Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: World War One Propaganda and the Creation of Lawrence of Arabia

Date and Time
November 5, 2014

Location

Event Details

David Lean’s iconic 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia is one of the foundation myths of the modern Middle East.  Patricia Goldstone (Frederick Lewis Allen Room), author of Making the World Safe for Tourism  (Yale University Press, 2001) , Aaronsohn’s Maps (Harcourt, 2007), and Discovering the Present (Counterpoint, 2015), Los Angeles Times journalist and NEA-award-winning playwright, explores the backstory of that film in the campaign waged by the British Foreign Office to bring America into World War I on the Allied side, and in the fraught, triangulated relationship between T.E. Lawrence and two Jewish propagandists, Aaron Aronsohn and his sister, Sarah.  The famous scene in the Turkish prison at Dera’a, in which Lawrence’s homosexuality was “revealed” is discussed alongside the strong possibility that Sarah Aaronsohn was the real S.A. of the highly erotic dedicatory poem that opens Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, one of the great literary mysteries of the twentieth century.  Why it took over forty years to make over the enigmatic, always controversial Lawrence into a Hollywood film hero provides a classic study of political film censorship, a bridge between the propaganda of two world wars, and a telling comment on the nature of propaganda itself.

This lecture is in conjunction with the exhibit Over Here : WWI and the Fight for the American Mind - Now through February 15