The Dust Bowl (film)

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The Dust Bowl
Directed by Ken Burns
Produced byDayton Duncan
Ken Burns
Julie Dunfey
Written by Dayton Duncan
Starring Patricia Clarkson
Kevin Conway
Amy Madigan
Carolyn McCormick
Narrated by Peter Coyote
Music byCraig Mellish
CinematographyBuddy Squires
Stephen McCarthy
Edited byCraig Mellish
Ryan Gifford
Production
company
Florentine Films
WETA-TV
Distributed by PBS
Release date
November 18, 2012
Running time
240 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

The Dust Bowl is a 2012 documentary film directed by Ken Burns which aired on Public Broadcasting System on November 18 and 19, 2012. The four-part miniseries recounts the impact of the Dust Bowl on the United States. during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Documentary film nonfictional motion picture

A documentary film is a nonfictional motion picture intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education, or maintaining a historical record. "Documentary" has been described as a "filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception" that is continually evolving and is without clear boundaries. Documentary films were originally called 'actuality' films and were only a minute or less in length. Over time documentaries have evolved to be longer in length and to include more categories, such as educational, observational, and even 'docufiction'. Documentaries are also educational and often used in schools to teach various principles. Social media platforms such as YouTube, have allowed documentary films to improve the ways the films are distributed and able to educate and broaden the reach of people who receive the information.

Ken Burns American documentary filmmaker

Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American filmmaker, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs in documentary films. His widely known documentary series include The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014), and The Vietnam War (2017). He was also executive producer of both The West, and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.

Dust Bowl period of severe dust storms in North America

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s; severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes caused the phenomenon. The drought came in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the high plains experienced drought conditions for as many as eight years. With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland to cultivated cropland.

Contents

The film features the voices of Patricia Clarkson, Peter Coyote, and Carolyn McCormick. [1]

Patricia Clarkson American actress

Patricia Davies Clarkson is an American actress. She has starred in numerous leading and supporting roles in a variety of films, ranging from independent features to major studio productions. Her accolades include one Academy Award nomination, two Golden Globe Award nominations, four Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, one Tony Award nomination, two Primetime Emmy Awards, two National Society of Film Critics Awards, and one British Independent Film Award.

Peter Coyote American actor and director

Peter Coyote is an American actor, author, director, screenwriter and narrator of films, theatre, television and audiobooks. He is known for performing in films including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Cross Creek (1983), Jagged Edge (1985), Patch Adams (1998), Erin Brockovich (2000), A Walk to Remember (2002), Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012) and Good Kill (2014). He was the "Voice of Oscar" for the 72nd Academy Awards ceremony, the first Oscars announcer to be seen on-camera.

Carolyn Inez McCormick is an American actress best known for her role as Dr. Elizabeth Olivet in the Law & Order franchise.

Episodes

  1. "The Great Plow-Up"
  2. "Dust to Eat"
  3. "Reaping the Whirlwind"
  4. "The Hardy Ones"

Other uses

Interviews from the documentary were used in the 2014 film Interstellar , that deals with massive dust storms in a near future.

<i>Interstellar</i> (film) 2014 British-American science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan

Interstellar is a 2014 science fiction film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Christopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Michael Caine. Set in a dystopian future where humanity is struggling to survive, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for humanity.

See also

Caroline Henderson (1877–1966) was an American schoolteacher, farmer and author during the Dust Bowl. Born Caroline Boa in Oklahoma and raised in Iowa, she attended Mount Holyoke College, graduating in 1901. After teaching in Iowa until 1907, she relocated to Texas County in the Oklahoma Panhandle. She married local farmer, Bill Henderson, in 1908, the same year when she bought a 160-acre farm near Eva, Oklahoma. Caroline and Bill had one daughter, Eleanor, born in 1909.

Sanora Babb Αmerican writer

Sanora Babb was an American novelist, poet, and literary editor. She was the wife of Chinese American cinematographer James Wong Howe.

Season ten of the television program American Experience originally aired on the PBS network in the United States on October 5, 1997 and concluded on April 13, 1998. The season contained nine new episodes and began with the first part of the film Truman.

Related Research Articles

<i>The Plow That Broke the Plains</i> 1936 film by Pare Lorentz

The Plow That Broke the Plains is a 1936 short documentary film which shows what happened to the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada when uncontrolled agricultural farming led to the Dust Bowl. It was written and directed by Pare Lorentz. The film was narrated by the American actor and baritone Thomas Hardie Chalmers.

Frontline is the flagship investigative journalism program of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), producing in-depth documentaries on a variety of domestic and international stories and issues, and broadcasting them on air and online. Produced at WGBH-TV in Boston, Massachusetts, and distributed through PBS in the United States, the critically acclaimed program has received every major award in broadcast journalism. Its investigations have helped breathe new life into terrorism cold cases, freed innocent people from jail, prompted U.N. resolutions, and spurred both policy and social change.

Pare Lorentz American film director, screenwriter, and New Deal documentary filmmaker

Pare Lorentz was an American filmmaker known for his film work about the New Deal. Born Leonard MacTaggart Lorentz in Clarksburg, West Virginia, he was educated at Buckhannon High School, West Virginia Wesleyan College, and West Virginia University. As a young film critic in both New York City and Hollywood, Lorentz spoke out against censorship in the film industry.

Robert B. Weide is an American screenwriter, producer, and director, perhaps best known for his work on documentaries and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

South Carolina Educational Television

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Nature documentary film genre

A natural history film or wildlife film is a documentary film about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on film taken in their natural habitat but also often including footage of trained and captive animals. Sometimes they are about wild animals, plants, or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema medium. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series.

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Black Sunday (storm)

Black Sunday refers to a particularly severe dust storm that occurred on April 14, 1935, as part of the Dust Bowl. It was one of the worst dust storms in American history and it caused immense economic and agricultural damage. It is estimated to have displaced 300 million tons of topsoil from the prairie area in the US.

The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms during the 1930s Depression Era.

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Henry Howard Finnell was an agronomist and erosion specialist who pioneered methods to combat soil erosion during the Dust Bowl that afflicted North America in the 1930s.

References

  1. ↑ Film's official website at PBS
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