For 50 years radio dominated the airwaves and the American consciousness as the first “mass medium.” In Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, Ken Burns examines the lives of three extraordinary men who shared the primary responsibility for this invention and its early success, and whose genius, friendship, rivalry and enmity interacted in tragic ways. This is the story of Lee de Forest, a clergyman’s flamboyant son, who invented the audion tube; Edwin Howard Armstrong, a brilliant, withdrawn inventor who pioneered FM technology; and David Sarnoff, a hard-driving Russian immigrant who created the most powerful communications company on earth.
You May Also Like
A locomotive journey traversing the North to the South of the German Democratic Republic on the eve of its dissolution. Labourers, punks, mothers, intellectuals, young and old are implored to reflect on their life choices, the sacrifices they’ve made, and their place in the world. Despite everything, hope persists.
A band struggles to reconcile for a reunion tour a decade after a contentious break-up and a fatal accident.
The untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson – brilliant African-American women working at NASA and serving as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history – the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.
How rich was Hitler really, and how did he waste his money, both while living and in his will?
Upstart payment firm Wirecard wowed the financial industry with its runaway success — until a tenacious team of journalists exposed massive fraud.
More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. This is a film about the prison in which we never see an actual penitentiary. The film unfolds a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from an anti-sex-offender pocket park in Los Angeles, to a congregation of ex-incarcerated chess players shut out of the formal labor market, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.
In the late fall of 2012, Theo Padnos, a struggling American journalist, slipped into Syria to report on the country’s civil war and was promptly kidnapped by Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria.
Investigative journalist, Jeremy Scahill is pulled into an unexpected journey as he chases down the hidden truth behind America’s expanding covert wars, and examines how the US government has responded to international terrorist threats in ways that seem to go against the established laws of the land.
The riveting story of the first all-Black tank battalion to fight in US military history. Under General George Patten’s command, the 761st fought heroically throughout WWII and were the furthest east of all US troops in the European theater of war.
Jeff Bridges, alongside prominent scientists and authors, weaves evolution, emergence, entropy, dark ecology, and what some are calling the end of nature, into a story that helps us understand our place among the species of Earth’s household.
Examines the implementation and ineffectiveness of anti-doping policies in sports.
Canadian documentarian Jamie Kastner (The Secret Disco Revolution) looks back at a notorious 1970s murder trial in the Virgin Islands — where five politicized young islanders were convicted of a massacre at a ritzy country club — and its dramatic aftermath a decade later, when the culprits’ ostensible leader staged a skyjacking and found refuge in Cuba.
