Last November was the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a brief but impactful speech that has gone down in history as one of our nation’s greatest.
Perhaps befitting the brilliant conciseness of that address, filmmaker Ken Burns looks at the speech in one of his shortest projects, the 90-minute film The Address. While it is nowhere near as sprawling as Burns’ other works, like The Civil War or Baseball, it — as the original address did — delivers an effective message in its brief time.
The Address differs from most of Burns’ other projects that viewers have become familiar with in other ways beyond its brevity. While the film does touch on the historical moment in which Lincoln spoke, one of its primary goals is looking at how those words still affect our country, all these years later.
This is accomplished through Burns turning his camera toward a tiny school in Putney, Vt. — the Greenwood School — where each year the students are encouraged to memorize, practice and recite the Gettysburg Address.
To capture the students at work, Burns — who lives in a neighboring community to Putney — used the cinéma vérité form, as he explained at a press event earlier this year.
“I just wept,” said Burns, about his first reaction to the school’s event. “[I] said, ‘Somebody should do this. This is cinéma vérité. I do something else.’ And I kept saying this over the years, and finally was like, ‘Shut up. Just do it.’ And, you know, I exercised some different muscles with The Central Park Five, and this is exercising still more muscles.”
The students at Greenwood are boys ages 11-17 who all face a variety of complex learning differences that make their personal, academic and social progress challenging. Seeing them, in the film, work toward memorizing the address — complete with their occasional frustrations — is very emotional, especially when coupled with Lincoln’s powerful words.
“Some of the boys learn it immediately,” Burns said. “They’ve adapted their own apparatus to do incredible and memorize it. They can hear it two or three times, and they’ve got it. But could they say the word ‘nation?’ No. You know, they are working on diction and some of the things that are auditory differences. So there’s amazing stuff that they work on, and it’s across not only the classrooms, but also individual tutorials, and the students help each other. And there‘s an incredible, amazing thing that goes on there. It’s hard to describe.
“It tells you the power of these words. … These kids, it takes three months, but they pull it off. … We’ve challenged the country — and we mean everybody — [to also memorize it]. You’ll curse me for a few days, but you’ll be able to do it.”
The Address premieres April 15 at 9pm ET on PBS (check local listings).
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Courtesy of Lindsay Taylor Jackson
