The Darkness of Abraham Lincoln

Cincinatti Post ^ | 1/16/05 | Patricia Brennan

[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."

[Chewie84]

I didn't watch it. I remember when my mother and I saw a commercial, she and I (Though her more than me) were both rather offended by the special's tagline: "He fought two wars: One was in his head." Lincoln was arguably our greatest president, and that tagline seemed to suggest he was insane or something. I am not sorry at all that I missed it.

[x]

People miss a lot if they don't have the historical context. Two writers born in the same year as Lincoln: Edgar Allen Poe and Alfred Tennyson. Both would count as clinically depressed today. It was part of the late romantic atmosphere of the time, and came almost as much from books as from reactions to life experiences.

Strong expressions of feeling between men were also common in the early 19th century, and Lincoln arguably had less of such such sentimentality than other contemporaries. You can see some of this male motionality in the movie Gettysburg. Bed-sharing, either at the same time or in shifts, wasn't uncommon in frontier areas, and rarely had a sexual side.

[4CJ]

Lincoln was the best thing that ever happened to the South.

Without Lincoln my ancestors would have lived lives of peace and contentment. With Lincoln it was just the opposite. Would you consider your family being killed, their home burned, their livestock, jewelry and other valuables stolen, the women and young girls raped, the men killed in battle as being "the best thing that ever happened"? God help this country if such sentiments are pervasive.