Parky at the Pictures (DVD 11/8/2011)

Derek Williams's travelogue Oxford (1958) is a case in point. All the landmarks, clichés and stereotypes are present and correct, as the camera roves around the more photogenic colleges and libraries. But the narration invokes the Brideshead idyll rather than acknowledging the realities being experienced by a generation of angry young men and women and it becomes increasingly clear that the majority of the pictures commissioned by the Foreign or Colonial Offices were designed less to hold up a mirror to the indigenous population than to show the wider world that Britain was not only open for business, but was still championing the causes of peace, democracy, liberty and fairness that it had defended at such great cost during the Second World War.

This determined effort to show how the past and present co-exist in a uniquely British manner is also evident in Gordon Hales's The Poet's Eye (1962), which illustrates actor Stephen Murray's appreciation of Shakespeare with images of a modern country adapting to the challenges of a changing world. But while the likes of Leonard Reeve's Ralph Richardson-narrated Come Saturday (1949) and Anvil Film's An English Village (1956) celebrate traditional sights and sounds, Norman Hemsley's snapshot of Huddersfield, Looking at Britain: Industrial Town (1962), brims with pride at the Yorkshire burg's regeneration and readiness to serve residents old and new.

Indeed, this suggestion that Britain was a welcoming destination for immigrants from across the globe is made so forcibly in J. Fares's Arabic-language Moslems in Britain - Cardiff (1961) that the tone feels positively propagandist. But the inclusivity conveyed by the Crown Film Unit's Local Newspaper (1952), Donald Kerr's Dateline Britain: Look at London (1958) and Gerald Cookson's Looking at Britain: National Parks (1961) is less apparent in such insights into British culture as Colin Dean's delightfully whimsical Shown By Request (1947), which notes the Central Film Library's efforts to bring non-theatrical titles to outlying audiences, and Don Levy's bullishly modish Opus (1967), which was produced for the British Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal to proclaim the achievements of such iconic names as Rolls Royce, Francis Bacon and Mary Quant, as well as showcase such theatrical successes as David Warner's interpretation of Hamlet, Peter Brook's Marat/Sade and Harold Pinter's The Homecoming.

The curious blend of paean and pep talk that informs James Clark's Speaking of Britain (1967) and Anthony Pélissier's Portrait of a People - Impressions of Britain (1970) is notably absent from the bucolic delights contained in another BFI collection, Here's a Health to the Barley Mow: A Century of Folk Customs and Ancient Rural Games. Packing 44 titles into six hours on two discs, this is a wonderfully wayward selection that defies its division into four themed sections to erupt with the energy and eccentricity of British life between the 1912 Kinora spools animated from still photographs depicting the dancing doyen of the folk revival Cecil Sharp and Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller's Shrovetide Football, Ashbourne (2000) and Hare Pie and Bottle Kicking, Hallaton (2005).

What fascinates about this eclectic mix is the enthusiasm with which past participants engaged in their chosen pursuit and the extent to which this sense of communality and continuity has all but vanished as a result of increased social mobility, multiculturalism, health and safety nannyism, teenage obduracy and the growing reluctance to take physical exercise. Yet pockets of resistance remain and teams continue to turn out for Shrove Tuesday football matches, just as hardy souls persist in playing such extreme sports as Dwile Flonking, Tar Barrel Rolling, Handba' and the Haxey Hood Game.

The Morris Men and various sword, coconut, step, horn, rapper and Flora Faddy Furry dancers also refuse to go gently, along with the May Queens, Boy Bishops, New Mayors and Burry Men. But what lingers longest from this riotous survey of the quaint and the curious are the rituals preserved in Alan Lomax's Oss Oss Wee Oss (1953) and Ian Russell's Derby Tup (1974).

The Derby Tup is a gigantic sheep with lightbulb eyes that has to be dragged to market and slain with a knife to the head. Its trio of adolescent attendants blacken their faces with oven soot and even one stuffs a pillow down his dress with a refreshing lack of self-consciousness. But the mummers' efforts are handsomely rewarded, as the villagers of Ridgeway in Derbyshire take up collections for their vigorous Yuletide revels. Money doesn't appear to change hands in the Cornish resort of Padstow, however, during the Oss Oss Wee Oss ceremony, which (despite local legend) seems to date from the 18th century rather than druidic times. Initially, a hobby-horse gambols down the street kissing the local ladies to determine who will wed before the next May Day. But a slaughter again takes place, albeit to presage a resurrection that symbolises the seasonal cycle.

It's been suggested that the Padstownians dressed in red, white and blue to coincide with the opening of the Festival of Britain on 3 May 1951 rather than uphold an ancient tradition and several other films invite similar speculation about Flahertyesque intervention. Conversely, the likes of Peter Kennedy's One Potato, Two Potato (1957) and John Bartlett's Children of the Moor (1975) were clearly made to preserve passing customs and practices in places with such evocative names as Abbots Bromley, Painswick and Bampton, Bacup, Grenoside, Kirkwall, Stonehaven, Harleston, Ottery St Mary, Ashbourne, Queensferry and Tichbourne. So, even if the odd entry feels as though it has been staged for the tourist trade, there is more than enough here of genuine anthropological interest to keep folklorists engrossed.

A more experimental perspective on the changing landscape is provided in David Gladwell's poetic pseudo-documentary, Requiem for a Village (1975). Inspired by the paintings of Stanley Spencer and the books of George Ewart Evans, this long-cherished project saw Gladwell fulfil the promise shown in such audacious shorts as A Summer Discord (1955), Miss Thompson Goes Shopping (1958), An Untitled Film and The Great Steam Fair (both 1964), which he directed (the latter in conjunction with Derrick Knight), while he was working as an editor on such prestigious features as Lindsay Anderson's If…. (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973) and James Ivory's Bombay Talkie (1970), as well as landmark television series like John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972).

Filmed in the Suffolk village of Witnesham, this meditation on the disappearance of swathes of green belt under soulless new towns formed a loose trilogy with Peter Hall's adaptation of Ronald Blythe's Akenfield and Alan Clarke's take on David Rudkin's Play for Today, Penda's Fen (both 1975), which similarly lamented the toll that regeneration was taking on traditional communities. However, Gladwell proved much bolder in combining elegiac, avant-garde and generic elements with a stylish simplicity that subsequently influenced such distinctive film-makers as Andrew Kötting and Patrick Keiller.

The action opens with an elderly man (Vic Smith) getting ready to leave his functional abode on a new housing estate. He collects his bicycle from the garden shed and sets off along a road that becomes increasingly rustic the further he gets from home. Woodland and thatching replace the anonymous uniformity of suburbia, as the man wheels into a sun-dapped cemetery and begins reminiscing about lives lived as he tidies around the gravestones.

Across the way, two more men stand outside a timbered manor house and bemoan the fact that so much natural beauty is being destroyed for developments that will also disrupt centuries of social continuity. As they speak, traffic hurtles along the quiet road to emphasise the ruinous intrusion of outsiders with no respect for the tranquility that is being lost forever and the cyclist looks with disdain at the mechanical digger churning up the fields he has known since he was a boy.

The younger of the pair at the manor sits on the council discussing the fate of the parish and, as he nods in agreement with the vicar decrying the callous ending of an era, the cyclist finds himself surrounded with the spirits of the graveyard occupants, who rise to greet each other with an unthreatening affection that prompts the man to follow them into the church, where a wedding service is about to take place.

However, this seems to be merely a reverie, as the man is back at his duties when the vicar arrives to engage him in conversation. But the temptation to further link past and present proves irresistible to Gladwell and he cuts from a scene of hay baling to a blacksmith repairing a broken hoof and thence to a town centre of charmless concrete and glass that the planners insist will become as pivotal to communal life as the village pub (where the ghostly wedding guests have assembled for a speech by the father of the bride that ruminates on the circle of life and prompts the groom to anticipate the birth of his first child).

The old man resumes his labours and thinks back to being reprimanded in school for having poor handwriting and lingers on such traditional pursuits as making a wheel and gathering the harvest. Such is his fury at the desecration of the soil that he hurls a clod at the digger. But he is soon to return to dust himself as the indivisibility of life and death is manifested by his killing by a biker gang that had been milling around the graveyard and his reunion with the souls with whom he had spent his last day communing.

Touching upon ideas that inspired John Ruskin and William Morris in the previous century, Gladwell paints a damning picture of the future without overly romanticising the past. Indeed, Bruce Parsons and Walter Lassally's photography and Michael Pharey and Doug Turner's sound recording succeed in capturing a precise moment in the present that is made to seem both ethereal and earthy by David Fanshawe's inspired use of sacred and secular music. Vic Shaw similarly seems caught between the terrestrial and the supernatural, as he relates his anecdotes with grumbling affection.

As one might expect, Gladwell's editing is impeccable and it seems a scandal that the now 76 year-old was only able to direct one more feature - a 1981 adaptation of Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor - as few British directors have exhibited a surer visual mastery and said so much when reliant on so few words.

Thanks to his eloquent narrators, Patrick Keiller's films tend to be more loquacious. But he also has a rare gift for the telling image, as he proves in Robinson in Ruins, a meticulously researched and beautifully photographed cine-essay that simmers with wit, insight and a tinge of nostalgic sadness and continues the odyssey started in London (1994) and Robinson in Space (1997).

The premise is simple. Some recycling workers discover 19 cans of film and a notebook while demolishing a derelict caravan and hand them over to an Oxford institute, where they are examined by an old acquaintance of their author (voiced by Vanessa Redgrave), whose deceased partner had been his companion on some earlier peregrinations. She reveals that Robinson had arrived in this country from Germany in the mid-1960s and had recently been spending time at Her Majesty's pleasure. However, he had not ceased to be a keen student of the passing scene and the start of the economic crisis in the spring of 2008 had prompted him to explore Oxford and its environs for items of scientific and historical interest that could shed light on the decline of liberal capitalism.

Robinson's initial aim was to visit the Pelican Inn in Berkshire, where the Speenhamland System of outdoor relief was devised in 1795 to aid the rural poor. However, he is easily distracted by the Boyle-Hooke plaque outside University College, the post box on the corner of Catte Street, St Margaret's Well at Binsey, the lichen on the road sign at Kennington roundabout and the Lidl store on the Cowley by-pass. Once out of the city, however, he passes Harrowdown Hill, where Dr David Kelly committed suicide in 2003, and RAF Brize Norton, which was the original point of repatriation for corpses from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also detours through fields of oilseed rape to view the Harwell complex that played a key role in the development of Britain's independent nuclear deterrent. However, by following The Ridgeway, Robinson reaches Donnington Castle and Speenhamland, just as the sub-prime bubble bursts and the banking crisis erupts following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

During the course of his journey, Robinson has identified the industrial, economic and military links between Britain and the United States since the Second World War and these are brought into sharper focus when he arrives at Greenham Common, where a Women's Peace Camp was pitched in protest at the decision to house 96 American cruise missiles on the base in the early 1980s. The land has since been restored to public use and this reclamation leads to a discussion of the enclosures attempted in Otmoor in 1830 - which provoked revellers at St Giles' Fair into attempting to rescue those arrested for smashing fences - and Hampton Gay in the 1590s. The latter pursuit of Cockaigne resulted in the hanging, drawing and quartering on Enslow Hill of Edward Bompass and Richard Bradshaw, whose father owned a mill that continued to produce paper until the Elizabethan manor house burned down in 1887 and whose employees had tried to rescue the victims of the Shipton-on-Cherwell rail disaster of Christmas Eve 1874.

These recollections of Oxfordshire and Berkshire's rich and often tempestuous histories would be fascinating in themselves. But Keiller also pauses to watch the harvest being gathered, to consider how rare flowers continue to flourish in the hedgerows of pollution-choked highways and how a spider can construct a web with intricate care and infinite patience, while the rest of the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart. Indeed, these close-ups of the varied and resilient flora and fauna serve to emphasise the transience of the derelict domestic and industrial edifices that testify so damningly to the persistence of human folly in ignoring the lessons of the past.

Ultimately, Robinson's unexplained disappearance prevents us from learning his proposals to heal society. But one can only hope that this is not the last we hear from this erudite émigré, whose itinerancy is only matched by his curiosity and acuity.

A haunting sense of the past also pervades Bill Morrison's The Miners' Hymns, a collaged dissertation on the lost coal culture of County Durham that makes intrepid use of archive footage and a beguiling score by Icelandic musician Jóhann Jóhannsson. As in Decasia (2002), Morrison employs evanescing shadows to explore fading glories and the images of besmirched bodies toiling in the bowels of the earth have an eerie poetry that alternately recalls a Val Lewton zombie movie and a noirish variation on the traditional industrial documentary.

The National Coal Board Film Unit produced over 900 titles and Morrison excavates its gems with a practiced eye and re-assembles them with a muscular sensitivity that recalls the great works of Soviet montagism. The opening helicopter shot reveals the scars left by centuries of mining and suggests that the ski slopes, supermarkets and football stadiums that now dominate the scene lack the intrinsic dignity of the pits that once held together places like Ryhope, Silksworth, Hylton and Monkwearmouth. This sense of unity is reinforced by the clips of the annual gala - known as the Big Meeting - which saw contingents from collieries across the region process through the streets to the accompaniment of brass bands before gathering for a service in Durham Cathedral. Indeed, Morrison is keen to draw comparisons between these celebratory marches and the demonstrations that were periodically mounted to protect livelihoods and periodically brought the miners into often violent confrontation with the police serving unseen corporate and governmental masters.

Mustering his material with a rhythmic surety that is matched by Jóhannsson's combination of brass, percussion and electronica, the New York-based Morrison appreciates the artistry of the anonymous cameramen who endured difficult conditions to capture the Stygian realities of life at the seam from seemingly impossible angles. Moreover, he recognises the centrality of the pits to the tightly knit communities and juxtaposes shots of sweaty endeavour with more cheerful images of white sheets fluttering on washing lines and small boys sliding down anthracite mounds with little thought for the fact that, within a few years, they will almost certainly be digging up the same black mineral themselves. Thus, while it tackles head on the strikes and closures of the 1980s, this is more a work of sociological commemoration than political protest.

Just as Morrison takes liberties with the classical documentary style, Portuguese newcomer Miguel Gomes blurs the lines between fact, fantasy and filmicness in his audacious 150-minute amalgam of documentary, fiction and metacinema, Our Beloved Month of August. Variously recalling directors as diverse as Robert Altman, Abbas Kiarostami, Werner Herzog, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Eugène Green, this is a tantalisingly mischievous, yet technically and intellectually exacting work that will enchant true cinéastes.

Much of the first section centres on the rural communities that host the summer music festivals that are a fixture of the Portuguese cultural calendar. Gomes and his crew base themselves in the small town of Arganil and coax the locals into revealing local myths and legends, while also capturing such spectacles as a philharmonic ensemble parading through the streets. They also record songs performed at the Pardieiros festival by an array of bands, whose enthusiastic merriment quickly proves infectious.

But the emphasis shifts from picturesque kitsch once Gomes alights upon the contretemps that arises between band leader Manuel Soares and his nephew, Fabio Oliviera, who has developed a crush on his cousin, Sónia Bandeira (whose relationship with her father is disconcertingly close). Suddenly, the lyrics being sung by the other acts seem to comment on the action like a Greek chorus. Moreover, Gomes enters the frame and begins discussing with his producer the problems he is having in turning his picture into a terrifying variation on Little Red Riding Hood.

In lesser hands, this transition from vérité to soap-inflected, self-reflexive satire would have collapsed under the weight of its own ambition. But Gomes has established his setting so meticulously that it seems perfectly natural both for the Bandeira-Oliviera romance to evolve against real events (for example, they get caught up in a church parade and make headlines in the local paper) and for characters who were initially presented as authentic residents to turn out to be actors playing a part. Even the conclusion, in which the crew comes together to solve a problem with the film's sound, feels like an integral part of the unfolding panoply.

Yet this would have been a very different film had the quixotic Gomes not run into the casting and financial difficulties that prompted him to incorporate the chaotic mechanics of movie-making into his central drama. But while the resulting hybrid of tuneful travelogue, love story and ambiguous avant-gardism is clearly as risky as it's enigmatic, it's also a triumphant celebration of cinema's unique ability to provide cerebral stimulation and sensory pleasure, as well as a thrilling avowal that the art form has only just begin to explore its potential for audiovisual expression.

By contrast, Julia Bacha adopts a starker reportagist approach in Budrus, which recalls the 2003 stand-off that made headlines around the world when the residents of a West Bank village lying in the proposed path of the Israeli separation barrier put up an unexpectedly stern fight. Despite occasionally bordering on agit-prop, this heartfelt record makes such solid use of interviews and eye-witness footage that it's almost impossible to watch without a rising sense of outrage.

Heading the bid to protect the village's olive trees are Ayed Morrar and his 15 year-old daughter Iltezam, who organise their neighbours to rise early and make such a nuisance of themselves in the olive grove on which their livelihood depends that the contractors detailed to uproot the trees have little option but to withdraw. However, the interlopers arrive before dawn the following day and not even Iltezam's efforts to sit in a hole and obstruct the diggers can prevent the pillage. But the protests continue and, as the Palestinians place women in the front line of the demonstrations, the Israeli Defence Force becomes increasingly frustrated in its bid to defuse the situation and restore some order.

Eventually, the troops are given permission to use greater force and an advance is planned. But a stand-off ensues and, as Palestinian children throw stones at the heavily armed IDF unit, tear gas gives way to live ammunition. When Hassan Mohammad Hassan is arrested, an heroic attempt is made to free him (with little backing from the local Hamas officials). However, several women are struck by soldiers, as houses are occupied and resistance seems to have been broken. But, during the night, youths set about dismantling the wire fence and Bracha informs us that Budrus (which had already lost 80% of its land in 1948) was finally reprieved when, 10 months later, a decision was taken to place the barrier along the line of the 1967 Green Line.

Ayed and Iltezam's dignified campaign of passive resistance contrasts starkly with the strident self-righteousness of soldiers Doron Spielman and Yasmine Levy, whose arrogant assertion of rectitude - Spielman at one point opines that the spoliation of the landscape is `unfortunate for the people of Budrus, but less unfortunate than the death of an Israeli citizen.' - is a far cry from the calls for tolerance expressed by Jewish anti-occupation activists like Kobi Snitz. But while Bracha admirably conveys the courage of those determined to prevent the Wall from passing through their property, she fails to impose a timeline. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to judge the tide of events. So, while this is undeniably effective, it's also highly emotive and just a touch confusing.

Chaos seemed to reign for much of the time that Molly Dineen and sound recordist Phil Streather were at London Zoo for the making of the BBC series, The Ark. With the institution haemorrhaging money after vital government subsidies were cut, the bean counters arrived in 1991 to demand drastic changes to save the world's oldest scientific zoo, which had occupied the northern corner of Regent's Park since 1828. However, in addition to making 26 keepers redundant, the administrators would also have to reduce the animal population by a third and find new homes for 1300 creatures.

Two of those destined for departure are Steve the bird keeper and Josephine the hornbill, whose touching relationship typifies the intimacy that exists between the exhibits and their carers. However, as Dineen shows in `Survival of the Fittest', the men in suits have no time for either such cosy excellence or the cherished heritage confirmed in such archive clips as Pathé's 1909 actualité At the Zoological Gardens, London. Hence, they dispatch reluctant curator Jo Gipps to break the bad news of imminent dismissals and co-ordinate the sordid process of forcing employees to re-apply for jobs they have been devotedly doing for many years.

But the sense of rising indignation is nothing compared to the fury expressed during `Natural Selection' by the members of the Zoological Society of London during a stormy meeting with the board. Their outrage at the suggestion of Director of Operations Andrew Forbes that keepers should be prevented from developing specialisms and should learn how to handle minor veterinary procedures seems fully justified. But Dineen (who takes more of a watching than an interrogatory brief in this episode) uses these heated exchanges as an emotional safey valve after depicting such heart-rending scenes as the exit of one of the first orang-utans to be born and raised in captivity in this country and keeper Brian Harman bidding farewell to a shy elephant named Thai as she is packed off to Chester.

The decision to dispense with animals deficient in crowd-pleasing qualities sums up the management attitude to downsizing and the clash between economics and ecology comes to a head in `The Political Animal', as the Fellows of the Zoological Society and the London Zoo Reform Group join forces to challenge Director General David Jones's obsession with exploiting newly arrived panda Ming-Ming while neglecting such key scientific achievements as the preservation of the partula snail, which is completely extinct in the wild and yet is thriving in a converted toilet underneath what used to be the bear enclosure. Amidst Orwellian assertions that some animals are more equal than others, an ultimatum is delivered and its consequence dominates the final instalment, `Tooth and Claw'.

As tropical bird keeper Dave Robinson predicts, civil animosity gives way to highly personal abuse as `those with an agenda and those with a mission' trade accusations during the extraordinary general meeting that will decide the zoo's fate. Yet, while Jones and PR guru Tim Bell become the villains of the piece, Dineen recognises the pressures they are under to devise strategies that make financial sense. But her first concern remains the animals and their keepers and few will be left unmoved by the tender care that Frank Wheeler, the head of the small mammals department, lavishes on a dying koala.

Clearly it was vital that the `Ark in the Park' became a viable business if it was to continue its pioneering research. But the lack of intelligence and compassion displayed by the arrogant moneymen entrusted with the task will come as no surprise to 2011 audiences reeling from the financial incompetence that has brought the global economy to the brink of collapse. Despite attempting to remain neutral, Dineen makes it pretty clear where her sympathies lie and, as a result, she is able to coax some remarkably candid observations from the keepers and their allies. Moreover, she shapes her material in the most dramatic manner and, thus, anticipates the style that has become synonymous with reality television without ever trivialising the subject or the issues at stake.

Dineen just about avoids getting too close to her protagonists, but Antony Penrose has more of an excuse for not always being entirely objective as he profiles his mother in The Lives of Lee Miller (1985). Working from his acclaimed biography, Penrose affectionately captures the chameleonic character of the chic fashion model who became a notable art photographer and an exceptional war correspondent. However, he is not blind to her occasionally capricious side, whose origins lay in a traumatic childhood incident when she contracted gonorrhoea at the age of eight when she was raped while staying with a family friend in Brooklyn.

Born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1907, Elizabeth Miller was the middle of three children. She learned about photography from her engineer father, Theodore, who made stereoscopic nude studies of her when she was still a teenager and encouraged her to become a model after she was stopped from walking in front of a car by Vogue founder Condé Nast. In March 1927, she appeared on the cover of the magazine and became a favourite subject for such esteemed shutterbugs as Edward Steichen, Arnold Genthe, and Nickolas Murray. However, she was forced to relocate to Europe in 1929 after an advertisement for Kotex sanitary pads caused a scandal and, in Paris, she became the student, lover and muse of the émigré photographer Man Ray.

Now moving in Surrealist circles, Miller helped Man Ray refine the technique of solarisation and also developed her own witty visual style. She even made her screen debut as the statue who comes to life in Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930). However, by 1932, she had ended her affair and returned to New York to set up a portrait studio with her brother Erik. Among her clients were actresses Lilian Harvey and Gertrude Lawrence and she sufficiently impressed Julien Levy to earn the only solo exhibition of her career.

But Miller was notoriously restless and, in 1934, she quit the business to marry Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey. While living in Cairo, she produced her masterpiece, `Portrait of Space', which she took near Siwa in the Western Sahara in 1937. However, she was soon bored with being a railway tycoon's wife and returned to Paris to start a liaison with the British painter Roland Penrose. Consequently, she was living in Hampstead when the Second World War broke out and she ignored all family pleas to return to the United States and reinvented herself as photojournalist for Vogue. In addition to chronicling the London Blitz, she and Life magazine's David E. Scherman also covered the napalming of St Malo, the Liberation of Paris and the discovery of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Moreover, she also managed to become a combat pin-up after Scherman snapped her taking a bath in Adolf Hitler's apartment at Prinzenregentplatz 27 in Munich.

However, Miller was seriously affected by what she had witnessed with the US Army and suffered from clinical depression for the rest of her life. She was somewhat distracted by her new role as a mother and, while she still took occasional photograph, she taught herself to be a gourmet cook and entertained the likes of Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Henry Moore and Max Ernst at the Farley Farm House she shared with Penrose in the Sussex village of Chiddingly. She died of cancer in 1977, since when her reputation has been considerably enhanced by the efforts of her son, whose knowledge of her life and work makes this documentary intimate and informative, as well as engaging and entertaining.

Finally, Mark Kidel latches on to another unique relationship in Set the Piano Stool on Fire, as he records the profound effect that wunderkind Kit Armstrong has on maestro Alfred Brendel. The Czech-born pianist had first discovered the British-Taiwanese prodigy when he was 13 and been moved by his rendition of Chopin's Nocturne. But he was reluctant to take him on as a pupil and was even less enamoured of the idea of Kidel charting his tutelage when he finally relented and agreed to impart his unrivalled knowledge of Beethoven and Schubert. However,, as Kidel had already produced a respectful portrait in Alfred Brendel: Man and Mask (2000), he was allowed into both the 80 year-old's cramped practice room and the concert hall where he gave his final public performance.

As Kidel reveals, Armstrong is not just a musical genius. He is also a brilliant mathematician, an intuitive philosopher, a fine tennis player and a creator of unfeasibly intricate origami models. But the YouTube clips of the six year-old playing Bach with exceptional maturity when barely able to reach the pedals don't lie and Brendel is evidently enthralled and deeply moved by Armstrong's feeling for and understanding of pieces that he has long worshipped. However, it's the octogenarian's determination that the teenager retains the childlike quality that makes his interpretations so distinctive that makes this insight into the humanity beneath the technique so revealing.

But this is not all about an apprentice embarking upon his career. Kidel is also keen to capture Brendel's swan song and is delighted at being granted access to the Bach, Schubert and Liszt encores with which he concludes his appearance at the 2008 Music at Plush festival in Dorset. Moreover, in showing Armstrong's reaction to his mentor's mastery, he also finds the perfect symbol for the passing of the classical torch.