From the 1976 BBC series I, Claudius:
If you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it recently, I really recommend it. To say it’s relevant would be an understatement: the problem is how many ways it’s relevant.1 Be forewarned: it was made at the nadir (though I’d say height) of a certain moment in postwar British culture when everything that had been inherited and fallen into decay broke down all at once (the US equivalent would be NYC ca. 1976), and the series’s production values distill that moment. The lighting wouldn’t be out of place in a janitorial closet, the costumes range from hopelessly corny to brilliantly accurate in their hand-me-down grunginess, the makeup skips from banal to a sort of homemade Lynchian Dune, the camerawork is artless except for when it tries to be arty,2 and the opening and closing credits are like fingernails on a chalkboard on steroids. So, all in all, the naively theatrical staging is about what you’d expect a community theater. But not one word of that is meant to be negative. On the contrary, all this candor, simplicity, and practicality are refreshing, the bare minimum needed for what matters most, the writing and acting, which, like the succession of emperors it follows, struggled with whether to be human or divine.
Addendum: The two replies noted below point up something I often forget, which is a leftover from years of teaching in an art/design context. With things like this, whose overall style is so different from what we’re fed these days, it’s usually a struggle to get people to look past their initial reaction. Who cares about the opening credits for I, Claudius*? Well, a good answer would be anyone trying to convince others to watch it — because they frequently won’t even make it past those first few moments. To compensate for that, I learned to avoid circular arguments like* this is what it is and you should appreciate it for what it is and to say, instead, this isn’t what you think.
Notes
Footnotes
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Maybe the least obvious: social media has bred a few generations of Caligulae — “little boots[es]” — or, maybe something more like Caligunculae, tiny boots: people who would commit monstrosities just for the selfies and the klout. ↩
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A friend (BLB) replied with something that gets to the essence of the show’s ethos: “At the very least, it’s a masterclass in blocking, camera movement, and the notion of foreground, midground, and background in filmmaking. Absolute masterclass on what a camera DOES.” Another friend (PS) points to this video on Youtube, “This Old TV Show Has Better Directing Than Anything Today,” which is 10 very well-spent minutes long. ↩