The BEST episodes directed by Michael Gill
#1 - Heroic Materialism
Civilisation - Season 1 - Episode 13
To conclude this landmark series, Kenneth Clark considers the ways in which the heroic materialism of the past hundred years has been linked to an equally remarkable increase in humanitarianism. The achievement of engineers and scientists such as Brunel and Rutherford has been matched by the work of great reformers like Wilberforce and Shaftesbury. As Clark notes, the concept of kindness only became important in the last century.
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#2 - Man: The Measure of all Things
Civilisation - Season 1 - Episode 4
Kenneth Clark continues his personal reflections on civilisation with a look at Renaissance man. Clark visits Florence, where the resurrection of a classical past first gave a new impetus to European thought, and then journeys to the palaces of Urbino and Mantua, where the Renaissance manifested itself in glorious architecture. He talks of Humanism and of perspective, of Donatello, Botticelli and Van Eyck.
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#3 - The Light of Experience
Civilisation - Season 1 - Episode 8
Here Clark tells of new worlds in space and in a drop of water that the telescope and microscope revealed, and the new realism in the Dutch paintings which took the observation of human character to a higher stage of development.
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#4 - The Fallacies of Hope
Civilisation - Season 1 - Episode 12
'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive' wrote Wordsworth of the early days of the French Revolution, but the storming of the Bastille led not to freedom but to the Terror, the dictatorship of Napoleon and the dreary bureaucracies of the 19th Century. Kenneth Clark traces the progressive disillusionment of the artists of the Romantic movement through the music of Beethoven, the poetry of Byron and the sculpture of Rodin.
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#5 - The Skin of our Teeth
Civilisation - Season 1 - Episode 1
Sir Kenneth Clark begins his classic 1969 series on the history of civilisation with the re-establishment of civilisation in Western Europe, in the tenth century after the fall of Rome to barbarism. He travels from Byzantine Ravenna to the Celtic Hebrides examining aqueducts, cathedrals, the lives of the Vikings and of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne.
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#6 - The Smile of Reason
Civilisation - Season 1 - Episode 10
Kenneth Clark looks at the beginnings of revolutionary politics in the 18th Century. His theme takes him from great palaces like Blenheim and Versailles, to Edinburgh, and to the hills of Virginia where Thomas Jefferson made his home in the 1760s.
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#7 - Romance and Reality
Civilisation - Season 1 - Episode 3
Kenneth Clark journeys from the Loire through Tuscany and Umbria, to the cathedral at Pisa. He explores the aspirations of the later Middle Ages in France and Italy, looking at the work of Giotto and Dante among other artists.
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#8 - Three Swings On A Pendulum
BBC Documentaries - Season 1967 - Episode 1
First transmitted in 1967, this documentary asks whether London really was 'swinging' during the 1960s.The film follows arts reporter Robert Hughes, writer Lewis Nkosi and journalist Olivier Todd to gather an Australian, African and French perspective on whether London really deserved its reputation as being a 'swinging, switched on' city. They begin their journey in Carnaby Street, the Mecca of swinging London.
#9 - Francis Bacon: Fragments Of A Portrait
BBC Documentaries - Season 1966 - Episode 3
Francis Bacon's paintings have been called sick and corrupt. He has also been hailed as the greatest British painter since Turner. This film study - Bacon's first appearance on BBC Television - shows his work and its sources, and critically assesses his paintings. (1966)