Civilisation: Complete BBC Series

DVD Wholesale Quick Overview:

This masterpiece, perhaps the greatest documentary ever made, gets four stars when it deserves FIVE, largely because of those who blame the Blu-Ray discs for their cluelessness about formats. If they cared to read the specs, then they would see the Blu-Rays don’t play on USA-region players. Instead of “Oops,” and getting their money back, they plant a vindictive one-star, which skews down the aggregate rating. This amounts to vandalism. Kind of like the Huns trashing things they don’t understand.

To those who are put off by the dated quality of the DVD, I suggest they buy a multi-format Blu-Ray player available here at a reasonable price. When you see the quality of Civilization in remastered high definition, you will be blown away. It’s almost like seeing it for the first time. It is well worth the price of the player because Civilization is a great life experience, aside from the bonus of hundreds of other titles from UK which become accessible.

As to the silly criticism of Clark’s not mentioning every civilization on earth, he talks of European civilization because that’s his area of expertice. Early on he gives the Indus Valley civilization credit for the greatest spiritual awakening in history. He speaks of civilization’s beginnings in Egypt and Mesopotamia. What Clark does is use what he knows about, namely Europe, to illlustrate how a particular civilization has evolved or, in the end, devolved. it’s such a rare pleasure to listen to someone on TV who actually knows what he’s talking about.

Critics choose to forget that Civilization is not about the art itself but how the art reflects the culture that creates it. Of course, one could set oneself up as superior to Clark and argue the points. On the other hand, one can sit back and absorb the insights of one of the great minds of the 20th century and come away a wiser person for the experience of thirteen episodes of ravishing beauty and brilliant elucidation.

– Jack Rice

One of the most acclaimed documentaries in the history of television is “Civilisation.” This masterpiece narrated by Kenneth Clark examines the progress of Western Civilization from the eleventh century. This DVD set contains all 13 episodes of the series; it originally aired on the BBC in 1969 and was aired in this country on PBS in 1970.

Clark defines civilization in part as creative power and the enlargement of human faculties, and recognizes that it is fragile—it is sustained by confidence but endangered by doubt and exhaustion. The series looks at just how close Western Civilization came to dying in the Dark Ages, but that the eleventh century saw a quantum leap that set the foundations for the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the rest of growth of the second millennium.

The narrator travels to many spots in Western Europe and a few in the United States to limn the stupendous artistic, architectural, scientific, spiritual, educational, communicational, philosophical, industrial, musical, and other accomplishments of the West in the last several centuries. Among the vital contributors to civilization highlighted by the series include Dante, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Luther, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Descartes, Bach, Mozart, Voltaire, Washington, Jefferson, and others.

Clark recognizes the role of the Catholic Church in advancing civilization in the centuries after the Dark Ages. And while the Protestant Reformation was inevitable, its effects were not uniformly positive, and Clark recalls some of the controversies that followed. The series looks at the decline of religion among the elites in the last three centuries and some of the philosophical schools that resulted that have had wide effects, some deleterious, in the West since then.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the founding of the United States of America, the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, and the abolition of slavery, and the series covers those vital events. Clark notes that there is continuity but also dynamism and change in the West, and offers reasons for both optimism and pessimism for the future.

This DVD set contains both a bonus feature on the making of the series as well as a booklet of informative liner notes. The late Sixties were a time much like our own, when some doubted the worth of Western Civilization. This superb classic that looks back on the accomplishments of the last thousand years serves as a rebuff to such doubts and is as timely today as it was nearly a half-century ago when it was first broadcast.

-Eric Mayforth

DVD Wholesale Main Features:

Format: Box set, DVD
Language: German (Dolby Digital 1.0), English (Dolby Digital 1.0)
Subtitles: English
Subtitles for the Hearing Impaired: English
Region: Region 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Number of discs: 4
Rated: Unrated – Not Rated
ASIN: B00077284C