Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  The first film shoot was less than auspicious.

  Very early in our planning we had decided to begin, not with the first film, but one from the middle of the series. In this way any early errors in style would be cushioned by being surrounded by the more confident presentation of later filming.

  They decided to start with the Renaissance, Programme Four in the series, very much Clark’s period, and with a wealth of beauty to show.

  But while our planning was going on, in November 1966, an unprecedented catastrophe occurred in Florence. The Arno flooded, burst its banks, and inundated all the lower city. At first the extent of the disaster was not apparent from London. Few lives were lost and floods subsided within thirty-six hours. But they left a terrible trail of damage; not only from the mud and refuse of the Arno. Many Florentines heated their homes and shops with oil which they kept stored in their cellars. Mixed with the flood, the oil was carried into churches and libraries and cloisters, seeping into the stone, staining the paintings, gumming together the pages of illuminated manuscripts. Not even the war had caused so much destruction. My friend Robert Hughes came back from making a TV report on the damage with a startling account of seeing the great Cimabue crucifix broken and lying in the mud, of the stench, and of the devoted labours of volunteer helpers from all over Europe.

  Still, there were nearly six months to go before filming in Florence in April, and they decided to keep their first location.

  It was much worse than I could have believed. I had first visited Florence soon after the war when the banks of the Arno were a confusion of noise and dust and rebuilding. Now the area of disaster was larger, the amount to be restored greater, the damage more complex and difficult to repair. In every cloister and chapel powerful heaters whirred, but hideous brown stains disfigured most of the places in which Clark wished to appear.

  They discussed alternative locations, not as appropriate as those originally chosen by Clark. They could not afford to delay the filming, as this would put all later plans back.

  Two alternatives suggested themselves: re-writing the present script to fit what was still available in Florence, or for Sir Kenneth to write another programme quickly enough for us to be able to arrange filming in a completely different place within a month. Neither option seemed very palatable. I asked Clark if he would like a day to think about it. The answer came at once and briskly.

  ‘Oh no, I’ll write Number Five. It’s got the advantage of keeping us in Italy. The Accademia’s all right, you said? Most of the rest is set in Rome. You’re travelling back on Tuesday? I’ll have it ready for you when you arrive.’

  Tuesday was three days away. Normally, a writer would take at least two to three weeks for a six-thousand-word script.

  The second script read better than the first, though ‘the sections on individual artists simply followed each other like separate railway carriages. And they still centred on art history, though it was implied that they were about something else.’

  Michael had invited Peter Montagnon, who had made a number of distinguished programmes on the arts, to be his co-producer. Discussing the script problem after the speedy arrival of the second unsatisfactory script, Peter made a momentous suggestion, which Michael noted.

  ‘He’s obviously getting better, and he clearly responds well to pressure. Why don’t we ask him to write the other Italian script, the one on Baroque Rome, right away? If he could do it in two weeks, we could film it on the same trip. That would be a big budget saving and we’d have two in the bag.’

  That was characteristic of Peter. Very small, with fragile wrists and an intelligent aesthetic face, his quiet manner concealed a dynamo of tough professional thinking. It was just this sort of ginger that I had hoped for when I asked him to join the team. . . .

  So it was that I read Clark’s first draft of Programme Seven over lunch on a terrace in Fiesole. I had gone there to see if there was a distant view of Florence that was better as an approach shot than any of the others I had seen. (There was not.) As I was leaving my hotel the London post had arrived and I had stuffed the script unopened in my briefcase. Now I took it down in one long gulp through the white wine and the coffee. It was not their influence, nor the ambrosial air, that made it an experience of a quite different order from reading the first two. Suddenly there was a unifying theme that laced its way through the pages and the theme was not art, but Rome. Rome at a certain moment in her history. Artists and architects (and popes) were the foreground that illuminated the theme, but the whole had an invigorating sweep that carried you from start to finish. The writing was fresh, caustic and pithy, totally unlike the well-worked caution of Clark’s earlier efforts. It was one of the best scripts I had read.

  So filming was about to begin, in Florence.

  I was preoccupied with the imminent arrival of Clark and the film unit. It would be the first time we had all worked together. Lady Clark was coming too. Here was one of the radical social adjustments which give a film-maker’s life such variety. For the last few days I had led a studious existence, walking the streets of Florence alone, or in the company of our local researcher, a charming and witty German art historian, spending hours looking in detail at every object and location we were going to film, reading the background texts. It was a quiet, concentrated period that I very much enjoyed, reminding me of the academic life I had nearly chosen on leaving university. Now I had to marshal a different set of skills, to pass on my conclusions to writer, cameraman and recordist with such energy and enthusiasm that they would adjust their vision towards the one I had arrived at. There was never very much time to do it, and simultaneously I needed to be aware of the intricate social balances that were developing between twelve diverse temperaments thrown together on the road. They demanded adjustment and tact from the director; leadership at the platoon level, as an old war-hand said.

  The first day’s filming was a silent shoot at the Accademia.

  The six unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo, known as the Prisoners, suggested exciting possibilities for filming. By moving the camera in close-up over the roughly worked stone, to where the finished portion of the torso jutted forth and then sank back into the rock, and continuing with similar explorations on the other figures I hoped to create a simile for the imagination of the artist. As was so often to happen, the unit grasped the idea and excelled it. Tubby (Englander, lighting cameraman) accentuated the effect by powerful raking side-lighting, and Ken (MacMillan, cameraoperator), on the tracking camera, provided some ingeniously slow and sinuous movements. We spent a happy and absorbed day under the cynical eye of the museum guards. We were the third unit to film the sculptures in a month. The Germans, we were told, had worked everything out in advance and were able to carry through the most complex moves with hardly a word spoken; the American cameraman quarrelled continuously with his director; we, on the other hand, spent more time discussing what to do than actually filming.

  ‘You see,’ whispered Erhardt, our twinkly German fixer, ‘these guardians are all Fascisti at heart. They prefer the military precision of my countrymen to your democracy.’

  To be able to talk things through in the unhurried atmosphere of the museum was a valuable introduction to each other’s style of work. We settled down with remarkable ease; the filming on the Prisoners was technically as complex as most of what we were to achieve in the next two years. No sequence I worked on gave me greater pleasure.

  The next day began less auspiciously. Back again in the Accademia at 8.30 we were to concentrate on the David. Later in the morning Clark was to speak two important sections in front of it. There seemed nothing particularly difficult about that. From the museum entrance there was an unhampered view of the statue, bathed in natural light against the far wall. All we had to do was place the camera inside the swing doors and position Clark in the foreground. Both Tubby and Ken demurred. It would be a terribly boring shot, they thought. Once they had the camera in position they proved it. The distant David towere
d over the stand-in speaker’s shoulder with all the impact of a postage stamp. On the other hand, if we got closer nothing was visible except David’s knees, feet and the enormous plinth on which he stood. Perhaps we could angle the camera to look up at the statue, suggested Ken. Foreshortening had the unfortunate effect of increasing the prominence of David’s already well-developed manhood. Each suggestion involved lugging the heavy 35mm camera on its gyromount into a new position. Our voices rose in urgency as the time for Clark’s arrival drew closer. The guards snickered together. The Inglesi were at it again.

  They were still at it when, precisely at 10.30, the time for which he was called, Sir Kenneth entered with Lady Clark. He was dressed immaculately in cool grey with a touch of cambric at the breast pocket, but at first I didn’t notice. I was lying sweating on the marble floor locked in argument with the equally prostrate Ken. A discreet cough from Tubby brought me to my feet.

  Clark asked me dryly if I thought he had dressed correctly for this particular sequence. I can see now that what to wear when posed in front of a naked man does present interesting problems, but at the time it seemed a matter of supreme indifference. Hardly looking at him, I explained that we were having some difficulties; would he and Lady Clark like to go away for an hour and do some shopping? His eyes seemed to recede to grey points, but he remained as courteous as usual. No, no, it would be interesting for them to watch us at work . . . He retired with Lady Clark to the thronelike chairs the guards had brought up, and crossed his elegant knees. Here was the long-awaited crunch and I was grovelling at his feet, cheek on the dusty marble, squinting up through Ken’s viewfinder.

  Clark’s ironic gaze, boring into the back of my neck, told me I was an incompetent loon, and every unavailing minute increased the weight of the charge. For the truth was there was no easy answer. If you envisage that the dimensions of the television screen are roughly 3 × 4, where height precedes breadth; that the David on its plinth is a narrow twenty feet high; and Sir Kenneth Clark was probably about five foot ten, you begin to see the nature of the problem. Why had I not foreseen it? Because the perfect proportions of Michelangelo’s carving deceives the eye as to its true size even when you are in its presence.

  Yet within minutes I had an inadvertent revenge. Anyone who from below has tried to focus on the top of a tall object while interposing a smaller object in the foreground will recognise the only solution: to get the camera as low as possible and bring the foreground object as close as possible. If the two objects are still not in alignment there is no alternative except to lower the background or raise the foreground. I could not do anything to the sculpture, so I would have to raise Clark. It was a prospect I had been struggling against for some time, because I knew he would not like it – I would not have liked on my first exposure to the group of technicians I was going to be working with for the next couple of years to be stuck high on a box in an empty museum where every other natural alternative – leaning against pillars, sitting on chairs, walking about – seemed available.

  Actually two metal camera boxes were needed . . . the second box made the perch quite rickety. Clark watched these feverish but largely silent preparations inscrutably from the sidelines, rather as an aristocrat might have observed the erection of the guillotine meant for him. When the moment of trial came he refused the offer of my supporting hand. A man with plenty of reason for personal vanity, he must have know the camera angle would be the least flattering to his uneven top teeth and the beginning of middle-aged flab around his jowls. It accentuated his unfortunate tendency to look down his nose . . .

  Yet art . . . also provides unexpected recompense. The realisation of the ambiguous visual response that the perfect proportions of the David evoked led me to persuade Clark to stay on and shelter behind the plinth, while we set up the camera for a long shot. The revelation of the true size of Michelangelo’s masterpiece when the diminutive figure of Clark walked into view created a memorable frisson in the completed film.

  The Roman shoot in May continued uneasily. The Vatican, wrote Michael,

  insisted on the delivery by my own hand of enormous amounts of Italian lire (in cash) before they would allow the filming of the Sistine Chapel that they had agreed to in principle months before. A transaction that did not prevent the arrest, by a clanking platoon of the Swiss Guard, of Peter Montagnon while filming in St. Peter’s Square a few days later.

  Back in London, editing Programme 5, Michael remained unsure of its quality.

  The film seemed an uncertain mixture of standard art criticism and social history, requiring more knowledge of the fifteenth-century background than we could expect from a television audience. Nor did the three giant stars of our show – Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael – get along very well together. There seemed nothing really to unite them except their proximity – a state of affairs that was mirrored by our own relations with the Clarks. These reached their nadir in a lunch laid on at their home, Saltwood Castle in Kent. Peter, Ann Turner, our head of research and a programme director, Tubby Englander and I had gone down for a reconnaissance. After a distinctly meagre meal, Lady Clark said she expected us to leave a token of our gratitude for the cook. When asked what would be appropriate, she said she assumed we did not want to be outdone by the Queen Mother, who the week before had left £20 (in those days a good meal could be had in the West End for £2). Our combined resources did not reach the required amount, but Peter suggested writing a cheque. ‘Careful, K, it might bounce,’ called Lady Clark across the table.

  Relations improved as K continued to respond with flexibility and brilliance to the demands of film. Michael particularly enjoyed working with him on the film about the Dutch Golden Age.

  I had been stationed in Holland at the end of the war and retained the happiest memories of it. I liked Dutch art and the practical humanism of Dutch society; an appreciation I was surprised to find Clark shared.

  Our days in Amsterdam and the Hague were much more relaxed than the summer trip to Italy had been. Lady Clark was with us, but so was their friend, the actress Irene Worth, adding a touch of mature glamour to our filming on the canals. It was as though the soft clear light of that rational man-made landscape entered into our own relations with each other. I persuaded Clark to let us start the film with a dawn sequence on the polders north of Amsterdam, where Rembrandt had done some of his most memorable drawings, and suggested the title for the programme: The Light of Experience.

  We were guided, in a breathtakingly rushed night journey to reach the location before the sun, by an old friend, Friso ten Holt, the Dutch painter. This led to the revelation of another side of Clark’s character. I told him the story of Friso’s brief television fame and its unhappy aftermath. K visited his studio on the Prinsengracht, liked his pictures, and put him in touch with a London gallery that subsequently mounted a successful show of his work.

  Filming at Greenwich showed another endearing trait.

  I was filming the exterior of the Royal Naval College when he appeared round a corner, moving with considerable haste. ‘I know you’re busy,’ he murmured, ‘but just come and look at this’. He took my hand (he took my hand, this man who never touched anybody) and rushed me into the chapel. Under the pulpit he stopped and gestured at the asymmetrical sweep of the stairs. ‘Aren’t those the most perfect curves you’ve ever seen,’ he whispered. He was trembling with excitement. Now I knew why he was so successful as a lecturer. He was really passionate about aesthetics.

  The next big filming stint carried the crew through Europe on a fivemonth trip which would give them the first four films. Michael’s home in Stanmore provided the first location.

  ‘Just do that again, Nicholas’, I demanded. My ten-year-old son crawled carefully through the icy fronds of the giant thistles. Above his head the camera panned with him, recording the stirring of the spiky tops. With added huffs and puffs on the sound track I hoped this would suggest the passage of some nameless Dark Age beast in the first programme. />
  Filming Kenneth Clark in the Baptistery at Poitiers turned out to be a crucial hinge of the whole series.

  Its very dreariness, its glum seediness, was part of Clark’s theme. Insignificance is exceptionally hard to put over on television – an aggressive medium that bombards the eye far more than it persuades it. We are accustomed to such cajolery and are liable to switch over or switch off attention as soon as we are no longer gripped by the metaphorical lapel . . .

  Despite the awful weather half a dozen people huddled outside, drawn by the unprecedented light we had been pouring into this corner of the Dark Ages. They turned out to be foreign students. When in answer to their questions I told them we were filming because Poitiers had been a bastion of civilisation in the Dark Ages, I aroused an immediate response. ‘This dump?’ scoffed one young black American. ‘Man, they shouldn’t have bothered.’

  Later in the shoot they reached Paris as planned in May – May 1968.

  The next seven days were some of the most remarkable in my working career. We were filming the opening sequences of the series in a city in turmoil. When Clark on the Left Bank of the Seine just beyond Notre Dame said: ‘What is civilisation? I can’t define it – yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it; and I am looking at it now’, what he was actually looking at were the menacing groups of fifty armed riot police who stood on every street corner. I and two others were gassed the next day when we were involved in a full-scale confrontation on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. I sat in a box with taxi drivers and advocates at the Odeon Theatre while the students discussed philosophical issues and the police massed outside. As the week progressed and we continued our film-making, the spasmodic strikes in sympathy hardened into a nationwide stoppage. How were we going to leave Paris and fulfil the complex schedule that lay before us? On the black market Peter acquired just enough cans of petrol to carry our convoy with care to the German border. Early on Saturday 18 May we fled the riot-torn site of civilisation for the barbarian north.