A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The World at War Last Days in Vietnam The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns Vietnam: A Television History The War: A Ken Burns Film Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns The Cold War Prohibition: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick Victory at Sea The West: A Film by Stephen Ives A Film by Ken Burns: The Roosevelts: An Intimate History Empire of Dreams: The Making of the  Star Wars  Trilogy The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick The Central Park Five: A Film by Ken Burns The American Experience: Battle of the Bulge

(C) 2015 PBS Home Video This review focuses exclusively on the techie features of the 25th Anniversary Edition. For a review of Ken Burns' documentary, please see: 'The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns - DVD Review.' On October 13, 2015, PBS Distribution and American Documentaries, Inc. released “The Civil War: A Ken Burns Film – 25 th Anniversary Edition,” a six-Blu-ray disc (BD) set that presents the widely-acclaimed 1990 series on high definition video for the first time. To commemorate both the series’ Silver Anniversary and the 150 th commemoration of the Civil War’s bittersweet end, Burns’ Florentine Films and PBS digitally remastered the series’ nine episodes and its assorted extra features from standard definition (SD) to the state-of-the-art Ultra-High Definition 4K format. This remastering project was carried out as a joint effort between Florentine Films and the George Eastman House, the repository where “The Civil War’s” original 16 mm negative...

Pros:  Fine (if sometimes inaccurate) script, great narrator, and always-interesting presentation "We have felt the incommunicable experience of war. We felt - we still feel - the passion of life to its top. In our youths our hearts were touched with fire."   - Oliver Wendell Holmes. On September 23, 1990, just as units of the XVIII Airborne Corps were taking up defensive positions in the desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield in the wake of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the Public Broadcasting Service aired "The Cause," the first of nine episodes of director Ken Burns’  The Civil War . It was an odd juxtaposition - as an almost unbelieving nation was sending the vanguard of what eventually became a 350,000-troop force to war against Saddam Hussein, millions of television viewers were watching what was to become the defining documentary about America’s bloodiest conflict. Although Burns wasn’t an unknown filmmaker...