bar drei

bar drei from Maggie Lee on Vimeo.

Visuals for this short is based off the idea of a VJ at Bar Drei.

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WHEN he died in 1983, Anthony Blunt was probably among the most famous spies in the world. At various times, before Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher exposed him in the House of Commons in 1979, he had been Sir Anthony Blunt (he was stripped of his knighthood in 1979), an art historian of the premier rank, the world's leading authority on Poussin, director of the Courtauld Institute in London, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures and a core member in the infamous ring of espionage agents now known as the Cambridge Conspiracy, which the Russians had ingeniously laced through the upper levels of British society and Government in the 30's and 40's.
The Cambridge Conspiracy was an intelligence operation established for recruiting idealistic young leftists in the British elite universities to be covert agents of influence, subversion and espionage in the British establishment they were preparing to enter. Having operated throughout the majority of the decades comprising the Cold War, Blunt was the sole member of his cohort to remain in the United Kingdom, forgoing defection by cooperating with authorities.
How Blunt came to lead his life of duplicity, especially in view of his great intellectual distinction, is a still largely unanswered question to which the common answer - that Blunt saw himself as a secret soldier in the war for the working class - is not very satisfactory, as the details of his biography make abundantly clear. His comrade in treason Kim Philby once remarked that the first job of a secret agent is to develop his cover personality. Blunt's cover personality was that of a genteel, discreetly homosexual, almost invisibly Marxist esthete and scholar. Wearing this mask, he performed indisputably distinguished work, playing a significant role in shaping the discourse of art history.
Perhaps, in the end, the mask became the face, but behind it swarmed very different passions. These included a rigid resistance to the large emotions, covering a deeper current of fastidious rage and an almost pathological snobbery (which Communism more assisted than inhibited), along with an obsession with the working-class men whom he used for sex. Though he was noted for demanding the most exacting standards of scholarly accuracy, his life swam in falsehood.
His one visit to East Berlin, incidentally, filled him with distaste. The prospect of exile there terrified him. He worshipped the Royals, fearing especially the contempt of the Queen Mother. He drank like a fish.
So this is interesting.
Matt Haley 8/26/14