Ken Burns' documentaries

I've been watching one of Mr. Burns' documentaries recently, so I decided to start a discussion thread about his work.

First, let's start with the bad. His stuff tends to be mawkish, ethnocentric to a highly irritating degree, and not terribly insightful. He completely lacks perspective, and everything is from an American viewpoint. EVERYTHING. I remember during his civil war series that he said over & over & over that "The world is watching", as if the entire world was enthralled by our struggle. Which, actually, it was. But not because we were so important, as he implies. No, they wanted to see how "modern" warfare on a large scale would turn out, and how it was fought. But to Ken Burns, America is the best ever, and every American should glow with pride at how awesome we are.

The plaintive violins that he uses when he wants to evoke sadness (which he often does, given his subject matter) are pretty tedious, as are the quiet sad piano pieces. And he uses more sepia toned pictures than you can shake a stick at.

There's more bad, but I can't think of any more at the moment, so on to the good! When he doesn't go overboard with his mawkishness, his work is highly engaging. In fact, it's the very emotions with which he imbues his documentaries that makes people interested. He often soaks them in too much emotion for my taste (hence the "mawkish" label), but nevertheless, he does tend to create watchable documentaries. If his documentaries were books, they would be "page turners".

I've criticized him for his absurd ethnocentrism and America boosterism, but I have to give him credit for one thing: he doesn't shy away from recounting the racism that is the ugly underbelly of much of American history. He regularly gives blacks plenty of screen time, and after watching his documentaries you have a pretty good grasp of how the slaves suffered before (and during) the Civil War, and how Japanese-Americans suffered in their internment camps, and so on. He may love America to a degree I dislike, but it's clear he wants his American audience to ensure that certain things Never Happen Again. And that requires telling some painful stories.

Finally, some recommendations:

I'm currently watching his series the War, which is a series about WWII. It's quite good, and I would recommend it. He hardly touches the Russian front, which is a shame. But at the same time, given his focus, it's understandable. He's upfront about his desire to describe how the war affected four American towns, and the fighting in Russia just didn't affect them that much. On the other hand, he's *very* good at bringing the war home and showing how the people in the States dealt with it & suffered, while at the same time showing what the fighting troops experienced & how they suffered. But it's not all suffering; life is rarely all suffering. He also recounts how people let off steam, what they did in their spare time, etc. My words are probably making the whole thing sound tedious, but it's a typical Ken Burns production, so it's a "page turner", like all of his work.

My favorite documentary he ever did was Mark Twain. This documentary was one of the most powerful I've ever seen. Burns' tendency to over-emotionalism is actually a strength here, since Mark Twain's story is inherently pretty sad & tragic. And although Twain had many faults, especially around money, he was a good man who railed against injustice. (Even a cursory reading of Huckleberry Finn demonstrates that about Twain.) All this is recounted against the backdrop of Twain's tragic personal life, where he lost child after child, and it was clear that he dearly loved every one of them. His misanthropy & cynicism near the end of his life was born out of despair rather than hatred, and you come to feel for the guy, rather than despise him. In any case, watching that documentary was a moving experience.

If you are at all a baseball fan, please do yourself a favor and avoid Baseball like raw sewage. Which is what it is.

What was the matter with it?

Geez, gonna make me a defend a position on the Internet?

It's a bit difficult to be precise, since I watched it a long long time ago, but it was deadly dull. It ignored the professional existence of the sport in any city other than NY, Chicago, Boston and to a lesser degree Philadelphia. It used still shots and home movies but virtually no on-field action, which was just weird. It had no sense of ballplayers as people or even as personalities. It tried to hard to be "IMPORTANT" by linking baseball to the wider life of the nation. It ended up simply being detached and clinical.

Only my opinion.

Eh, I never really considered watching it beyond the Civil War series. Watching them for the first time the nature of the subject matter suited, or covered up, or wasn't negatively impacted by what retrospectively appeared to be Burns' various defects, most of which you mentioned, Mark. The fact that the 19th century was mawkish and fusty and earnest makes a mawkish and fusty and earnest civil war documentary series kind of awesome. The stills, pans and maps stuff works, as did the forlorn music. Transposing all of that style to other topics flopped. And the whole source narration stuff features an amazing cast reading the highlights of gorgeous, leap-off-the-page source material. Burns deserves credit for not fucking that up, but he's also working with gold.

EDIT: Not even just obvious stuff like Morgan Freeman or Sam Waterston, either. Arthur Miller and Jason Robards as Sherman and Grant? George Plimpton didn't have to affect a Locust Valley Lockjaw for George Templeton Strong because that's how he talks.

Likewise, if you are a jazz fan, please do yourself a favor and avoid Jazz like raw sewage.

Actually, it's not all *that* terrible as a biopic of early-swing era jazz. However, if your primary interest is the growth of small-group improvisational jazz, or god forbid, more modern strains of jazz, you are going to be sorely disappointed.

Wow... his stuff was clinical? That goes against the grain of all the other documentaries I've seen by him. Weird. When I dislike his stuff, it's usually because I'm gagging on the emotions. Well, that, or screaming at the screen "THAT WASN'T THE BIGGEST BATTLE EVER, DIPSHIT! THERE IS A PLACE CALLED EUROPE, YOU KNOW!"

I wasn't that thrilled with the Civil War series, but I think he deserves more credit than you're giving him. A large part of a documentarian's job is *finding* all that golden material in the first place. And he did find it, and he selected interesting bits out of it. Plus he managed to get a great cast together, which is also to his credit. Those aren't mean feats.

I really like your comment about how his mawkish, fusty style suited the mawkish fusty era. I hadn't thought of it like that, but you're right.

Yeah. I was prepared to and wanted be immersed in mawkish, over-sentimental, operatic poetry of baseball. So I was pretty much "WTF?"

Agree with Jestintime - "Jazz" is the only Burns documentary I've watched in its entirety, and it's filled with what Mark M notes as Burns cliches. It's overly emotional, it approaches its topic with a thesis that it forces the topic to fit into, it spends a long time stating the obvious in solemn narration; it's mawkish, narrow, uninterested in much of the music beyond 1960, and it's unnecessarily sanitized. Worse, it doesn't let the music speak for itself - I remember watching it and wondering if we'd ever hear any tunes that weren't either excerpted clips or ruined by monotonous voiceover.

His creative consultants were Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch, which is part of the problem. Marsalis is often seen as a kind of museum director for jazz music; he has narrow ideas of what jazz is (actually was), and his and Crouch's focus on early-era swing-centric jazz informs the whole movie. While nobody in their right minds would diminish the contributions of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Miles Davis, the documentary omits so many other important voices - especially those after Kind of Blue - that it presents a slanted, almost morbid tribute to the music; an epitaph for the form which, to Burns, Marsalis, and Crouch, effectively died a slow death after that seminal Miles record. (And even when recognizing the importance of Kind of Blue, Burns doesn't even mention Bill Evans, who co-wrote several tunes on the album and helped Miles develop the modal approach.)

And of course, the evolution of jazz post-1960 is more or less swept under the rug. If you're someone like Cecil Taylor - an important contributor to the avant garde strain of the music - you're shit out of luck, because in Burns' view, that's not 'real' jazz. All jazz music from the latter forty years prior to the film is covered in a single episode; Burns & Co simply don't regard it as significant enough to merit anything more.

Are there good things about Ken Burns' Jazz? Sure. For an American public that's largely ignorant of the music, it's a nice introduction and presents a decent (though biased) history of swing-era jazz. As Jestintime said, as long as you don't take it as some kind of comprehensive, encyclopediac, objective chronicle of the history and development of the music, it's not all bad.

Well, I actually loved it, and wound up taking a course / reading a bunch of other books in consequence to it being such a strong and striking introduction to the subject. I'm just being a critic.

Well, "finding." The creator of a documentary (or even a generalist synthetic history) generally isn't "finding" these things so much as "collating" them. He did a good job collating them. The arrangement of the cast, production values and all the rest is even more directly to his credit as a documentary filmmaker (as opposed to filmmaker/historian.

It may even have "created" Burns style to some extent; immersing one's self in historical writing or primary sources of past eras often does funny things to one's writing style - leaving aside the fact that the Civil War made Burns' career.

Am I the only one who liked his prohibition documentary? It's almost all I've seen of Ken Burn's work, and after I finished I got really excited and spent an hour figuring out how to make a Ken Burns effect in PowerPoint.

I haven't seen it, but thanks for mentioning it. I'll check it out when I get the time.

I liked the Prohibition one, and the most recent one he did about the Dust Bowl was pretty good as well.

My rule of thumb is if I feel I learned something I didn't know before I started watching, then it's time well spent.

I just finished the last episode of The War, and I wanted to share one observation about it. This is the episode that covered the discovery of the nazi concentration camps, and Burns' mawkishness (especially his sad music) really really doesn't work for this subject matter. The Holocaust is beyond sad, it's beyond anger, it's pretty much beyond emotion. There isn't an appropriate type of music for this, he should have restrained himself and not used any music. To his small credit, he did go with minimalist music; it was just a single clarinet. But... that was still the wrong choice. When you see the images of the starving Jews, and the sheer horror contained in their eyes, the clarinet felt really grating. And when the G.I.'s recounted their experiences, their tears & their faces were enough. We didn't need the music, and that entire segment could have used less voiceover narration.

If you want to see a documentary give the Holocaust the treatment it requires, see Shoah. Watching it is an incredibly painful experience, and yet I can't recommend it enough. Claude Lanzmann created a true masterpiece, and his work more than any other helped me to absorb and come to grips with that event... at least as much as possible. Perhaps a better way of putting it is to say that Lanzmann's work helped me to understand that it's impossible to understand.

Reading that made me think - you know who Burns' emotionally saccharine style just reminded me of? Thomas Kinkade. There's a parallel there, I think.

As I went to get lunch, I chewed over this idea. Although it feels right in a certain sense, something about your comparison bothers me, and I think I figured out what it is.

Kinkade is a hack. He's a shit painter. Somebody (it might have been Veternarias) did a good job of dissecting just how crappy Kinkade really is. He really has nothing to recommend him, and liking his work is a sign that your palate isn't that refined.* Burns, on the other hand, is quite good at his craft. Yes, he's overly manipulative and often kinda schlocky. But so is Spielberg, and I think Spielberg is also good at what he does. And what's more, Burns' virtues often outweigh his vices. Despite the Holocaust segment, I really enjoyed The War. And as I mentioned earlier, his Mark Twain is probably the best documentary I've ever seen. You can't produce something that good and be a total hack.

But you're right in that there are parallels. They're both targeting middle to low brow America, and both of them produce works that are largely unchallenging. But even there, Burns is better than Kinkade. He *does* occasionally challenge when he recounts the racism inherent in the American experience. Granted "racism is bad" is hardly a revolutionary concept. But he makes sure to embed the story about racism in with everything else, so that Americans have to confront their sometimes ugly past. Yes, great uncle Jebediah might have been a wonderful Confederate soldier, and a good family man, and so on & so forth, but Burns makes sure that you realize that Jebediah was also fighting to preserve the insitution of slavery, and the evil that that entailed.

Anyways, interesting observation.

*I should add that we all have our guilty pleasures in this regard. I liked Ace of Bass for the longest time, even though they are the Thomas Kinkade of music.

The Civil War is OK. It's got its high points and in a lot of ways its responsible for the popular resurgence of Civil War history. On the other hand it also - from what I recall - buys into some of the Lost Cause mythology that's been debunked. That's not surprising since the documentary was released in 1990 (and thus filmed in the late 80s) and a lot of the rethinking of the Lost Cause occurred in the eighties. So ultimately it's not bad, but you have to be aware that it's kind of an old way of approaching the subject.

Yeah, I had to cut that post short and don't intend to compare their relative strengths at their crafts - I only meant a parallel in the sense that both Kinkade and Burns seem to feel the need to project an egregious amount of emotional indicators into their work. Like Kinkade needs to oversaturate a landscape with an unnatural degree of color and make his compostions as overwrought and precious as possible, so Burns cutes it up with sappy music, excessive narration or other nonsense - when the subject at hand could speak more poignantly on its own behalf if they'd just get out of the way.

So if Ken Burns is Kinkade, what's the painting equivalent of the History Channel's Ancient Aliens documentaries?

That would be the MAD Magazine pictures that fold in half to show a "hidden" image.

I know it was probably just meant humorously, but I think it'd be unfair to even Burns' lesser docs to say he was anything like Thomas Kinkade. Doing some justice to history on TV is a tall order and I really learned (and was inspired to learn a lot more) by having seen and loved the Civil War series. And the others were better than the usual garbage run on history channels, as evidenced by Mr. Tsoukalos there.

True, but I think Super Jay made it clear that Burns is quite a bit better than Kinkade. He was referring to certain stylistic parallels, and now that he's pointed it out, I see exactly what he's talking about. Maybe comparing someone to Kinkade is like comparing someone to Hitler; even when the comparison is appropriate to the traits being discussed, it's still considered an unfair comparison because, dude, it's Hitler.

So basically what I'm saying is that Kinkade is like Hitler.

What a strange thing to say. I'm always interested when a filmmaker imprints their artistic vision of a reality so deeply that it appears to be our historical sense of it (ie Full Metal Jacket and the Marine Corps), but this seems like a really peculiar statement.

Obviously it's bit of a broad brush when you paint an entire century as having a couple traits. (All 100 years? Everywhere? Really?) But I see what he's talking about. Well... not so much the "fusty" part, but mawkish? Earnest? Yeah. In England it was the Victorian age, and they took mawkish to new heights. And from what I've read from that era, some of it bled into American culture. And I can see earnest as well. Of course, most periods in history were earnest compared to the current sarcastic, ironic, and "meta" culture we have going on now. But the fact that the 19th century was so close to ours kinda highlights their earnestness for me.

Of course, I find the 1960s (hippes & civil rights movement and everything else) also hopelessly optimistic & earnest, so YMMV.

It just seems like a strange gap in self-awareness when it describes Burns so well and "the 19th century" or Civil War America so imperfectly, if indeed broad adjectives are a good way to do this kind of thing at all. Made my knee jerk on account of the eternal struggle with ease of organizing historical ideas in a classroom and the talking points that populate the descriptions of periods. The Roaring Twenties and all that bullshit.

As to the topic of the thread, I don't know. I find Burns deadly dull, so it's hard for me to judge beyond that cardinal sin and make a balanced statement since you must endure in order to assess.

I'll grant that "fusty" is anachronistic and misplaced even by the stereotyped AJP Taylor-summarizes-a-country's-personality standards of characterization I was using. But as Mark said, in as far as one can talk about "Victorian England" "being mawkish and earnest," the same sort of thing could be said Civil War America (by which I mean the various prominent-in-the-literature parts of pop culture and the tone of diarists that tend to flesh out our "feel" of the era.)

If all such sweeping generalizations - roaring 20s, militaristic Prussians, what have you - are inadmissibly pernicious habits of mind then "the conjunction of the pernicious habit of seeing 1863 America as mawkish and a mawkish documentary about 1863 avoids cognitive dissonance."

I imagine that my appreciation of "Civil War" in 199x was helped by my monumental ignorance of the war beyond 2-3 key battles and dates. Although honestly it was still something I watched the odd episode of on the history channel subsequently even having read better history. Some good narrator runs you through the Vicksburg campaign. Another reads some Lincoln. Pretty map, pretty photographs, violin music.

And not a single mention of my favorite Ken Burns documentary.

(This is an almost verbatim post from Qt3, so if it feels familiar and stupid, you know why...;))

Let me unconditionally recommend the Ken Burns documentary for people who both hate and love Ken Burns documentaries. This is one of his smaller works, and very likely you missed it on PBS or while shopping DVD's. Now's your chance, as it's streaming on Netflix.

The documentary is called "Horatio's Drive". The cynical and jaded amongst you needn't apply, but for everyone else...well, if you want to sit with a smile plastered to your face ear-to-ear for two hours, this is the documentary for you.

It helps that this is an incredible story (why this hasn't been made into a movie yet, I have no idea.) The subject matter is almost too ridiculous to be real. Check it: Horatio Nelson Jackson is a 31-year-old retired doctor (he gave up his practice after suffering a mild bout of tuberculosis) from a well-to-do family in Vermont. He and his wife are far from their home state though, visiting in San Francisco in 1903 when over dinner, Dr. Jackson hears some gentlemen at a nearby table declaiming the new invention of the automobile as a passing fad, saying that the horse will remain the tried-and-true method for long-distance travel in the future.

Dr. Jackson interrupts their conversation; he's kind of a crazy, optimistic forward-looking guy, very much in the mold of the then-current president, Teddy Roosevelt. He ends up making a $50 wager with those gentlemen, betting that he can drive a car from San Francisco to New York in 90 days. Sound tough? You don't know the half of it. A cross-country drive had been attempted numerous times, but never yet succeeded in traveling more than a few hundred miles. America had perhaps 150 miles of paved road in 1903, and almost all of it was in the northeastern quadrant of the country. The horseless carriage was very much a novelty item for the rich. What roads there were tended to be of the dirt variety, and once one left populated towns, those roads turned into overgrown wagon ruts that could maybe be called cow paths if one was generous.

Add to that that Jackson really didn't know much about cars; in fact he didn't even own one. He knew even less about fixing one. This was a recipe for failure. Undeterred, two days after his wager was accepted, he marched up the road and bought a second-hand 20-hp Winton Touring Car, and hired a young bicycle mechanic named Sewall Crocker to travel with him. 3 days after making his bet, sets off on his transcontinental odyssey, with spare parts, tools, and provisions strapped to the rickety vehicle. The duo didn't even think to buy a map. (Before the car could leave the state of California, all of those spare parts, tools, and provisions had been jostled off and were irretrievably lost, too.)

It ends up being an amazing story, a quintessentially American story, and one which Ken Burns and writer Dayton Duncan clearly are retelling with undisguised glee. For one thing, as a protagonist, Horatio Nelson Jackson is so irrepressibly likable that you almost feel sad for having never met the guy in person. Tom Hanks handles the voice-overs for Nelson in this documentary, and he's the perfect everyman choice. There's also just something brilliant about the mad, crazy genius of making a $50 bet, and then buying a $3,000 car to win it. Nearly two weeks into their journey, having already realized what long, long odds the two are up against, they take the obvious step to help their cause: Jackson plunks down fifteen bucks to buy a bulldog to ride along with them. How great is that? "What we really need here is a dog to ride along with us." How great is it, too, that the dog, Bud, becomes as much a celebrity as the two humans driving the car across the country? How can you see a picture of Bud wearing his goggles and not get a feeling for the droll, subtle humor of this entire documentary?



The story of Horatio's Drive also takes on a "little man against the establishment" tone as well. Unbeknownst to Jackson at the time of his bet, the deep-pocketed Packard Motor Company was planning their own attempt to drive across the country from San Francisco. The Packard folks had hired a professional driver/mechanic and also arranged for Packard engineers and teams of mechanics to ride along, pony express style, in separate cars as well as take trains to various stops along the way across the continent, where plenty of spare parts and tools would be available to keep their car running in tip-top condition. Packard weren't even the only ones doing this. Oldsmobile had their own transcontinental drive ready to go from San Francisco as well, with the same sort of precautions and repair chain set up. Dr. Jackson, Crocker, and Bud had none of those accommodations, and at various times found themselves waiting for nearly a week at a time in some forlorn frontier railroad town outpost, hoping that spare tires or engine crankshafts would be arriving from a distant factory by train. "Horatio's Drive" becomes a thrilling race across the country before too long.

Who wins? Come on now, that's the best part of the story! I will mention that when Jackson arrives in Omaha, he's surprised to find a huge posse from the Winton Motor Company. They've finally gotten wind of the race across the country, with Jackson in one of their cars competing against drivers in a Packard and Olds respectively. The Winton folks offer for the remainder of the trip the same sponsorship/engineering/mechanical accommodations the other two teams have enjoyed. Dr. Jackson's answer to the offer actually made me do the fist-pump and a "Yeah!!" before I realized it.

"Horatio's Drive" may lack the depth and historical significance of many of Burns's documentaries, but of all that I've seen, this one may be the most fun.

I lost any respect I had for Ken Burns after Jazz. As soon as I figured out that it would be a Wynton Marsalis-fest of shitting on anything that resembles post-bop (and pretending that fusion wasn't vital to the jazz narrative), it only served to remind me that jazz is dead because of people like Wynton Marsalis.

I would like to see Horatio's Drive, though. It sounds just quirky enough to get my attention.

I'm also a fan of the Lewis & Clark documentary, although there's a particularly curious decision made in something significant left out of it--namely the return trip home. Yes, it was a faster trip made easier because they were traveling with the current instead of against it on the Missouri, but still...they barely mention the return trip. They certainly completely ignore Meriwether Lewis getting four new holes in his ass courtesy of a hunting expedition with Pierre Cruzot, a member of the expedition who was losing his sight. Apparently Cruzot mistook Lewis for an elk and shot him in the ass.

Still, the Lewis & Clark documentary is terrific, and I think it's because Burns has the good sense to get out of the way--something he does in the Mark Twain documentary as well. In the Lewis & Clark doc, he mostly turns things over to the late Stephen Ambrose and to frequent collaborator Dayton Duncan. Burns gets one of the most memorable moments in any of his documentaries towards the end of this one when Duncan--who is clearly quite fond of the tormented Lewis--details the explorer's final night. It is a lovely bit of documentary film-making.

Not really the right place for it, but how often do these things come up? There's a kickstarter for Meriwether Lewis action/rpg/I don't know that seems promising in that mixed way that these things often do. I just thought I'd throw that out there, but obviously don't let me interrupt the Burnsing.