“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided.” Abraham Lincoln’s words perhaps most effectively encapsulate the event known as the American Civil War. The Civil War set North against South, white against black, agriculture against manufacturing, gray against blue. The war resulted in nearly 1,100,100 casualties and 620,000 deaths, and decisively determined the future of the United States of America.
As the nation and the region begin to mark the 150th anniversary of the war that divided a country but created a nation, Ken Burns’ landmark nine-part series returns to witf.
Premiering on PBS in 1990, The Civil War drew an audience of 40 million viewers, making it the highest-rated series in PBS history. The renowned documentary filmmaker is praised for his innovative style and skill. His groundbreaking method uniquely combines archival photographs, period paintings, newsreel footage, interviews and readings from diaries, newspapers and speeches. Many of the historical photos used in The Civil War are from the Army Heritage Center in Carlisle.
Narrated by historian David McCullough and featuring the voices of such personas as Morgan Freeman and Arthur Miller, The Civil War airs April 3-7.
Honored by critics and audiences as a masterpiece of “heroic television” (Washington Post), The Civil War confirms Burns as “the most accomplished documentary filmmaker of his generation” (New York Times). The series has won more than 40 film and television awards, including two Emmys, two Grammys, Producer of the Year, a Peabody, a People’s Choice Award and a $50,000 Lincoln Prize.
Commenting on the making of his monumental series, Burns says, “We knew, as documentary filmmakers, that one of the most dangerous things is to rely too heavily on re-enactments and re-creations. And so The Civil War has almost none. We rely instead on a kind of atmospheric, evocative, live, modern cinematography that took in the two villages that we followed, North and South, that took in sites like the Capitol dome or the Smithsonian in Washington, or various other scenes … hoping, straining, listening, trying to catch the ghosts and echoes of this almost inexpressibly wide path that we hoped to bring back for ourselves and for our audience.”
Burns’ work will surely echo and resound with audiences, just as the effects and aftermath of the American Civil War still echo through our united nation today.
— SUZY BIEVER
