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Movie Reviews
Robert Brent Toplin
Contributing Editor
Reel Report, 2005–2006
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| "Reel Report" appears annually as an introduction to the film reviews. It identifies important developments of the last year that may be of interest to historians who study film and teach courses related to it. The report also draws attention to new films in production and forthcoming conferences that deal with film. |
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In the category of documentary productions, the History Channel featured a new series this year, Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. Each program in the series focuses on a particular moment in the past, but the productions also examine the historical background to those events. The documentary in the series with the earliest focus looks at May 26, 1637, when the English destroyed a Pequot Indian village (Massacre at Mystic). The program dealing with the most recent historical event studies the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi during the summer of 1964 (Freedom Summer). Ten different award-winning filmmakers received assignments from the History Channel to produce the ten films. This arrangement gave artists opportunities to develop distinctive approaches to their cinematic interpretations. Several films from the series are reviewed in this issue of the Journal of American History. All productions from Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America are now available for purchase by the public and by educational institutions. |
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Some important new documentary series are in development. Thirteen/wnet New York will broadcast a four-part series on the history of the United States Supreme Court on Wednesday, January 31, 2007, and Wednesday, February 7, 2007, at 9 p.m. (est). This pbs broadcast fuses biography and history. It examines the temperaments, passions, personal beliefs, and life stories of the justices as well as those of people who brought important cases before the Court. The series will focus on several controversial decisions of the Court and reveal how justices struggled with difficult issues related to the shifting balance of power between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the U.S. government. Not surprisingly, the filmmaker Ken Burns has a large-scale documentary series in development. The new production may rival the popularity of Burns's 1990 television documentary about the Civil War. Scheduled for release in 2007, The War will be a seven-episode series, produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. It will examine the myriad ways World War II touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in the United States. By telling the stories of ordinary people in four quintessentially American towns—Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and the tiny farming town of Luverne, Minnesota—the series will portray this enormous worldwide catastrophe on an intimate, human scale. Burns and his colleagues at Florentine Films are also at work on a documentary about the history of America's national park system (tentatively scheduled for broadcast in 2009), and they are considering production of a film about Prohibition. |
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