| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Reviews

Reconstruction: The Second Civil War. Prod. by Elizabeth Deane, Llew Smith, and Patricia Garcia-Rios. WGBH Productions, 2004. 180 mins. ( PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314-1698; 800-344-3337; < shop@pbs.org >; < http://shop.pbs.org/education/ > [Sept. 13, 2004])

American historians have described Reconstruction as this country's most complex era. Few books provide a comprehensive and credible synthesis spanning the period from slave emancipation to the Compromise of 1877. Instead, they focus on some significant historical events and people. For the PBS documentary Reconstruction, it is especially appropriate that Eric Foner, who wrote Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988), now the best scholarly overview, was a historical consultant. He is joined by Edward Ayers, Ira Berlin, David Blight, James Horton, Leon Litwack, Nina Silber, and Clarence Walker. Translating words about Reconstruction into film is not only about historiography; it also tests whether that complicated era can be adequately or even better portrayed through pictures in a documentary than with printed words. The aphorisms "a picture is worth a thousand words" and "seeing is believing" are concretely tested when one compares a Reconstruction film shaped by historians with their published work. (When Foner, whose Reconstruction is 690 pages long, told the filmmaker John Sayles that "a word is worth a thousand pictures," he did not yet know that he would be transforming his and other historians' work into a three-hour film.)

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