We Heard the Bells: The Influenza of 1918

The 1998 PBS American Experience documentary on this pandemic is more from a subjective point of view, full of personal anecdotes. This one starts out with personal anecdotes, because that is usually how you grab someone's attention - with real stories of human tragedy. And it does tell the tale so often talked about in relation to the 1918 pandemic - the tragedy of mass death in Philadelphia and why the flu hit so hard there.

Then the documentary segues into a story of native people and how they were effected, and in particular, one tribe of Eskimos in which 72 of the 80 members died of the flu and were buried in one mass grave. Because this grave was in the permafrost, and thus the bodies preserved, this starts the scientific part of the documentary as one medical student in Sweden travels to Alaska in 1951 in search of unraveling the mystery of the virus that caused the pandemic.

Well narrated By S. Epatha Merkerson, it includes a couple of scenes with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Produced by the Department of Health and Human Services, it was probably made in response to the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic. There were parallels to that epidemic and the 1918 epidemic - younger people were effected in both cases where older people seemed to have some immunity.

It's definitely worth an hour of your time.

It has that 90's poetic documentary style to it that you'll recognize right away. For me it feels ill fitting to the topic at hand.

It's also a very narrow focus. They focus on small villages with minorities. So no usual stuff about soldiers or big cities which means that they actually don't really tell the story about a huge number of deaths. But the choice of telling about small minority villages fits well with the scientific topic of finding the source of the virus in such a small village. Still, I feel like I don't learn enough about what this virus actually did to big groups and the world.

The talking heads here don't work as well as an expert narrator as they very often just state "we don't know". They also philosophise a lot. Tons of vague guesswork and small suggestions.

But this is probably very ideal for laymen as they do give some low brow advice for the masses. Yet no talk about masks. So this is pretty much a made for kids documentary.

It's an okay intro to the virus epidemic itself. But it's far from the best intro you can wish for because a lot of this is unspecific talk. I probably like all the other documentaries on the topic more than this one. But this one is not bad for an 8th grade school class.