Here’s another win for the YouTube suggestion algorithm, which showed up after the post which I made on September 10th that included a recent documentary about the cathedral of Chartres: namely, a documentary about the cathedral of Chartres from 63 years ago. The approach is, of course, quite different from that of the modern documentary, but very respectful even where it assumes some of the nostra of the modern age about its own progress and achievements.
This film was made as part of an educational series by the Encyclopedia Britannica, of the kind that used to be shown quite often in schools. The on-sight narrator who appears in the town of Chartres in the first minutes, John Canaday, worked for 1959 until 1976 as an art critic for the New York Times, and shall live in blessed memory for beginning his career there by writing that Abstract Expressionism as an artistic movement allows for “exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception.”
