LITTLE ROCK — Nearly 21 years after it first aired, Ken Burns’ The Civil War remains the highest-rated series in the history of American public television. More than 40 million people tuned in sometime during its initial broadcast, on five consecutive nights from Sept. 23-27, 1990.
The series will be rebroadcast at 7 p.m. April 3-7 on AETN, to mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of America’s Civil War, and a new six-DVD “Commemorative Edition” of the series, featuring many new bonus features, is now on sale with a list price of $99.99.
It is the series that made Burns famous, that catapulted him from the anonymous ranks of earnest documentarians to his own brand. Before The Civil War, his name was perhaps known to a certain cultural cognoscenti; now his name conjures a certain sepia-toned stateliness, the music of fiddles and banjos. We have an idea of what it means to say that something is a Ken Burns film,that the stories he endeavors to tell are a product of his particular, personal way of apprehending and comprehending the world, that a Burnsian flavor attaches to his truth.
This is not all bad, and probably not all good either.
“I’m still a documentarian,” Burns tells us, but he knows how he is perceived. “History is the way ... that I best express myself as an artist. And I’ve never pretended to be anything other than an amateur, or semi-professional historian. What I am is a filmmaker, and I’m just trying to tell stories.”
With the story of the American Civil War, Burns and his colleagues - he’s always careful to stress the collaborative nature of his work, he stresses the “we” whenever he claims accomplishment for his work - struck a remarkably resonant chord with Americans.
“What we ran into was one of those great, fortuitous kinds of things,” he says. “That the interests of the country, the level of development of the filmmaker I had become, and all of the folks who contributed to it, made this film into a historic event .... A lot of it just has to do with the centrality of the Civil War in our national life and in our psychological life. There’s an extraordinary contradiction in the paradigm - that is, in order to become one, we tore ourselves in two.”
Burns notes that before the before the Civil War, people commonly said “the United States are ... we saw ourselves as a plural thing, a collection of states.” When Robert E. Lee declined command of the Union Army, he did so saying, “I cannot raise my sword against my country,” meaning Virginia.
“To call ourselves a nation,” Burns says, “to say ‘the United States is’ - which is still ungrammatical - we had to nearly kill ourselves.”
Burns remembers the moment when he decided to undertake the vast, complicated story of this American passion. It was Christmas Day 1984, and he’d just finished reading Michael Shaara’s historical novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels.
“I put it down,” he says. “I was visiting my dad and he walked into the room and I said I know what I’m doing next.
“He said, ‘What’s that?’
“And I said, ‘the Civil War.’
“And he said, ‘Oh, that’s great. What part?’
“And I said, ‘All of it.’
“He just shook his head and walked out of the room, like ‘my idiot son.’ It took me five-and-a-half years to prove him a little bit wrong.”
Burns quickly learned that it would be impossible to even begin such a project without talking with Shelby Foote, the Mississippi-born, Memphis based novelist who’d written The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume, nearly 3,000-page work that had originally been commissioned as a short history designed to capitalize on the war’s centennial. (The first volume was published in 1958, the second in 1963 but the final volume didn’t come outuntil 1974.)
It was a phone call from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Penn Warren that led Burns to approach Foote.
“I knew just from early, early research we were going to have to dive into [Foote’s trilogy],” Burns said. “The previous film I had made was on Huey Long. ... I was eating dinner and I got this call from Red Warren - as everyone called him - and he had this great elliptical Kentucky voice, and he said, ‘Thinking about the Civil War ... thinking about how if you have to do it right you have to talk to Shelby Foote right away.’
“Now you don’t ignore ... the first poet laureate of the United States. So the very first rolls [of film] we exposed were with Shelby, and you know, the rest is history. It was such a generous gift; we came back and interviewed him two more times, as our questions got smarter, and he helped us really understand some of the complexities of how you communicate the Civil War as a narrative. And that was hugely important to us, and valuable, and it launched a friendship that lasted until he passed away [in 2005].”
And The Civil War benefits not only from the force of Foote’s personality (as well as his magnificent drawl), but from Burns’ knack for conveying the uncanny and poetic in the pictures and sounds he arranges. Burns’ movies don’t machine-gun out factoids, hoping a sharp shard of trivia will penetrate some random skull. They move forward conscientiously, building an accretive case.
Burns understands that the response to The Civil War might be deeper for more Americans than some of the other big subjects - baseball, jazz - he has tackled.
“I think what we did [with The Civil War] was parse the complicated issues of race ... of sacrifice and honor and duty,” he says. Sure, the film recapitulated the stories of the battles and it surveyed the causes and the effects, but “what we really got at was much more emotional, more difficult to contain in words. Only Lincoln seemed to be able to say it, when he talked about ‘the mystic chords of memory,’ and ‘the better angels of our nature.’ All those things were our pole stars.”
Burns has his critics, “real” historians who see his necessary abridgments and elisions as oversimplification, as a kind of dumbing down.
But history shouldn’t and needn’t be a specialized stream of knowledge available only to those who have the training and expertise to study it. It ought to be the stuff of pop culture; we all ought to have a fairly accurate idea about how things were and how we got here. And television ought to be good for something other than the dissemination of sensational images, screaming commentators and mindless provocations aimed at the basest human reflexes. It still has the potential to be an important way we might talk to and among ourselves.
Burns is one of a relative few who has found a way to put the medium to a higher use, and while we might quibble with the stories he chooses to pursue and the details he selects, we ought not lose sight of the genuine value of the art he produces. Burns reminds us of parts of our heritage we might otherwise take for granted. He interrogates his images, he holds them up for our consideration, rather than flash-carding them at our subconscious.
“All meaning accrues in duration,” he is fond of saying. He still believes in the power of the still photograph, although he often treats the static image like a living scene, crawling over its surface, cutting back, interplaying the image with a bed of music and sound effects and narration that hums through what otherwise might seem an inert collage of graying image.
As an artist, he seems concerned more with the image,with the unspoken stories behind the rigorous gray faces of the past, than with any script that is later fitted to the film. The more you look at his movies, the more you find to admire. They are not all the same; his 1985 biography of Huey Long moves more briskly than some of the others, it seems to accept more humor. A re-enactment - that sin against pure documentary! - appears in the first episode of Baseball, proving, if nothing else, that Burns is no ideologue. (Burns used the re-creation footage to illustrate the myth that Abner Doubleday invented baseball, a myth he subsequently exploded.)
But most importantly, Burns is able to locate the human impulses, the individual appetites and aspirations, that drive history. What Burns calls “emotional archaeology.”
“I was trying to describe why people were so opposed to history,” he says, “why they felt it was this dry archaeology of dry dates and facts and events. It had little meaning for people, particularly Americans, who like to go forward. But an ‘emotional archaeology’ understood that there were higher forces.”
He understands his insistence on the individuals who make up the forces of history can be criticized as sentimental and nostalgic, but in fact it might be the best - the only - way for us to appreciate the way those larger, mindless forces act, and to understand our own part in the ever-unfolding American story, a story too large and immediate for us to hope to understand.
“I want to make this very clear, this is not sentimentality or nostalgia,” he says. “That’s the enemy of [a work of art] ... a documentary film. But what happens is that we tend to retreat safely into a rational world where one plus one equals two. But emotional archaeology understands, as in so many parts of our personal lives, the most important things in our lives - family, faith, love, work - it’s one plus one equals three.
“And it’s the emotional archaeology that I think we were trying to get at, in not just The Civil War but ... all the films.” E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com blooddirtandangels.com
Style, Pages 29 on 03/29/2011