The 13 one-hour TV films in which English art historian, arts administrator, and writer Kenneth Clark historically narrates a “personal view” of the history of Western civilization were first shown in Britain and the U.S. 50 years ago as the series Civilisation. Their amazing popularity began immediately and has continued unabated since 1969, with translation into several languages and publication of the text and many of its illustrations as a book that has never been out of print. The films continue to be bought and shown and looked at again and again all over the world. Guides to the series’ masterworks have been published. The nature and size of the success make the series a cultural phenomenon worth remembering and meditating on.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) brought vast and unprecedented resources to the making of the films, implicitly expressing a faith in Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) personally that was probably the fundamental factor in the creation of the series. The story and the facts are lucidly narrated in James Stourton’s recent, award-winning biography Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. “The research, filming and editing took three years (1966–1969); the film crew of twelve travelled eighty thousand miles, visited eleven countries, used 117 locations and filmed objects in 118 museums and 18 libraries. Two hundred thousand feet of film were shot (the length of six feature-length movies) and £500,000 was spent.” Clark’s series led subsequently to numerous other “authored” series of TV documentaries, often originating in the U.K. but very much with the vast American audience in mind, as was the case with Civilisation itself.
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