Empire of the Air (1991)

EMPIRE OF THE AIR  (1991)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Ken Burns
Ken Burns' history of radio focuses on the lives of three pioneers: obsessive, lone-wolf inventors Lee De Forest and Edwin H. Armstrong, and David Sarnoff, the cutthroat head of RCA and NBC, who knew how to exploit the medium and sell it to the masses. The movie's only two hours long, and you can't help wishing it had a wider bandwidth. As crucial as the technological breakthroughs of Armstrong and De Forest were, it was the programming those breakthroughs made possible that defined radio's social and cultural impact, and the attention that gets here is limited. Part of the challenge is what do you do visually when the subject of your movie is by definition not visual. (At several points, Burns solves that problem by letting the screen go black, with just the sound of a radio transmission on the soundtrack.) The movie effectively ends around 1950, with the advent of television, and a lot of radio history has gone down since. The impact of radio on rock & roll, and talk radio's influence on American political life, would both rate extended chapters in a longer, more comprehensive film. Radio might not be as close to Burns' heart as baseball, or jazz, or the Civil War, but the subject deserves more screen time than he gives it here. Jason Robards narrates.