Product Description

Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 10/20/2005 Director: Ken Burns

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #889 in DVD
• Brand: Paramount
• Released on: 2004-09-28
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 240 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
Another reliably well-crafted, generally engrossing documentary from Ken Burns, Lewis & Clark employs the director's now-familiar approach to his subjects, from its elegant juxtaposition of period illustrations and portraits against newly filmed footage of historic sites to Burns's repertory of accomplished actors to provide gravitas for quotes from the key figures. Granted the formula has become familiar enough to allow parody, but Burns knows how to invest his historical investigations with movement and drama, making this four-hour journey a worthwhile trip.

As narrated by Hal Holbrook, Dayton Duncan's script explicates the agenda presented by Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, placing it in the context of the young country's gamble in Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, and the expedition's goals for opening the West. While preserving the heroic scale of the undertaking, Burns also finds time to delve into the politics of the venture and the disparate personalities of the two explorers; in particular, Duncan and Burns look at the career of Lewis, the presidential protégé, his moody demeanor, and his untimely death. The film also looks beyond its titular leaders to examine the personalities of their corps of soldiers, their boatmen, and the Indians they met and depended on, most notably their female Shosone guide, Sacagawea. --Sam Sutherland

Customer Reviews

An experience in its own right
This film makes history live. The Core of Discovery expedition was more than a century and a half before my birth and yet, this film made me feel as if I were a member.
Like other Ken Burns films, it is long. However, like other Ken Burns films, it encouraged me to take my time. I watched the 4 hours one segment at a time in the evenings with dinner over the course of almost two weeks. And what a viewing!
I never knew that the Lewis and Clark expedition was a military expedition. I never knew that Lewis and Clark where military officers and that they took a platoon of soldiers with them. I never knew that they took plant and animal samples, including sending a live ground hog back to Thomas Jefferson.
I never knew that the expedition was called the Core of Discovery or that these two incredible military officers took so many soldiers such an incredible distance over the course of years and lost only one, who was lost to a disease that most likely no one could have cured at the time. I never knew that they drew the first map of most of the United States, using only dead reconning and were accurate to withing 40 miles of the actual distance despite their primative instruments and a distance of some 4,000 miles! I never knew these men were so incredible. And, I never knew that Merriweather Lewis was so incredibly depressed that he died, "I'm sorry to say," by suicide.
This film is so personal, I felt the tears that the historian on the film displayed when he told of Lewis' death. He died more than a century before my birth and yet, by the time I was finished with the film, I felt pain for his death, anger at York's difficulty gaing his freedom and sadness at the passing of the Shoshone Indian lady guide Sakajeya.
Films like this might actually make me like history, a topic I learned to hate in elementary school. I wish there were more historical films like this one. I wish I were on Ken Burns' staff. I'd love to do research like this. I'd love to bring life not only to history, but to the people who view it. What a great film!

Brilliant
I had always thought that "Baseball" and "The Civil War" were very good films. However, as good as they are, they do not compare to "Lewis and Clark." The job which Burns did in blending images of the time period, the west, and the telling of a true American story through the words of historians such as Dayton Duncan and Stephen Ambrose, as well as the narration of a script which included journal entries of several members of the Corps, was marvelous. Before seeing this documentary, I had never appreciated the difficulties, hardships, and dangers which Captains Lewis and Clark and the rest of the Corps of Discovery had to meet and overcome, nor did I ever appreciate the fact that these men were, in every sense of the word, heroes. I would recommend this tape for anyone who has an even slight interest in American History. This documentary draws your emotions into it, and is perhaps as close as an average person can ever come to feeling the emotions of triumph, tragedy, excitment, fear, apprehension, and patriotism which the member of the members of the corps felt. A trueley wonderful film and well worth the cost.

Travel with the Corps of Discovery
I absolutely love this movie. Something about the Lewis & Clark expedition appeals to the adventurer in each of us. The United States as a country is less than 30 years old on May 14, 1804, as Lewis & Clark leave with Jefferson's "the Corps of Discovery" on their famous expedition to explore the west. The photography of this DVD is stunningly beautiful, the music hauntingly reminiscent of the early 1800's. The story is told through reading excerpts from the Corps' diaries and journals, beautiful photography, and interviews with Dayton Duncan (writer), John Logan Allen (geographer), Stephen E. Ambrose (historian), William Least Heat-Moon (writer), James P. Ronda (historian), Mylie Lawyer (Twisted Hair Descendant), and others. This movie leaves the sense of having travelled with the Lewis & Clark expedition and having seen the beautiful country with their eyes, as you hear their words and see the land they saw.

As stated of the Corps of Discovery in the movie's Introduction, "They were beginning the most important expedition in American History, the United States' first official exploration into unknown spaces, and a glimpse into the future of their young nation. They would become the first United States citizens to experience the Great Plains, the immensity of its skies, the rich splendor of its wildlife, the harsh rigor of its winters. They would be the first United States citizens to see the daunting peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the first to struggle over them, the first to cross the Continental Divide -- to where the rivers flow west. And after encountering cold, hunger, danger, and wonders beyond belief, they would become the first of their nation to reach the Pacific Ocean by land. It would be the greatest adventure of their lives. . . It's a great story. It's a human story. It's a story of those who went first. THEY were first. They led the way. They opened the trail." "It's America's story . . . They turned the nation and faced it west. And that's where the future has always been, that's where hope and possibility have been. And I think that is what draws us to Lewis and Clark, it's about possibilities, it is about what could be. . . it's about potential, the future, and hope."

I first borrowed this DVD from our local library, but then had to buy it for my own. Sometimes I watch it just for the beauty of the scenery and the hopeful young optimism of a new country, looking west all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

Disc One has these chapters:
Introduction (the start of the Corps)
The Grandfather Spirit (the Mississippi River)
The Garden of Eden (the Great Plains)
Our Friends (the Mandan Indians and Fort Mandan)
The Real Unknown (Montana)
The Portage (around the Great Falls of the Missouri River)
The Northwest Passage (the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide)
Special Features:
Interview with Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan
Interview with Stephen Ambrose

Disc Two
Introduction (summer of 1805 and summary of accomplishments)
The Most Terrible Mountains (Rocky Mountains)
Watkuweis (the elderly woman of Nez Perce "Returned From Being Lost")
O! The Joy (the Pacific Ocean)
Rainy and Wet (Fort Clatsop)
Done for Posterity (the end of the expedition)
Special Features
The Making of Lewis and Clark
Ken Burns: Making History
A Conversation with Ken Burns

You can read more on PBS' Lewis & Clark website:
http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/