Homer with a Camera, Our Iliad Without the Aftermath: Ken Burns's Dialogue with Historians

“The Civil War was our great, epic, Homeric poem of national self-definition.”

—Ken Burns, “Four O’Clock in the Morning Courage,” 1996

“However thickly strewn a tragedy may be with ghosts, portents, witches, or oracles, we know that the tragic hero cannot simply rub a lamp and summon a genie to get him out of his trouble.”

—Northrup Frye, “The Mythos of Tragedy,” 1957

Collaborations, as well as conflicts, between historians and filmmakers have intensified in recent years. The sheer power of the film medium has inevitably attracted historians. The old friction between writers of historical fiction and writers of formal history has almost been replaced by the high stakes tension between sound, verifiable history, and history that can be rendered filmic, between the emotive medium of film and the analytical medium of history. The tension between the history we write and the visual mediums through which it can reach unprecedented mass audiences represents one of the greatest professional challenges of our time. At stake, simply, is the nature and quality of the national or social memory, the vast public’s knowledge of its past.

Good history has always relied on a kind of poetry among its best storytellers; good poetry has always instructed us about the past. As poet-historian Robert Penn Warren wrote in 1953, “historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.” ¹Ken Burns, the maker of The Civil Warand several other distinguished documentary films, understands this mutual dependence of poetry and history.

Burns has a deep and infectious sense of history, although he took only one history course in his formal education at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, and that in Russian history. A self-described “narrative amateur historian,” Burns is interested in biography, and in telling stories and anecdotes about people. In an interview with David Thelen for the Journal of American History,Burns called these interests and tendencies “the structural building blocks of whatever I’m doing.” Acknowledging the influences of the various scholars he has worked with, he nevertheless declared that he approached The Civil Warseries “essentially with my heart, to feel my way to a kind of truth for myself of how this material should be structured and presented.” Likening himself to a “painter” who may choose “oil over water colors,” and who “might favor certain particular earth tones in the oil paints,” Burns justifiably concludes that this “does not mean that I am lazy about how I attendto history . . . it just means that I am primarily an artist.” ²When a filmmaker with such widely recognized talents so eloquently describes himself as an artist working in the materials of history, why should there be any tension between the historians and the artist? In the century and a quarter since history became a professional discipline, haven’t historians repeatedly acknowledged their debt to, indeed their envy of, the poets’, novelists’, and other narrators’ abilities to portray the past and to forge the modern historical imagination?

Robert Brent Toplin’s collection of nine essays by historians responding to Burns’s The Civil Warand, in some cases, to each other, offers some answers to the challenges of historian-filmmaker collaborations. It also demonstrates the enduring significance of the Civil War in American historical memory. This book contains what The Civil Warseries, given its extensive educational use, has long needed: a serious discussion in print of the merits and flaws of this evocative film. To that end Toplin has provided an important service, and the legions of us who teach with this film can make direct pedagogical use of these essays. A flaw that both the editor and Oxford University Press should account for is why the first six essays are footnoted and the final three are not.

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