MISSING THE DARK SIDE : Ken Burns does 'Mark Twain'.

Whether it deals with the Civil War, baseball, or jazz, a Ken Burns documentary always takes us into the world of Ken Burns. In that world, populations surge west across America, skyscrapers thrust upwards, bridges reach across waterways, capitalists infuse money into the financial bloodstream and suck disproportionate sums out, and the greatness of athletes, thinkers, and musicians surges down the corridors of history.

Lots of surging there. Yet the images and sounds of a Ken Burns film don't surge, they lull. Faces of the famous and obscure stare mournfully out of sepia photographs while a narrator murmurs the contents of a letter, newspaper clipping, or diary full of misery, longing, or patience. And under the quiet narration is even gentler music, music that strives to be subliminal, tinkled on a parlor piano and diffidently accompanied by a fiddle or banjo. This music further fades the faded photographs. (The jazz program was, necessarily, the exception since the music that was the subject matter kept the whole program dancing.)

The most energetic ingredients in a Ken Burns documentary are the intervals of commentary, the talking heads of historians, sociologists, and critics coming at us in living color and discoursing volubly. Yet these enthusiastic and often perceptive commentaries rarely pierce the thick coating of nostalgia, and sometimes make the subjects even more distant. Perhaps the contrast between brown photographs and flesh-toned talking heads is simply too marked; or perhaps the commentary is so knowing and assured that the mere participants in history begin to seem like conscripts of ignorant armies clashing by night.

In short, Ken Burns savors the pastness of the past. And, by now, he's as locked into his documentarian mannerisms as an old-time burlesque comic is locked into his leers. So, to evaluate Burns's latest work, Mark Twain, there is no use asking if the filmmaker and his colleagues captured Twain's world. Instead: How well did Mark Twain fit into the nostalgic world of Ken Burns?

Up to a point, a very decisive point, quite well. After all, much of Twain's writing is suffused with nostalgia for the Missouri of his childhood, so the coincidence of nostalgias--Twain's and Burns's--warrants the familiar Burnsian strategies. The old photographs-on-parade method gets full play: We see Missouri towns, Sam Clemens's unsmiling father and plucky mother, the Mississippi life of steamships and paddle boats, the faces of auctioned slaves congealed with fright, views of the Western plains as seen by young Sam when he went prospecting for gold, the mining camps and saloons and gamblers and prostitutes, the San Francisco newspaper offices and the bohemian enclaves of Bret Hart and Ambrose Bierce where Clemens first tasted the literary life and where Mark Twain was born. All this comes floating to us on the gently eddying stream of Burns's instant nostalgia, instant melancholy, and instant lyricism. The photos are knit together with the usual editorial skill, and the serviceable narration by Dayton Duncan and Geoffrey Ward benefit from Keith

David's crisp delivery. The music (piano improvisations by Jacqueline Schwab on old American songs) performs the usual trick of pushing the events of a mere century-and-a-half ago off into some Edenic mythological era, which is pretty much where Twain himself located the time of his childhood and youth. Kevin Conway's vocal impersonation of the author succeeds better in capturing the platform entertainer than the private man but, to be sure, no matter how many of Twain's misfortunes the filmmakers are willing to recount, it is ultimately the public persona of Twain, The Man in the White Suit, he of the abundant white locks and moustache and twinkling eyes, capable of convulsing audiences with nothing but a well-timed pause, that make Ken Burns and colleagues truly happy. And this isn't solely because any public performer is obviously more amenable to the camera than any author at work at his desk. It surely has something to do with the nature of the writings themselves.

Many of those writings are, in this show, nothing but names on the soundtrack: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, The Gilded Age. Even Life on the Mississippi, though extensively quoted to document Twain's piloting experience, is never truly acknowledged as a milestone in its author's career. The few remarks about Tom Sawyer only confirm the conventional view of it as the literary equivalent of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover, though in it are scenes of cruelty, violence, terror, and bigotry that deserve acknowledgement, if not examination. Worse, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, rightly described by Justin Kaplan as "an extravagant, savagely conflictive book," receives but a few sentences of plot summary. And that strange work of crystalline nihilism, The Mysterious Stranger, with its portrayal of Satan as humanity's benefactor, is barely mentioned, though it's the summation of late Twainian bleakness.

The one book that receives extended consideration is, inevitably, Huckleberry Finn, which the program's commentators rightly treat as Twain's masterpiece. Some of the analysis is excellent. Laying the groundwork for it is the story of an ex-slave, Maryanne Cord, which Twain, her employer, set down in print as "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It," and published in the Atlantic Monthly. This memoir of a mother separated by slavery from her children, skillfully excerpted, beautifully spoken, and strongly visualized by well-chosen photographs, has an immediacy and a poignancy that cut through the program's nostalgic mist in a way that nothing else does. And the notion that Cord's story shook Twain's preconceptions of race and slavery, thus preparing him to create the great character, Jim, seemed quite plausible.

On the book itself, the Twain scholar Jocelyn Chadwick is eloquent as to why only a Southerner could have written it, and why, by writing it, Twain became a subversive Southerner. Dick Gregory then nails down the fact that the use of the word "nigger" is precisely what leads to the subversion, since the epithet conditions us (and, even more, the first readers of the book) to think of Jim as chattel rather than as humanity. The subversion comes when Jim proceeds to act with such innate dignity that Huck cannot ignore the humanity of his companion. And the novelist David Bradley emphasizes that Huck means it when he declares, "All right, then, I'll go to hell." That an action we can take to be "the ultimate Christian moment" means damnation to a young Southerner is another piece of subversion by the Southern writer Samuel Clemens.

Yet it must also be said that there is more to this masterpiece than the theme of race, though it was only Twain's progressive thinking about race that the commentators here find in it. This is the key to the limitation of Ken Burns's Mark Twain. He and his collaborators seem to think of Twain, first and last, as a political progressive. To be sure, several of the writer's social stands were progressive, and Burns adduces as many as he can: the denunciations of imperialism, the support of African American education, the encouraging words he gave to American suffragettes, his contempt for war.

But a political progressive has a vision of society as a thing that can be brought to perfection or, at least, significant improvement by political change and social activism. Twain had no such vision in the long run. He mistrusted humanity's capacity to save or significantly improve itself, and was pretty certain that our civilization would self-destruct. He mistrusted democracy and the jury system and organized religion and sometimes reality itself. Perfectly willing to regard the black man as fully human, he was always haunted by sexual fears about the black female, a psychological taint that he discussed with great honesty in his journal but which may have led him to turn the initially promising character Roxanne in Pudd'nhead Wilson (her dilemma so similar to Maryanne Cord's!) into an operatic ogre midway through the book. (I found downright risible commentator Ron Powers's suggestion that Roxanne is Twain's only textured female character.)

Twain's several pronunciamentos in favor of causes most of us now find noble were not gestures toward Utopia. They were efforts to disconnect himself from the stupidities of the rest of "the damned human race." Surely that is the meaning of the physical image Twain took such pains to cultivate: The Man in the White Suit. "I prefer to be clean in the matter of raiment--clean in a dirty world." Exactly. And his disgust with this "dirty world" peeks out at us even in his early, cheerful writings and becomes savagely explicit in the later ones.

But most of this savagery, this nihilism, Ken Burns spares us. Honest enough to document the sadness of the writer's later domestic life, he is also dishonest enough to use those personal misfortunes to explain away the dark side of his genius, with Arthur Miller telling us of his certainty that Twain was suffering from depression. An order of Prozac, please, for the creator of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.

If there is such a thing as a "starter home" for newlyweds, then Mark Twain is a good starter biography for younger viewers who might go on to familiarize themselves with the writings of this great author. But before you order the video, consider another, cheaper, ultimately more valuable purchase. There is a Claymation children's film called The Adventures of Mark Twain (Paramount Home Video, 1985) which succeeds precisely in what the Ken Burns film fails to do: It gives us a taste, sometimes even a blast, of the life inside the books and shows its relationship to the external life of the books' creator. It's neither a biography nor even a fictionalized life, but rather a fantasia of Mark Twain's state of mind on the brink of death just as Halley's comet arrives to carry his soul to heaven. All this in a children's film? Yes, and that's a fact that would have tickled the author of Huckleberry Finn, a work once dismissed as a vulgar book for boys.