LIVING WITH LINCOLN

US, 2015, 70 minutes, Colour.

Directed by Peter Kunhardt.

For anyone wanting to know more about President Abraham Lincoln as well as to see myriads of photos of him, this is 70 minutes well spent.

The film was directed by Peter Kunhardt, prolific documentary producer but also director of significant documentaries on American politics, Nixon in his own Words, King in the Wilderness, a portrait of John McCain and a three part series on President Obama. He is aided in the production by members of his family.

The director is very much involved because this is a family story. It goes back to the Civil War, where the director’s great-grandfather served on the Union side and wrote a diary. However, he was affected by the war, abandoned his family and became a travelling preacher. However, his son, Frederick Hill Meserve, eventually tracked down his father and worked with him on preparing the diary for publication. Meserve himself became an enthusiast about Lincoln and decided to track down as many photos of the President as he could. This documentary shows his quest and the extraordinary number of photos that he was able to discover, acquire, preserve. (He was born in 1865 and died in 1962.)

His daughter, Dorothy, who is married name was Kunhardt, shared in her father’s enthusiasm and decided to investigate the life of Lincoln, his wife and children, again collecting an enormous amount of material, including buying all the books that remained from the Lincoln household.

The work was difficult for Dorothy because she suffered from depression, bringing up her children, marrying into wealth (her in-laws disapproving) but her husband losing his money in business during the Depression. Dorothy was always interested in telling children stories and began to write them, illustrate them, even have a device where children could interact with the books (illustrations covered, holes in pages…). This aspect of Dorothy’s work is a story in itself.

While the family story has its exhilaration as well as that sadnesses, this telling of the story of the director’s great-grandfather and grandmother, is interesting and entertaining but it does open up many reflections on Abraham Lincoln, the character of Mary Todd and her relationship with her husband, and the four sons that they had.

The whole collection of text and photos was acquired by Yale University in 2015.