Recreations in We Shall Remain

Seeing History Through Indians’ EyesIN his two-decade career as a filmmaker Ric Burns has made histories of the exploration of the American West and the settlement of New York City without resorting to the use of dramatic re-creations. In the passionate debate among filmmakers over the documentary form he sides with those who find the acting and low-budget effects too often cheesy and distracting.

Dramatic re-creations were as alien to him as documentary and period work were to Chris Eyre, an American Indian director whose character-intense films include “Smoke Signals” and the adaptations of Tony Hillerman’s novels “Skinwalkers” and “A Thief of Time” for PBS’s “Mystery!”

So it was with some mutual wariness that Mr. Burns and Mr. Eyre teamed up, at the request of the PBS history series “American Experience,” to direct “Tecumseh’s Vision,” one of five documentaries that make up “We Shall Remain.”And:Starting as what Mr. Eyre called “an arranged marriage,” the production team had some tense moments that needed to be smoothed out by a few walks in the woods. At one point Mr. Burns was so insistent on his vision for a particular shot that he went running a quarter mile across a field to set it up, leaving his exposed legs scratched and bleeding; Mr. Eyre, won over by Mr. Burns’s passion, conceded.

There were other challenges. The two directors appealed to members of the Absentee Shawnee tribe to include a depiction of a tribal football-like game but were rebuffed. “There’s such skepticism among Indians at telling our history in movies,” Mr. Eyre said.

And there was still the problem of the re-creations, a form that Mr. Burns says he generally loathes.

Ms. Grimberg and Mr. Samels were insistent on re-enactments. Some of the stories the series would be telling predated photography. And there wasn’t much in the way of documents and archival material to make them visually interesting in the way pioneered by “The Civil War,” on which Mr. Burns worked with his brother, Ken. “There was no way to really humanize the stories without having some drama in them,” Ms. Grimberg said.

With the cinematographer Paul Goldsmith the team tried to avoid what was so objectionable. “They’re always hokey,” Mr. Burns said, adding that “99 times out of 100” they were merely illustrations.

The team settled on images that included plenty of abstraction, shot from a distance or in extreme close-up, or filmed through reeds. In one scene where Lalawethika falls into an alcohol-induced stupor and has a vision that changes the course of his people’s history, some images move in and out of focus, while others are seen through a haze of campfire smoke.

“There’s always got to be a ratio between what the image discloses and what it holds back,” Mr. Burns said. “If you just give everything, if the camera just sees with blinding clarity all the real estate, the audience goes away. There has to be room for the audience in the image.”Comment:  Yeah, that's a real problem, Mr. Burns. Theaters packed with people watching documentaries--people who suddenly get up and go when they see dramatic recreations. I.e., people who demand talking heads and archival material even if these old-fashioned techniques suck the life out of subjects. Not.

For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Movies.