PBS’ documentary adaptation of Drew Gilpin Faust’s book “The Republic of
Suffering” exemplifies the strengths and deficiencies of the kind of film-making
associated with public TV and the National Endowment of the Arts -- that is, the
Ken Burns’ school of film essay. This program, made for Memorial Day 2014, and
exploring the mortuary culture associated with the American Civil War, contains
about 45 minutes of excellent, almost unbearably sad material. The picture
opens with a fireball sunrise over some nameless Civil War battlefield -- at
least, that’s how the viewer interprets the image. A young soldier has had his
shoulder torn apart and he is writing a valedictory letter to his father; the
yellowed paper is clotted with his blood and we can see the young man’s
handwriting palpably deteriorating as he bleeds to death. Like innumerable men
who fought in the Civil War, the young man’s prose style is exquisite: carefully
measured, dignified, courageous. The effect is extraordinarily moving. For
another twenty minutes, the film quotes other Civil War letters about death on
the battlefield. Again, the diction is superb and this part of the documentary
is almost unbearably sad. People of the Civil War era were schooled to regard
death as a public event that occurred with certain ritual gestures in the family
home surrounded by loved ones. Sudden death on the battlefield or in an
anonymous hospital horrified these people and the film demonstrates the lengths
to which soldiers and their families would go in an attempt to reconstitute the
warm, familiar solemnity of dying at home. Near the end of the show, there’s a
couple factual sequences that are fascinating and, also, emotionally
compelling. These sequences involve efforts to retrieve and rebury Union dead
strewn across the South by E. B. Whitman and the Federal government as well as
parallel efforts undertaken by southern women’s associations. There is
interesting material about freed slave populations tending union graves,
protecting them against desecration by bitter ex-rebels, and
initiating “decoration day” ceremonies that may be the predecessor to today’s
Memorial Day holiday. A grave African-American scholar with grey and intricate
dreadlocks pronounces some words that the rest of the program is afraid to
utter: he quotes Frederick Douglass making a distinction between obsequies for
those who died fighting for freedom and those who perished in the effort to
preserve and perpetuate slavery. But the program is too long and immensely
padded and, fundamentally, uninformative in the worst Ken Burns manner. About
15% of the show consists of lugubrious panning or tracking shots over Victorian
memorabilia lit by candle. These images contribute nothing to the film and are,
in fact, unjustifiable -- they are simply filler. The same striking pictures
are used again and again, and, often, in confusedly different contexts. One
shot showing a famous image of skulls and bones and tattered uniforms with a
boot sticking out of it, this mess heaped on a stretcher with a Black kid gazing
out over the rotting remains in a huge desolate cemetery is repeated four
times: in the first application, the picture stands generally for the shock
that Americans felt in 1862 when Matthew Brady’s first pictures of corpses in
windrows on battlefields were shown in New York. When used a second time, the
picture illustrates disrespectful treatment of Black volunteers forced into
disagreeable burial duties. In its third showing, the picture is supposed to
have something to do with Gettysburg. The fourth time the picture is shown, the
war is over and we are being told about Whitman’s work scouring the south for
unmarked Union graves. This is MTV film making; there is a total disregard for
the meaning of the original photograph. In fact, whatever the photograph was
supposed to show is completely obscured by the Ken Burns-style use of the image
as visual wallpaper for mournful and pretentious voices pontificating over the
images. Many of the pictures that we are shown are extraordinary and one longs
for some helpful commentary, some factual information about where the old image
was taken and by whom and what exactly it displays to us. One picture shows
rows of men in a hospital sitting up in their beds under elegant wing-shaped
white curtains. The white curtains are all exactly identical and have the look
of some sort of wonderful and marmoreal sculpture. What are those white forms?
Are they mosquito nets or partitions or what? Why is one man facing the others,
apparently with one or both legs amputated? Who is he and why is he turned in a
different direction from everyone else? A scene of a Southern city shows
enormous amounts of devastation -- but why is there a man standing in profile to
us with a series of wooden rods wrapped around his shoulder, protruding in a way
that makes him like a porcupine? In a battlefield somewhere, someone has
gathered a half-dozen skulls and set them on a slab of rock in the wild looking
forest. In the middle of the skulls, there is a post on which another skull,
only semi-decomposed and half-bearded, glares out at us -- what in the world
does this picture show? Is this evidence of desecrated graves or the work of a
burial party or what? Again and again and again, we are shown pictures with
bizarre and questionable content -- but the documentarian regards all these
images as completely generic. We see “A Civil War Corpse” that is anonymous and
hideous; but, of course, the picture was taken at a specific place and time and
was supposed to illustrate something about the battle or the battlefield or the
way the man died. Why aren’t we given any of this information, particularly
since the program is as bloated as the corpses that it shows us -- at one point,
the documentary stops dead in is tracks so that someone can slowly and
deliberately recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, the speech followed by several
tendentious and platitudinous interpretations. Furthermore, the talking heads
don’t really seem to understand much of what they are saying -- they are so
caught up in being Ken Burns’ interlocutors, so fiercely passionate and solemn
and funereal that they really don’t seem to care that much about what they are
telling us. The solemnly hectoring tone of their voices seems more important to
these commentators than what they say. In one sequence, Dr. Faust tells us that
the secular religion emanating from the Civil War reinterpreted death not in
terms of a Christian afterlife in heaven, but in terms of a civic afterlife in
the memories of fellow citizens. Deaths were consecrated to the State. This is
certainly an interesting concept and one that bears close scrutiny. In this
context, the documentary shows us a seemingly gratuitous image of Abraham
Lincoln enthroned in his memorial temple on the Mall in Washington. For the
first time, I noticed that Lincoln’s throne has fasces supporting its
arm-rests. But no one comments on the potentially fascist aspects of defining
death in battle as a sacrifice to the State.
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