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23.5 Degrees: More Bloodline Musings
By Stella Maris
October 04, 2008
Light blobs on the transept wall of
Saint Sulpice in Paris
© Alain Brethereau
Okay, well I thought I'd do the decent thing and buy a proper commercial DVD of Bloodline--The Movie, even though I already had a complimentary review copy of it. Actually, to be honest, I really only bought it because I wanted to analyze their version of the "Dossiers Secrets", which was offered for free with advance orders.
So, we all got our advance order copies in the UK last week...
Firstly, the advertized free "Dossiers Secrets" wasn't included, after all, so we're having to chase for that (no response so far).
Secondly, be aware when ordering that the extremely basically-packaged UK PAL version of the DVD doesn't contain any extra "Bonus Features" or outtakes (as far as I can tell, unless there's a secret code needed to access the clips).
The NTSC version comes in a proper DVD case with blurb and contains a few extras such as excerpts from an interview with "Nicolas Haywood of the Priory of Sion", the "British Museum examines the 1st century chest" and the "Coded messages at the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France", among other bits.
As I know both Saint Sulpice and the British Museum set-up very well, I made a beeline for those segments and immediately grasped why these scenes had been deleted from the original version of the movie…
A noted "expert" in the Sulpice outtake claimed that the gnomon in the church was actually the "marker for the Paris Meridian" that runs down to Rennes-le-Chateau... but anyone who spends even thirty seconds on a Google search can see for themselves that the Sulpice gnomon isn’t actually the same as the Paris Zero Meridian (which is located 300 meters to the east) - which doesn’t run through Rennes-le-Chateau itself, and not even through the so-called Poussin Tomb, even if it was.
Then, the "expert" explained how the sun comes in through a stained glass window (so far so good) on the Summer Solstice and runs along the "meridian line" across the church and up a significantly Egyptian-styled obelisk...
But, anyone who has spent any time actually watching this process will know that the gnomon is broken - the lens hasn't been functioning for years, so all you can see are blobs of light on the northern wall of the transept (in fact, you can actually see a lightblob in the background on the film sequence, if you know what you are looking for).
Furthermore, the sunbeam on the Summer Solstice was designed to alight on the marble plaque (on which they are actually standing in the film sequence) directly under the south transept window. The sunbeam aligns with the altar on the Equinoxes and only reaches as far as the obelisk on the Winter Solstice, when the sun is lower in the sky.
And there's no big coded secret about the obelisk. It was nothing more than just a clever way of accommodating the fact that Sulpice's transept is only 170 feet wide, which is 70 feet short of the 240 feet needed to measure the Midwinter sun at its furthest point (i.e., the exact solstice). So the astronomers came up with the clever idea of running the copper gnomon line vertically up the wall, incorporated into a decorative obelisk in the style of the Emperor Augustus' own Roman time keeping device (okay, which admittedly contained a real obelisk that Augustus had stolen from Egypt). The beam didn't even go all the way up to the gold ball at the top, it only went about halfway, because of the low angle of the sun on the solstice.
I won't even go into the rest of it, I'll just start ranting.
The British Museum sequence appears to be blatantly stage-managed. Ben Hammott is filmed walking into the museum carrying a supposedly ancient chest in what looks like bubble-wrap. He stops to ask directions at an Information desk in the lobby (if he'd genuinely had an appointment, then he would have known exactly where to go), then he's filmed walking through an exhibition hall and in and out of elevators. No information is given as to which department he attended or which expert he spoke to - he's only filmed "afterwards" waiting for an elevator again, describing his feelings about the meeting, which had allegedly just transpired, as "elated" because the dating of the artifacts had been confirmed by an unidentified museum expert as 1st century.
Anyway, I would recommend that, if you absolutely must see this film out of morbid curiosity, that you download it from the site for 6 bucks, especially since the UK PAL version doesn't include any extras anyway.
Or, better still, if I had the time and the resources, I'd organize a free Bloodline screening party for all and sundry here in London, where we could all dress up as Templars and drink Bloody Marys... at least that way we might have more fun than I heard the attendees of the screening in Rennes-le-Chateau had.
Sorry, I just had to get all that off my chest (no pun intended!). I'll let you know if I ever get my "free" Haywood dossiers...
Lastly, a secret squirrel message to Bruce Burgess... if you want to have a whinge at me, there's no point in asking Michael Baigent for my private email address - all you need to do is scroll down to the "Contact Us" link below and Chip will happily forward your message to me.
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