Documentary DVDs

Studio: Sony Music Release Date: 01/29/2002

"He was the most American of artists and the most artistic of Americans," one man later said – "so American in fact that he is almost invisible to us." ANDY WARHOL – a riveting and often deeply moving film portrait of the most famous and famously controversial artist of the second half of the twentieth century – is the first to explore the complete spectrum of Warhol's astonishing artistic output, stretching across five decades from the late 1940's to his untimely death in 1987. Combining powerful on-camera interviews and rare still and motion picture footage, it is also the first to put Warhol himself – his humble family background and formative experiences in Pittsburgh, and his crucial apprenticeship as a commercial artist in New York – back into the presentation of his life.

Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 09/30/2005

Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 09/23/2005

Before there was Disneyland, there was Coney Island. By the turn of the century, this tiny piece of New York real estate was internationally famous. On summer Sundays, three great pleasure domes--Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland--competed for the patronage of a half-million people. By day it was the world's most amazing amusement park, by night, an electric "Eden".

Written and directed by Ric Burns and narrated by Russell Baker, The Way West chronicles the extraordinary story of how the American West was lost and won from the time of the Gold Rush until the final major battle of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee.

Between 1845 and 1893, the American West was lost and won – wound with ribbons of iron and wire and brought within the dominion of the United States – while, along the way, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans were violently disrupted and all but destroyed. This mesmerizing six-hour documentary series from acclaimed filmmaker Ric Burns (The Civil War, Coney Island, New York), chronicles the final astonishing decades of the American frontier from the time of the Gold Rush until after the last gasp of the Indian wars at Wounded Knee.

Of all the 19th-century pioneer stories, none exerts such a powerful hold on the American imagination as the tale of the Donner Party in the high Sierra Nevadas in the winter of 1846. The excursion became a terrifying tale of misery, death, madness, and cannibalism. Through family journals, newspaper accounts, and interviews with historians and descendants of the party, the program re-creates the Donner Party's now legendary journey.

Written, directed and produced by Ric Burns and timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ansel Adams's birth, Ansel Adams is an elegant, moving and lyrical portrait of one of the most eloquent and quintessentially American photographers. At the heart of the film are the themes that absorbed Adams throughout his career: the beauty and fragility of "the American earth," the inseparable bond between man and nature and the moral obligations that the present owes to the future. Ansel Adams was co-produced by the Sierra Club and attracted 5 million broadcast viewers upon its initial airing on PBS.