Sir Steven Runciman: Bridge To The East (TV Documentary - 1987)

Sir Steven Runciman: Bridge to the East
Documentary
1987
54m
Director: Lydia Carras
Stars: Alan Bates(voice) and Steven Runciman

A look at Byzantium through the eyes of one of Britain's greatest historians, Sir Steven Runciman, who guides us from the mosaics of Ravenna, to the beauty of Monemvassia, to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, to spectacular Mystras and the harmony of its architecture.

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Just who was Peter O'Toole supposed to be in "The Last Emperor"? He was actually based on the young history professor from Trinity College of Cambridge University Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman, son of the 1st Viscount and Viscountess of Doxford, who read Latin and Greek by five years of age, was close friends with George Orwell, with whom he studied French under Aldous Huxley, and who found himself in China playing "thump thump thump" on an upright bass to accompany Henry "The Last Emperor" Puyi's piano rendition of "Baa Baa Black Sheep"! When not walking and sailing throughout the whole of the medieval Greek world of the Byzantium empire, or reading or writing in a dozen or so languages, or teaching the teachers of Turkey the history of their own country by order of the Attaturk, he was reading tarot cards for the King Of Egypt, getting ancient streets named after him in Sparta, being made into an honorary Whirling Dervish after Sir Runciman helped ensure its heredity chief would be permitted to assume his leadership title, and hitting, not once but twice, the jackpot on Las Vegas slot machines. He achieved all this and much else, the crowning achievement being his magnum opus, "The Great Crusades" trilogy of books, yet uppermost among his triumphs was his maintaining to his core the same bookish intellectual student still full of innocent wonder for the world right up to the ripest of old ages of 97 years old!

This very special 1987 1 hour documentary looks into the medieval Greek world he loved so much, the art that moved him most to move you and I to admire and be made better by, and provides us with gems of his written genius, so adequately summed up by this documentary's final quote:

"Human behavior defies scientific laws. Human nature has not yet been tidily analyzed. Human beliefs disregard logic and reason. The historian must attempt to add to his objective study the qualities of intuitive sympathy and imaginative perception, without which he cannot hope to comprehend the feelings and aspirations and convictions that have moved past generations. These qualities are, maybe, gifts of the Spirit; gifts which can be experienced and felt, but not explained in human terms."

Sir Steven Runciman, "The Great Church in Captivity".