There was a strong camaraderie amongst the crew. Montagnon recalled, ‘Tubby and Ken worked well. Ken was a man on the up. Occasionally, we would all go out and get drunk on location. I remember Ken and myself climbing back into the hotel room one night in Germany. We needed a bit of relaxation with such long filming schedules.’17 The crew would start at seven or eight in the morning for the light, then set up for Clark, who would appear at ten. Jane sometimes joined him on set, where she was always his first concern. Civvy turned out to be an Indian summer for their marriage, which had not been so happy for years – it was their last burst of luxury on a Grand Tour that covered favourite old haunts and took them to significant new ones like Aachen and Conques. Clark was enjoying himself hugely, and looked forward to every day’s filming. The BBC made life as comfortable as possible for him, providing a car and driver. ‘It was all incredibly grand,’ remembered Maggie Crane, one of the crew. ‘We would spend all day or several days getting the shots set up and K would arrive at the last moment. He would insist on showing us things as we drove up France which had nothing to do with the series.’18
At first Clark had approached the crew with a degree of diffidence, but this soon wore off. Ken Macmillan describes the process: ‘He was never patrician or haughty to us, but had a shy charm. At first he would have dinner with Michael or Peter alone with Jane, but he gradually discovered the fun of the crew, who were a very mixed bunch. He then took to joining us for dinner, and it was probably a new experience for him to be part of a working team. He loved being included in the group, which created affection. He would sit rather quietly through dinner and rarely drank much, except a brandy after with a thin cigar.’19 Clark frequently surprised the crew. Macmillan recalls that they had a large autocue which they used for every shot: ‘He read every line, but he was very good at sounding warm and sincere on camera. He rapidly de-iced with us, and I remember on the ferry to Iona he waved at me, “You should come and look at this which will interest you,” and it was eight lusty highland girls dancing a reel together.’20 Clark was to astonish the crew during the filming of one of the early episodes when he carried the medieval Cross of Lothair up to the altar of Aachen Cathedral, and burst into tears. Michael Gill, who before that point had thought of Clark as a cold and unemotional man, had to change his opinion. Nor was this the last time that the crew would be surprised to see Clark suddenly weeping: it happened again during the filming of episode 6, Protest and Communication, when he was standing at the church door at Wittenberg – the shot took six takes because as he proclaimed Luther’s putative words ‘Here I stand!’ he kept breaking down.
Macmillan felt that if Jane was present, ‘Clark became more edgy and anxious. He would whisk her away before any trouble; and at dinner he would say: “Come on Jane, time to go up!” Jane was very nice if slightly fey. She always had a silver flask in her handbag.’21 Jane was certainly high-risk on set, and an anxiety to Michael Gill. The Clarks usually stayed at different hotels from the crew, more for reasons of privacy than luxury – Clark, with his elephantine memory, would specify not only the hotel but the room he wanted.22 Gill found Clark’s hotel and restaurant choices distressingly grand and banal, but they may simply have reflected an older generation’s desire for a dependable meal and a good night’s sleep. The crew were ambivalent about Jane: ‘We were aware that he had mistresses,’ Peter Montagnon explained, ‘but we could see that Jane was a difficult creature. She was too far gone to be charming. We were happier when she was not there, as she could hold things up, especially if they had rows – which resulted sometimes in K taking to drink himself. I remember watching him in the car mirror sitting in the back drinking whisky from the bottle.’23 Clark, on the other hand, thought that Jane ‘rather enjoys the sense of concerted action that film-making produces’.24 The crew were surprised that when she henpecked her husband in public he never reacted or attempted to restrain her. He also made no reference to Jane’s drinking, although they certainly witnessed it. Ann Turner remembered that during filming at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome they left Jane ‘at the foot of the church steps, and when we came out she was plastered’.25
Michael Gill and Peter Montagnon had an excellent working relationship, and divided the programmes according to their own tastes and what came up. Gill was the most astringent of the three directors, and for him the focus was always on the idea, the word and the story. Ken Macmillan thought that ‘Michael was basically a journalist, and writing was always the most important element for him. He wasn’t particularly visual, and that’s where we came in. I think he understood that.’26 Clark and Ken would often have an idea for a different shot to Gill; they would catch each other’s eye, Clark would wink, and without Gill realising Ken would quietly set it up. Clark also had a close rapport with Basil Harris, the sound recordist, which perturbed the directors. Montagnon recalled: ‘We were annoyed that he listened so much to Bas – although this was no bad plan because Bas was usually right.’27
The differences between the Montagnon and Gill episodes are interesting. The crew thought that Peter had rather more imaginative ideas and took more risks, but Michael was the more effective and reliable director; his programmes were technically better, and more tightly constructed. Michael directed the first episode, The Skin of Our Teeth, which along with the last was always going to be the most difficult to get right. There was endless argument about how the series should begin – with a bang, or slide into it? The Paris opening, if a little clichéd, worked well. Gill loved the fact that Clark was prepared to say that civilisation was almost snuffed out, and ‘we nearly didn’t make it’.28 Peter Montagnon directed episode 2, The Great Thaw, and Clark thought he made a terrible hash of it, redeemed by editing.*3 If Peter was out of sympathy with the subject, Clark thought ‘he could go terribly wrong’ – he was at his best with exuberant subjects such as the Catholic revival, Grandeur and Obedience, and the Rococo episode, The Pursuit of Happiness.
Ann Turner may have been patronised by Michael, but she was the person on whose knowledge and organisation the series most depended. Clark correctly thought that she ‘felt she was being slighted and so was given a programme which the other two did not like’.29 Michael gave her episode 4, Man the Measure of All Things, about the Florentine Renaissance, because as Montagnon admitted, ‘Michael and I found the content unsympathetic, too absolutist, and disagreed with the idea of man as the measure of all things.’30 The crew found Ann a nervous director. This should have been Clark’s favourite episode, as Florence was his spiritual home, but he felt ‘I talked much too fast…and the whole thing does not have the relaxed feeling of the other programmes.’31 There was an external reason for this anxiety: in 1966 the city had suffered a terrible flood, the effects of which were made worse because floodwater was contaminated with oil stored in basements. This had a gravely deleterious effect on marble, paintings, documents and works of art on paper. Quite apart from Clark’s distress at the damage Florence had suffered, either filming had to be drastically curtailed or the crew had to move to another location. As Gill, who was in London, recalled, ‘Neither option seemed very palatable.’ Uncertain how to proceed, he put a call through to Italy: ‘I asked Clark if he would like a day [to consider the options]. The answer came at once and briskly, “Oh no, I’ll write [episode] Number Five. It’s got the advantage of keeping us in Italy…I’ll have it ready for you when you arrive.” ’32 That was only three days away, and the script was finished, as Clark had promised, by the time Gill arrived. Gill judged it ‘fresh, caustic, and pithy…one of the best scripts I had read. Well, well, I thought; if he continues like this there may be a book here anyway.’33
Clark particularly enjoyed filming at Assisi and Urbino: ‘Assisi is more uplifting – in this it is second only to Chartres. But Urbino is such a sweet place – so compact, so humane and without any of the air of exploitation which is a slight drawback at Assisi (very slight – less than Stratford). As for the palace of Urbino, it is the most ravishin
g interior in the world.’34 He observed, however, that ‘All producers long to get away from works of art, and take film of sheep being milked, etc.’ Gill insisted that each episode should at some point bring in the present, and on the hills above Urbino they found scenes straight out of Giorgione. The Mayor of Urbino certainly saw the benefits of filming the town, and put on a banquet for the crew; the wisdom of his actions was proved when Civilisation put Urbino on the tourist map. Grandeur and Obedience is the only episode filmed in one location, Rome. It and episode 9, The Pursuit of Happiness (both directed by Montagnon), are the most emotional in the series. Michael Gill might have toned these down, but Peter revelled in them, and for episode 7 he recalled ‘hiring an aeroplane to fly over the Vatican with a photographer pilot with myself and Ken. The Vatican came to trust us and left us alone: the prestige of the BBC helped a great deal.’35 There were two especially memorable scenes in this episode. The first was of Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of St Teresa in the church of S. Maria della Vittoria: perfect, sensuous camerawork on a great subject by a great artist, illustrating the Catholic revival, and accompanied by the saint’s words telling of her moment of ecstasy – which Clark then unstitches by showing a plain portrait of the real Teresa. The other great scene was the ending. Montagnon recalled: ‘When we were filming in the Vatican, K wanted to finish the programme about the Baroque with some enormous room, because he said the mind of the seventeenth century was used to living in these huge rooms.’36 They hit on the idea of a mesmerically long shot reversing back down the interminable Gallery of Maps.
The Pursuit of Happiness is the most indulgent of the programmes, and one of the most original. Clark enjoyed revisiting German pilgrimage churches and showing them to Jane for the first time. This episode was to be about music – a key factor in the series. Clark and Montagnon chose the music for all the episodes so that the extracts had been written within twenty years of the art they illustrated, but as Clark told Janet: ‘What to do with Bach!! He was so Protestant, one can hardly illustrate him by Catholic architecture, and there is no Bach town like Dürer’s Nuremberg.’37 They had no choice but to have Bach’s music alongside the Rococo churches, and nobody complained. Montagnon recalled: ‘It was extraordinarily difficult to light the great church of Vierzehnheiligen to get the detail. We had an enormous number of lights, perhaps twenty, with two special lighting crews who took all day to set up. Otherwise it came out flat as a pancake.’38 He believes that Clark revealed himself most fully in this episode, and came out with his innermost feelings. Clark’s inclusion of the Rococo passage from Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey was a masterstroke, and seemed to describe perfectly the world of Watteau’s paintings.
Perhaps the most unsung member of the Civilisation team was the brilliant editor, Allan Tyrer, considered the best in television, brought in for Monitor by Huw Wheldon. Peter Montagnon singled out the point in The Pursuit of Happiness when Clark is reading the passage from Sterne, and there is the elision of string music just as he reads the words ‘the natural notes of some sweet melody’ – ‘a masterpiece and the work of wonderful Allan’.39 Michael Gill generously said of the episode, ‘I am certain that this is the best film so far. Even without the music it’s clear that it is magical…if the flower people have not all been blown away by 1969 this film should become their anthem.’40 Clark agreed, as he told Mary Potter: ‘The Rococo is a dream – in fact the best programme I have ever seen on Television!’41 Montagnon concluded, ‘This episode is more a work of art than a work of history.’42
David Attenborough had anticipated that the directors would come back and ask for more money: ‘Peter and Michael had the wit to come and ask me after they had shown me a particularly effective section of a rough cut they had put together, and I recklessly said, “Michael, that’s exactly what we’re looking for. Wonderful.” ’43 Attenborough was able to come up with extra finance by a simple ruse. Television was funded in those days by the hour or slot, and repeats were unknown. Attenborough thought, ‘This was so marvellous that anybody seeing this would want to see it for a second time. So I decided there and then that we would show each episode twice in the same week, and that meant that I halved my per-hour cost, which was great.’44 The main surprise for Attenborough was that the programmes ‘encompassed not just art but Beethoven and Montaigne, something I had not expected. But whichever way you look at it, they are important figures – and the fact that the series made anyone aware of them made it all worth it.’45 The programmes were to be fifty minutes long; as their commercial success depended on sales to the US they had to be able to accommodate regular commercial breaks within an hour, and when Time Life executives came over to London this was their main concern.
Gill and Montagnon evolved the idea of letting the camera linger and caress certain works of art to music, and such sequences came to be known facetiously as ‘commercials’: a notable example was the moment of sheer eroticism as the camera rises slowly up the thighs of Donatello’s bronze David. Gill was always looking for ways of using images that would go beyond Clark’s script. Two scenes have remained the subject of much debate. One is the actors on set declaiming Shakespeare in episode 6, Protest and Communication. Although this was a Montagnon production, it was Gill’s idea to show actors performing extracts from Macbeth, King Lear and Hamlet. Many, including Attenborough at the time, thought these scenes were out of place, and inconsistent with the style of the programmes.46 They certainly interrupt the narrative, and Clark afterwards admitted, ‘we could never decide what to do about [Shakespeare]’. He thought the awkwardness arose from the choice of ‘an old actor [playing Lear] who had a great success in the part in the 1920s and very little success since’.47 The other much-debated scene was the so-called ‘Osterley-on-Sea’ moment in episode 10, The Smile of Reason. Gill thought that a visual metaphor was needed for leaving the finite, symmetrical, enclosed world of the eighteenth century for the infinite and uncontrolled world of Romanticism that lay ahead. Clark passes under the portico of Osterley Park, a Neoclassical mansion which is actually located in a London suburb, and in a coup de théâtre faces a churning ocean. The crew couldn’t find a convenient coast with big enough waves, and so settled for a close-up of a rocky bit of Cornwall and turned up the music. Clark regretted the contrivance, as everything else in the series was filmed with complete authenticity.*4
Filming could be unrewarding, and sometimes even dangerous. Clark adored Voltaire’s house at Ferney: ‘the nicest country house you can imagine…looks like a Hubert Robert [i.e. pouring rain]…so we have had to transfer the exterior to the interior – a wearisome day. After hours of trouble in laying down rails, fixing lights etc I have said two sentences – about ten seconds…one must take the rough with the smooth.’48 Clark’s preferred director was generally Gill, as he was the safest pair of hands, and they found it easy to laugh together; but he reported to Janet: ‘Michael Gill doesn’t like my “revolutionary” script – but it isn’t so bad. I was looking forward to doing the last one with Peter Montagnon, but he has taken the job of head of the University for the Air [i.e. the Open University] – dreadful trade.*5 We shall miss him very much, as he is so kind and thoughtful, and I have really enjoyed my programmes with him. Michael fusses me with his fashionable modern views.’49 The filming of the programme that covered the French Revolution, however, was overtaken by the outbreak of student riots and the series of strikes later known as les événements. Maggie Crane recalls: ‘We were staying in a small hotel near le Pont des Arts and got [tear] gassed in Paris, but it was the day before K arrived…We had great difficulty getting to St Denis because of the general strike. We decided to cut short Paris filming and head for Aachen: “We are like Louis XVI fleeing Paris,” said K cheerfully.’50 The music for the episode was to include a rendering of ‘The Marseillaise’, but no recording could be found. Clark made the imaginative suggestion of driving down to the nearby Renault factory and trying to persuade the striking workers to sing it for them
, but at this point Michael’s radicalism failed him. They eventually found a recording of the French national anthem sung by Russian sailors.
Clark had trouble with episode 11, The Worship of Nature, as he told Janet: ‘Still struggling with the early romantics, and I am tempted to say that the whole movement was due to the fact that two men of genius [i.e. Byron and Wordsworth] fell in love with their sisters.’51 But while they were filming that programme they had one splendid piece of luck which made up for all the times they had to do retakes owing to noise and other street hazards: ‘We found a splendidly Turneresque valley – but alas an airplane came over during the best shot. And then the light lost some of its magic. Then we went back to the summit, and suddenly there appeared (as to Ruskin) the whole line of the Alps from Mont Blanc to the Matterhorn, rising above the clouds. It was a stunning sight – we immediately set up our camera, etc. amid the clanging cowbells, and I set about a piece in which Turner, Goethe and the study of clouds all come in. I was standing with my back to the view, and by the time I got to the word clouds I saw the crew grinning – at that moment the whole landscape had been blotted out by a cloud, and two seconds later I was enveloped and practically invisible. What a coup de theatre if it comes off.’52
Kenneth Clark Page 45
