Ken Burns's America - The Statue of Liberty

Rating:
Summary: Ken Burns and PBS = Great Television.
Review: PBS makes very good DVDs. Here Ken Burn's Statue of Liberty film has been restored and remastered and the movie has never looked and sounded better. Using newspaper accounts, photographs, and the personal accounts of those who helped create this symbol of freedom and hope of America. The movie is both great film making and good documentry, the kind only found on Public Television.It's also great that PBS now has Paramount making their DVDs as the new DVD editions are great picture and sound quality and are an improvement over the previous second rate ones that were done at Warner Brothers,

Rating:
Summary: Ken Burns and PBS = Great Television.
Review: PBS makes very good DVDs. Here Ken Burn's Statue of Liberty film has been restored and remastered and the movie has never looked and sounded better. Using newspaper accounts, photographs, and the personal accounts of those who helped create this symbol of freedom and hope of America. The movie is both great film making and good documentry, the kind only found on Public Television.

Rating:
Summary: Celebrating Freedom and the American Experiment
Review: What does liberty and freedom mean - to 20th century Americans, 19th century Frenchmen, and our 18th century founding fathers? Statue of Liberty, Ken Burns' award-winning documentary originally broadcast in 1985, asks that simple question in a refreshingly poignant manner. 21st century audiences will recognize the universal spirit and appreciate the classical questions raised in this moving film.
Conceived, directed, and broadcast long before Burns' became an American television legend for his insightful The Civil War and Jazz series, this inspiring documentary features illuminating interviews with Mario Cuomo, Barbara Jordan, James Baldwin, and Jerzy Kosinski reflecting on the unique aspirations of the American experiment in personal liberty. Burns, like in his more famous documentaries, combines a vast array of primary source material (diary entries, letters, newspaper articles) along with photographs, paintings, and drawings to tell the riveting story behind the making, exporting, and celebrating of the Statue of Liberty in New York's Harbor. Historian David McCullough provides, as he so often does on PBS documentaries, a calm narration sensitive to both the text and context of historical figures and events.
One can only hope that this outstanding work will be shown to schoolchildren, taught in citizenship classes, and kept in libraries across the United States and France. The enlightenment ideals of personal liberty still need to be remembered, celebrated, and protected.