IF you must apply a boxing metaphor to Ken Burns’ new documentary about Jack Johnson, then score it a TKO.
It’s a technical knockout because it’s the technical aspects of Burns’ films that lift them above all other historical documentaries made for TV.
What’s his gift? It just might boil down to patience.
He never hurries to tell his stories and he is obviously painstaking and dogged in his pursuit of every known scrap of appropriate, historically accurate footage, no matter how old or obscure.
With “Unforgivable Blackness,” the result is a rich, hypnotic documentary -aided by an original score by Wynton Marsalis -that more than justifies its four-hour length.
At the heart of the film is, simply, a great story. As you’ll learn if you watch this, Jack Johnson was the world’s first black heavyweight boxing champion.
He was a larger-than-life African-American superstar whose bravado, dominance in the ring, and preference for white women angered white Americans at a time when the lynching of blacks, particularly in the South, was at its zenith.
Born in Galveston, Texas, on March 31, 1878, Johnson won the crown in 1908 at age 30 from a white champion, Tommy Burns, who Johnson demolished.
That victory was repellant enough to whites, but when Johnson dealt similar punishment to a revered and undefeated former champion, Jim Jeffries, on July 4, 1910, race riots erupted in dozens of cities.
Fortunately for us, films of those fights and others were available to Burns and he makes electrifying use of them to tell the story of Johnson-from his against-all-odds rise from poverty to international fame to his fall, precipitated in large part by racial hatred.
“Unforgivable Blackness” brings vividly to life an era – the early years of the 20th century before World War I – that is little known to most of us.
It’s much more than a dry history lesson, though. It is also supremely entertaining – which, for TV, makes this documentary as rare as a black heavyweight champion in 1908.
—
“Unforgivable Blackness”
[****] (Four stars)
Tonight and tomorrow night at 9 on WNET/Ch. 13
