‘The Lost Cause will boast a monument towering above all the triumphal arches and columns of ancient Rome and more enduring than the pyramids.’
Conceived by a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1914 but not fully completed until 1970, the Confederate Memorial Carving at Stone Mountain in Georgia depicts and memorialises the Confederate Civil War leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee and Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, and is the largest carving of its kind in the world. In Graven Image, the US filmmaker Sierra Pettengill uses archival footage to document the carving’s century-spanning history. The result is deeply unsettling, revealing how the enduring dream of the Confederacy, centred around a deeply racist ideology, is laundered and repackaged from generation to generation.
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History
In the face of denial, this film uncovers the hidden scars of Indonesia’s 1998 riots
21 minutes
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Art
Defying classification, fantastical artworks reframe the racism of Carl Linnaeus
8 minutes
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History
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
13 minutes
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Engineering
Can monumental ‘ice stupas’ help remote Himalayan villages survive?
15 minutes
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Fairness and equality
There’s a dirty side to clean energy in the metal-rich mountains of South Africa
10 minutes
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Fairness and equality
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation
7 minutes
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Information and communication
‘Astonished and somewhat terrified’ – Victorians’ reactions to the phonograph
36 minutes
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History
From Afghanistan to Virginia – the Muslims who fought in the American Civil War
22 minutes
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Fairness and equality
Visit the small Texas community that lives in the shadow of SpaceX launches
14 minutes