Summary: A generation after Americans had freed themselves politically and economically from Britain, it would be up to Ralph Waldo Emerson to carry the Revolution to individual men and women by exhorting them to a freedom of the spirit as well. Through a detailed recounting of Emerson's life, this program traces his vision of the ideal in America from its genesis to its flowering as the principles of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: How do photographic images evoke meaning and emotion? To understand that, viewers first need to understand how the eyes and brain process input from the visual world. After an overview of the biomechanics of vision, this program explains how proximity, similarity, and continuity affect perception; what light is and how lighting types and angles alter an image; and how color theory operates....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program addresses the emotionally manipulative power of photography by illustrating how commercial advertising has created an obsession with youth and physical perfection and can exploit viewers' fascinations with celebrity, sexuality, and violence. The video also demonstrates how photogenic people who adroitly use the visual media have come to dominate the political scene. Commentary is...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: The power of the photographic image remains undiminished in the latter part of the 20th century, even though it faces new challenges from television, technology, motion pictures, and elsewhere. Photography Transformed examines surveillance photography and the Cuban Missile crisis, searing images from the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights violence—while highlighting the transformation to the new...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1999
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Summary: Photographs have the potential to present powerful truths-or to create convincing fictions. This program uses case studies involving Iwo Jima, Elian Gonzalez, and O. J. Simpson to show how images can be manipulated to influence the way viewers perceive events. The ethics of photography and the positive and negative impacts of digital technology, which is steadily eroding the border between...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Once strictly considered a visual recording device, the camera has expanded beyond its documentational niche and made places for itself in the worlds of fine art, advertising, and news media as well. This program describes existing and emerging genres in the photographic arts, including documentary photography, portraiture, still life, commercial photography, and photojournalism. Commentary is...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Movies, magazines, TV, billboards, the Web-the world is filled with captivating photographic images competing for viewers' attention. Not surprisingly, citizens of the Global Village are experiencing a growing need for visual literacy: the ability to read between the lines and extract meaning from that daily bombardment. This program takes a close look at the vital importance of visual language...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Riveting real-life television, Intervention explores the lives of people dependent on drugs, alcohol, or other destructive behaviors and the people who intervene to save them. We are first introduced to Renee, whose food addiction and eating disorder now threatens her health, marriage, and finances. This episode also explores Peter’s problem with video games. This addition is so extreme, he...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
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Summary: Henry Ford meets Franklin Roosevelt to discuss New Deal and their differences
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1938
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Summary: Beginning in 1935, a group of New Deal-sponsored photographers roamed the American landscape, capturing the human face of the Great Depression. This film tells the story of the mammoth project, supervised by Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administration and later made part of the Office of War Information. Viewers will encounter the poignant, iconic images and personal challenges of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program analyzes the cultural changes that occurred during the early 20th century, the golden age of American mainstream theater. Ellen Adler, owner of The Stella Adler Conservatory; playwright Michael Dinwiddie; Brooks McNamara, director of the Shubert Archive; and theater historian and author Mary Henderson address topics such as the impact of immigrants on the emerging voices in drama;...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Listening to our Past is a piecing together of the family histories of four of the series participants. The episode explores the post-World War I “Great Migration” of African-Americans from the South to northern cities like Detroit and Chicago, as well as those who stayed in the South during the period of Jim Crow segregation. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. also begins an intriguing examination of his...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: This Universal newsreel focuses on Soviet clandestine operations during the Cold War. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge supports his accusation that the Russians bugged the U.S. embassy in Moscow by displaying a Soviet gift: a wooden carving of America's Great Seal that, when pried open, reveals a listening device.
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: In this episode, when the paper trail runs out, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. visits scientists who are using DNA analysis to trace ancestral roots. With results in hand he meets with leading historians of the slave trade and discovers more fascinating details about his own ancestry. Finally, Professor Gates and a guest journey to Africa, where they visit the port from which the guest’s patrilineal...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Often called the father of modern photography, Frenchman Eugene Atget embraced a heartfelt realism that influenced generations of younger photographers-including an American, Berenice Abbott, who championed him in his later career and carried on his legacy. This program examines the work of both artists, juxtaposing Atget's Paris oeuvre with Abbott's views of New York, describing how their...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: The challenge of genealogical research is even more evident as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. continues back through the Colonial period of American history in this program. The film takes us on a journey to fill in the family trees of each of the series participants, through war service records and various records of property during slavery's apogee—including inventories, sales, or gifts of slaves. In...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Using only the words of some of the great photographers, this program seeks to trace "the life-line of the species" (in the words of John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art, New York) Selecting their own favorite photos from contemporary works back to 1839, the producers of this program trace the lineage of photography as art and present a glorious parade of great photographs drawn from the...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: Hispanics and African-Americans-from politicians to poets to everyday people-speak candidly about the tensions between their communities. In Los Angeles, Mexican-Americans resent the African-American perception of them as mostly illegal immigrants who are taking their jobs. In Miami, the division between blacks and Hispanics leaves Cubans feeling culturally isolated. In New York, Puerto Ricans...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: In 1993, Mohammed Aideed's militia triumphantly paraded U.S. corpses through the streets of Mogadishu. In stunning irony, Mohammed's son, Hussein, though not a representative of Somalia's official government, now offers the U.S. strategic bases. This program presents a candid interview with Somalia's de facto leader, a warlord with unusual credentials: American citizen, former Marine, and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006