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As a documentary filmmaker myself... (long)

Posted by EBerlin (A) on January 22, 2005 at 17:43:00

In Reply to: Ken Burns documentary opinions please; the best and worst posted by grinagog on January 22, 2005 at 06:31:49:

...I have strong opinions about Ken Burns, none of them favorable.

First: a creative filmmaker will generally apply an approach to his or her subject matter that evolves from the collision of subject and skill: what can I do that creatively harmonizes with my subject and that my skills and my collaborators can pull off.

However, let's look at several of Burns' best known pieces, The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz. You have three subjects that are utterly different from each other but which are handled in virtually identical ways. So, he imposes an imaginatively limited style on all these subjects, and even in that basic sense performs an act of homogenization.

Second: the matter of control. A documentary film is normally an attempt to capture a reality that exists outside the mind and body of the filmmaker. I submit that one's approach should generally allow for the unexpected, and for the voices of others to have a kind of pride of place over the "voice" of the filmmaker. Yet Burns is a preternaturally controlling filmmaker. Just consider the fact that to represent the kaleidoscopic realities of Jazz, he made one very conservative and opinionated jazz musician the primary reference point for the film's ideas. And it was someone that he either began by agreeing with, or ended up agreeing with. A spectacularly greater and more illuminating range of perspectives on jazz would not have been hard to achieve, but it just ain't there. And, the last 40 years of jazz, arguably the most diverse, was barely touched on. Burns' explanations as to why may be the biggest creative copout I've ever heard. So, Burns carefully hones every word while making sure it cleaves to his own monolithic view, and in the end "Jazz" says a lot about what Ken Burns came to believe about Jazz, and much less what artists and other, more deeply committed students of the art believe about it. In the end he's just taken the contents of a very heavy & thick coffee-table book and put it up on your TV screen. There's little about what he does that's inherently "cinematic," whether that term is imagined in narrative or documentary terms.

Of course there are examples of very creative, very personal filmmaking (McElwee's "Sherman's March" for example) that are all about what the filmmaker thinks. But I don't think the Civil War, the history of baseball, and the first century of jazz qualify as the subjects of "personal" filmmaking!

Third, I've always resented the notion that Burns somehow came to define for many viewers, simply on the basis of the amount of attention he got/gets, that HIS approach is somehow normative for documantary creation. In fact the opposite is true. Historical filmmaking is not the most natural fit for a documentary in a basic sense. I mean think about it: isn't the most natural fit for a documentary something that's happening now and is documented as it unfolds? That sort of documentary is likely to be a bit scruffy, certainly not as controllable in its creation as Burns' films.

This is not to say that historical non-fiction films shouldn't be made, but I do think there's something wrong when such a fundamentally motion-less style of work becomes normative for something that's a subset of motion pictures.

I can probably admit that most documentarians NOT named Ken Burns feel a bit of sour grapes, because he's in a place where up to now he can apparently get funding for just about anything he wants to do. Meanwhile most of the rest of us stand in the wilderness with the recurring, sisyphean task of conceiving, proposing, and funding our own films without even a probability of success, much less a guarantee. But I can't recall a single documentarian I've spoken to who admires Burns for what he does.
Elliot Berlin

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