TV Reviews : PBS’ ‘Millennium’ Seeks Truths of Existence

Perhaps more than anything television has attempted before, the epic 10-hour “Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World,” hosted by the velvety-toned, ultra-worldly British anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis (beginning 8 p.m. tonight, KCET Channel 28 and KVCR Channel 24; 9 p.m., KPBS, Channel 15, through June 8), strives to answer the Big Questions of human existence, summed up in Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian painting: “Who Are We? Where Did We Come From? Where Are We Going?”

The difference from past intellectual public broadcasting forays is that “Millennium” frames the questions within the context of both pre-technological and high-technological societies. The most troubling question here is: Can the two societies coexist anymore?

Maybury-Lewis, though, takes a cue from Huichol shaman Juan Bautista--one of several tribal people profiled here--and resolves not to firmly answer the questions as much as to urge a collective and individual journey, a pilgrimage of the mind and heart. Underlying everything in “Millennium” is a tacit understanding that aboriginal peoples have lessons for the rest of us but hold to their secrets. An observer of tribal culture for during three decades, Maybury-Lewis keenly knows the difference.

He is interested in how such matters as love, social contracts, religion and art manifest themselves in the old and new worlds and how the latter might glean some wisdom from the former. No viewer, for instance, can ignore the connections between the social breakdown in Los Angeles and the social cohesion of the nomadic Wodaabe people, enduring harsher climes than South Central.

Maybury-Lewis, wherever he looks, finds the pattern: Where there are intact families, a tie of support from elders to children, and clear roles and responsibilities, there is ethical society. Rather than the ruthlessness of the modern marketplace (even though tribes invented the market), tribal economy is based on enduring cycles of personal debt, as Weyewa elder Lendi Mbatu explains it. The contrast, in the remarkable seventh hour titled “A Poor Man Shames Us All,” to adman Phil Dusenberry may seem crass, but it is actually poignant.

Perhaps unavoidably though, writer-producer Adrian Malone’s film and Maybury-Lewis’ commentary slip into the rhetoric of white man’s guilt cloaked in criticisms of such efforts as space exploration and contemporary art. The fifth section, “The Art of Living,” displays the series’ sometimes cognitive dissonance regarding Western achievement. While Maybury-Lewis decries our lack of play, he is seen enjoying modern kids playing. Putting art on a gallery wall is made to look stupid here, yet the quiet yet social contemplation of art in a public place is surely one of the great pleasures of the Western world. (And nothing is said of Picasso’s borrowing from Ghanian tribal imagery.)

More troubling is Malone’s muddled filmmaking, which mixes straight docu-information with seemingly restaged events based (apparently) on tribal peoples’ stories as spoken by (apparently) actors. Switching between such actual events as Mbatu’s monumental effort to rebury his father and “real” episodes as the marriage of a Nyinba couple of Tibet, “Millennium” mixing of cinema verite and narrative movie making gets in the way of Maybury-Lewis’ ideas. We’re meant to get “inside” the aboriginal mind, but the effect is contrived. Unlike, for instance, Mali filmmaker Souleymane Cisse’s telling of similar tribal stories within a fictional, staged frame, Malone’s real/artificial confusion itself becomes “Millennium’s” own distinctly Western problem.