The Second Moment Of Creation
Series 1, Episode 1 Unrated
SD
HD
Simon Schama investigates the remote origins of human creativity with the first known marks made some 80,000 years ago in South African caves; marks which were not dictated merely by humanity's physical needs. As time passes the elements of civilisation are assembled: written language, codes of law, and expressions of warrior power forged in metals. And humanity begins to produce art not just for ritual, as Simon discovers in Minoan civilisation. But how do such cultures arise and how do they fall? Simon travels to the civilisations of Petra in the Middle East and the Maya in Central America to answer those questions.
How Do We Look?
Series 1, Episode 2 Unrated
SD
HD
Mary Beard looks at images of the human body in ancient art, seeking answers to fundamental questions at the heart of ideas about civilisations. Why have human beings always made art about themselves? What were these images for? And in what ways do some ancient conventions of representing the body still affect us now?
Picturing Paradise
Series 1, Episode 3 Unrated
SD
HD
Simon Schama examines one of our deepest artistic urges: the depiction of nature. Simon discovers that landscape painting is seldom a straightforward description of observed nature; rather it's a projection of dreams and idylls, as well as of escapes and refuges from human turmoil; the elusive paradise on earth. Simon begins in the 10th century, in Song dynasty China. The Song scrolls are never innocent of the values of that world: the landscapes depict immense mountains projecting imperial authority. But as that authority was threatened and overwhelmed, majestic mountains are represented in geological turmoil, writhing and heaving.
The Eye Of Faith
Series 1, Episode 4 Unrated
SD
HD
Mary Beard broaches the controversial, sometimes dangerous, topic of religion and art. For millennia, art has inspired religion as much as religion has inspired art. Yet there are fundamental problems, which all religions share, in making God or gods visible in the human world. How, and at what cost, do you make the unseen, seen? Beneath all works of religious art there always lies conflict and risk. And the result is often iconoclasm - the destruction of works of art - which Mary believes can, paradoxically, lead on to new forms of creativity.
The Triumph of Art
Series 1, Episode 5 Unrated
SD
HD
Think Renaissance and you think Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering. The two phenomena did not unfold in separate artistic universes; they were acutely conscious of, and in competition with, each other and mutually open to influences flowing both ways. The fifth film in Civilisations goes east and west with Simon Schama: to Papal Rome but also to Ottoman Istanbul and Mughal Lahore and Agra, exploring those connections and rivalries.
First Contact
Series 1, Episode 6 Unrated
SD
HD
In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time, David Olusoga shows, art was always on the frontline. David travels to Japan to explore how the Tokugawa Shogunate, after an initial embrace, became so wary of outside interference that they sought to cut ties with the outside world. But in their art, as in their trade, they could never truly isolate themselves from foreign influences. By contrast the Protestant Dutch Republic was itself an entirely new kind of creature: a market driven nation-state.
Radiance
Series 1, Episode 7 Unrated
SD
HD
Simon Schama starts his meditation on colour and civilisation with the great Gothic cathedrals of Amiens and Chartres. He then moves to 16th century Venice where masterpieces such as Giovanni Bellini's San Zaccaria altarpiece and Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne contested the assumption that drawing would always be superior to colouring. Simon ends the film in Matisse's great chapel at Vence, where colour is used - against a backdrop of the Second World War - once more to enrapture, enlighten and as a path to God.
The Cult of Progress
Series 1, Episode 8 Unrated
SD
HD
David shows how in New Zealand one artist was co-opted by the Maori who used his sills to record their culture and celebrate their ancestors. As the 19th Century came to an end, the certainties of industrial and scientific advance were increasingly questioned; many artists (Gauguin and Picasso amongst them) turned to non-Western art and culture for inspiration. And in the face of the catastrophic conflict of the First World War, the idea that progress, reason and industrial advance were guarantors of higher 'civilisation' was rejected.
The Vital Spark
Series 1, Episode 9 Unrated
HD
SD
Simon Schama explores the fate of art in the machine and profit-driven world. It looks at the rise of art as a tradeable commodity and turns on one central question: should art create a realm separate from the modern world, a place where we can escape and pull the ladder up after us? Or should it plunge headlong into the chaos and cacophony while transforming the way we see it and live in it? Using the works of both dead and contemporary artists of the 20th and 21st Simon seeks answers to these profound questions.
Portions of content provided by Tivo Corporation - © 2024 Tivo Corporation