Capturing the past, not staging it
For "Wounded Knee," the final episode of "We Shall Remain," director Stanley Nelson had access to ample archival footage of the 1973 standoff at South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. For "Geronimo," the fourth episode, codirectors Dustinn Craig and Sarah Colt keep returning to photographs of the main character's familiar, weathered face.
But for the series' first three episodes, which recount events in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, there were no photographic records, no living witnesses. And so "We Shall Remain" had to enter the realm of reenactments.
That's always treacherous territory, said Mark Samels, executive producer of "American Experience." The PBS history series has used re-creations in the past, but not as extensively, Samels said. And filming Native Americans in costume, he said, poses particular problems.
"You put someone in buckskin and naked from the waist up and it kind of defaults to hokey," Samels said. This series, he said, had the opposite goal. "We wanted to have the audience feel as if a reality was being captured rather than staged."
So Samels worked with producer Sharon Grimberg, directors Chris Eyre and Ric Burns, and cinematographer Paul Goldsmith to develop a visual style that would make the reenactments feel less forced. (Eyre said he likes to joke that he brought his "anti-cheese radar" to the set.)
They shot on film, not video, making each episode more costly than a typical "American Experience" film. What helped, Samels said, is that the series gained early interest from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and "attracted a lot more funding than we can usually attract."
They treated the film to make it feel aged before shooting began, and did more chemical processes in post-production: taking out the primary colors, tinting the film toward elements of red.
And they developed a style of camerawork designed to make events feel immediate. Rather than blocking out the scenes beforehand as with a typical costume drama, Samels said, they sent Goldsmith into scenes without a clear sense of what would happen, so that the images would have a searching feel.
"When you're not quite sure you're going to see everything you want to see, you're going to start looking to the left and the right of the frame," Eyre said. He pointed to a scene in the third episode, "Trail of Tears," which re-creates the Cherokees' long and deadly march from their native homeland. The camera seems to grasp for images, settling on a hand with a dirty fingernail, a child carrying a doll, a tight shot of a foot trudging through the snow.
As Goldsmith moved his camera, Eyre said, "we would watch the monitor and . . . we would just say yes, yes, pan right, tilt us, yes, yes, yes, awesome, awesome, awesome, stay there, go tighter." It turned out to be a filmmaking lesson, he said.
"The photographic style that we chose to tell the series with, I'm going to take and use in my repertoire," he said.
JOANNA WEISS 