Customer Reviews

Influenza 1918: The American Experience [VHS]

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When this film was originally broadcast on PBS in 1998, I had not heard of the 1918 Spanish Influenza. I was shocked that I had never heard of the 1918 pandemic, given the impact it had on the 20th century. I've now read every book I coould find that chronicles the outbreak. Some of the historical facts in the film may be disputed in other histories, but it's a solid documentary and I highly recommend it. It is a rivoting film.

This was my favorite American Experience documentary. I saw it years ago and never forgot it, so I bought it recently from Amazon to see if it still had the same effect on me. It did. A haunting and poignantportrait of our innocence in that era. The filmmakers paid great attention to detail and successfully captured the mood.This is such an engrossing film I had to give it five stars.

After much research on the influenza outbreak of 1918, I was looking forward to a nicely done synopsis (which is what the American experience usually does). This wasn't it. The video states as fact items that are not fact and ends the program in October, after the first wave of the flu, when a second wave came in late Nov/ early December. The personal narratives were wonderful, but I would reccomend viewing this video only AFTER gaining a broad knowledge of the epidemic, otherwise, it is doing a great disservice.

I am afraid that I must disagree with the other reviewers. Comparing a video to a book is unfair. An hour video can not be expected cover the length and breadth of such a topic as well as a four hundred page book.
The movie does an excellent job of introducing the uninformed to the terrible experiences of families struck by the flu in 1918. It puts the virus in historical context and shares sad but fascinating interviews with those that lived through it. My students learned a great deal about this virus and the link between history and infectious disease. Viewing this video lead to many interesting discussions. My only complaint is that the editors, obviously pressed to fit everything in, left out the link between this virus and literature. One of the main characters in this video is Katherine Anne Porter. They share her experience with the virus and how she recovers only to find that the soldier boyfriend that helped her through it , has died of the flu. Very touching but they never mention that she went on to become one of the finest American short story writers. Porter won the Pulitzer prize for literature in 1966 for her collected works. One of her stories, titled Pale Horse, Pale Rider, tells a fictional but semi-autobiographical tale of characters in 1918 and their experience with the flu. The video quotes from this story but does not mention that Porter shared her experiences in this fine short story. My students enjoyed the show, learned a great deal and it lead to excellent discussions.

I saw this documentary when it came out on PBS several years ago. The individual accounts of the virus and its rapid spread were quite unsettling. I got a good sense of the public's panic as friends and relatives started dying. However, if you want a thorough account of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, I would suggest reading Gina Kolata's "Flu" and "The Forgotten Pandemic" (can't remember the author--sorry). There are other books out there as well.
Overall, I liked this documentary because it takes you back to a time when doctors and scientists were new to viruses. Recommended.

I did relatively well in high school American history and yet I never heard of this national crisis. I guess World War I wasn't the only big deal of the 1910s. I am glad to see that the American Experience series not only covers great names, wars, and transportational feats, but also health concerns.

I recall that Charlie Chaplin's sweetheart died in a flu epidemic in Britain, but I didn't know the problem started in the United States. (If our revolution and our stock market crash can have global effects, I guess I should not be surprised.) It's easy to think of the bubonic plague as the world's only human international die-off. However, this film shows that it happened in the recent past too. This shows that savage diseases can be spread widely, unlike the localization of Ebola or SARS. I learned that the Titanic's sinking humbled early 20th-century modernists, but this flu outbreak must have been the same way. Nowadays, incurable diseases are usually associated with stigmatized groups. In contrast, this work clearly points to American soldiers, a well-respected group, as the cause of the spread.

This work proved the problem was cross-regional. This is not example of something on the East Coast being equated with all of America. The epidemic hit Philadelphia, but San Francisco, Nebraska, and the Dakotas as well. This work starts with interviewees waxing nostalgic about the pre-flu period. I thought it was offensive to think of a Jim Crow time as wonderful. However, this work compensates by interviewing an African-American witness to the crisis and a person recalling how a Native American group was affected.

In "Memoirs of a Geisha," one character says, "The interesting thing about wars is that you never know who will survive and who will not." This work revealed the same is true in epidemics. It was a bit anti-climactic how this crisis was resolved, but history doesn't usually have spectacular conclusions. After the bubonic plague, Europeans stopped killing cats and started killing mice. Because of AIDS, many are now practicing safer sex and cleaning drug needles. This documentary doesn't suggest that public health changed at all due to the flu. I'm surprised by that.

I usually don't care for scientific matters, but this work was informative and really has my wheels spinning.

As a nurse, I was facinated by this incredible event that many of us have perhaps never heard about. It is interesting to me how far we have come both in medicine and nursing care, yet we still don't have all the answers. It was a well put together documentary with footage of the times as well as the interviews that gave a first hand look at how people were affected. One interviewee states, "In the middle of a crisis, you need to do something even if its wrong." This is useful for teaching both history and science and is appropriate for middle and high school students. Teachers will appreciate that it has a teacher guide in Adobe PDF format.

I just previewed this short film and was really taken back at how fascinating the story is behind the Spanish Influenza. I was never taught about it in school or college and I'm a history major, it truly is a forgotten and often overlooked topic. This movie would be great for showing students and is in parts a tear-jerker. Powerful images, poignant music, and a great overview of this influenza. It makes you think about if we are prepared should a new strain arise. Great movie!

This is a great DVD for history buffs. American Experience always produces quality programs, and this is no exception. Fascinating story of the pandemic with focus on small-town USA. Good footage and interviews!

This documentary gives us an excellent account of the 1918 flu epidemic that came upon us quite mysteriously and always eluded the best efforts of medicine and science to cure people afflicted with it or inoculate those who were still well. The archival footage and the still photos from that era are very, very good; and the interviews with now elderly survivors of the epidemic are so well done that they truly bring this horrible nightmare to vivid life in all its grotesqueness. The story moves along at a very good pace and I was never bored; although this only lasts one hour, they always made it a very human portrayal of the problem and it never felt rushed. The script for the narrators was well written, too.

When the film starts, we see America as it was not too long after the turn of the century; we were a young nation already emerging as a world leader. Our sense of strength and invulnerability was shattered when the flu came upon us seemingly out of nowhere. The film discusses one possibility that the flu epidemic may have started with a few military soldiers in Kansas; but to this day they're not completely certain of that. What we do know is that this strain of the flu killed people who were thought to be most resistant to flu--young people in their 20s although many others, of course, got the flu and did not survive. We also see the flu as it impacted on both sides fighting the First World War in Europe (especially France) and the story is rather grim.

Of course, there's much, much more to this story but I will stop here; I don't want to spoil it for you.

The DVD comes with a link to a teacher's guide in the form of a PDF file; you can access this from a DVD-ROM drive. There's also a link to the PBS website.

Overall, this fine documentary tells the story of a horror that caused the uncontrollable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. I recommend this for people studying American history, the history of medicine in general; and documentaries about the human experience.