Civilisations

First: the title. This is a ludicrous title for the series, because it is actually about art alone, and completely ignores all other aspects of civilisations - the science, mathematics and technology that makes civilisation possible; how they rise and fall; and even why they exist at all. Remains of Homo sapiens have been found which have been dated to around 300,000 years ago, but there were no civilisations until the last 10,000 years ago. This needs to be explained!

Also, it describes cave paintings which were created tens of thousands of years before civilisation, so they should be irrelevant if the title of the series actually has any meaning.

This criticism applies to Clark's series "Civilisation", but this new series, while similar, is far more incoherent, with several presenters instead of one, no structure, and claims made without any evidence: "These hand stencils do what nearly all art that would follow would aspire to. Firstly, they want to be seen by others. And then they want to endure beyond the life of the maker."

I would recommend the viewer to watch it with muted sound because visually it is great, but the commentary is distracting and adds little.

I am a lifelong fan of Kenneth Clark's original series (and its companion programs such as "The Ascent of Man" and "The Age of Uncertainty") but I think that the three presenters here really outdid themselves.

Let's be honest, Clark's view of the world is interesting and his classicism is compelling, but he was also proudly and famously a fairly conservative westerner at the end of the day. His view shouldn't be removed from TV channels, sure, but it's great to have an updated look at cultures from around the world, and taking into account another 50 years of scholarship since Clark wrote his piece (50!).

Another reviewer here - the only one thus far as I write this - lamented that both this and the original were only about art, not civilisation, and I feel I must defend. First of all, the original series was commissioned as a "personal view", not a wide-ranging study in the manner of Attenborough. But also both Clark in his first episode, and Simon Schama in this first episode, explain very clearly that they believe art is an access point into the mind of a culture. Schama states that art is where the essential nature of a particular culture expresses itself, where we can find a window into the people. And Clark of course quotes the great Ruskin: "Great Nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art." (Ruskin goes on to clarify that, while we must read all three of those books, only the art can actually be trusted as time goes on.)

Is it perfect? Well, of course not. 9 episodes can never encompass everything humanity has to offer. But isn't that the beauty of having decades of documentaries available to us? No single Attenborough documentary covers everything, but we have access to all of them. So too with the many works on civilisation and art, of which Clark is one, and now the impressive viewpoints of Schama, Mary Beard, and David Olusoga are another.

I had huge hope for this series. I did not even read IMDB reviews before giving it a try on Netflix. As episode by episode i gave chances my hope were increasingly lost until I felt forced to write a review here. Civilization is not just visual art. Civilization is mostly human development over time based on different factors. Technology forms a backbone here. Agriculture was the first steps towards creating modern civilization because it forced us hunter gatherers to settle down. Harnessing sun, Wind, water became other factors. Art too is an important parameter but where are other sources of art like music or folks stories or mythical creatures? Given the sheer presence of science and technology here I would give only one chapter to art when it comes to civilization. There are simply so many things that could have taken especially the water and the importance it plays in civilization. This series did came pretty close when it talked about Yangtze river in one episode but did not go down further. This series was mostly obsessed with European visual arts. There was a whole episode on dome. My question during that time was where is pagoda? Pagoda was to east as dome was to west. But it was not even mentioned. Utter disappointment.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? This documentary explained first two question which are where do we come from and what are we. However, it avoids the most important one, where are we going. Our human being writes down history, not for fun, it's for our children know the idea of what happened and what should be. We always want to keep our children away from danger, like tell them do not eat the red mushroom because it has poison. But if we only wrote the book and told them how beautiful the red mushroom is, they will pay the price which is their life, then learn.

I've often imagined I'd like the chance of offering up my personal version of history on television; what a history of art? Art is not so simply to reduce to a straightforward narrative, so this is a bold project for co-presenters Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga. And it's very heartening to see that the BBC hasn't tried to dumb down their commentary. In other BBC programmes I've seen Beard idiotically reciting Caesar's speaches in modern day Rome, and Schama presenting a fairly convetional wisdom; but here we get their true intellectual insights, and if in places the series is pretentious it's also hard to watch without genuinely learning something. 'Civilisations' has been contrasted to Kenneth Clark's famous series with almost the same title from 60 years previously, but without the latter's Euro-centric bias: to it's credit, though, it never feels to be taking cheap pot-shots at Europe, but rather puts Europe's acheivements (and failures) quite properly in their global context. This is the sort of programme that almost no-one but the BBC could make, and that even the BBC barely makes any more. In the age of YouTube, watch it while you can.