescreen photographic process that was the forerunner of today's IMAX.
It was introduced by Hollywood in the early 50s. In an effort to keep audiences going to movies rather than staying home in front of their TV's.
You're looking at it. You are there. You are right there. Shot from this is Cinerama made in 1952.
If we look at a recent depiction of Robin's first encounter with Little John, Kevin Costner's Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves from 1991.
We see that the director of Public Barbas, much from classics illustrated as from pile of Flyn costumes.
Robin Hood, by the way, is as much a part of his time as respectably.
Piles and Flins were theirs, released shortly after the first Gulf War.
It portrays Robin as a battle hardened veteran of a messy conflict in the Middle East known as the Crusades.
Nineteen ninety three. Director Mel Brooks spoofed the legendary hero in his comedy Robin Hood Men in Tights.
Brooks AME's tearful erosive Pyle Fairbanks for Flynn, to be sure, but most of all at Kevin Costner as seen in this pairing of advertising images.
Pile differs essentially from all the pop pop culture versions we've been examining,
not only in visual style, but also in gravity, in tone, unlike the later versions.
His ends in elegiac sadness. He dares to recount the death of Robin Hood.
The last full page illustration of the book shows Robin Haggard in.
Sitting up on his deathbed to fire one last arrow through an open window where it lands.
That is where he wishes to be buried. Little John.
His face darkened with grief, cradles his friends and Master Pyle details the wood grain of the wall and mantelpiece and the living near the window.
That leaves the planks of the floor and folds the bedclothes almost empty of lying.
This emptiness provides a foretaste of the void that Robin's death will leave a compare Pyles pen
and ink account of Robin's demise to the 1917 oil painting by Pyle's most gifted student in CYF.
The great illustrator in his own right, Wyeth's rended. Rendition is certainly beautiful,
but I find it sweeter and more sentimental than piles less complexly attuned
to the loneliness and gravity of approaching mortality in the early 1950s.
There was a new surge of interest in Robin Hood.
In 1952, Walt Disney released the story of Robin Hood and his Merry Men with Richard Todd as Robin and Peter Finch as the sheriff of Nottingham.
It was broadcast in two weekly instalments on Disney's Wonderful World of Colour.
In 1955, a comic book adaptation tied in with the film's theatrical release appeared in 1962.
The half hour TV series, The Adventures of Robin Wood,
produced for British television but broadcast in the United States as well, ran for four seasons from 1955 to 1960.
Its most memorable feature was the rousing song The Closed.
Every Episode and became the anthem of those who would later be known as the Woodstock generation.
Robin Hood. I tried to sing. Robin Hood. Robin Hood.
Riding through the Glen. Robin Hood. Robin Hood with his band.
Men Feared by the bad. Loved by the good.
Robin Hood. Robin Hood. Robin Hood. It would be more reforms.
What's most intriguing to me,
at least about the Robinhood revival of the early 50s is that it occurred during a period of great political tension dominated by this man,
Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Cold War was at its peak in the entertainment industry,
was under duress by the anti-communist in Washington and elsewhere who sought
to purge American film and television of any possible taint of socialism.
Yet here was Robin Hood, a man of the people who fostered class warfare by stealing from the rich to give to the poor.
And he lived with his cohort in an egalitarian, non-hierarchical, non capitalistic, communal harmony.
One wonders what the senator from Wisconsin would have thought of Robin and his band.
Make no mistake, Hollywood wasn't entirely pink,
and not all of its best-known stars could embrace or even paid lip service to the Robin Hood ethos, as we see in this next snippet.
Kurt Campbell is the CEO of General Motors.
Three quarters of a century earlier, Pile had not shied away from the traditional view of Robin Hood as a wealth redistributor.
He tells us the Robin and his men, quote, vowed that even as they themselves have been despoiled, they would despoiled their oppressors.
Whether Baron, Abbot, Knight or Squire and the fighting each,
they would take that which had been run from the poor by unjust taxes or land rents or in wrongful fines.
Thanks to Robin's illegal activities, quote, money and food came in time of want to many a poor family.
So Pyles book, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, appeared at the height of the Gilded Age.
This was a time, as never before in American history of enormous disparities between privileged and poor.
Or to put it in appropriately metaphoric terms between robber barons and the benighted farmers,
peasants and immigrants who comprise the vast majority of the American population.
When Pyle published Robin Hood at age 30, he was still young and hungry.
Perhaps he identified with the poor having undergone a near poverty as a fledgling artist in New York.
Later, when Pyle was rich and famous and began to count politicians, robber barons and captains of industry amongst his friends,
he became fascinated with pirates and piracy and the so-called golden age of piracy from roughly 16 50 to 70 30 became his recurring theme.
He wrote and illustrated a number of books and stories about pirates.
As I mentioned earlier, a compilation volume Howard Pyles Book of Pirates,
published 10 years after his death, sparked new interest in the art of the legendary illustrator.
One influential fan was Hollywood legend Douglas Fairbanks, whom we have already seen as Robin Hood in 1926.
Fairbanks converted his admiration of Pyles Book of Pirates into a feature length adventure film,
The Black Pirate, which he wrote under a pseudonym and co-produced.
He also played the title role while performing his own stunts.
It's an excellent adventure film and holds the distinction of being the first full length feature shot in technicolour.
The advertising poster of the film,
which you see on the left borrowed from Pyles images such as his 1985 painting an attack on the gallingly scene on the right at the box office.
Success of the Black Pirate led to a succession of pirate themed films over the next quarter century.
One way or another, all of them derived from PI. Let me remind you of some of the most famous movies.
Reading Clockwise from upper left are the 1934 MGM production of Treasure Island,
Warner Brothers, 1935 Captain Blood, Disney's 1950 remake of Treasure Island,
which was the studio's first full length of live action film in Peter Pan,
released by Disney in 1953, Pyle's influence extended beyond the realm of movies and comics.
In 1967, the Disney Corporation, drawing heavily on Pyle, introduced Pirates of the Caribbean,
an indoor water ride with animatronic figures costumed as pirates.
It was great hit. And years later, it spawned the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise starring Johnny Depp.
Pyle, this is to say, invented or present day image of the pirate.
Early representations of pirates were generally stiff, colourless and static.
Pyle veered away from these bare bones representations by adding colour, dynamic energy in vivid, vividly rendered settings.
Compare this 1974 story.
Compare this 1724 drawing of Blackbeard with Pyles 1987 depiction of a fictional pirate captain planting this booted feet on a steeply canted deck.
Pyles image has formed far more life and movement to it.
The perspectival, perspectival,
lines of F deck direct the viewer's eye beyond the captain to the roiling sea where a distressed Gallion churns heavy smoke.
The smoke clouds rine visually with abrupt turns of the ship's railing and the folds.
The black flag that spills from the top of the image down to the corner of the
captain's cap needed to time and motion pictures were still in their infancy.
Pyles painting anticipated by years, if not decades.
The capacity of movies to portray pirates with elaborate costumes and sets fully realised seagoing environments.
Action on multiple planes. Dramatic colouring and intensity of.
The logical expression that Pinel self consciously sought to avoid stereotypes in his
illustration allows his work at its best to offer fresh perspectives on old material.
A curator at the Deleware Museum of Art, where the majority of the piles paint, pirate paintings and drawings are located,
has told me that filmmakers for Pirates of the Caribbean drew heavily on the museum's collection.
When conceiving sets and costumes for their films. Unfortunately, this clip isn't playing on on the computer we're using here.
But it's a scene from Pirates of the Caribbean released in 90, the first of the series released in 2003.
As you would have seen, it's not only in costume set borrows from Pyle,
but also in terms of the dynamic motion and inherent drama that gave life to the best of his diary images.
So let's return to the first of the pile derived pirate movies.
The Black Pirate. Its most famous moment occurs when the title character after single handedly captured an enemy ship,
makes a rapid yet graceful descent from the heights of a masked by plunging his dagger
into the canvas of a breeze filled sail and writing the night down to its deck.
This is a spectacular stunt,
rich and symbolic overtones showing the self reliant individual taming the surging power of technology epitomised here by the 18th century sail.
Pile, on the other hand, refused his pirates', whether heroes or villains, such unmitigated control of their environment in this regard.
His pirates are the antithesis of what Hollywood later envisioned.
As often as not, they are victims of a hostile environment, not its supreme masters.
The unsparing view of existence in which cruel univers torments poor suffering humanity with its perverse
indifference found powerful expression in the work of the American literary naturalist Stephen Crane.
Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. I believe it emerges from Pyles work as well.
Take, for example, marooned, an illustration he made for Harper's Monthly in 1887.
It shows a lonely figure sitting hunched over on a desolate strip of beach.
He seems resigned to his fate. Death by thirst or starvation?
If not from the madness of endless solitude in the black pirate, Fairbanks is also marooned as seen in this clip.
But make no mistake.
In Fairbanks film, the maroney's dejection is only momentary and the very next scene, Fairbanks, a swashbuckling individualist, springs into action.
When the bad pirates land on this desert island to bury their treasure, he takes them on without an ounce of hesitancy or fear,
fights a duel with their chief, kills him, is summarily takes over leadership of the band.
In 1989, two years before his death, Pyle painted a new version marooned.
Despite its golden hue, its darker, lonelier and more despairing than the earlier version,
he eliminates the bottle from which the marooned pirate might drink or even send a call for help.
And he increases the expanse of sand, reduces the size that figure,
and places him on the horizon by making him appear that much more remote from human contact.
Further darkening the mood is the sky no longer clear and unthreatening, as in the magazine image.
It now palpitate with clouds.
A flock of birds wheeling about the height taunts the beach sailor with the freedom of mobility he so sambal lacks piles later version of broomed.
The nineteen oh nine painting is starkly modern compared to the earlier version or to the passage we've seen in Fairbanks.
His film, The Paintings vast horizontal vista inhabited by a solid dimity of diminutive figure set off asymmetrically to the side calls to mind.
Sorry. OK.
Calls to mind the desolate, widescreen compositions of cinematic masters of the 1960s, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Stanley Kubrick and David Lean.
Here we see a still from Lean's magnificent 1962 desert epic, Lawrence of Arabia.
Make no mistake, I'm not claiming the David Lean In the other epic filmmakers of the 60s.
Looking at pie, but only the pile. Half a century earlier had grasped the psychological potential of widescreen composition.
PIOs pirates should never be taken literally. That is not metaphorically.
They are always more than simply pirates. Consider these two depictions of duels in the sand.
The hero, the one on the left, his back to the viewer, has made a bid to replace the captain of a band to pirates.
Onlookers study the engagement with grim concern,
for they must accept as leader whoever proves stronger and more ruthless in the painting on the right to knife
wielding pirates embrace in a death struggle under the setting sun while the crew looks on intently for again,
their own survival depends on that of the theatre or more devious of the combatants.
Here's Fairbanks version of the duel The Sand showing him eliminate that pirate captain.
I spoke up earlier. It's very aggressive way of making this guy die.
These pictures, allegories, the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age.
Life is a dog eat dog affair and then ending struggle for limited resources.
A relentless competition which only the fittest and boldest survive and only for a limited time before they too miss to come.
Pile appreciated the irony that his fame was based on depictions of scallywags and scoundrels,
brigands and thieves, social outcast and violent aggressors.
He had a sense of humour about this duality, pointing out the oddity that he, quote,
a Quaker gentleman in the farmlands of Pennsylvania should devote such Paduan attention to men of the past who penalise lawlessness and greed.
What he admired about the pirate, he said, was the quote. He knew his own mind in what he wanted.
In other words, he saw pirates as decisive men of action, which by all accounts, he was as well.
Like many of his generation, he seems to have regarded pirates as spiritual forefathers figures to be emulated within reason,
of course, for their transgression of repressive social norms.
In 19 in photographer Edward Steichen famous 1933 portrait of America's most feared financier J.P. Morgan,
the analogy between capitalist and pirate was explicit.
So much so that Morgan despised the photograph and refused to accept it with good reason to fear.
It makes it seem as though he's clutching a knife in his fist. You see the knife in this?
He's like the combatants in one of piles. Death struggles on the sand.
Except that in Morgan's case, it's not really Blakeney orders in his hand, but rather a chair handle gleaming in the light.
Over the decade, Pyles themes have found their way into other types of films besides pirate movies.
The atavistic lust for gold depicted in So The Treasure was divided,
returned with a vengeance in Eric von Stroheim 1924 silent classic greed shown
here on the left and in the 1948 Humphrey Bogart saga of greed and betrayal.
The treasure of the Sierra MindTree in Oliver Stone's 1987 hit film Wall Street.
Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas as a corporate raider.
And then our money suit proudly proclaims greed is good.
Thus providing a catchphrase that in Reagan era, America was both reviled and admired.
Since 2008, Hollywood has turned out a spate of movies about white collar piracy, with movies such as Michael Clayton, Duplicity,
The Informant, Margin Call, The Wolf of Wall Street The Big Short in my own personal favourite in the genre, The Social Network.
Action movies in the past 30 years that have drawn on the pirate archetype where there's good guys or bad,
include the Wild Punch Star Wars Waterworld in Gangs of New York,
to name but a few in which powerful, self-reliant heroes or antiheroes take charge of marauding gangs in lawless times through sheer force of will.
Here, alongside one of Pyles buckin years, is young Mel Gibson in an early starring role as a futuristic land pirate known as the Road Warrior.
Piracy remains with us today, literally so as described in this recent cover story in the New York Times magazine,
but also figuratively, as in this New Yorker cartoon. We should make it past the rocks by nightfall, provided our luck holds, says the pirate leader,
who clearly has not had a very good run of luck, suggesting that there's little we can do to avoid the hard times ahead.
We live in a new Gilded Age. Negatives are everywhere.
We seek Robin Hood. We long for King Arthur. We hope for pirate captains who will lead us past the rocks piles.