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Blue Ridge PBS staffer Carol Jennings films Union troops at New Market, Va.
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Photo by Aaron McDowell.
Bud-Robertson
Bud Robertson lectures to his Virginia Tech Civil War history class.
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Flags fly at a re-enactment.
Flags fly at a re-enactment.
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Blue Ridge PBS staffer Carol Jennings films Union troops at New Market, Va.
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Will Anderson (Blue Ridge PBS V.P. of operations and production) films infantry re-enactors in Loudon County, Va.
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William Davis, who co-narrates the documentary, is filmed by Carol Jennings on location at Fredericksburg's Chatham Mansion (Va.).
Aerial photography and airplane fuel, interstate traffic and re-enactors roasting shish-kebabs: The making of a Civil War documentary film has its challenges.
A new documentary just aired on Blue Ridge PBS in conjunction with the Virginia Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission and the Virginia Tech Center for Civil War Studies, just in time for the war’s 150th anniversary year.
They covered as much ground as most Confederate regiments did, shooting over the course of two years on location in Harpers Ferry, Antietam, Manassas, Lexington, Blacksburg, Appomattox. They spent eight hours in an airplane in June 2008 – “you pray that what you shoot is going to work,” says Blue Ridge PBS producer Jim Hammerstrom. “Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.” They waited out airplane and truck noise and wrote scripts that translated military strategy into language eighth-graders would understand.
They filmed hundreds of hours of interviews and re-enactments, culled down to three hours, divided into nine 20-minute segments to be used in schools, museums and libraries across Virginia and a one-hour version that aired on Blue Ridge PBS this fall.
The aim was to create films that brought the war to life, “not blue and red arrows jumping back and forth on a map,” as Dr. James I. Robertson, Jr., executive producer and narrator for much of the film (along with William C. Davis, also a professor at Virginia Tech), puts it.
Robertson has worked on other documentaries with Blue Ridge PBS over the years, and he’s appeared on A&E, The History Channel and C-SPAN – “I’d go to New York or Hollywood and they’d interview me for two hours for 10 minutes [of film],” he says. “The camera doesn’t scare me anymore.”
Robertson also served as chief historical consultant to the 2003 film “Gods and Generals,” based on Jeff Shaara's book "Gods and Generals" and on Robertson's biography of Robert E. Lee, starring Robert Duvall as Lee.
“[Duvall] listened. He would ask me a question about Lee, and he listened as if I were the only voice he would ever hear on the subject.”
This film, “Virginia in the Civil War: A Sesquicentennial Remembrance,” specifically written and produced for students, has been a long time in coming. Robertson, who was executive director of the National Centennial Commission in the 1960s, always regretted not having done more with education then, but they ran out of money. “That’s eaten at my gut for 50 years,” he says.
“The young [are] our future… we are losing our culture – history, geography, grammar, writing.”
So this project is close to his heart. “We want to catch the kids’ attention. And education will follow.”
The film’s nine parts will focus on different aspects of the war – some on broad, big-picture topics including the military and the legacy of the war – others focusing on smaller stories, the homefront, slaves, women, refugees – and on the common soldier. The Salem [Va.] High School Band performs music on the soundtrack: an arrangement of “Shenandoah.”
As for the filmed re-enactments: “I am the Judas Iscariot of re-enactors, I guess,” admits Robertson. “I think re-enactments are educational – they show what gunfire was like, they show what people wore… but they stop there.
“I want you to show me a young soldier whose leg has been blown off by a cannonball – he’s dying. Let me know what’s going through his mind. I want to know what his mother is going to say when he’s not coming home because he’s been killed in a place she can’t even remember the name of.”
Robertson’s approach to the film is much the same as his approach to teaching at Virginia Tech:
“Guess what word I’m going to use a lot of?” he asks his Civil War lecture students. “Emotion.”
“If I can make a college kid cry,” he notes in an interview, “Yeah.”
Despite devoting his professional, and one guesses, much of his personal, life to the Civil War, Robertson doesn’t soften his opinion that it should never have had to happen, that the human loss was an incalculable waste.
“We didn’t just lose [the soldiers],” he says. “We lost all the things they could have done. We lost their children…
"It was a tragic war.”
More About the Film
“Virginia in the Civil War: A Sesquicentennial Remembrance” has been two years in the making. The final, three-hour documentary will be segmented into nine 20-minute films and distributed on DVDs to every public and private school in the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as to libraries and museums.
It’s not the first film Dr. James I. Robertson has produced with Blue Ridge PBS. Starting in 1996, they collaborated on a 10-episode documentary on the Civil War, covering a range of topics from Robert E. Lee’s retreat across Virginia to the role of railroads in the war.
Robertson, a professor at Virginia Tech, traces his own work in Civil War history back to the centennial (and before), when he was executive director of the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission under presidents Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. He has written more than 20 books and for years delivered commentaries on public radio in Virginia. The Ted Turner/Warner Bros. film “Gods and Generals” was based on Robertson’s biography of Stonewall Jackson; he served as chief historical consultant for the film.
For more information and to order DVDs of Robertson’s documentaries, visit Blue Ridge PBS online at blueridgepbs.org. More on Robertson can be found at history.vt.edu/Robertson.
Blue Ridge Country magazine is serving as a media sponsor for the documentary, and will be giving a year’s subscription to every high school in Virginia as part of that sponsorship. —CEM