Vision On

Churches nos. 253-260

Friday afternoon I drove up to Stratford-upon-Avon for a preview performance of the RSC's Hamlet with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart. That's another story (and one I'll write at some point). I stayed overnight nearby (a fine manor house converted into an OK, and relatively cheap, Best Western) and after breakfast was away from the hotel just before 9am for a day of church-going on my way back to London.

It was a beautiful sunny morning and there was a wonderful range of churches to choose from -- I eventually visited 8 new ones, plus one I'd been to before and one that was closed, but where I could peer through the window. So that equalled my best day in my collecting of those in Simon Jenkins' book England's Thousand Best Churches. I thought I was going to make 9 but 8 is a good tally, and it's a good focus for an entry that tries to capture something of why I like this activity so much. Which by way of an outline of the day, with some photos, is what I'm attempting here.

Watching the Qur'an on television

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.

The power of language

I'm reading Adam Nicolson's very good book Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. (Earlier in the year I really enjoyed and appreciated Nicolson's Earls of Paradise about a related aspect of English culture from a few decades before.) It's a vivid snapshot of the first decade of the reign of James I, and it's very good on the complex relationships between the established church of the time and the "puritans". There are also exceptional moments when he writes about the power and the ambiguity of language. Including the following (which for me, odd as it may sound, has real resonance with my sense of contemporary television).

"The blessed Jenkins"

A long-term hobby project of mine is to visit all of the places of worship in Simon Jenkins' essential England's Thousand Best Churches. (Or at least to go to nine hundred and ninety-nine of them, as at least one, I'm convinced, is a fiction to foil those who might flout Jenkins' copyright.) Wandering around one some years ago, the vicar saw that we had this guide with us. "Ah, the blessed Jenkins," he reflected, before bemoaning the parsimonious rating given to his building by the journalist and historian.

The book alone is worth celebrating on a regular basis, but so too are the blessed one's regular contributions to the Guardian, a pair of which on successive days shows why he is the best columnist writing today. Yesterday, he wrote thoughtfully and precisely about atheism, aesthetics and Easter, and on Friday he eloquently hymned the pre-Reformation murals in his beloved churches across the land, using as a peg Roger Rosewell's new book Medieval Wall Paintings. (The book's author has a new site to complement the publication here.)

Two more expressions of enthusiasm prompted by the Guardian. One is to delight in the way in which online Jenkins' piece was quickly complemented by knowledgeable comments extending his arguments and offering links to relevant images. (The one above comes from Kempley church in Gloucestershire, about which Jenkins is so enthusiastic, and is borrowed from the online developing catalogue Medieval Wall Painting in the English Parish Church authored by Anne Marshall.)

My other pleasure from the paper this week has nothing to do with Jenkins, but is Adrian Searle's column "Critical condition" about the art market and criticism. There's much that's wise here about all critical writing, including this:

Writing about art only matters because art deserves to be met with more than silence... An artist's intentions are one thing, but works themselves accrue meanings and readings through the ways they are interpreted and discussed and compared with one another, long after the artist has finished with them. This, in part, is where all our criticisms come in. We contribute to the work, remaking it whenever we go back to it - which doesn't prevent some artworks not being worth a first, never mind a second look, and some opinions not being worth listening to at all.

Postcard from Cairo

It's 1am in downtown Cairo. The road is packed with traffic, there are plenty of stores open and neon shines from night-club facades. This is my fourth continent in a fortnight: home in Europe; India ten days ago to film the Taj Mahal on the Art of Faith project; Canada last weekend for a festival screening in Toronto; and tonight the Faith to Faith film has brought me to Egypt. My fixer has effectively negotiated immigration at the airport and now he's explaining about collecting the camera kit tomorrow morning.

"Are you a good cameraman?" he asks. "No," I reply, with just a trace of wariness. "I'm a producer, a writer." To which he has the by-now inevitable follow-up: "But how will you work the camera?"