[2][3] The narration of the film is done through the mouth of a statue of the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, which Kaiser Wilhelm II had removed from the Achilleion palace on Corfu after he took over ownership from Empress Elisabeth of Austria.

Excavating on Corfu, the scholar Kaiser on the scent of long lost temple pediment not filling trenches, excavating the trenches where the Gorgon's waiting there in the trenches to supervise the unearthing of the Gorgon's eyes.Harrison uses the myth of the petrifying gaze of the Gorgon to analyse the common elements of the war-related atrocities of the twentieth century and to demonstrate that the war crimes of governments or the social failures of the capitalist system transcend historical time periods and they have the common element of turning individuals and societies to metaphorical stones as demonstrated by their apathy, inflexibility and intolerance.

Harrison concludes his 1992 film-poem by making a proposal that in the 1994 European Union summit in Corfu, Heine's statue be returned to the Corfu Achilleion, where the European leaders held their meetings, in time to assume the presidency of the new Europe so that EU can keep its eyes open:[6][13][14][15]Soon, in 1994, in this palace Greece starts to restore, in this the Kaiser's old retreat Europe's heads of state will meet,...So to commemorate that rendezvousof ECU statesmen in CorfuI propose that in that yearthey bring the dissident back hereand to keep new Europe open-eyedthey let the marble poet presideThe book Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma mentions that Harrison points to the muted response of the Western world to the traumatic events during the Gulf war as an indication of the petrifying effect of Gorgon's gaze.

[18] English Social and Cultural History: An Introductory Guide and Glossary mentions that Harrison has also been called "the Gorgon poet" because of this work.

[20] Canadian Poetry comments that Harrison "uses two monuments, an ancient "pediment…featur[ing] a giant Gorgon" and a "marble statue of [the] dissident German Jewish poet" Heinrich Heine to confront Kaiser William II's legacy to the twentieth century".

[22] Professor Roger Griffin Department of History Oxford Brookes University in his paper The palingenetic political community: rethinking the legitimation of totalitarian regimes in inter-war Europe calls Harrison's film-poem "magnificent" and comments that he is trying to tell his audience "to avoid falling prey to the collective mirage of a new order, to stay wide awake while others succumb to the lethe of the group mind, to resist the gaze of modern Gorgons".

By using his verse-documentary, Robinson continues, Harrison is trying to force his audience, through his art, not to turn away from the horrors and atrocities which would otherwise make them try to avoid and forget them.

By doing that he is trying to make these events memorable through art and therefore help people not to forget the horrors and atrocities that are an integral part of their common memory and therefore essential to a life worth living.

Harrison achieves this because of the continuing narration of his poem which reaches his audience through their ear, thus helping them, through his art, absorb the events and make them part of their collective memory.