27:42 minutes
Across a banner bearing the words ‘end of uncertainty’, a game of billiards is played out by three shadowy figures. The balls however move in a way that defies the laws of nature. As the game unfolds, a male and a female narrator read from TE Lawrence’s famous memoir ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ 1922, an account of British military adventure on the Arabian Peninsula during World War I. The spoken words embody the concept of ‘the great game’, a phrase denoting power rivalry between global super-powers, and as pertinent to the current era as to the preceding two centuries.
“I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us. Mecca was to lead to Damascus; Damascus to Anatolia, and afterwards to Bagdad; and then there was Yemen. Fantasies, these will seem, to such as are able to call my beginning an ordinary effort.”
T.E. Lawrence