"Heritage, not hate."
That's a phrase that has been bandied about lately with the controversy over displaying the Confederate battle flag. Now viewers can experience again Ken Burns' seminal documentary that covered the heritage, the history, the hate and the "peculiar institution" that lay at the heart of the most crucial period in American history.
Twenty-five years after it was first shown, PBS will broadcast a digitally remastered edition of The Civil War. The nine-part, 12 1/2-hour series airs on AETN at 8 p.m. Monday through Friday. Running times vary each evening (see below).
The Civil War was seen by an astonishing 38.9 million viewers during its premiere in September 1990 -- a record for the highest-rated PBS series broadcast, which still stands.
The series helped turn Burns into what The New York Times called "the most accomplished documentary filmmaker of his generation."
Columnist George Will added, "'If better use has ever been made of television, I have not seen it and do not expect to see better until Ken Burns turns his prodigious talents to his next project."
The praise was widespread. The Civil War has been honored with more than 40 awards, including two Emmys, two Grammys, a Peabody Award, a D.W. Griffith Award and the Lincoln Prize.
Burns was caught off-guard: "When The Civil War first appeared on PBS, no one -- myself included -- was at all prepared for the overwhelming national response that followed."
It is, quite simply, important television and the gold standard for all historic documentaries that followed. It will be time well spent, even for those who saw the original. The high-definition restoration will be eye-opening.
"For the first time," Burns says in a recent PBS interview, "viewers will see what I saw when I looked through the lens of my camera. It is truly remarkable."
The series, narrated by David McCullough, features an A-list of Hollywood talent in voice roles. They include Sam Waterston (Abraham Lincoln), Julie Harris (Mary Chesnut), Jason Robards (Ulysses S. Grant), Morgan Freeman (Frederick Douglass), Garrison Keillor (Walt Whitman) and Arthur Miller (William T. Sherman).
Other voices include those of Derek Jacobi, Pamela Reed, Jeremy Irons, Kurt Vonnegut, Colleen Dewhurst, Hoyt Axton, Laurence Fishburne and Shelby Foote.
In a 2004 PBS interview, Burns noted that The Civil War was six years in the making. The project, he realized, "had taken longer than it took the nation to fight in the first place."
But the painstaking process permitted Burns to refine his now-familiar style that includes, he explains, "the careful use of archival photographs, live modern cinematography, music, narration and a chorus of first-person voices that together did more than merely recount a historical story.
"The Civil War was the greatest event in American history -- where paradoxically, in order to become one, we had to tear ourselves in two."
I've heard it explained this way. Before the Civil War, the common reference was, "The United States are." After, it was, "The United States is."
To put the war in perspective, roughly 2 percent of the population -- an estimated 620,000, according to the Civil War Trust -- died in the war. Two percent of America's population today (319 million) would be 6.38 million dead.
Burns added, "We wanted to tell the story of the bloodiest war in American history through the voices of the men and women who actually lived through it. And, to the greatest extent possible, we wanted to show the war and the people who experienced it through a medium that was still in its infancy in the 1860s -- photography."
In an Aug. 23 interview on CBS' Face the Nation, Burns said the central cause of the war was slavery and the theme of The Civil War is freedom, including "the tensions of individual freedom versus collective freedom and state's rights versus the federal government."
Burns noted, "All of these tensions have been in place since the very beginning, even before the beginning. But we also notice that race is always there. We pretend with the election of Barack Obama that we're in some post-racial society. And of course, you know, we're not."
That makes the lessons of The Civil War all the more apropos today.
Here are the episodes and running times. Note that all but Monday are double episodes.
• Monday: "The Cause -- 1861," 8-9:30 p.m.
• Tuesday: "A Very Bloody Affair"/"Forever Free -- 1862," 8-10:30 p.m.
• Wednesday: "Simply Murder"/"The Universe of Battle -- 1863," 8-11 p.m.
• Thursday: "Valley of the Shadow of Death"/"Most Hallowed Ground -- 1864," 8-10:30 p.m.
• Friday: "War Is All Hell"/"The Better Angels of Our Nature -- 1865," 8-11 p.m.
Style on 09/06/2015