On one wall of the main studio at WGBH-TV in Boston are two black-and -white posters - one of General George Armstrong Custer and the other of Sitting Bull. These two icons, permanently frozen by the camera, stare out from a period in American history when Manifest Destiny meant great promise to one - brutality and broken promises to the other.
Underneath the photographs are Ric Burns and Lisa Ades, two filmmakers who have forged a brilliant 6-hour nonfiction film from mountains of material on the American West. PBS's "The American Experience: The Way West" (tonight at Tuesday, 7 p.m., Ch. 7).Burns and Ades give us a clear and cogent portrait of one of the most complicated periods in U.S. history. In fact, this pair of New Yorkers, who look as if they never stepped foot on the other side of the Hudson River, have produced a work that might even draw envy from Ric's more celebrated brother, Ken.
In fact, while Ken has been credited with revolutionizing the documentary with "The Civil War" and "Baseball," Ric's work has a greater sense of visual poetry. The images of vast herds of American buffalo and the wide sky of the Great Plains illustrate that Burns and Ades may not have borrowed director John Ford's myth-making apparatus but they certainly understand Ford's visual appreciation for the West.
As during the Gold Rush, when a tremendous public interest was centered on the West and the population of San Francisco went from 429 in 1848 to 50,000 two years later, today a corresponding media frenzy exists. Turner Broadcasting, the Arts and Entertainment Network and dozens of home video suppliers have discovered there's media gold in going west. But this one's the best.
In a small room, off to the side of the studio, Burns and Ades spoke of their technique in transforming the raw material into a substantial work of documentary art.
"The stuff is lying all over the place," said Burns, referring to the mountains of photographs, motion picture film, books, periodicals and other archival material available to historians investigating the movement west.
Burns, who coproduced "The Civil War" with brother Ken and cowrote it with Geoffrey C. Ward, has always been fascinated with the cultural myths and historical realities of America's westward expansion.
"Our chief aim in making `The Way West' was to show how these seemingly disparate events were, in fact, inextricably linked. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 had dramatic consequences not only for the history of California, but for the history of the Great Plains and the fate of 65 million buffalo and the tribes who depended on them for their subsistence. The Gold Rush set in motion a final series of terrible conflicts between Native Americans and whites by making inevitable intensive contact and conflict over land and resources.... Gold was the gun that set everything off," says Burns. "The mineral beheld both bright promise and dark possibility for Americans - native and otherwise."
Although it's clear from the beginning that the Native Americans will get a fairer shake from Burns and Ades than they did from the U.S. government, it's not because of political correctness but out of respect for historical correctness.
"We saw Sitting Bull as a hero, not a victim, and Crazy Horse as a hero for all Americans. We weren't just interested in the tragedy or in the Indians as victims. That's wrongheaded and simple-minded," he says.
The narration from Russell Baker and observations from commentator Charlotte Black Elk, novelist Tom McGuane, historian/author Alvin M. Josephy Jr. and Dee Brown, author of "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," clarify and punctuate the inevitability of the culture clash.
Aside from the focus on the battles between various tribes and the military, Burns and Ades focus their attention on other matters as well.
"Originally, people thought the West was an infinite, inexhaustible resource," says Ades. "Eventually, both sides understood that the West was not infinite."
"Many people - depending on whether they're more sensitive to the Indians or to the settlers - see the West as a clash of opposites," says Burns, who clarified the point in a special essay he wrote to accompany the series.
"The West was always many places at once - Indian and non-Indian, real and imaginary, natural and developed, pastoral and industrialized, free and fenced-in, beautiful and spoiled," he writes. "In `The Way West' we have tried to communicate a powerful sense of this doubleness, and much of the style and craft of the film is devoted to portraying the spectral presence of more than one reality at the same time."
Later, from his office in Manhattan, Burns spoke of his relationship with his older brother, Ken, and the nature of working for the Public Broadcasting Service.
"I owe a lot to Ken," says Burns. "He invited me to work with him on `The Civil War' and I'm very grateful. Ken is the most talented person I know. He re-invented the historical documentary. But we're both irritatingly insistent at having our own way. Unless I went to work for him or he went to work for me, it would never work."
Burns seems comfortable with his relationships with both his brother and PBS. "The whole battle over PBS isn't political, it's commercial," he says. "This entire controversy about funding for PBS has nothing to do with political correctness. It has everything to do with profit. It's terrible that the absence of a commercial agenda is equated with political correctness. I'm all for profit but you'd think with 70-odd channels we could have one that isn't commercial. Also, there is no bias in PBS. It's like genial chaos that's open to talent."
Meanwhile, Burns and Ades are going east for their next epic documentary - the history of New York City.
"There's so much material," says Burns. "Early filmmakers took pictures of New York from the earliest days of the film camera's invention," he says.