Documentaries
Over the last few years Michelle and I have chewed through a bunch of documentary series. There's a staggering number out there on a lot of topics, and finding good ones is tricky. Actually finding copies is also tricky, though the internet makes it a little easier. Buying them outright is often very expensive.
Cosmos (PBS, 1980)
Producer: Adrian Malone
Presenter & writer: Carl Sagan
Length: 13 episodes of 60m
An interest in physics and space is one thing that brought Michelle and me together. She's always had an excellent layperson's qualitative understanding of science and engineering. In any event, she proposed we watch the world's premier source of youtube science clips and bought us the 2005 re-issue (with some updated animation and facts) DVD edition for Christmas in 2010. We watched it front to back and had a great time. It's still an excellent series that provides a qualitative description of the origin and structure of the universe, modern physics and the scientific view of the world, discussing issues of research religion & superstition and exploration. At multiple times it attacks war for the setbacks it's imposed on human scientific progress and, as a product of the Cold War era, the threat nuclear weapons pose to human survival.
The Life of Mammals (BBC, 2002)
Producer: Mike Salisbury
Presenter & writer: David Attenborough
Soundtrack: Dan Jones & Ben Salisbury
Length 10 episodes of 50m
This is part of the legendary Life series, providing an overview of Earth biology with famous zoologist David Attenborough's crunchy English accent describing with utmost excitement the way creatures work. Mammals covers mammal evolution and why we have the features we have, as well as the specific adaptations of all of our various types. The series was on Netflix but we didn't finish it before Netflix contract with its distributor ended.
The Civil War (PBS, 1990)
Producer: Ken Burns
Narrator: David McCullough
Soundtrack: Jay Ungar
Length: 9 episodes 11h 30m total
The Civil War put Ken Burns on the map as a film producer, and led to his other famous works like The War and Baseball. I'd started watching Baseball with my mother in 2007 but we stopped for some reason, it does an excellent job describing the evolution of the sport and its role in shaping 20th century American society. My mother had also seen the Civil War when it aired and encouraged me to do so. The Civil War is famous for what's now called the Ken Burns effect- there is no video from the war (there is a little of veteran groups from after) so visual interest is maintained by scanning across photographs. It goes beyond issues of race and slavery, into the deep cultural divide across the US that made the war possible, the complicated political hoops Lincoln had to jump through during it, and has a daughter of a veteran (then 104 years old) recite her poetry about her father's experience. It also covers well the difficulty of adapting war to the rifle and the tactics of combat, and is known for popularizing Maine's Joshua Chamberlain, an obscure officer who ordered a bayonet charge at Gettysburg when his troops ran out of ammo that helped save the battle. All of Ken Burns' films are on Netflix.
The War (PBS, 2007)
Producer: Ken Burns
Narrator: Keith David
Soundtrack: Wynton Marsalis, Gene Scheer and Norah Jones
Length: 7 episodes of 120m
As we were watching Baseball, the fact that Ken Burns would be tackling the Second World War sounded pretty incredible and my mother and I watched the first episode when it aired. I didn't keep up with the others. There's a mountain of WWII features so this one has unique take of looking at the war through the people of four towns and cities in the US. It interviews their veterans and the folks who worked and suffered through rationing at home, and describes the effects the war had on their populations and economies. Sacremento for example exploded from a small town to a major city due to defense work in California, and also saw its Japanese-American population removed. The series focuses a lot of the poor treatment of minorities, especially the Japanese, during the war. It's about as good a look you'll find at the American experience of the war, but obviously an incomplete picture of he whole conflict.
The World at War (Thames TV & ITV, 1973)
Producer: Jeremy Isaacs
Narrator: Laurence Olivier
Soundtrack: Carl Davis
Length: 26 episodes of 50m
The big daddy of WWII documentaries, Jeremy Isaacs attempted to tackle as much of the conflict as we could with famous actor Laurence Olivier's solemn voice setting the tone. It's a bit British centric- it was partly produced by the Imperial War Museum, and really you can't cover everything in 26 episodes. The overall incredible quality of the series makes the omissions stand out more- notably it glosses over the war in China a lot and in the Pacific a little. The Rape of Nanking is mentioned and the battle of Midway gets a few minutes. The Soviet Union was also upset that the fact that it did about 80% of the fighting in Europe wasn't represented fairly, though the film still gives several episodes to the Eastern Front and an entire episode to Stalingrad, the worst battle in human history, when it was often ignored completely then and since. What makes the film special though is it's about 30 years after the war. There were many more veterans and survivors with much fresher memories to interview than there were for the mountain of later features. Additionally, many older people who were in or close to positions of power were still alive. Albert Speer, one of Hitler's closest friends and a high ranking official in his government had just finished a 20 year jail term and is featured many times. Many military officers and adjutants were available. They even tracked down senior members of the SS who were spared or escaped execution. It covers the cultural issues in the main powers (USA, UK, Germany, USSR and Japan) and dedicates a famous episode to the effects the Holocaust. A "making of" feature talks about something I had suspected- much of the sound in old film is dubbed. At the time video was recorded only on film, which can't record sound and you needed a separate sound recorder (which either carved a record or used early audiotape) and those were usually not available unless the recording was planned in advance by a news team. This is usually not an issue but there was some irritating things- every rifle made the same echo-y sound they overused an annoying "ptow" sound like every movie in the 70's I'd started watching this on VHS tapes borrowed from the Caldwells when I was little but never finished it. Michelle and I got it on DVD from Lowell library.
The Great War (BBC, 1964)
Producer: John Terraine, Tony Essex and Gordon Watkins
Narrator: Michael Redgrave
Soundtrack: Wilfred Josephs
Length: 26 episodes of 40m
It occurred to Michele and I that we knew little of the other world war. While WWII may have a stunning range of documentation, the war that spawned it is barely remembered. Today no one literally remembers it as it reaches 100 years old and no veterans are left alive. In 1964 there were plenty of veterans, mostly around age 70. You will not get a variety of interviews like this in any feature since then. Part of the dearth of features has to do with its bigger, badder sequel and part has to do with the fact that the US played mostly a minor role late in the war. There are more recent films but they were tough to find. This one would normally be too, it was only released for home video in Europe but the entire thing is on Youtube. It does a decent job describing the war as more than just an accident of alliances following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and covers the tinderbox nature of Europe at the time. It doesn't say as much about the colonial races or the UK-Germany battleship arms race, but mentions them. It strikes a good balance between personal experience and general description of tactics and action and really gives a good sense of how the battles happened, something I knew nothing about beyond the fact that there were trenches, poison gas and high casualties. Another Imperial War Museum feature, it features a lot of video- more than most WWI features which tend to fall on a few clips. It runs the video at the correct speed which allows you to see the slow frame rate (but eliminates the sped-up feeling of a lot of old video) but makes the dubbed-in sound effects, which are mostly of decent quality seem kind of out of place. The French national anthem gets used as background music too often. English people don't like it because it goes easy on Field Marshall Douglas "Butcher" Haig, hated in England for losing 2 million men under his command, but it explains why- no one had any idea what they were doing and everyone suffered pointlessly high causalities. It also doesn't cover war aftermath at all- "It's over hurray!" without mentioning that damage down by the Treaty of Versailles. It may be black and white and uncaptioned it still looks modern today and you probably won't find a better description of the major battles of the war.
Cold War (CNN & BBC, 1998)
Producer: Jeremy Isaacs
Narrator: Kenneth Branagh
Soundtrack: Carl Davis
Length: 24 episodes of 46m
Back at TMCS middle school I had a growing interest in political and military history (I was playing the alt-history video game Red Alert which is basically full of WWII and Cold War references and jokes) and every week the school gave us TIME magazines and we had to summarize something from the news. One day I saw an ad in one for a series on the Cold War on CNN and said we must watch it. For 24 weeks my parents and I did, suffering through those damned ads for Unysis (we eat sleep and drink this stuff!) but it was very interesting and played a big role in my understanding of world politics as I entered more contemporary history classes at school and developed political consciousness as I neared voting age. The Cold War seemed long ago as a kid then, but it now looks like a recent history 15 years later. The Cold War was only 6 years old then. It's pretty comprehensive and covers in detail the horrible treatment of the world by the USSR and USA over a 45 year period. It doesn't go into the space race much, which was an important, positive part of the era, but does cover a little of it. It covers issues in Asia like Israel and Afghanistan but avoids Iran, which is a major part that still matters today. Plenty of world leaders were around and willing to talk, including George Bush Sr., Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev. It talks about how we trained and armed terrorists in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invasion- three years before that blew up in our face. Seeing the story end without the way we know it does it seemed odd. The omission of the CIA overthrow of Iran's government, which resulted in the hostile, possibly nuclear Iran we have today seems odd too. Michelle and I watched it (again for me) on Amazon and from DVDS from the library.
Victory at Sea (NBC, 1952)
Producer: Henry Salomon
Narrator: Leonard Graves
Soundtrack: Richard Rodgers
Length: 26 episodes of 26m
One of the first TV documentaries, this covers Allied naval strategy and action in WWII just a few years after its end, using all kinds of footage provided by the US Navy. It mostly avoids dubbing and instead keeps audio interest with an extremely bombastic soundtrack- a famous one I've heard before (my parents had copies and played it as background music around the house sometimes when I was growing up) and extremely serious, gung-ho, wordy narration. The Fate Of The World Is At Stake And We Are Fighting For God And Country And Freedom. The dated narration makes it kind of hard to watch so I probably won't finish it soon and the soundtrack is kind of exhausting but it has some interesting facts about the war and discusses well why naval actions matter- it's all about supplies and transportation. Ships don't shoot at each other just to do it. The series has lapsed to public domain and is on youtube.
We're looking for more stuff to watch, maybe Baseball. Michelle would like to see something about Vietnam since her father is a veteran, but finding something that covers it well may be tough because of how controversial to war was.
Cosmos (PBS, 1980)
Producer: Adrian Malone
Presenter & writer: Carl Sagan
Length: 13 episodes of 60m
An interest in physics and space is one thing that brought Michelle and me together. She's always had an excellent layperson's qualitative understanding of science and engineering. In any event, she proposed we watch the world's premier source of youtube science clips and bought us the 2005 re-issue (with some updated animation and facts) DVD edition for Christmas in 2010. We watched it front to back and had a great time. It's still an excellent series that provides a qualitative description of the origin and structure of the universe, modern physics and the scientific view of the world, discussing issues of research religion & superstition and exploration. At multiple times it attacks war for the setbacks it's imposed on human scientific progress and, as a product of the Cold War era, the threat nuclear weapons pose to human survival.
The Life of Mammals (BBC, 2002)
Producer: Mike Salisbury
Presenter & writer: David Attenborough
Soundtrack: Dan Jones & Ben Salisbury
Length 10 episodes of 50m
This is part of the legendary Life series, providing an overview of Earth biology with famous zoologist David Attenborough's crunchy English accent describing with utmost excitement the way creatures work. Mammals covers mammal evolution and why we have the features we have, as well as the specific adaptations of all of our various types. The series was on Netflix but we didn't finish it before Netflix contract with its distributor ended.
The Civil War (PBS, 1990)
Producer: Ken Burns
Narrator: David McCullough
Soundtrack: Jay Ungar
Length: 9 episodes 11h 30m total
The Civil War put Ken Burns on the map as a film producer, and led to his other famous works like The War and Baseball. I'd started watching Baseball with my mother in 2007 but we stopped for some reason, it does an excellent job describing the evolution of the sport and its role in shaping 20th century American society. My mother had also seen the Civil War when it aired and encouraged me to do so. The Civil War is famous for what's now called the Ken Burns effect- there is no video from the war (there is a little of veteran groups from after) so visual interest is maintained by scanning across photographs. It goes beyond issues of race and slavery, into the deep cultural divide across the US that made the war possible, the complicated political hoops Lincoln had to jump through during it, and has a daughter of a veteran (then 104 years old) recite her poetry about her father's experience. It also covers well the difficulty of adapting war to the rifle and the tactics of combat, and is known for popularizing Maine's Joshua Chamberlain, an obscure officer who ordered a bayonet charge at Gettysburg when his troops ran out of ammo that helped save the battle. All of Ken Burns' films are on Netflix.
The War (PBS, 2007)
Producer: Ken Burns
Narrator: Keith David
Soundtrack: Wynton Marsalis, Gene Scheer and Norah Jones
Length: 7 episodes of 120m
As we were watching Baseball, the fact that Ken Burns would be tackling the Second World War sounded pretty incredible and my mother and I watched the first episode when it aired. I didn't keep up with the others. There's a mountain of WWII features so this one has unique take of looking at the war through the people of four towns and cities in the US. It interviews their veterans and the folks who worked and suffered through rationing at home, and describes the effects the war had on their populations and economies. Sacremento for example exploded from a small town to a major city due to defense work in California, and also saw its Japanese-American population removed. The series focuses a lot of the poor treatment of minorities, especially the Japanese, during the war. It's about as good a look you'll find at the American experience of the war, but obviously an incomplete picture of he whole conflict.
The World at War (Thames TV & ITV, 1973)
Producer: Jeremy Isaacs
Narrator: Laurence Olivier
Soundtrack: Carl Davis
Length: 26 episodes of 50m
The big daddy of WWII documentaries, Jeremy Isaacs attempted to tackle as much of the conflict as we could with famous actor Laurence Olivier's solemn voice setting the tone. It's a bit British centric- it was partly produced by the Imperial War Museum, and really you can't cover everything in 26 episodes. The overall incredible quality of the series makes the omissions stand out more- notably it glosses over the war in China a lot and in the Pacific a little. The Rape of Nanking is mentioned and the battle of Midway gets a few minutes. The Soviet Union was also upset that the fact that it did about 80% of the fighting in Europe wasn't represented fairly, though the film still gives several episodes to the Eastern Front and an entire episode to Stalingrad, the worst battle in human history, when it was often ignored completely then and since. What makes the film special though is it's about 30 years after the war. There were many more veterans and survivors with much fresher memories to interview than there were for the mountain of later features. Additionally, many older people who were in or close to positions of power were still alive. Albert Speer, one of Hitler's closest friends and a high ranking official in his government had just finished a 20 year jail term and is featured many times. Many military officers and adjutants were available. They even tracked down senior members of the SS who were spared or escaped execution. It covers the cultural issues in the main powers (USA, UK, Germany, USSR and Japan) and dedicates a famous episode to the effects the Holocaust. A "making of" feature talks about something I had suspected- much of the sound in old film is dubbed. At the time video was recorded only on film, which can't record sound and you needed a separate sound recorder (which either carved a record or used early audiotape) and those were usually not available unless the recording was planned in advance by a news team. This is usually not an issue but there was some irritating things- every rifle made the same echo-y sound they overused an annoying "ptow" sound like every movie in the 70's I'd started watching this on VHS tapes borrowed from the Caldwells when I was little but never finished it. Michelle and I got it on DVD from Lowell library.
The Great War (BBC, 1964)
Producer: John Terraine, Tony Essex and Gordon Watkins
Narrator: Michael Redgrave
Soundtrack: Wilfred Josephs
Length: 26 episodes of 40m
It occurred to Michele and I that we knew little of the other world war. While WWII may have a stunning range of documentation, the war that spawned it is barely remembered. Today no one literally remembers it as it reaches 100 years old and no veterans are left alive. In 1964 there were plenty of veterans, mostly around age 70. You will not get a variety of interviews like this in any feature since then. Part of the dearth of features has to do with its bigger, badder sequel and part has to do with the fact that the US played mostly a minor role late in the war. There are more recent films but they were tough to find. This one would normally be too, it was only released for home video in Europe but the entire thing is on Youtube. It does a decent job describing the war as more than just an accident of alliances following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and covers the tinderbox nature of Europe at the time. It doesn't say as much about the colonial races or the UK-Germany battleship arms race, but mentions them. It strikes a good balance between personal experience and general description of tactics and action and really gives a good sense of how the battles happened, something I knew nothing about beyond the fact that there were trenches, poison gas and high casualties. Another Imperial War Museum feature, it features a lot of video- more than most WWI features which tend to fall on a few clips. It runs the video at the correct speed which allows you to see the slow frame rate (but eliminates the sped-up feeling of a lot of old video) but makes the dubbed-in sound effects, which are mostly of decent quality seem kind of out of place. The French national anthem gets used as background music too often. English people don't like it because it goes easy on Field Marshall Douglas "Butcher" Haig, hated in England for losing 2 million men under his command, but it explains why- no one had any idea what they were doing and everyone suffered pointlessly high causalities. It also doesn't cover war aftermath at all- "It's over hurray!" without mentioning that damage down by the Treaty of Versailles. It may be black and white and uncaptioned it still looks modern today and you probably won't find a better description of the major battles of the war.
Cold War (CNN & BBC, 1998)
Producer: Jeremy Isaacs
Narrator: Kenneth Branagh
Soundtrack: Carl Davis
Length: 24 episodes of 46m
Back at TMCS middle school I had a growing interest in political and military history (I was playing the alt-history video game Red Alert which is basically full of WWII and Cold War references and jokes) and every week the school gave us TIME magazines and we had to summarize something from the news. One day I saw an ad in one for a series on the Cold War on CNN and said we must watch it. For 24 weeks my parents and I did, suffering through those damned ads for Unysis (we eat sleep and drink this stuff!) but it was very interesting and played a big role in my understanding of world politics as I entered more contemporary history classes at school and developed political consciousness as I neared voting age. The Cold War seemed long ago as a kid then, but it now looks like a recent history 15 years later. The Cold War was only 6 years old then. It's pretty comprehensive and covers in detail the horrible treatment of the world by the USSR and USA over a 45 year period. It doesn't go into the space race much, which was an important, positive part of the era, but does cover a little of it. It covers issues in Asia like Israel and Afghanistan but avoids Iran, which is a major part that still matters today. Plenty of world leaders were around and willing to talk, including George Bush Sr., Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev. It talks about how we trained and armed terrorists in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invasion- three years before that blew up in our face. Seeing the story end without the way we know it does it seemed odd. The omission of the CIA overthrow of Iran's government, which resulted in the hostile, possibly nuclear Iran we have today seems odd too. Michelle and I watched it (again for me) on Amazon and from DVDS from the library.
Victory at Sea (NBC, 1952)
Producer: Henry Salomon
Narrator: Leonard Graves
Soundtrack: Richard Rodgers
Length: 26 episodes of 26m
One of the first TV documentaries, this covers Allied naval strategy and action in WWII just a few years after its end, using all kinds of footage provided by the US Navy. It mostly avoids dubbing and instead keeps audio interest with an extremely bombastic soundtrack- a famous one I've heard before (my parents had copies and played it as background music around the house sometimes when I was growing up) and extremely serious, gung-ho, wordy narration. The Fate Of The World Is At Stake And We Are Fighting For God And Country And Freedom. The dated narration makes it kind of hard to watch so I probably won't finish it soon and the soundtrack is kind of exhausting but it has some interesting facts about the war and discusses well why naval actions matter- it's all about supplies and transportation. Ships don't shoot at each other just to do it. The series has lapsed to public domain and is on youtube.
We're looking for more stuff to watch, maybe Baseball. Michelle would like to see something about Vietnam since her father is a veteran, but finding something that covers it well may be tough because of how controversial to war was.