Iconic ‘Civil War’ documentary back in stunning HD
“It was called the ‘irrepressible conflict,’ and I guess it’s impossible to repress it.”
Ken Burns
On why the Civil War is still so important — and captivating — in American history
This summer proved to Americans yet again that the Civil War, which officially ended 150 years ago, has never really gone away.
The Charleston, S.C., church shooting that killed nine in June sparked a national debate over racism and public displays of the Confederate battle flag; ultimately, the emblem of Dixie was hauled down in July from the grounds of the state Capitol in South Carolina, where it had flown for more than half a century. Officials in Texas and elsewhere have pondered what to do with monuments honoring Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders who have come to symbolize the nation’s tormented history with slavery and race relations.
Long before the current controversies, PBS executives decided to honor the 25th anniversary of Ken Burns’ landmark 1990 documentary series “The Civil War” by showing a digitally restored version suitable for today’s HD flat-screen TV sets. But the nearly 12-hour epic arrived this week with perhaps even more relevance than when it originally aired.
Which is no surprise to the film’s creator.
“It was called ‘the irrepressible conflict,’ and I guess it’s impossible to repress it,” Burns said in a recent telephone interview, referring to the 1861-65 war that took the lives of an estimated 620,000 soldiers alone (historians disagree on the exact figures) and many more civilians. The death toll amounted to approximately 2 percent of the U.S. population at the time.
“It is the central event in American history,” he added. “Everything that came before it led up to it, beginning with Thomas Jefferson authoring the Declaration saying, ‘All men are created equal’ — but, oops, he owned other human beings. Everything since then has been a consequence in some way or another” of the war.
Burns, now 62, has gone on to become one of the premier documentarians working in America today, with a filmography that includes “Baseball,” “Jazz” and last year’s “The Roosevelts.” He has lately been working on a lengthy film biography of baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson due next year, plus another devoted to novelist Ernest Hemingway.
But “The Civil War” remains his signature work, partly because it offers a deep and resonant view of an American turning point that most adults otherwise recall only faintly, if at all, from high school courses, or else know through historically questionable entertainment such as “Gone With the Wind.”
The Burns film told a vast and complicated story through archival photos matched with readings from primary sources such as letters and diaries; well-known historians, such as the late Shelby Foote, offered analysis of key events and battles.
Backed with funds from PBS and corporate underwriter Bank of America, Burns and his team converted the original 15-millimeter film stock to high-definition video. Daniel J. White, an editor at Burns’ production company Florentine Films, was pulled off an upcoming Burns project on the Vietnam War to work full time on the restoration.
“All of a sudden, the whole blurry archives are less blurry and much sharper,” Burns said. “Old bouncing images going through film sprockets have now been stabilized. A beautiful live shot of an iconic silhouetted cannon is not just a smear of sunset orange, but there’s, in fact, an entire palette of colors, from orange to pink to red to gray to blue to purple.
“You are now seeing the film as good as I saw it through the viewfinder of the camera,” he added. “I cried when I saw the first results. ... It was as if I had never seen the film before.”
When PBS first showed “The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns” in September 1990, it became a national sensation, ultimately seen by more than 40 million total viewers, the most-watched program in PBS history. It has since become a staple in high school and college classrooms.
“The Civil War” has been criticized from time to time by historians who say it distorted or ignored important events. Military historians, for example, were irked because they believed Burns gave short shrift to the Western theater in Tennessee and Mississippi, where key battles such as Shiloh and Vicksburg were fought, according to UCLA historian Joan Waugh.
Waugh sees the Burns film as a valuable part of a cultural trend that has placed the battle over slavery and emancipation as key to understanding the Civil War. For decades, historians focused on the notion of the war as a battle to preserve the Union, while Southern sympathizers promoted the idea of the Confederacy as a “lost cause,” a noble and charming plantation society vanquished by an overwhelming enemy.
“The Civil War,” along with the Oscar-winning film “Glory,” countered those interpretations by putting slavery — America’s “original sin,” as some have called it — front and center in talking about the conflict and its aftermath.