After reading the previous entry, a friend of mine e-mailed to let me know of someone else whose passing is worth noting: Shelby Foote, the soft-spoken Southern novelist and historian who became a minor-league celebrity after appearing in the landmark PBS series The Civil War. Foote died Monday at the age of 88.
The general style of Civil War director Ken Burns — a slow pan across or zoom into an ancient photograph, accompanied by appropriate sound effects and actors reading from letters, diaries, and such — has become so much the de facto standard for historical documentaries that it’s hard to remember what an impact The Civil War really had back in 1990. I think it still stands as the highest-rated program ever to air on PBS, and I myself was utterly spellbound by the series. I’ve always been interested in this conflict anyway, but Burns and his talented cast of voiceover artists and subject-matter experts brought it to life in a way I’d never experienced before. Not the ersatz life of even the best fictional movie, in which you’re always aware that you’re watching modern people pretending to inhabit another era, but a sense of what things were really like in the early 1860s. I felt so in touch with the lives of the people being discussed that, at times, I almost expected the black-and-white photos that comprised most of the series to begin moving. It was like they were merely some sort of membrane between now and then, and if you just knew how to push, you could break through and see, hear, and smell everything that was.
Foote’s presence in The Civil War no doubt contributed greatly to this effect. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he appeared on-screen no less than 89 times during the 11-hour series. He had a knack for storytelling, and for breathing life into individuals who were formerly nothing more than meaningless names in a textbook. His mission was to make men like Lee and Grant human, to strip away the marble that now encases them and turn them back into the sweating, fallible, heroic, miserable people they actually were. That mission dovetailed nicely with Ken Burns’ goals, and the end result was one of the greatest pieces of documentary filmmaking I’ve ever seen. As Burns himself has been quoted as saying, “[Shelby Foote] made the war real for us.”
If you want to read more, that Times article on Mr. Foote is the most complete I’ve found. You’ll probably have to register to see it, but I think it would be worth your trouble. As for me, I’m thinking that I may stop by Barnes and Noble tomorrow afternoon and see if I can pick up Foote’s own history of the war… all three volumes of it. Hey, it’s summertime; I could use a little light reading.
