Dan Cruickshank’s Adventures in Architecture: Death
A bit of a delay on this one, as the iPlayer stream didn’t appear for a good couple of hours after broadcast yesterday.
If you can cope with an hour of Dan Cruickshank’s oooh-gosh-blimey-cripes presenting style – truly, he is what Molesworth would have grown up to be – this second programme in his culture and architecture series is a macabre little gem.
Ruin-bibbing at its best, Dan bounces round the globe looking at the architecture of death – from the temple of Hatshepsut (who, despite being a queen was always shown as a bloke with a beard… you can add your own joke here) to cremation sites on the banks of the Ganges.
The jaw dropping bit is a visit to the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic. Fourty thousand skeletons, arranged by a mad genius of a woodcarver in to coats of arms, chandeliers and… oh, just watch it for the bit where the bloke hoovers a skull.
As Dan would say, golly! Amazing!
I really like the random collision of kooky eccentric architectural historian Banham and golly gosh eccentric architectural historian Cruickshank. They don’t have much else in common, I suppose. Both great communicators, though…
Could anyone inform me on the music used in this (“Death”) episode? Thx!
I have been trying to find out for many years who is responsible, the producer, the director, can’t be the cameraman, for documentaries going out of their way NOT to show the subject matter.
Take the Maps docu.-I know intimately the contours of the presenter’s face but can I study for a few seconds the microsecond glimpses of the maps themselves – no chance. When a map is shown (usually a moving image at a low angle }and I begin to focus on it, it’s back on the presenter’s face again my eyes being fooled again and again. Even if the maps are shown for a few seconds the camera is always moving so if an item seems interesting it quickly disappears off screen. What is the point of repeatedly showing a complete map (British Isles eg), even on a 17″ screen, when only the outline of the country is recognisable?
We know what the presenter looks like from the beginning and he/she should only reappear at the end or when introducing a guest speaker. Don’t show him to us looking at the object, describing it when it is not shown to the viewer to be studied.
You docu. makers should have a message shown at the start saying, “If you wish to see the subjects under discussion record this programme on a video hard drive so that images can be paused for study otherwise it won’t be worth watching”.
This post applies to 99% of docus. don’t you agree?