Civilisation: The Complete Series
by Michael Gill, Peter Montagnon
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Kenneth ClarkDirector: Michael Gill, Peter Montagnon
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 670 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-06-27
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: BBC Warner
Movie Reviews of Civilisation: The Complete Series
Movie Review: Clark's Civilization is a treasure
Summary: 5 Stars
My favorite Christmas gift this year was Lord Kenneth Clark's Civilisation documentaries on DVD. The viewer gets barely 10 minutes into the comprehensive series before Clark makes his first bold thesis: Civilisations collapse, not primarily from disease or invasion or corruption, but rather from exhaustion.
Is this the beginning of the end or are claims of Western demise greatly exaggerated? I see a few signs that we have some kick left in us:
- Perhaps no nation embodies Lord Clark's diagnosis of exhaustion better than the Greeks, who were too tired to get out of bed to pay their taxes. I hope they will find their German creditors setting the alarm clock a bit earlier than usual.
- A new word is fresh on the tongue of Europeans: Austerity. The birth-rates and demographics still look dreadful, but maybe there are a few strong-backed ditch-diggers ready to bury old man Keynes.
- In Germany, it has been a real treat to see Angela Merkel wake up from her nap to find strange Arabians crowding her bed. She has found multi-culturalism to be a nightmare, not a dream.
- While the continent slumbers through endless EU Summits, Euro-skeptics in the UK have found a bullhorn.
- While the USSR came of age and grew old in the same breath, the last Soviet satellites are set to come out of orbit in Cuba and North Korea.
- Supporters of that failed ideology are resigned to senile day-dreaming wrapped in Ivy League tenure or in sea-weed exfoliators near Hollywood.
- The People's Republic of China continues to insist that each shall work to his ability and receive according to his need. Told by wise and loving Party Leaders that they are too over-worked to have more than One-Child, millions of Chinese men without wives will start to wonder when that need is going to be fulfilled.
- A Bavarian pope continues to bring his always sharp intellect to bear on wearisome heresies born anew. His genius is no surprise, but his vigor and energy continue to impress.
- As a seminarian, Joseph Ratzinger was told that in the New Germany there would be no need for priests. But even the Nazi war machine could not sustain the depleting fantasies of a tyrant.
- The Third Reich was to last for 1000 years but never reached 100. The Keys given to a fisherman should never have lasted 100 years, but in Anno Domini 2010 they set foot in Westminster Abbey.
Lord Clark's Civilisation continues to prove more valuable than most of my Yale history seminars. Clark opened his documentary with the assertion that great civilizations collapse due to exhaustion. But what is the underlying dynamic that sustains and advances great civilizations? Our gracious guide offered one answer: internationalism.
Instead of the empty "citizenship of the world" offered by our current President, Clark cited the emanations from ancient Athens, 12th c. Chartres, 15th c. Florence and Baroque Rome. During these periods, the Church Universal was often the supranational conduit for artistic and intellectual exchange. To Clark's list, we might add the British Empire, that host of cultures churning underneath Pax Brittanica. Eventually the Empire would be superseded by the Colony as the American project assumed the torch of Liberty. The genius of the American constitutional republic is an intramural application of Clark's international exchange, turning each state into a laboratory of democracy.
If the value of Clark's internationalism is not self-evident, perhaps the absence of this dynamism proves its worth. The small world inhabited by image-smashing "Reformers" was made more claustrophobic by their thuggery. When Europe retreats into nationalism, her member states will only emerge to bloody the entire continent. The United States is not immune from neutering isolationism and the result is similar to a rowdy schoolroom when the teacher steps into the hall. Despite grandiose designs for conquering the world, has there ever been a more self-limiting nation than Hitler's racially and culturally homogeneous Third Reich?
I could only suggest the Soviet Union with millions ensconced behind the Iron Curtain. I assume that Lord Clark would heartily approve of the international response to this deadly threat. At a time when many in the West were ready to concede that the Cold War could not be won, or should not be won, the US and Britain galvanized the international response to Soviet aggression.
George Weigel continues to illustrate the victory won by the 20th century's most international figure: Pope John Paul II. "Every generation ... needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought." Pope John Paul II showed the world the freedom that comes from Faith and the power of grace to topple tyrants.
I see little of Clark's international vibrancy in the European Union, which looks more like a huddle of sickly bodies clinging together for warmth. Providentially, from the continent's smallest state a voice is heard of one crying out in the wilderness. Pope Benedict XVI warns us of the "dictatorship of relativism." This dangerous lie binds man in his own ego. A civilization of one is fruitless, introverted, selfish... in a word: uncivilized.
Having left Bernini's Rome, Lord Clark's Civilisation moved to Holland where skepticism and curiosity are locked in battle. Clark was an art historian but everyone is an economist as each of us grapples with the fundamental problem of scarcity every day. Clark recognized the benefits of free flowing capital: leisure, movement, independence. In Holland, we find some of the first bourgeois democrats along with a rapacious scientific interest and visual appreciation.
One of the dangers is that this affluence spoils and becomes opulence with its attendant ostentation, smugness and sentimentalism. The Tulip Mania was a classic speculative bubble driven by scientific aesthetes laden with cash and buoyed by optimism. If only the current price of gold reflected a spike in the demand for monstrances and dental fillings instead of inflation and instability.
Minds in Holland raised mathematics to new heights of appreciation. Artists like Johannes Vermeer had more beautiful paintings, but their city-scapes are a triumph of perspective. Their geometry is so precise that Lord Clark was able to re-create with a video camera the exact scene outside a church and "step-into" the shot.
Unfortunately, in an increasingly Christo-skeptic intellectual culture, mathematics could become ideology as a clumsy Theory of Everything. Descartes had Leonardo da Vinci's diagrammatic approach to observation but his arrogant, isolated skepticism tainted his curiosity, leaving his work cold and inhuman compared to the Renaissance Man. In an effort to think without preconception, he began to explain natural and social phenomena in the way he wished they worked instead of reality.
At its best, scientific inquiry in Holland displayed a sense of wonder at the magnitude and complexity of creation from the expanse of the heavens to the contents of a nucleus. Clark presented beautifully ornate instruments: telescopes, astrolabes, sextants and diptychs with enough genuine style to be both scientific and artistic artifacts. Now consider the split-pea green x-ray machine at your hospital. Perhaps a visit to the dentist would be more enjoyable if the oral hygienist wore a paisley facemask?
Beyond aesthetics, AD 2011 sees science at its worst. Medical genius is turned away from solving agonizing infertility and toward the frustration of conception. Scarce medical resources are used frivolously on tummy tucks, nose jobs and bosom enhancements. In our top medical schools, expertise that could save and incubate even the tiniest and barely viable life is instead used to snuff out innocents on a scale far greater that of King Herod.
A conversation was recently overheard in a small town south-east of Rome. A soft-spoken Bavarian whose primary focus is the Queen of the Sciences, not biology or physics, remarked that "It is only so long as one is intoxicated by individual discoveries that one says: There can't be anything more than this, now we know everything. But soon as one recognizes the incomparable grandeur of the whole, one's vision penetrates farther and the question arises about a God who is at the origin of all things."
Summary of Civilisation: The Complete Series
The eminent art historian Sir Kenneth Clark was commissioned to write and present an epic examination of Western European culture defining what he considered to be the crucial phases of its development. Civilisation: A Personal View by Lord Clark would be more than two years in the making with filming in over 100 locations across 13 countries. The lavish series was hailed as a masterpiece when it was first transmitted in 1969.Running Time: 670 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DOCUMENTARIES/MISC. UPC: 794051260628 Manufacturer No: E2606Similar DVD Movies
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