The Palace of Versailles

I read the reviews before purchasing this video, yet, I ordered it anyway. Even though I am in total agreement with the other two reviews and find the narrator's talking over the French historian quite annoying, this video gives me information to better understand Versailles' history. I ordered several videos - The Louvre, Impressionists, Marie Antoinette, Napoleon - in preparation for our upcoming vacation to Paris and watched them before watching this video. One glaring mistake in the video that seems to have missed the editor's review is that section showing a room supposedly of King Louis XVI and describes him a warrior who spent many years in battle. The portrait is of a man with long, dark hair and the room has other portraits of his many mistresses. Obviously, from every account I've read, this cannot be Louis XVI.I found it difficult to follow, but worth purchasing and watching. It's good to get information from more than one source!

Beyond horrible. What's the matter with the people who made this? To begin with, they should have chosen a language and stuck with it instead of having them both drone on at the same time! How did they manage to make such a fascinating subject so tedious? Have they never seen Lucy Jarvis' NBC documentary, The Louvre? Versailles is the product of a century of inspired and sustained creative genius but the approach of this crappy video would have been more appropriate to the telling of the story of the development of the quonset hut. The good news is that this subject is still available for a documentarian of imagination and daring. DO NOT BUY THIS VIDEO.

I like the footage of the palace and and the history of the rooms, but I hated that it was a voice-over! The people describing the rooms were speaking in French, then you had to wait for the translator to come on and tell you what they were saying and most of the time they were going at the same time. It got very annoying fast...I only made it about 45 mins in before I had to turn if off.

Nice eye candy. Lovely photography. The only flaws are the "cracks in the facade" of the structure of Versailles it's self. Certain "restorations" and curatorial privilege have not gone far enough for me but at least they removed the equestrian statue of Louis XIV from the forecourt.

I found this DVD poor the English translation over the top of the french to be very irratating and this version is a very old version I have been to Versailles and let me tell you if I had not been this DVD would certainly not incourage me to want to go and visit it. NOT A GOOD PURCHASE WOULD NOT RECOMMEND.

Outstanding , friends loved it.Thank you.

I had high hopes the other review complaining about the narration was overstating the problem. It wasn't. The English isn't narration. It's translating the French in the background, which makes the whole DVD noisy! The translator has almost no vocal inflection and seems, at parts, to be breathlessly struggling to keep up with the French track underneath. The video isn't narrated. It is strung together faces and sound bytes from curators and people who work at Versailles and not much video of the palace inside. Strange and sad. I turned it off after 10 minutes.

the spoken English over the spoken French drove us crazy. Having visited Versailles we were hoping to know about its history. Who originally conceived it, how it was built and over what time-frame. We know it is really fascinating--how it functioned, was managed and how all the back room intrigues were carried out. By the half hour mark we were asleep from this bore.

Sad thing is it is the wrong "Zone" so i can't watch it.

It was not compatible so was returned