Last night I watched two hours of television straight through -- and it was just a single programme. Well, alright, I did make one phone call and I got up to get a drink at least twice. But devoting this amount of time to an off-air showing one film, and a documentary at that, is much rarer today than it once was.
Technology (from the VCR to the iPlayer) has combined with social change (too many other media demands) to reinforce forms of television directed primarily to the short attention span. So in both fact and fiction we have faster editing, busier shots with constant movement and frenetic graphics, plus ever-stronger verbal sign-posting. All of which -- one could argue (I would) -- drains meaning and the potential of complexity from individual images and their juxtapositions. And all of which is familiar, perhaps overly so. But it can take something that resists these pressures to expose their workings -- and that's certainly what Antony Thomas' film The Qur'an did on Channel 4 last night.
One of the first films that I wrote about seriously, back in 1980 when I was first working for Time Out, was the immensely controversial Death of a Princess, and I interviewed Thomas about the research that he'd done in Saudi Arabia. (Frontline has an excellent site reflecting on the film 25 years on.) If I can say this without sounding condescending in any way, it's great to see that Thomas continues to be able to make ambitious, attention-grabbing documentaries. Many of his peers, after all, from that other country that is television of thirty years ago have retired hurt (at least metaphorically so) or disillusioned.
So The Qur'an is what's called these days "old-fashioned" television. Thoughtful and reflective, unflashy, intelligently scripted (with personal touches in the script, but an avoidance of anything suggesting the confessional), this is an intelligent classical assembly of archive, interviews and location filming in the Middle East, in Iran and elsewhere. I was surprised by how dependent it is on the detailed narration (but beyond the scripting and Thomas' credit up front: A Film by...) there's little sense of authorship. The imagery was good but (at least when compared with many factual offerings now) comparatively plain, with a distinctive style. There were minor irritants, such as the failure to indicate where the mosques were which were used as examples of Islamic civilisation, and there was a sense that it was a kind of artless film. But that was also it's great strength.
What it did supremely well, as other critics have noted, is inform and educate at the same time as stressing the compelxities and contradictions of Islam and of understandings of the Qur'an. Towards the end, like Islam itself, it stressed the sense of challenges and choices being offered to each of us individually, along with the requirement to Think -- and think again. There's too little television today (and certainly too few two-hour offerings on Channel 4) that trusts us all in such a manner.
(image and further links to follows)
Comments