Marble Review – A thoughtful outline of the issue of returning the Parthenon Marbles to Greece | film

IIn a deeply personal and thoughtful documentary, director David Wilkinson revives the great question of restoring the Parthenon Marbles, that long-standing Hellenic enthusiasm and leading cultural cause for educated Britons who departed from Lord Byron in the 1810s to Christopher Hitchens in the 1980s (although Hitchens’s strident defense is not mentioned here). For more than 200 years, the British Museum in London has been proudly displaying the Marbles – and doing a very decent educational and curatorial job while gradually registering awareness that these are stolen properties. These artefacts were effectively looted by Lord Elgin, and their supposed purchase can be considered nothing more than a bribe, especially since the permission document or ‘firman’ from the then-dominant Ottoman Empire is missing and only exists in highly suspicious manuscript translations. But none of the British politicians wanted to get involved, believing it would only mean trouble. Keir Starmer is unlikely to offer his right-wing opponents a new weapon in the culture war.

Wilkinson amusingly recounts Elgin’s arrogance and also sets before us the new context of museum recovery in which institutions are reclaiming contested items, particularly in Scotland, which is leading the way in this movement. Activist and actor Brian Cox told Wilkinson that if the marbles had found their way to Edinburgh and not London, they would have returned to Athens a long time ago. He could be right. Furthermore, there are new innovative ways of thinking: digital and virtual reality renderings of the marbles and how they would have looked on the Acropolis could theoretically be shown at the British Museum.

The director was also generous and open in allowing the pro-British argument to be aired: the suggestion that museum culture is cosmopolitan and that it is reactionary and patriotic to bring marble to Greece. But that’s my only small complaint about this movie; Or rather, a question that is not asked or answered here. Given that the aesthetic point is so important, and that these marbles were part of every art inside the Acropolis, isn’t it worrying that they will not be re-plastered but will simply be placed in another museum near the Acropolis (and a museum that incidentally charges €20 a ticket, instead of free admission at the British Museum)? Well, with all that said, this is a thoughtful and deliberate case of their return to their homeland.