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Watch This is Civilisation online: Episode 3 Save Our Souls

Save our Souls, the third of these four films, explores the impact of the industrial revolution on our ideas about art, nature and society, focussing on the visionary ideas of the British art critic John Ruskin. The rise of modern industrial society in the 19th century produced a crisis of faith and confidence in the very idea of civilisation – a crisis that continues to freak us out today. Workers were hideously exploited in the new factory system, and people everywhere felt increasingly alienated from their work, from nature, and from each other. In the third programme of the series, Matthew Collings follows in the footsteps of an eminent Victorian who diagnosed the problems of his age, and thought that art could be the solution to them: the visionary British art guru, John Ruskin. Ruskin is one of Collings’ heroes. He believed that art could save our souls. It could reconnect us with nature, and heal the spiritual wasteland created by industrialisation. And Matthew Collings argues that as it’s becoming ever clearer what damage we’ve been doing to nature, we need to listen to what Ruskin had to say more than ever. Ruskin wrote about art, nature and society, and showed how they were all connected. He famously championed the great British landscape painter JMW Turner, rescuing him from obscurity and pointing out to his fellow Victorians the urgency and power in Turner’s turbulent landscapes. Matthew Collings starts his journey with Turner’s work, exploring its visionary message – both for his own times and for ours. Then Collings travels to the places and explores the art which meant most to Ruskin, and which became the raw materials for his visionary message about how to save our souls. He visits the Alps, which inspired both Ruskin and Turner with the awesome power of nature and the need to respect it. He tours the architectural wonders of Venice, where Ruskin discovered some surprising lessons about what made a society healthy and what made it sick, about what made civilisations rise and fall. He explores the blasted landscape of northern industrial Britain. And he finds some unexpectedly urgent and contemporary messages in the art which Ruskin’s thinking inspired – the work of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and the furniture of William Morris. The journey ends in Ruskin’s beloved Lake District, where Ruskin lived and died. He’s a gloomy-looking old Victorian with a beard – but with Matthew Collings’ passionate enthusiasm Ruskin stands revealed as years ahead of his own times – and a visionary thinker for ours.

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