The Civil War (1990)

Director: Ken Burns

History can be just as compelling as any subject, fact or fiction. Besides the great storytelling that can be inherent in history, there is the bonus of knowing that the story you're watching has certainly happened therefore you can never accuse a story about history of being "unrealistic". When we see the many Civil War anecdotes that Ken Burns tells us during this almost 11 hour long documentary minseries, we don't question their authenticity, we just take in the emotions and ideas expressed through those stories. It makes those stories that much more effective. This expansive and ambitious documentary series is great accomplishment just on the basis of of its scope. We get the history of a grand event that has had a large impact on the world today, and multiple smaller stories that take us into the real America during the Civil War. It's an extensively researched and detailed series that took five years to finish, one year longer than the Civil War itself.

Burns' trademark classical documentary style that has been copied so much now is in full use, but despite the fact that we've seen so much of this "conventional" style in the 20 years after this film, the style rarely inhibits the film. Getting actors to recite letters, or using slow motion zooms on photographs accomplish the goals of Burns. He gets you into the world and connects you emotionally to the soldiers, the politicians, and ordinary people involved through the melancholic and humorous stories told by either the actors or talking head historians (very few appearances by them I must add). The grand scope and long length of the film enable Burns to not just tell the whole story event-by-event of the Civil War from start to finish, but also take many digressions along the way by looking at issues like women in the war, sanitation issues, and pardons for deserters. Not every digression is interesting though, and if I could change one thing it would be to add more about the political issues going on during the war rather than soldier life. Though the film can once in a while seem like a dull moving textbook, we also get somethings that textbooks overlook. These are the smaller stories, the moments and unimportant individuals who lived during this enormous conflict that created, as Abraham Lincoln called it, a new birth of freedom.

Grade: B+