Films with: Samels, Mark

American experience.

One of the most-recognized figures in American literary history: poet, patriot, and faithful advocate of democracy. But in his own time, critics denounced Walt Whitman as a "lunatic raving in pitiable delirium". This "American experience" production tells Whitman's life story, from his working class childhood in Long Island to his years as a newspaper reporter in Brooklyn when he struggled to support his impoverished family, then to his reckless pursuit of the attention and affection he craved for his work, to his death in 1892 at the age of 72.

DVD 11973

Battle of Chosin

On Thanksgiving Day, 1950, US Army troops pushed north through the Korean peninsula to drive North Korea's Communist army out of democratically held South Korea. Within days, they were surrounded by more than 85,000 Chinese soldiers in the mountains by the Chosin Reservoir. View the intense battle in intimate detail in this vivid narrative of combat and survival in the first major military clash of the Cold War.

DVD 12744

Brilliant madness

This tells the story of mathematician John Nash. Called "the most remarkable mathematician of the second half of the century", Nash suffered a devastating breakdown at the age of thirty. He suddenly claimed that aliens were sending him messages, became obsessed with secret numbers and saw conspiracies all around him. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Nash spent a decade in and out of mental hospitals, surviving with the support of his wife and former colleagues. During that time, a mathematical proof he'd written at the age of twenty became a foundation of modern economics. Sometime in the 1980s, he gradually began to recover. In 1994, Nash capped his remarkable return from madness by winning the Nobel Prize.

DVD 9688

Tesla

"Nikola Tesla has come to be seen by many as a tragic figure, a visionary engineer who died impoverished and largely forgotten--eclipsed by names such as Edison and Marconi. A tireless inventor who registered numerous patents and developed many working prototypes, Tesla would become most famous for his dazzling demonstrations. Audiences flocked to see him send thousands of volts of electricity pulsing through his body, dazzled by the spectacle of the inventor seemingly on fire. Even more read about his claims of receiving signals from outer space and his plans for using the earth's natural charge to distribute free electricity. Tesla the strange wizard and mad scientist overtook Tesla the brilliant engineer--the seer of the wireless world we all live in. Lost in the spectacular rise and fall was the real man, a consummate inventor and dedicated engineer. That his ideas ricocheted from tangible inventions to projections of a future with head-spinning possibilities only partly explained his downfall. Yet it was his technology that helped drive the electrical age in the 20th century, and his vision that imagined the wireless world of the 21st century. In Tesla, American Experience chronicles the life of a man whose ideas revolutionized his time, and ours"--Container.

DVD 12489