Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in June 1981, inaugurating a series of films about a daredevil, anti-Nazi and somewhat cowboy archaeologist. The character is a hodgepodge of authentic archaeologists who are sometimes just as diehard as he is.
Scene from the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (released in 1981)
This is the shocking revelation of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , the third film featuring the eponymous character in 1989:"Indiana" is actually the name... of the family dog, an Alaskan Malamute. The adventurous archaeologist is named after his father, Henry. But Henry Junior didn't like it. To tell the truth, the truth is still elsewhere:Indiana was the name of George Lucas' dog in the early 1970s, when the American producer-director invented this character for a B-movie adventure. The animal, a big beast hairy 65 kg, also inspired the character of Chewbacca from Star Wars (1977).
Portrayed by Harrison Ford, Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones Jr. made his first appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark 40 years ago, in June 1981 (Walton is the middle name of George Lucas). Three other films will follow and a fifth is planned for 2022. For the occasion, Arte is broadcasting on May 14 Indiana Jones, in search of the lost golden age , a never-before-seen documentary by Clélia Cohen and Antoine Coursat about what has become, for better or worse, a pop culture icon.
The character was first called Indiana Smith. At the end of May 1977, George Lucas was in Hawaii with his friend Steven Spielberg. This now famous stay away from Hollywood is used to escape the theatrical release of his third feature film, Star Wars who, according to him, will make a huge flop and sign the end of his career. It was while discussing with Spielberg that Lucas changed the name to Jones - Indiana Smith is a little too reminiscent of the western Nevada Smith .
Inspirations at the University of Chicago?
While one no longer wants to hear about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and the other is still working on Encounter of the Third Kind (1977), the two filmmakers develop together their hero, doctor in archeology and anthropology, disciple of the fictitious Egyptologist from the University of Chicago Abner Ravenwood, teacher in a university (the fictitious Marshall College or the Barnett College of the State of New York according to the films) in the mid-1930s. Three of the four episodes are set between 1935 and 1938, in a world over which lies the menacing shadow of Nazism. "Indy", as the archaeologist is nicknamed, is a patchwork, drawing on adventure novels, comics and cinema from the 1930s to 1950s, of which the Arte documentary multiplies the welcome examples. Sometimes disturbing, even, as some shots of "Indiana Jones" are real copies of past feature films.
The assumptions as to the authentic researchers who served as models are numerous.
This is the shocking revelation of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , the third film featuring the eponymous character in 1989:"Indiana" is actually the name... of the family dog, an Alaskan Malamute. The adventurous archaeologist is named after his father, Henry. But Henry Junior didn't like it. To tell the truth, the truth is still elsewhere:Indiana was the name of George Lucas' dog in the early 1970s, when the American producer-director invented this character for a B-movie adventure. The animal, a big beast hairy 65 kg, also inspired the character of Chewbacca from Star Wars (1977).
Portrayed by Harrison Ford, Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones Jr. made his first appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark 40 years ago, in June 1981 (Walton is the middle name of George Lucas). Three other films will follow and a fifth is planned for 2022. For the occasion, Arte is broadcasting on May 14 Indiana Jones, in search of the lost golden age , a never-before-seen documentary by Clélia Cohen and Antoine Coursat about what has become, for better or worse, a pop culture icon.
The character was first called Indiana Smith. At the end of May 1977, George Lucas was in Hawaii with his friend Steven Spielberg. This now famous stay away from Hollywood is used to escape the theatrical release of his third feature film, Star Wars who, according to him, will make a huge flop and sign the end of his career. It was while discussing with Spielberg that Lucas changed the name to Jones - Indiana Smith is a little too reminiscent of the western Nevada Smith .
Inspirations at the University of Chicago?
While one no longer wants to hear about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and the other is still working on Encounter of the Third Kind (1977), the two filmmakers develop together their hero, doctor in archeology and anthropology, disciple of the fictitious Egyptologist from the University of Chicago Abner Ravenwood, teacher in a university (the fictitious Marshall College or the Barnett College of the State of New York according to the films) in the mid-1930s. Three of the four episodes are set between 1935 and 1938, in a world over which lies the menacing shadow of Nazism. "Indy", as the archaeologist is nicknamed, is a patchwork, drawing on adventure novels, comics and cinema from the 1930s to 1950s, of which the Arte documentary multiplies the welcome examples. Sometimes disturbing, even, as some shots of "Indiana Jones" are real copies of past feature films.
His name may be that of a dog, but is the character modeled after genuine researchers? The assumptions are many. For example Robert Braidwood (1907-2003), a specialist in the prehistory of the Near East who took his first steps in the field in 1933, in Syria, as part of an expedition led by the founder of the Oriental Institute of University of Chicago (in 1919), James Henry Breasted (1865-1935). The latter, a pioneer of Egyptology in the United States, participated in the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. Inventor of the expression "Fertile Crescent", he would be the model of Abner Ravenwood (who did not does not appear in the movies).
On December 12, 2012, the University of Chicago Admissions Department was surprised to receive a letter addressed to "Henry Walton Jones Jr.", stamped with old Egyptian stamps! Even better:it contained the diary of Abner Ravenwood, which Indiana Jones consults in Raiders of the Lost Ark (the action is located in Egypt), newspaper clippings from the 1930s, maps, photos of his daughter Marion (Karen Allen in the film)… Has the fiction taken shape? The diary was actually a copy of the one from the film, bought on eBay by a surfer in Italy and lost in the maze of postal services.
The Adventurer of the Lost City
But Indiana Jones would have other inspirations. Percy Fawcett (1867-1925?) being the most commonly cited. A British explorer and member of the Royal Geographical Society, he disappeared in 1925 while looking for the "lost city of Z" in the Amazon forest. His story was the subject of a book by David Grann, adapted for film by James Gray. Embarked on crazy expeditions between Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, this former Indian army colonel had time to report many stories of confrontations with hostile nature. Giant anaconda, vampire bats, unidentified swamp monsters, rafting in the rapids… Indiana Jones before its time, from which Arthur Conan Doyle, a friend of Fawcett, drew many ideas for writing The lost world (1912).
Visually, the Indiana Jones model is called Harry Steele. He is the adventurer embodied by Charlton Heston in The Secret of the Incas in 1954. It's all there, the fedora on the head, the leather jacket over a light shirt, the little scoundrel and scruffy look. And for good reason:the costume designer of Raiders of the Lost Ark Deborah Landis readily admitted to being more than inspired by it to dress Indy. Now, the hero of Secret of the Incas is a copy of the American Hiram Bingham III (1875-1956) whose photos appeared in National Geographic served as a reference. Hiram Bingham III was not an archaeologist by training. He taught South American history at Yale University. This led him to go on an expedition, to go down in history as the first Westerner to discover, in July 1911, the Inca city of Machu Picchu in Peru.
Hotheads and tough guys
For the hotheaded and tough side, the clues strongly point to an American naturalist and self-taught taxidermist. Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960) began in the study of whales. It was while traveling through Asia in search of fossils of ancient mammals that he discovered dinosaur eggs associated with a complete skeleton of an oviraptor in the Gobi Desert. A feat to which he will owe his fame. He would end up director of the New York Museum of Natural History in 1934 after having started his career there as a simple maintenance worker in the taxidermy department.
Roy Chapman Andrews is the archetype of the archaeologist-adventurer, a portrait he himself refined in his books, with all kinds of falls, face-to-face with a whale, a python, wild dogs , gun-to-hand confrontations with desert bandits. To complete the picture, he hated snakes. Like Indiana Jones.
Another colorful figure is sometimes mentioned, Wendell Phillips (1921-1975), a paleontologist from the University of California at Berkeley. Flamboyant, media-savvy and controversial, in 1951 he led the first American archaeological expedition to Yemen, where he worked on the excavation of the ancient city of Timna and the capital of the kingdom of Sheba, Ma'rib. He is the second Westerner, after Lawrence of Arabia, to have been elevated to the rank of sheik, in this case of the Bebouin tribe of Balharith.
Colt. 45 in the Indy-style belt, laden with sponsors (including the arms manufacturer), he forged strong friendships with the kings and sultans of the Arabian Peninsula. But he too had, according to his own writings, his share of tough incidents with hostile natives and warring tribes. He would also have been treated to a meal, as in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). In this case goat eyes. Phillips transformed himself in the mid-1950s into a businessman and oil magnate.
An excavation site in Iraq
That's not all. In 2014, an article from the Chicago Grandstand devoted to the representation of archaeological work in the films of Indiana Jones evokes the anthropologist Henry Field (1902-1986). Tanis dig site set created for Raiders of the Lost Ark says researcher looks unmistakably like one of Field's construction sites in what is now Iraq in the late 1920s, where children were not averse to child labour. Watch the video below:
In the midst of this crossfire of supposed influences, one man has, on the contrary, always denied having inspired Indiana Jones. It was Walter Fairservis (1921-1994), who led the first American archaeological expedition to Afghanistan in 1949. , he revealed that he had been consulted by the production of Raiders of the Lost Ark . At the time, he was curator at the Museum of Natural History in New York. He had been asked what a typical archaeologist should look like, and he had described his own attire when he was in the field.
The cowboy of exotic lands
However, Spielberg and Lucas never cited any scientists. Their hero is a composite nourished by popular imagery, itself resulting, with a good dose of exaggeration and romance, from the adventures of authentic personalities. Indiana Jones is ultimately nothing more than yet another variant of the cowboy figure in a wilderness hostile, transplanted into an exotic context.
Never on a dig site, except to infiltrate the German-controlled Tanis, Indiana Jones mostly plays anti-Nazi vigilante and treasure hunter. Even the grave robbers if we stick to the very first scene of the first film in the series. In January 1978, George Lucas did not describe the character differently during a work meeting with Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan:"He started looking for antiques and this activity was turned out to be very lucrative, so that rather than an archaeologist, he became a kind of outlaw in archeology. He began to be a mercenary in looting of graves. Museums hire him to go and strip for them tombs and other such sites." Under these conditions, it is probably more practical for everyone that Henry Walton Jones Junior adopted the name of an Alaskan Malamute.