11. Civilisation

 

by Allan Fish

the next in the series of small screen classics

(UK 1969 670m) DVD1/2

Man – the measure of all things

p  Michael Gill, Peter Montagnon  d  Michael Gill, Peter Montagnon, Ann Turner  w  Kenneth Clark

presented by  Kenneth Clark (with Ian Richardson, Patrick Stewart, Ronald Lacey, Eric Porter (voice))

There are so many reasons to venerate Kenneth Clark’s monumental – in every sense – small screen undertaking.  It was the first of the mammoth documentary series that came to redefine the BBC’s factual programming unit in the seventies.  It was the first major series undertaken in the colour age.  It was the start of a series of three such momentous works – Alistair Cooke’s America and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man are the others – that still stand as magnificently as the rocks at Stonehenge in British – and thus world – television history.  It is on the foundations laid here, and on those laid by Cooke, Bronowski and later the natural history programmes of David Attenborough (who had a large part to play in persuading Kenneth Clark to do this epic series when a BBC2 administrator in the mid-late sixties) that all the wonders of the digital age documentaries from around the millennium, from The Blue Planet to Auschwitz to A History of Britain, stand fast.  It might be old school, but its targets, modus operandi and intentions are probably more relevant than ever.

Clark’s “personal view” in Civilisation begins at the end of the Dark Ages, a period where civilisation itself was all but extinguished by the fall of the Roman Empire.  In his own words, the title of his first episode, we survived by “the skin of our teeth“, and this phrase seems all the more prescient today.  In a modern world where life itself is hanging in there like a boxer waiting for the bell, staggering like Victor McLaglen’s drunken Gypo Nolan to a place of refuge, society itself is once more under threat.  He discusses in this episode how civilisation is remembered, by words, deeds and art.  All three last, but the most lasting is in art.  And he’s right, for who but scholars remember the campaigns and Renaissance inter-family plotting of the Sforzas, Borgias and Dei Medicis, while who can forget the work of Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo?  He covers all forms of art, be it in architecture, sculpture, painting, printing, writing, theology, philosophy, or even music; Beethoven and Mozart rubbing shoulders with Shakespeare, Rembrandt, St Francis of Assisi, Charlemagne, Gislbertus, Dante, Giotto, Botticelli, Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, Vermeer, Wren, Bernini, Handel, Voltaire, Wordsworth, Byron, Delacroix, Rodin, Tolstoy, Brunel, Turner and Constable.  Their works are part of the western consciousness, part of our very fibre.  As man is created equal by the intrinsic belief in God, so art is seen as created equal by Clark.

In closing, however, there’s a wonderful irony.  Made in 1969, the only art Clark really doesn’t mention – though he pays little attention to opera – is the seventh art.  This is the art of the 20^th century, and it is not mentioned.  Yet it is through the use of this seventh discipline, and its offspring television, that such arts and views on these arts, are best represented to the masses.  How many thousands of books could invoke as much interest in a given subject as documentaries presented by the aforementioned Bronowski, Cooke, Simon Schama, Michael Wood, or David Attenborough?  Just think how the masters of a previous art, that of music, have entered into the seventh – Prokofiev, Walton, Korngold, Shostakovich, etc – and how the seventh art brings new life and passion to the works of literature and the theatre, and we see what power the moving image has on the public conscience.  It was that in itself that, back in 1969, Kenneth Clark couldn’t quite see, but I’m sure after the event, he was most pleasantly converted to the power of the new medium.  For who is to say that, forty years on, if someone takes it upon himself to do another such series, the names listed above will not be joined by Buñuel, Eisenstein, Bergman and Renoir, the latter of whom and his parentage, sums up exactly what Clark is saying.  All art is equal, and long may it remain so.