Movie Review

Ken Burns's The Civil War (1990) established a bench mark for documentary filmmakers, reaching a huge audience and provoking a renewed interest in the causes, conduct, and people involved in that conflict. Burns successfully combined hundreds of photographs, illustrations, modern photography of battlefields and forts, evocative music, interviews with historians, and exceptional narration of letters and other contemporary documents. The result was a film that informed while it touched the emotions of its viewers, but one that also inspired controversy over the way it presented some of the leaders and events of the Civil War era.

1

Sylvia Komatsu and her production team aimed to do for the United States-Mexican War what Burns did for the American Civil War, using the techniques that Burns mastered. Advised by an excellent group of historians from both the United States and Mexico, Komatsu's production is commendable and evenhandedly presents the issues and personalities of the conflict, making it suitable for classroom showings or assignments, but it will not be ranked with Burns's Civil War. Limiting Komatsu is the fact that the United States-Mexican War was fought before the widespread availability of photography. Martha A. Sandweiss's book, Eyewitness to War (1989), which offers examples of daguerreotypes and prints of the war, demonstrates how few early photographs Komatsu had to work with and how she thus had to rely on paintings, portraits, and prints. Those illustrations helped give the spirit of the times, but some of them are known to portray people, places, and battles inaccurately. As alternatives, Komatsu creatively deployed reenactors in period uniforms, posted Mexican and American flags waving in the breeze, and inserted video footage of battlefields, tents, rivers, and the interiors and exteriors of buildings. None of these alternative images makes up for the impression that viewers are missing out on what the people and locales looked like in the 1840s. Thus, this production cannot overcome its lack of photographs, which did so much to give Burns's film its vitality.

. . .