Standing on the airy second floor of the Chicago Historical Society, filmmaker Ken Burns looks like someone who got dressed in the dark.
His shirt has a stain, his tie is too wide, his pants are rumpled, and his sportcoat appears to belong to a person sizes larger.
He might be distracted in the mornings. He has been having weird dreams. In one, he is filming and fighting in a Civil War battle. At the end of the dream, he is stabbed in the eye.
So forgive the outfit in which the boyish 37-year-old is dressed. He is still the center of attention at this gathering of Historical Society members. He sips from a glass of soda, and whenever someone walks over to shake his hand and offer congratulations-as they do in a steady stream-Burns nods and smiles the tired smile of a man who has just run a marathon.
In a sense he has. He has been busy-passionately, all-consumingly busy-for the last six years. And like some goldminer digging in the wilderness, he has emerged with one of the most triumphant treasures in the history of TV: an 11-hour drama called ”The Civil War.”
Over five riveting evenings (8 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, WTTW-Ch. 11), ”The Civil War” brings us the conflict in a brilliant rush of images, words and sounds that enlighten, enrapture, touch the heart and enliven the mind.
This is an amazing thing. No other event in our country`s history has been so analyzed and documented. More than 50,000 books have been written about the Civil War, hundreds of films and TV shows have tackled it.
But the ”The Civil War” brings the struggle home to viewers in a fashion never before accomplished. With powerful poignancy, it is a tragedy retold with emotional depth and factual detail that almost defy the documentarian`s art. This is drama of the highest order, all the more impressive because in an age of flashy action packing, Burns does not resort to re-enactments, dramatizations or ”stars.”
Working only with old photographs, except for a fascinating 1913 film showing elderly soldiers re-enacting Pickett`s Charge, he manages to convey extraordinary action.
”I was drawn to the Civil War because it seemed to be the central influence on all the other subjects I had made films on,” Burns said.
Those films did much to make Burns` reputation as the country`s leading documentary filmmaker; ”The Civil War” solidifies it.
Taking on the Civil War
His first two documentaries, ”The Brooklyn Bridge” (1981) and ”Statue of Liberty” (1985), were both nominated for Academy Awards. He followed with other prize winners: 1984`s ”The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God”; and ”Huey Long” in 1985.
By that year, Burns had already mustered his own army to tackle the Civil War. With his brother and co-producer, Ric Burns, and co-writer Geoffrey C. Ward, he visited more than 150 archives across the country, plowing their files for more than 16,000 period photos, paintings, lithographs, broadsides and newspapers.
They compiled tactical maps and contemporary footage of the great battle sites, filming on the same day of the year and same time of the day as the battles. For the soundtrack, authentic cannons and muskets were fired. If bird songs were heard at the battle, the program has the same bird songs.
Editing an epic
After nearly five years, the Burns brigade had on its hands a ”first draft” of more than 150 hours of film, nearly 500 hours of sound, music and effects, dozens of interviews, and 2,500 first-person quotations.
The editing, ”the distilling” as Burns calls it, of this mass yielded the 11-hour epic.
The 3,000 photographs in the finished work allow for spectacular camerawork. Burns` camera zooms, cuts and pans through the photographs in a way that drags viewers into the events. Battle scenes-from Gettsyburg, Antietam, Shiloh and other sad sites-explode from the screen, brutal and bloody.
Even the stillest of the stills pop to life. There are Lincoln`s eyes in closeup, deep set and filled with sorrow; the eyes of Gen. Thomas
”Stonewall” Jackson, seemingly afire. And there, the Battle of Bull Run:
before, with people riding in carriages to watch the action, and after, in a pile of amputated feet.
Embellishing what Burns calls ”this blizzard of images” are the words of those who were there.
”We get to know what the spear carriers are thinking,” Burns said, ”in addition to what the generals, the gods, are thinking.”
There is poetry in them all: ”If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.”
That was written by Union Maj. Sullivan Ballou to his wife, one week before he was killed at Bull Run.
We meet some 900 of the war`s witnesses through their writings, speeches, diaries, letters and military dispatches. Most prominent and graceful are
”spear carriers” Sam Watkins, a private in the 1st Tennessee, and Elisha Hunt Rhodes, a private in the 2nd Rhode Island. They were young, but their diaries are filled with urgent eloquence.
All are brought to life by distinctive off-camera voices: Sam Waterston as Abraham Lincoln, Morgan Freeman as Frederick Douglass, Garrison Keillor as Walt Whitman, playwright Arthur Miller as Gen. William T. Sherman, Jason Robards as Gen Ulysses S. Grant, Julie Harris as diarist Mary Chestnut. Other voices come from Jeremy Irons, Kurt Vonnegut, Colleen Dewhurst, Pamela Reed and Studs Terkel.
All worked for free or union scale, helping Burns meet his $3.2 million budget, provided by General Motors, the National Endowment for the Humanities and foundations. When all was said and spent, the making of ”The Civil War” took longer than the war itself.
`Just tell the story`
If the program has a star, it is Shelby Foote, the Southern novelist and historian whose three-volume ”The Civil War: A Narrative” is considered a masterpiece. One of a half-dozen historians who act as on-camera tour guides, Foote is magnificent: funny, insightful, intimate and deeply compassionate.
And it was Foote who provided the show`s creative inspiration when he told Burns, ”God is the greatest dramatist-just tell the story.”
We get harrowingly accurate accounts of major battles and campaigns. The staggering facts are there: More than 3 million Americans fought, and more than 620,000 died. We learn of the political, social and economic forces that tore the nation apart. We get a long-overdue account of the little-known role of black troops and of women in war, ”of old men with silver locks dead in the trenches side by side with mere boys of 13 or 14.”
Battling the networks
We get it all, which is why few programs in TV history have been as highly praised as has ”The Civil War.”
And why PBS has chosen to battle network TV`s new-season soldiers by putting ”The Civil War” in direct competition with them.
Why not?
”I have never seen anything like it,” an elderly man whispered to Burns at the Historical Society gathering. ”I must tell you that.”
”I know,” said Burns, touching the man`s shoulder. ”Thank you.”
In between encounters such as this, Burns was asked if he was thinking ahead to his next project.
”Oh, yes, already started,” he said. ”It`s baseball.”
He hopes to have it on air some time around the 1993 World Series.
One hopes, by then, he will be dreaming of home runs.
`THE CIVIL WAR`
A PBS series. Directed by Ken Burns; produced by Ken Burns and Ric Burns and written by them and Geoffrey C. Ward. Narrated by David McCullough. Voices by Sam Waterston, Julie Harris, Jason Robards, Morgan Freeman, Garrison Keillor, Arthur Miller, George Plimpton, Studs Terkel and many others. Airing at 8 p.m. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on WTTW-Ch. 11.
