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One day in the mid-1990s, Ken Burns caught a cold while in Los Angeles raising money for his upcoming documentary. He hid in a cafe for hot tea, and after paying, one of the 20th century’s most ardent historians turned away from the counter and laid eyes on perhaps his most imposing icon. . Muhammad Ali was seated in a booth nearby. The two silently stared at each other for longer than most strangers, celebrities or not.
“There has been almost no movement on the both of us except that kind of openness, that love that happens when you feel unashamed and uncomfortable in the face of the lingering gaze,” Burns said recently. “This conversation without words; I have the script in my head, I heard his voice in my head. But it was just without going and shaking hands, of course, without asking for an autograph or anything like that.
At this point Ali was struggling with Parkinson’s disease – hence the silence of a man who for many decades could not Stop to speak: of his own beauty and skill, of the ugliness and lack of talent of his opponents, of the injustice that black Americans have faced for hundreds of years.
Almost three decades later, Burns; his eldest daughter, Sarah; and her husband, David McMahon, have assembled a comprehensive portrait of Ali’s impact from more than 40 years of images and photographs. “Muhammad Ali,” a four-part documentary series to air September 19 on PBS, follows the arc of a man whose life has crossed many of modern America’s most profound changes – and who was also not as revered in his heyday as he is now.
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and author of ‘King of the World’, a biography of Ali in 1998, said “it was very clear that many Americans found him dangerous, threatening the way people were “supposed” to behave. – a lot less blacks.
“He won people over because he was right about the war,” Remnick continued. “He won people over because as an athlete he has proven time and time again that he is not only good looking to look at but incredibly brave. So his athleticism and superiority as an athlete just couldn’t be denied, even when he lost.
There has been no shortage of documentaries or biographies on Ali over the past decades. For these filmmakers, the idea germinated in 2014, when their friend Jonathan Eig was working on a book about Ali, “Ali: A Life” (2017). Eig’s research led him to believe that a full cinematic portrayal of Ali’s life had never been made before and that the Burns were the perfect team to make it happen.
McMahon said it only took a few archival clips to convince them of the potential power of a high-profile documentary on Ali. “There were so many possibilities to tie all of these threads that were sort of out there,” he said. “You would see documentaries about a single chapter of his life or a single fight, or books covering only part of his life. “
The more interested the filmmakers in Ali’s life, said Sarah Burns, the more they realized “just how much there was in this story.”
“Not just boxing, obviously,” she said, “but her relationship with Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, her family life, her marriages, her resistance to the draft and her courage and willingness to go to jail. for his convictions, and also his battles with Parkinson’s – you know, his later life, his life after boxing. details “.
The new series traces the path of young Cassius Clay in Louisville, the days of Jim Crow, Kentucky, to the complicated, sometimes contradictory adult who won the heavyweight title three times and faced the government. American for his refusal to fight in Vietnam. . The filmmakers show him not only as a dominant heavyweight during his best fighting years, but also as a figure of significant impact on society. Here is “The Greatest” clowning with the Beatles; standing on a podium with Malcolm X; kiss Martin Luther King Jr .; calling another black fighter an “Uncle Tom” for refusing to acknowledge his name change, while an ogling Howard Cosell tells cameras to “keep filming” the ensuing brawl; and finally publicly declaring – at the risk to his career and his endorsements – that he was a Muslim.
Ali’s rise to stardom has coincided with a period of intense cultural change in the United States, and his connection to civil rights and anti-war movements is central to distinguishing Ali the man from Ali the boxer, McMahon said – and acknowledging its effect on American public.
“You cannot understand his refusal to be inducted into the US military without understanding his faith, without understanding the meaning of Elijah Muhammad in his life,” he said, referring to the mercurial and sometimes caustic leader of the Nation of Islam, with whom Ali had a close relationship. “We hadn’t really seen that explained. There were also points of view that had not been heard; we thought, ‘Who out there could tell us more about their faith?’ “
Eig, the biographer, shared a huge amount of contact with the filmmakers, and they began their first interviews in 2016, a week after Ali died. Dozens of boxing writers, friends and ambassadors attended: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Holmes, Jesse Jackson, novelist Walter Mosley, ESPN writer Howard Bryant, boxing promoter Don King.
Over the following years, the filmmakers unearthed more than 15,000 photographs and unearthed images that had not been seen publicly. A production company that had filmed “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali’s third and final fight with Joe Frazier, in the Philippines, had folded before the film could be used. Their images were buried in archives in Pennsylvania.
“This woman took out these boxes and said, ‘They say’ Ali ‘on it – I don’t know what they are,’” McMahon said. “It’s Technicolor, it’s 16 millimeters, taken from the apron [of the ring] – it just jumps. And you see combat in a way that has never been seen before. “
Ali’s relationship with Frazier, who as a young fighter had been one of Ali’s fans, is one of the more thorny aspects of the documentary. Ali’s treatment of him before their fights was pretty cruel, employing some of the language of “racist whites,” as one commentator on the show puts it, to denigrate Frazier (who has never forgiven him). This is part of the complex picture of Ali that the series provides: a champion of the people who could be mean; a devout Muslim who was a serial womanizer; an idealist who made many people angry with his refusal to conform to public expectations.
Bryant said he didn’t think “people understand why this story is so heroic, so important and so unique.”
“We just seem to think that every person, if they protest something, if they say something, if they face some kind of sanction, we put them in the same category as Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson,” he said. he continued. “And that is so absurd.”
“Name another athlete where all the weight of the United States government has been on one person. I’m not talking about the NFL saying you can’t play when you’re already a millionaire. Colin Kaepernick obviously sacrificed himself and lost some things. It’s not the same thing. It’s not even close.
For two of Ali’s daughters, Rasheda Ali (from her second marriage, to Khalilah Ali, née Belinda Boyd) and Hana Ali (from her third, to Veronica Porche), the new documentary is an honest look at the father they have experienced mainly while under the weight of Parkinson’s disease. The film opens with a photo of him sitting with his oldest child, Maryum, encouraging him to look out the window so he can steal a bite of his food. The images made Rasheda cry.
“I have never seen the pictures of the family – and even the photos! Rasheda said. “I was like, ‘Wow, where did you get this?'”
“He was always making jokes and he was amusing, “she added.” This is what Muhammad Ali’s people don’t really see on a regular basis. “
Hana, who said anyone other than the Burns would have made “just another documentary about my dad,” also noted that the more intimate footage helped fill in some of the nuances about her.
“It’s so hard when you live a life like my father’s, where you are so accessible and so photographed, and her story has been told so many times,” Hana said. “Honestly, I’ve seen so many documentaries about our dad, and even just watching the start of it, it was already different – it was nicer.”
The series ends with Ali becoming, as Ken Burns described him, “the most beloved person on the planet”. Images of his surprise and trembling appearance at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta are a crucial part of Ali’s enduring image and mythology. But as Burns says, “Mythology is a Mask”.
Bryant, who argued that Ali had changed the relationship between athletes and fans, was more direct about the evolution of the boxer’s public image in recent years.
“People hated his guts and white people didn’t like him until he couldn’t speak,” said Bryant. “There were people – black and white – who still called him Cassius Clay; there were people who still did not want to give him his due. And there were people who still resented him a lot.
“Then he couldn’t speak, and suddenly he belonged to everyone. “
Ken Burns suggested that this public redemption was akin to “a funeral where people talk very well about each other.”
“And you’re like, ‘Why can’t we do this for the rest of our lives? ” “, he said. “Funerals are not for the deceased – funerals are for those who remain, and we always model the best, most humane behavior. And yet, we don’t seem to be able to apply it to our own lives.
He quoted one of the documentary’s reporters, Dave Kindred, who said that in death Ali “can no longer hurt us; he can no longer drive us mad.
“He couldn’t make us angry anymore, he couldn’t make it harder for us, force us to come back to our own feelings, our own beliefs, our own prejudices,” Burns said. “Then there’s this room to forgive and maybe exalt. “
“It’s a long process with him,” he added. “And it’s so interesting that a lot of that positive progress comes from defeat.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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