The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns
War may be hell, but it can make for great television, as Ken Burns proves in his masterful 11-hour PBS series chronicling the deadliest war in American military history. The Civil War was a landmark TV event that held record numbers of viewers riveted to their screens and reinvented the documentary form. Taking full advantage of the fact that the Civil War was the first war to be captured extensively on camera, Burns synthesizes evocative archival photographs (among them, Matthew Brady's emblematic images of Union soldiers) with diverse and illuminating narrative voices.
Well-known actors read diary entries, letters from the front, official dispatches, and speeches from the era. These voice-over readings convey the full range of human fears and hopes of those shaping and being shaped by the war, while an engaging group of historians (most notably Shelby Foote) provide historical perspective.
The result is a seamless collage that illuminates, with quiet nobility, this most painful chapter in our nation's past. It's been said that history belongs to the victors; like Homer before him, Burns demonstrates that a major chunk of it belongs to the best storytellers.
A truly transformative documentary series, that personalized a war we had only heard of in school, with various battles and personalities related by teachers, if we were lucky. This series changed the form and set the standard for all documentaries to come, and held a yardstick by which all previous ones have been measured. Each episode moves you to tears. Incredible. That this isn't a 10 is a sad statement to how jaded and how short our attention spans have become.
This excellent documentary series is a 7.6? It should be a 9.5.
I believe his documentary "Prohibition " should be shown in every high school just to show for once how this country is controlled by only a few and twisting the untruths into facts. As Ken Burns says in his appearance on CSpan. "Human nature never changes.
Good to see Ken still pimping his documentary, after all these years.
too bad we haven't learned anything from that awful war, never have and never will....