For most Americans, it is probably safe to say, the 4th of July has lost its meaning except as an inducement to grill things or blow them up.
But all the explosions from all the fireworks in Indiana can’t completely drown out the deeper meaning of the holiday and its historical significance.
Two documentaries airing on the holiday — one 13 years old, one brand new, the first from a man who would come to be our unofficial national documentarian, the second from a Brit obviously taken with the American concept — hold the founding ideas of the United States up to the light for examination.
“Statue of Liberty,” from 1985, is one of Ken Burns’ early films, which you can tell by its elegant brevity. Less than an hour in length, it tells the story of the behemoth in New York Harbor while also reflecting on what it as a symbol, and liberty as a concept, represent.
Airing Saturday (8:30 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11) on PBS, it boasts a kind of innocence, from a time when Ken Burns was just another name scrolling by in the end credits and not the man behind the national sensation “The Civil War.
There is a playfulness in “Statue of Liberty” that some of Burns’ later work, for all its elegiac power, has seemed to lack as well. Pop-culture appearances by the statue are sewn artfully into the fabric of the film, everything from Paul Simon’s lyrical “American Tune” to the statue as sick punchline in “Planet of the Apes” to the waitress-as-Lady Liberty on the cover of Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” LP.
The now-familiar stylistic signatures fade into the background, serving merely as graceful underpinning to the gripping, inspirational and, yes, patriotic story the film is telling. It is a tale of twin ideas: the American one of equality of opportunity as a beacon to the world and the French sculptor Frederic August Bartholdi’s notion, not entirely logical, that he was going to give this new country a sculpture that represented its best self and this country was going to place it in a prominent spot.
The concept actually came from a French historian at a dinner party Bartholdi attended two decades before the statue would be erected. But it was in Bartholdi, a man who liked America much more than he did Americans, that the idea burned.
Burns’ knack not just for meticulous research but for culling from it the potent detail is on a pedestal here. He points out that at the dedication ceremony, attended by assorted swells and only two women, no one mentioned immigrants. And then he shows what a profound impact this symbol had on the newly arriving. In this way, it was a perfect work of art, one that had exactly the intended effect.
But the key to the effectiveness of “Statue of Liberty” is that it is not wide-eyed or unquestioning. Burns accomplishes this by, in the beginning and end, offering varied personalities the opportunity to reflect on what liberty is. The Czech film director Milos Forman speculates that the film will mean little to those born American, who hold liberty as self-evident and not worth thinking about, while the black American writer James Baldwin calls the statue “a very bitter joke” to his people.
While renewing our appreciation of the awesome power of the idea the statue symbolizes, the film also reminds us that the statue stands as a scold, taking us to task for our failings in achieving true liberty.
One of the newspaper editorials Burns quotes is from the Times of London, which sniffed about the statue: “We question why liberty should be sent from France, which has too little, to America, which has too much.”
Anthony Geffen, the London-based maker of the new documentary “American Stories: The American Dream,” has a less uppity attitude about the United States. He filmed the poignant “The Promised Land,” which examined the migration of African-Americans from the rural South to the industrial North this century.
In “American Stories” (5 to 10 p.m. Saturday on Discovery Channel), he offers a kind of essay on the many meanings of the dream. Geffen’s method is to trace three generations of 10 families through this century, and he reaches some of the same conclusions he did in “The Promised Land”: that the American Dream is an elusive thing, just as ready to tease with its unattainability as it is to deliver the pot of gold.
To deliver this complicated message, Geffen has assembled a terrific cast of characters. Included are the Manoffs, where Dick, the son of immigrants, became a top ad man only to see his own son drop away from commercial culture; Dave Moore, the grandson of slaves who went north to work for Ford and developed, among other things, a facility for a biting quote; and Endicott Peabody, American aristocrat, football and war hero, politician and embodiment of noblesse oblige.
Perhaps owing to Geffen’s outsider perspective, the film takes in the panorama of American society with equanimity.
These families tell the story of the 20th Century in America, as they experience its upheavals and joys. But burning through the personal stories, as in “Statue of Liberty,” is this notion that the United States is animated, still, by ideas and ideals.
And although watching television, albeit an eminently American activity, may not be everyone’s idea of how best to spend a holiday, we could do worse than taking a few hours on the 4th of July to reflect on those ideas.
