I would like to share with you two of my favourite documentaries - Civilisation, A Personal View by Kenneth Clark and Matthew Collings' This is Civilisation.
Lord Clark's passage of civilisation ended in 1967 with Heroic Materialism when western civilisation was once again haunted by a threat as menacing as the barbarians who trampled Rome when it escaped oblivion, as he started the series by saying, 'by the skin of the teeth'. At the time BBC aired the documentary no one in the West could fail to smell the imminent threat from the Soviet Union.
Four decades on, Matthew Collings presented to us his passage of civilisation (I finally found this article on guardian.co.uk) - This is Civilisation, at a time communist threat was replaced by other problems far more in number but lesser in magnitude. Collings follows the same route but with a pair of different, more secular eyes.
I love Lord Clark's trail which starts from the fall of Rome through the rise of Christianity and the Enlightenment to the maturing of capitalism, for I am a person who shares some of his beliefs (view his Stick in the Mud, you will know); of course, I am not as erudite and gentlemanly as he was, not to mention I am not a member of the peerage or I am unable to be old-school.
If I were 20 years younger, I won't like Collings' revisit of the same trail. I would dimiss as nonsense his comparison of Islamic art with Jackson Pollock. I would not accept his perspective on topics such as Christianity and modern art. But now I am old enough and open enough to 'appreciate' that.
Both talk heavily about art but do not simplistically reduce civilisation to art. Lord Clark's brief introduction, 'I don't know what civilisation is but I think I'd know when I see it, and I am seeing it now' (idea) when standing in front of Notre Dame Paris, adequately summarises what takes a journey of civilsiation to start.
Hope you enjoy both.
