Ken Burns’s Best Work Ever
His documentary of America’s national parks far surpasses Burns’s earlier, famous film work.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 08/25/2009
Ken Burns is more than a chronicler of American history and culture.
As early as 1981, when Burns presented his film on the history of the Brooklyn Bridge, he began developing a reputation as a significant figure in the world of documentaries. He followed up with features on Huey Long (1985), the Statue of Liberty (1985) and Congress (1988).
But when his five-part, 11-hour series on the Civil War was broadcast, like most of his works, on PBS, in September 1990, Burns became a brand, the name above the title, and the man whose works would provide a high-water mark for any similarly serious study. You’ll see the “Ken Burns Effect” in a variety of media applications, where still pictures can be panned or processed for maximum dramatic effect in video presentations. Unfortunately, home documentarians still have to provide their own soundtracks and narration.
Burns followed The Civil War with, among other efforts, the nine-part Baseball (1994), the 19-hour long Jazz (2001) and a seven-part series covering World War II, The War, broadcast in 2007.
From September 27 through October 2, audiences will see Burns’s The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a six-part documentary on PBS. The places he visits within the episodes of this series are so spectacular, they ought to be seen on an IMAX screen. Better yet, as far as Burns is concerned, they should inspire audiences to actually visit the national parks in person.
I met Burns on a blustery summer afternoon at the Tempe Center for the Arts in Arizona, where he was setting up an evening presentation of a portion of his National Parks series. Burns, who I had spoken to some years before, on the telephone, was, in person, fixed, focused and incredibly smart. He was determined to make certain that the show proceeded with the kind of clockwork precision that most identifies his film work.
But he was also clearly ideologically determined to express, in this work as in his others, a lesson to his audience about values as seen through the prism of history. The national parks represented something even more fundamental in theme, something more personal, than his earlier visits to sports, war and music.
It may be safe to say that The National Parks is Burns’s best work.
Ken Burns: Much of our presentation tonight centers on the Grand Canyon, which is, according to the Hopi creation myths, where the first people came out of.
True West: A considerable climb.
As one person, who wrote about hiking down the Canyon, put in her journal, “seven miles down and 107 miles up.” I thought that was a pretty accurate description.
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