Posted on 01/17/2006 7:53:48 AM PST by presidio9
Vikram Jayanti wanted to call his portrait of the nation's 16th president "The Darkness of Abraham Lincoln."
In fact, he said, that was the production's working title for nearly three years. Rather than create a biographical documentary, he planned to show how one man "transcended depression and turned it into light."
Jayanti's three-hour film airs under a simpler title, "Lincoln," at 8 tonight on the History Channel, but it still focuses on the traumas the president endured over his lifetime, ending with a war that claimed more American lives than any other - including his own.
The New York-born filmmaker acknowledged that his own struggle with depression informs the film. "Our model of depression, as a society, is that you're broken and lost if you're depressed," Jayanti said. "Here's a man who, because of his depression, becomes a transcendant human being."
In a film he saw as youth, Jayanti said, "Charlie Chaplin says, 'Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the world.' Well, Lincoln freed himself by freeing the slaves."
Lincoln, Jayanti said, was "a very calculating guy, a bare-knuckled warrior. Had he lived, I think he was the only person who could have reintegrated the South in a wholesome way."
History Channel commissioned the film in January 2003. Jayanti spent more than a year doing research and thinking about how to portray Lincoln. He decided to go beyond the marble statuary and yellowed photos and explore the man's emotions and what drove him.
Lincoln, an up-by-the-bootstraps frontiersman, left no autobiography. But Jayanti found what Carl Lindahl, History Channel's vice president for historical programming, called "a lot of new scholarship about Lincoln." The voices of those scholars and writers, rather than that of a narrator, carry Lincoln's story. None of the actors speaks lines.
"Each person I interviewed at some point wept, they feel Lincoln's life so personally," Jayanti said. "I wanted the film to work not in the language of information, but in the language of emotions."
Jayanti, who produced "The Christmas Truce" for History in 2002 and won the 1997 Oscar for best feature documentary for "When We Were Kings," called this "a very ambitious film."
"A lot of it is done with cinema effect - things are a bit hallucinatory, the action is smeared across the screen," he said.
The film explores the emotional trauma that may have resulted in Lincoln's depression and his proclivity to hide his feelings. Experts discuss his fear that he might have contracted syphilis from prostitutes, and whether he had homosexual relationships.
"I was desperately concerned not to do a hatchet job on Lincoln," Jayanti said. "You can do a 'gotcha' on anyone, but Lincoln is bigger and better than that. What I was trying to do is to make Lincoln more human. That's not available if he's made of marble."
It was Gore Vidal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gore_Vidal
Oops, sorry for the double post.
That was Gore Vidal? I actually enjoyed his books. I missed this program at 8:00, and was plannign on watching the replay at 11:00. I happend to flip over and see that segment, and decided that I had seen all I wanted to see.
same here i lasted about 10 seconds
Lincoln indeed is the greatest of United States Presidents, and GW Bush is having an adminstration much like Lincoln had. Lincoln was openly vilified by the Democrats for misconduct of the war, and in the spring of 1864 he privately admitted that he did think he could be re-elected. However, his brillant choice of Generals that would fight to victory, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, etc., was a masterstroke as this group gave him the victories he needed to sustain his Presidency. Lincoln, in addition, had the loyalty and admiration of the common Union soldier and the common folk in America. They believed in him. They realized he was a flawed human being, as we all are. And...when election time rolled around, they returned the destiny leader to the White house for a second term.
I watched the film about Lincoln last night, and actually enjoyed it, although it did not spend enough time showcasing the brillance of Lincoln in his conduct of the war, leadership of his administration and great depth and understanding of the conflict at hand. Lincoln was blessed and guided by the Lord almighty in the war he fought to maintain this great union. Like a spiritual mystery and destiny, he could see what other men could not, much like GW Bush sees the America of the future and the Democrat Party does not have a clue, just as whimpy George McClellan and the Democrat Copperheads did not have a clue in Lincoln's time. They say history repeats itself. I guess it does.
Two comments that I heard until I turned off the TV...Lincoln had syphllis, at the same time noting that this was pure speculation, and that Lincoln was gay.
I went to bed.
It's utterly characteristic of the modern period that anyone who was anyone was neurotic, abused, depressed, and/or battling a variety of other pathologies. No doubt this says a great deal more about these historians and their generation than it does about the great figures of history, for which our obsession with navel-gazing and our boundless appetite for wallowing in our psychic deformities would have been utterly incomprehensible.
It was Gore Vidal, a hate America leftist through and through.
Apparently the History Channel believes that it is better to have the opinion of some schmuck who did a Lincoln mini-series rather than a legitimate historian.
Our coddling of the Saudis and "Palestinians" shows that this understanding has now been lost.
What a waste that the valuable lessons to be gleaned from these giants of our history are ignored in favor of instead humanizing these individuals at all costs. After watching this mess last night, it is my feeling that the producer went far past searching for context in Lincoln's pathologies, instead all we got was a giant group encounter session.
Man, I hate hippies.
They went there, did they? One reason I wanted to watch this was because I figured if they brought this up it would surely leak. So I figured they gave this stupid theory the respect it deserved and left it out. The buttsex loves draft dead soldiers who can't defend themselves to lend legitimacy to they perverted lifestyle. There is no reason whatsoever to indicate that Lincoln was gay.
As I watched the "Lincoln" revisionist history, I kept wondering how someone as pathologically "depressed" as Abe Lincoln allegedly was could possibly have told all those jokes and humorous "little stories" for which his friends and enemies alike best remembered him. Not to mention all the eminently quotable ad libs attributed to the Great Emancipator. With the arguable exception of "JFK", this was the most agenda driven historical "docu-drama" I've ever seen.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.