Category Archive: Documentary
Civilisation
(by Kenneth Clark) Really a compilation of scripts for a television series, this book, much ridiculed and parodied over the years (remember Monty Python’s “Are you civilised? Have you been civilised recently?”), is a wonderful, personal, informed view of humankind and culture from classical times to the then present (1968). Elegiac, nostalgic, pessimistic; almost everything in the arts since has borne out Clark’s view that “we can destroy ourselves by cynicism* and disillusion, just as effectively as bombs.” [* A cynic being a “man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” – Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s…
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(dir. J. Berlinger & J. Sinofsky) (1992) A great, ambling account of a yokel murder case. One of the Ward boys (farmers with arrested development, putting it mildly) ups and dies; the State thinks one of the other Ward boys dun it. Film-makers get an extra half-star for inhaling near the Ward boys. Note to DA’s pathologist and the defence attorney: never appear on film again. It’s all a little exploitative, but unmissible all the same.
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