Sistematori? Punishers? Bogeyman? Ghe-think-I? Of course not.
Avengers: so, loaded with an implacable threat, is the best name for a squadron of heroes - obviously super, otherwise what heroes are they? - whose sole purpose in their super existences, otherwise full of psychological problems and unresolved traumas, is to respond rather than avenge the offenses and wrongs suffered not by them personally, but by the whole world at the hands of unimaginable villains. Their deeds are known to young and old thanks to the Marvel saga that, which began with comics in 1963, has moved weapons (many) and (minimum) baggage to the big screen for about ten years. With the effects of special effects well known to all.
These are the avengers of today, but let's take a step back, before the chroma key and digital, because the story we want to tell you is there, just a couple of years before Stan Lee put his dream team together in Los Angeles with Thor, Hulk, Iron Man & Co.
It was 1961 and in gray England where there was still no dream of Beatles and Carnaby Street came to the world of the other Avengers, a completely autonomous lineage without, poor people, no super power. Only simple heroes, but with a more British style and humor. To give points to Simon Templar and why not, Bond himself. Six seasons and 162 episodes of TV series, first b & n and then color, with the very stylish John Steed and his most famous partner Emma Peel (thrilling at the wheel of the Lotus Elan) and, in the final, Tara King. It took Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman to make a big screen film that could compete with the originals in 1998. Mama Rai translated Avengers into "Special Agent".
Here, in the Casa Tips Clear, in April 2010, we told how, in those archaeo-spy television series, the scenographies had a role and were not simple backdrops. In short, more than a series with a style, a series on style.
(Paolo Lavezzari)
Among the various mirrors from which the 60s still reverberate on our days, the television series " The Avengers"- with us" Special Agent "- is one of the brightest.
Designed by Sydney Newman and produced in the United Kingdom from 1961 to 1969, with six consecutive seasons broadcast in 90 countries, the shows were characterized by the bowler hat and jacket cut of the protagonist - the agent John Steed, played by Patrick McNee (designer of his own costumes, apart from a Cardin interlude) - as well as by the tight black leather suit of the heroine-rider; suit worn first by Honor Blackman, alias Cathy Gale (1961-64), then by the legendary Diana Rigg-Emma Peel, whose charismatic presence coincided for the series (1967) with the transition to color, and finally, in the last round, by the Canadian Linda Thorson, in the role of the young woman ( and youth worker) Tara King.
If until '64 it was the customs that dictated it Avengers style, in 1965-66 the set designer Harry Pottle marked a revolution in the history of English television scenography, exalted (for others, cut down), in the last two seasons, by Robert Jones. The two made it the environments the indispensable materialization of nature otherwise abstract of the characters and their world. While tradition believed that only the scenography for the big screen had a chrism of art, the creations of Pottle, and Jones, proved that television, in its lightning-fast realization times (scripts and sets composed in a weekend), could free the scenography from cinematographic naturalism.
In his book " Reading Between Designs. Visual Imagery and the Generation of Meaning in 'The Avengers', 'The prisoner', and 'Doctor Who'", Written with Simon J. Barker (2003, University of Texas Press), Piers D. Britton, professor of art history at the University of Redlands, demonstrates how scenography and furnishings of these three series, especially "The Avengers", thanks to the work of great artists remained almost unknown, expressed with the language of stylization, artifice, paradox (and self-quotation) the historical transition between postmodernism and pop culture. "The Avengers", for Britton, was not so much a series with a style, but a series on style; for the first time, a popular product was also an experimental and successful planetary work. The common point between the three series, according to Britton, is the emphasis on a stylized imagery, surprisingly associated with a realistic design; a absurd furnishings which expresses that post-modern irony that Umberto Eco described as a challenge with time, a remote play with the "already said" and the "already seen".
In the case of Pottle's sets, the audience was blinked mentally, and the use of kitsch and cliché expressed the concept of concealment underlying the series. "Kitsch for him," explains Britton, "had satirical potential because he worked on" The Avengers "in years when the refined tastes of the middle class had influence in England, and kitsch expressed comedian vulgarity and of the foreigner ". On the other hand, the cliché offered a double reading: "The authors understood that, unlike the satire, not very exportable, it was an excellent export product. Thus, the series, regardless of how the British would have read it, offered the foreign public a seductive cliché of British identity.
If to some British spectators Tara's apartment, furnished by Kenneth Tait, could appear young and daring, to others vulgar, across the sleeve he projected a hip image of Englishness, like that of Carnaby Street stores. " Not surprisingly, Tara lived at 9 Primrose Crescent. Since 1968, the principle of concealment has been exacerbated, becoming a play in the play, a playful mechanism, which Tara King's house reflects as much as the costumes of Alun Hughes, in being a showcase for the Chelsea girl, "a tableau of vintage objects, with the extravagant flower fabrics, the pink and gold from the candy store ". It is an aesthetic of the playroom, "and the game is that of accumulation: space becomes tactile, bright, full of gigantisms, of objects that encourage you to be touched, pervaded by an infantile pleasure for bright things and colors ".
Absent accumulation, however, in the establishment's furnishings, whose being above the world is expressed by a minimalism that transforms everything in line and purity, without space even for art. "Bob Jones' Avengers-land was a world in which the furnishings were the refined solos of a virtuoso; graceful notes, opposed to the clean lines of a bass. The objets d'art were transformed into elementary forms, the furniture and accessories were in the name of minimalist seriality on a pop scale, the intensity of the colors or the purity of the shape. In such an environment, the work of art becomes a footprint and appears when it has the function of caricature ".
Color also determines categories, as in the mansions of the British upper class government apparatus: an example of Simon Wakefield's decor in "Love All": "Purple is the color of sovereignty and empire, green suggests nature, and there is nothing more representative of the "Georgian" elegance of white. Stylized to the maximum, these sets shape nostalgia for a rural, feudal and aristocratic England; a fantasy England that the series "The Avengers" has created in its own measure, where the emptiness of the sets refers to the emptiness of this parody social world ". And if Postmodernism, with its playing with different eras and styles, and for which, quoting Britton, "the same notion of originality is antiquated", is perhaps beyond the reach of our daily life, today more than ever its sophisticated language would restore irony to an era that lacks it. For, as the American scholar admits, "the Postmodern predisposes to the suspension of judgment, to the ability to keep things in a state of unresolved mutual tension".