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https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-s-So-Bad-About-Ken/241364
What’s So Bad About Ken Burns?
By Jonathan Zimmerman OCTOBER 03, 2017
Frederick M. Brown, Getty Images
Ken Burns speaks at the Summer 2017 Television Critics Association Press
Tour, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Historians aren’t very happy with Ken Burns. He’s a simplifier; we
complicate. He makes myths; we bust them. And he celebrates the nation,
while we critique it.
That’s the party line, anyway, among my fellow academics. And while I
agree with some of their attacks on the recently concluded TV series
about the Vietnam War that Burns co-created and co-edited with Lynn
Novick, there’s something else at work here.
It’s called sour grapes. Put simply, Burns has managed to engage a huge
public audience. And that makes him suspect among members of our guild,
who write almost entirely for each other.
We pretend we don’t envy his fame and fortune, but of course we do.
We’re like high-school kids who don’t get asked to the prom, then say
they never wanted to go in the first place.
That’s the only way to understand the dismissive, vituperative tone of
our profession’s reaction to Burns’s and Novick's series. Several
scholars praised Burns for including multiple voices — especially
Vietnamese ones — in his interviews. But most historians in the
blogosphere took him to task for distorting the conflict, especially
with regard to his quest for a shared national narrative that can bind
Americans together.
We pretend we don't envy his fame and fortune, but of course we do.
That’s been Burns’s key theme since his blockbuster 1990 series on the
Civil War. And yes, it can lead him astray. As many historians observed,
his Civil War series seriously underplayed the ways that the postwar
"reconciliation" reinforced white supremacy.
It also portrayed the nation’s most cataclysmic war as a kind of tragic
mistake, which wiser minds could have avoided. And we see the same flaw
in his portrayal of the Vietnam War, "begun in good faith, by decent
people, out of fateful misunderstandings," the narrator declares.
ADVERTISEMENT
That probably wouldn’t pass muster around a university seminar table,
given what we know about the lies that led up to the war. So what?
Surely, these documentaries have engaged millions of Americans in
dialogues about their past. And isn’t that what history is supposed to do?
A century ago, when the modern historical profession was born, its
leading lights assumed that informing the broad public was central to
their job. Charles Beard, Carl Becker, and James Harvey Robinson all
wrote monographs and textbooks that sold hundreds of thousands of
copies. "Research will be of little import except in so far as it is
translated into common knowledge," Becker told the American Historical
Association in his 1931 presidential address. "The history that lies
inert in unread books does no work in the world."
After World War II, academic historians wrote popular books that
punctured America’s Cold War facade of righteousness and invincibility.
In The American Political Tradition, which sold a million copies,
Richard Hofstadter argued that the Founding Fathers feared democracy,
that Abraham Lincoln was a crude opportunist, and that Theodore
Roosevelt coddled big business.
The civil-rights and feminist movements brought women and scholars of
color into the historical profession, which started to examine
previously neglected topics like slavery, immigration, and family life.
This "people’s history" provided us with much more layered,
sophisticated portraits of the past than earlier interpretations, which
had focused mainly upon white men.
But what if you gave a people’s history party, and nobody came? Although
they added immeasurably to our understanding of America, the new
accounts lacked the strong narrative arc that would attract popular
audiences. For the most part, then, people’s histories were read by
small handfuls of specialists rather than by everyday people.
That ceded the popular turf to amateurs like David McCullough and Doris
Kearns Goodwin, who continue to sell millions of books. And it opened up
a space for Ken Burns, of course, whose documentaries tell compelling
stories about the making and meaning of America.
It’s almost too easy to take potshots at this romantic, highly stylized
version of the national past. It’s much harder to substitute a better
one, especially when you have been trained to write for a tiny group of
fellow experts.
RELATED CONTENT
The Ken Burns Effect
How Historians Lost Their Public PREMIUM
Who Needs Historians?
The Education of Ta-Nehisi Coates
"I believe you have failed and lost touch absolutely in the
communication of history to the public and that it has fallen to the
amateur historians, if you will, to try to rescue that history," Ken
Burns told the Journal of American History — the flagship publication in
our field — in 1994. "I would hope that the academy could change course
and join a swelling chorus of interest in history for everyone."
That never happened. To be sure, a small number of academic historians —
think Eric Foner, or Jill Lepore — have published books that attract
wide readerships. And many others have entered the public sphere via
blogs and social media, as the reaction to the Vietnam series illustrates.
At almost every institution, however, historians are still evaluated and
promoted based on their peer-reviewed scholarship rather than by their
public engagement. If anything, writing for lay audiences counts against
them. When I was a junior professor, a senior colleague advised me to
stop publishing op-ed columns. They marked me as a glib and unserious
scholar, she said, or even — gasp! — as a journalist.
Until our academic reward system changes, Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and
their fellow popularizers will dominate the history that Americans
actually consume. That makes historians jealous, and — even worse — it
makes us irrelevant. Our research won’t matter until it becomes common
knowledge. And the history that lies inert in unread books does no work
in the world.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is the author, with Emily Robertson, of The Case for
Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools
(University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Correction (10/4/2017, 2:10 p.m.): An earlier version of this essay
failed to include Lynn Novick’s role as a co-creator and co-editor of
The Vietnam War. That has been corrected.
version of this article appeared in the October 13, 2017 issue.
Questions or concerns about this article? Email us or submit a letter to
the editor. The Chronicle welcomes constructive discussion, and our
moderators highlight contributions that are thoughtful and relevant. Add
your comments below; we'll review them shortly. Read our commenting policy.
Comments include
sunnsea • 2 years ago
Yes let's leave it to the right wing blogosphere to determine what the
people believe as their history. No public engagement for scholars. Then
you want to know why there is Trump, why your grant monies are drying
up, why anti-intellectualism is abroad in the land and why public
institutions of higher learning seem to be on their last gasp.
18
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This comment was deleted.
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carbon Guest • 2 years ago • edited
Then beat him at his own game. Seriously.
(P.S. In my half-century, I've *never* seen a person with Burns'
Trying-Too-Hard-To-Show-I-Don't-Care-About-My-Hair. I reckon that's an
easy win for you, even for the Legendary Hair of the Tower Ivory.)
1
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PeterTx52 sunnsea • 2 years ago
ah yes the right wing blogosphere boogieman.
6
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Avatar
droslovinia • 2 years ago
Good points. Thanks for making them. I've always thought that the only
thing worse than bringing an obvious prejudice to the study of History
is the failure to admit that everyone does it. If someone does what I
might consider to be an otherwise "incomplete job" in their treatment of
an issue, yet gets people's attention in doing so, they open the door
for me - or someone on the other side - to "correct" the narrative
through participating in the conversation. I don't expect people to
share my Marxist interpretation of the War Between the States, but at
least Burns did something to get us talking about it. Let's hope that
the conversations around Vietnam that may be brought about by this
production also prove to be fruitful.
14
•Share ›
Avatar
wendywyrm • 2 years ago
As a non-historian professor, I appreciated the series and I think
you've made some brave and valid points here. I knew so little about the
conflict and the time period; Burns' series educated me. What was gained
in knowledge surely outweighs any concerns about interpretation that
academics would quibble over.
7
•Share ›
Avatar
goodsensecynic wendywyrm • 2 years ago
It's not "knowledge" when it's wrong.
Academics must "quibble" about "interpretation." It's what they're paid
to do. When they do it well (and when people listen and understand), it
makes "knowledge" better.
lizard goodsensecynic • 2 years ago
I find your phrasing quite telling. Knowledge is built through
reciprocal engagement among observations, scholars, and learners. It is
not just the responsibility of the people (who pay for the scholarship
in the first place) to "listen and understand" to scholars but also of
scholars to reach out, inspire interest, and unpack nuances for the
people. Moreover, we academics are perfectly aware that one must build,
develop, constantly check, and modify real, nuanced knowledge-
especially of history. It is this awareness that leads us to require
Ph.D.s of college professors and introductory level course work of
incoming students. In one sense, Burns' approach is absolutely the same
as our introductory courses that gloss messy, complicated dynamics in
sets of 50 page chapters and lists of vocabulary words to be memorized
for a test. It is not until we cultivate that base knowledge and a
degree of attention that we take our students further into the thick of
it. If the public does not have the interest or skill set to critically
evaluate Burns' perspective in the same way they should be critically
evaluating your favored text book or peer reviewed articles, the fault
lies with academics and an academy more interested in navel gazing than
teaching knowledge and cultivating learning skills- which is what we are
actually paid to do.
Avatar
wendywyrm • 2 years ago
As a non-historian professor, I appreciated the series and I think
you've made some brave and valid points here. I knew so little about the
conflict and the time period; Burns' series educated me. What was gained
in knowledge surely outweighs any concerns about interpretation that
academics would quibble over.
7
•Share ›
Avatar
goodsensecynic wendywyrm • 2 years ago
It's not "knowledge" when it's wrong.
Academics must "quibble" about "interpretation." It's what they're paid
to do. When they do it well (and when people listen and understand), it
makes "knowledge" better.
Avatar
Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
"[S]our grapes.... That’s the only way to understand the dismissive,
vituperative tone of our profession’s reaction to Burns’s series.
Several scholars praised Burns for including multiple voices —
especially Vietnamese ones — in his interviews"
Yeah... actually his Jazz miniseries is almost universally excoriated by
jazz musicians, writers, and historians for having essentially handed
Wynton Marsalis nigh-complete control of the narrative. Wynton has,
shall we say, limited and retrograde views on what jazz is and is not.
Latin jazz (and its enormous contributions to US jazz), fusion/electric
jazz, free jazz, and virtually all jazz created since 2000 and/or
created in Eurasia or Africa were summarily ignored. It would be akin to
his Vietnam series excluding everything north of the DMZ and ending in 1970.
4
•Share ›
−
Avatar
Mike Strong Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago • edited
Burns re-packages popular and canonical tropes. He certainly does little
critical analysis. To use an example from the jazz series he repeats the
trope of Charlie Parker supposedly "uttering" the phrase "when I came
alive" (or something close, I didn't look it up) as he was working on
playing the 1939 hit "Cherokee." That is 1) a rewriting of a late 1949
Downbeat article by two reporters. In that article they clearly (you can
look this up, I did, a couple of years ago) state this as a matter of
description, by them, about Parker. 2) this also makes the general
assumption that Parker was inventing bebop and inventing in the
abstract, these musical constructions.
Even minimal analysis, if you have to go that far - just thinking about
starting out should show that he was like any other young musician
beginning a career then or now. He was working on two things: 1)
learning a repertoire of songs expected of any band member for requests
and playlists to get a job and 2) working on how to play to "get over
on" the audience.
And, no one ever "uttered" such a phrase.
Younger brother Ric Burns did a piece on American Ballet Theater in
which he totally butchered Agnes de Mille's old footage by cropping the
legs off dancers in cropping to a wide-frame look (from a 4:3 ratio) and
by non-dance/musical edits. de Mille was extremely sensitive how
cinematographers filmed her work and she took great care to train and
keep the one wh
The other part is the way in which documentary grants have changed, in
considerable part because of the Burns brothers. The entire landscape
has moved from reportage to a slick, marketable, grant-pulling product.
This is very important because that turns reportage into a corporate
product. That is where the lies and the cheap shots come in. And he took
some very large cheap shots.
From the spitting meme to Jane Fonda. I would have been spit on a lot,
as would my fellow company members as we were constantly on TDY - travel
- working in civilian territory across the world and in the US. We would
have known and would have told each other. We got nothing but respect or
deference, even welcome anywhere we went. Not even so much as a cross
look for me. I almost punched out the screen at episode #109.
Fonda's treatment was nothing short of character assassination.
Protestors, including Fonda were working for and with troops and largely
saw troops as victims of the country's leaders (the "baby killer" meme
was toward those in charge, not the grunts, as in "Hey, Hey,LBJ, How
many KIDS did you kill today" with kids meaning troops as well), as in
her FTA (Free the Army) tour (a double pun, on F... the Army - uttered
by troops, and on the Army's recruitment slogan then of Fun, Travel and
Adventure). When Fonda returned from North Vietnam she realized, and
apologized for, the propaganda value of her off-the-cuff remarks.
However, there are plenty of people who refuse to let it go and in the
process let off the hook the people who "cut the orders" as we used to
say. Burns had certain talking heads who were clearly pushing that line.
The GI Anti-war movement was barely recognized and should have been
given a full examination.
Hitch goodsensecynic • 2 years ago
Being a "populizer" is not the equivalent of a hard won academic credential.
mindfullwhim
----While the film's script does contain some editorializing, I cannot
imagine screening the countless hours and hours of film and video
footage they must have combed through, attempting to choose what
information to reveal to the audience, and in what order.
I am also a veteran and the film is respectful to their experiences
also, a point of view that most academics tend to overlook while they
search for the political smoking guns in the Pentagon papers. Remember,
many of those students who were protesting at the time most likely did
not carry an M16 in Vietnam, but instead became...wait for it... academics.
All in all, the film places a great deal of faith in America's
perception of it's own optimism and fair play, which is really what
seemed at stake in the 60s and 70s, and was in a sense, what the war was
all about.
−
Avatar
average_joe • 2 years ago • edited
The trouble with this documentary is that he is dealing with a modern
event when he narrates his perspective on the Vietnam War.
Many of us can relate to events during the Vietnam War; we lived through
those years. My story and my recollection profoundly differ from what
Ken Burns is depicting. Burns appears to have a distinctly biased view
of how the general population thought of the war at that time. He is
portraying a revisionist interpretation of the War.
No; the protests were confined only to “some” college campuses, not all.
And, there was no other news source then- no Internet or social media.
The media covered the protests generously. The evening news started and
ended with maliciously edited excerpts against the War. While the media
had a decisive role in destroying the Johnson and Nixon administrations,
the public at large favored actions taken by the government. And, so did
the college kids. I was one of those!
Ken Burns wants the viewers to believe a different reality. He ignores
the atrocities of USSR and Red China at that time or their corrosive
influence in North Vietnam. The American public was genuinely concerned
about the red scare during those decades and tolerated the war at least
for that reason.
When Burns produced the documentary on Civil War, there was little
challenge since there were no living eyewitnesses who could narrate a
different story. Perhaps it is safer for him to do a story on the
Revolutionary War. Don’t try to do a story on the war in Afghanistan or
Iraq as actions of a failed Republican administration. Too many people
remember the 911 tragedy.
46020 • 2 years ago • edited
Plus there is the timely value of Burns reminding us all of the insanity
of the Vietnam War as we continue living with our Middle East
entanglements. This war has always existed for our current undergraduate
students--America's perpetual war for perpetual peace has devolved into
perpetual war as a normal state of being.
Bob
How about Johnson ignoring his advisors' estimate that the US had less
than a 1 in 3 chance of winning the war. That was 1965 or so. Nixon may
never have been president had Johnson heeded the advice that was given him.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-s-So-Bad-About-Ken/241364
What’s So Bad About Ken Burns?
By Jonathan Zimmerman OCTOBER 03, 2017
Frederick M. Brown, Getty Images
Ken Burns speaks at the Summer 2017 Television Critics Association Press
Tour, in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Historians aren’t very happy with Ken Burns. He’s a simplifier; we
complicate. He makes myths; we bust them. And he celebrates the nation,
while we critique it.
That’s the party line, anyway, among my fellow academics. And while I
agree with some of their attacks on the recently concluded TV series
about the Vietnam War that Burns co-created and co-edited with Lynn
Novick, there’s something else at work here.
It’s called sour grapes. Put simply, Burns has managed to engage a huge
public audience. And that makes him suspect among members of our guild,
who write almost entirely for each other.
We pretend we don’t envy his fame and fortune, but of course we do.
We’re like high-school kids who don’t get asked to the prom, then say
they never wanted to go in the first place.
That’s the only way to understand the dismissive, vituperative tone of
our profession’s reaction to Burns’s and Novick's series. Several
scholars praised Burns for including multiple voices — especially
Vietnamese ones — in his interviews. But most historians in the
blogosphere took him to task for distorting the conflict, especially
with regard to his quest for a shared national narrative that can bind
Americans together.
We pretend we don't envy his fame and fortune, but of course we do.
That’s been Burns’s key theme since his blockbuster 1990 series on the
Civil War. And yes, it can lead him astray. As many historians observed,
his Civil War series seriously underplayed the ways that the postwar
"reconciliation" reinforced white supremacy.
It also portrayed the nation’s most cataclysmic war as a kind of tragic
mistake, which wiser minds could have avoided. And we see the same flaw
in his portrayal of the Vietnam War, "begun in good faith, by decent
people, out of fateful misunderstandings," the narrator declares.
ADVERTISEMENT
That probably wouldn’t pass muster around a university seminar table,
given what we know about the lies that led up to the war. So what?
Surely, these documentaries have engaged millions of Americans in
dialogues about their past. And isn’t that what history is supposed to do?
A century ago, when the modern historical profession was born, its
leading lights assumed that informing the broad public was central to
their job. Charles Beard, Carl Becker, and James Harvey Robinson all
wrote monographs and textbooks that sold hundreds of thousands of
copies. "Research will be of little import except in so far as it is
translated into common knowledge," Becker told the American Historical
Association in his 1931 presidential address. "The history that lies
inert in unread books does no work in the world."
After World War II, academic historians wrote popular books that
punctured America’s Cold War facade of righteousness and invincibility.
In The American Political Tradition, which sold a million copies,
Richard Hofstadter argued that the Founding Fathers feared democracy,
that Abraham Lincoln was a crude opportunist, and that Theodore
Roosevelt coddled big business.
The civil-rights and feminist movements brought women and scholars of
color into the historical profession, which started to examine
previously neglected topics like slavery, immigration, and family life.
This "people’s history" provided us with much more layered,
sophisticated portraits of the past than earlier interpretations, which
had focused mainly upon white men.
But what if you gave a people’s history party, and nobody came? Although
they added immeasurably to our understanding of America, the new
accounts lacked the strong narrative arc that would attract popular
audiences. For the most part, then, people’s histories were read by
small handfuls of specialists rather than by everyday people.
That ceded the popular turf to amateurs like David McCullough and Doris
Kearns Goodwin, who continue to sell millions of books. And it opened up
a space for Ken Burns, of course, whose documentaries tell compelling
stories about the making and meaning of America.
It’s almost too easy to take potshots at this romantic, highly stylized
version of the national past. It’s much harder to substitute a better
one, especially when you have been trained to write for a tiny group of
fellow experts.
RELATED CONTENT
The Ken Burns Effect
How Historians Lost Their Public PREMIUM
Who Needs Historians?
The Education of Ta-Nehisi Coates
"I believe you have failed and lost touch absolutely in the
communication of history to the public and that it has fallen to the
amateur historians, if you will, to try to rescue that history," Ken
Burns told the Journal of American History — the flagship publication in
our field — in 1994. "I would hope that the academy could change course
and join a swelling chorus of interest in history for everyone."
That never happened. To be sure, a small number of academic historians —
think Eric Foner, or Jill Lepore — have published books that attract
wide readerships. And many others have entered the public sphere via
blogs and social media, as the reaction to the Vietnam series illustrates.
At almost every institution, however, historians are still evaluated and
promoted based on their peer-reviewed scholarship rather than by their
public engagement. If anything, writing for lay audiences counts against
them. When I was a junior professor, a senior colleague advised me to
stop publishing op-ed columns. They marked me as a glib and unserious
scholar, she said, or even — gasp! — as a journalist.
Until our academic reward system changes, Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and
their fellow popularizers will dominate the history that Americans
actually consume. That makes historians jealous, and — even worse — it
makes us irrelevant. Our research won’t matter until it becomes common
knowledge. And the history that lies inert in unread books does no work
in the world.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is the author, with Emily Robertson, of The Case for
Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools
(University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Correction (10/4/2017, 2:10 p.m.): An earlier version of this essay
failed to include Lynn Novick’s role as a co-creator and co-editor of
The Vietnam War. That has been corrected.
version of this article appeared in the October 13, 2017 issue.
Questions or concerns about this article? Email us or submit a letter to
the editor. The Chronicle welcomes constructive discussion, and our
moderators highlight contributions that are thoughtful and relevant. Add
your comments below; we'll review them shortly. Read our commenting policy.
Comments include
sunnsea • 2 years ago
Yes let's leave it to the right wing blogosphere to determine what the
people believe as their history. No public engagement for scholars. Then
you want to know why there is Trump, why your grant monies are drying
up, why anti-intellectualism is abroad in the land and why public
institutions of higher learning seem to be on their last gasp.
18
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This comment was deleted.
Avatar
carbon Guest • 2 years ago • edited
Then beat him at his own game. Seriously.
(P.S. In my half-century, I've *never* seen a person with Burns'
Trying-Too-Hard-To-Show-I-Don't-Care-About-My-Hair. I reckon that's an
easy win for you, even for the Legendary Hair of the Tower Ivory.)
1
•Share ›
Avatar
PeterTx52 sunnsea • 2 years ago
ah yes the right wing blogosphere boogieman.
6
•Share ›
Avatar
droslovinia • 2 years ago
Good points. Thanks for making them. I've always thought that the only
thing worse than bringing an obvious prejudice to the study of History
is the failure to admit that everyone does it. If someone does what I
might consider to be an otherwise "incomplete job" in their treatment of
an issue, yet gets people's attention in doing so, they open the door
for me - or someone on the other side - to "correct" the narrative
through participating in the conversation. I don't expect people to
share my Marxist interpretation of the War Between the States, but at
least Burns did something to get us talking about it. Let's hope that
the conversations around Vietnam that may be brought about by this
production also prove to be fruitful.
14
•Share ›
Avatar
wendywyrm • 2 years ago
As a non-historian professor, I appreciated the series and I think
you've made some brave and valid points here. I knew so little about the
conflict and the time period; Burns' series educated me. What was gained
in knowledge surely outweighs any concerns about interpretation that
academics would quibble over.
7
•Share ›
Avatar
goodsensecynic wendywyrm • 2 years ago
It's not "knowledge" when it's wrong.
Academics must "quibble" about "interpretation." It's what they're paid
to do. When they do it well (and when people listen and understand), it
makes "knowledge" better.
lizard goodsensecynic • 2 years ago
I find your phrasing quite telling. Knowledge is built through
reciprocal engagement among observations, scholars, and learners. It is
not just the responsibility of the people (who pay for the scholarship
in the first place) to "listen and understand" to scholars but also of
scholars to reach out, inspire interest, and unpack nuances for the
people. Moreover, we academics are perfectly aware that one must build,
develop, constantly check, and modify real, nuanced knowledge-
especially of history. It is this awareness that leads us to require
Ph.D.s of college professors and introductory level course work of
incoming students. In one sense, Burns' approach is absolutely the same
as our introductory courses that gloss messy, complicated dynamics in
sets of 50 page chapters and lists of vocabulary words to be memorized
for a test. It is not until we cultivate that base knowledge and a
degree of attention that we take our students further into the thick of
it. If the public does not have the interest or skill set to critically
evaluate Burns' perspective in the same way they should be critically
evaluating your favored text book or peer reviewed articles, the fault
lies with academics and an academy more interested in navel gazing than
teaching knowledge and cultivating learning skills- which is what we are
actually paid to do.
Avatar
wendywyrm • 2 years ago
As a non-historian professor, I appreciated the series and I think
you've made some brave and valid points here. I knew so little about the
conflict and the time period; Burns' series educated me. What was gained
in knowledge surely outweighs any concerns about interpretation that
academics would quibble over.
7
•Share ›
Avatar
goodsensecynic wendywyrm • 2 years ago
It's not "knowledge" when it's wrong.
Academics must "quibble" about "interpretation." It's what they're paid
to do. When they do it well (and when people listen and understand), it
makes "knowledge" better.
Avatar
Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
"[S]our grapes.... That’s the only way to understand the dismissive,
vituperative tone of our profession’s reaction to Burns’s series.
Several scholars praised Burns for including multiple voices —
especially Vietnamese ones — in his interviews"
Yeah... actually his Jazz miniseries is almost universally excoriated by
jazz musicians, writers, and historians for having essentially handed
Wynton Marsalis nigh-complete control of the narrative. Wynton has,
shall we say, limited and retrograde views on what jazz is and is not.
Latin jazz (and its enormous contributions to US jazz), fusion/electric
jazz, free jazz, and virtually all jazz created since 2000 and/or
created in Eurasia or Africa were summarily ignored. It would be akin to
his Vietnam series excluding everything north of the DMZ and ending in 1970.
4
•Share ›
−
Avatar
Mike Strong Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago • edited
Burns re-packages popular and canonical tropes. He certainly does little
critical analysis. To use an example from the jazz series he repeats the
trope of Charlie Parker supposedly "uttering" the phrase "when I came
alive" (or something close, I didn't look it up) as he was working on
playing the 1939 hit "Cherokee." That is 1) a rewriting of a late 1949
Downbeat article by two reporters. In that article they clearly (you can
look this up, I did, a couple of years ago) state this as a matter of
description, by them, about Parker. 2) this also makes the general
assumption that Parker was inventing bebop and inventing in the
abstract, these musical constructions.
Even minimal analysis, if you have to go that far - just thinking about
starting out should show that he was like any other young musician
beginning a career then or now. He was working on two things: 1)
learning a repertoire of songs expected of any band member for requests
and playlists to get a job and 2) working on how to play to "get over
on" the audience.
And, no one ever "uttered" such a phrase.
Younger brother Ric Burns did a piece on American Ballet Theater in
which he totally butchered Agnes de Mille's old footage by cropping the
legs off dancers in cropping to a wide-frame look (from a 4:3 ratio) and
by non-dance/musical edits. de Mille was extremely sensitive how
cinematographers filmed her work and she took great care to train and
keep the one wh
The other part is the way in which documentary grants have changed, in
considerable part because of the Burns brothers. The entire landscape
has moved from reportage to a slick, marketable, grant-pulling product.
This is very important because that turns reportage into a corporate
product. That is where the lies and the cheap shots come in. And he took
some very large cheap shots.
From the spitting meme to Jane Fonda. I would have been spit on a lot,
as would my fellow company members as we were constantly on TDY - travel
- working in civilian territory across the world and in the US. We would
have known and would have told each other. We got nothing but respect or
deference, even welcome anywhere we went. Not even so much as a cross
look for me. I almost punched out the screen at episode #109.
Fonda's treatment was nothing short of character assassination.
Protestors, including Fonda were working for and with troops and largely
saw troops as victims of the country's leaders (the "baby killer" meme
was toward those in charge, not the grunts, as in "Hey, Hey,LBJ, How
many KIDS did you kill today" with kids meaning troops as well), as in
her FTA (Free the Army) tour (a double pun, on F... the Army - uttered
by troops, and on the Army's recruitment slogan then of Fun, Travel and
Adventure). When Fonda returned from North Vietnam she realized, and
apologized for, the propaganda value of her off-the-cuff remarks.
However, there are plenty of people who refuse to let it go and in the
process let off the hook the people who "cut the orders" as we used to
say. Burns had certain talking heads who were clearly pushing that line.
The GI Anti-war movement was barely recognized and should have been
given a full examination.
Hitch goodsensecynic • 2 years ago
Being a "populizer" is not the equivalent of a hard won academic credential.
mindfullwhim
----While the film's script does contain some editorializing, I cannot
imagine screening the countless hours and hours of film and video
footage they must have combed through, attempting to choose what
information to reveal to the audience, and in what order.
I am also a veteran and the film is respectful to their experiences
also, a point of view that most academics tend to overlook while they
search for the political smoking guns in the Pentagon papers. Remember,
many of those students who were protesting at the time most likely did
not carry an M16 in Vietnam, but instead became...wait for it... academics.
All in all, the film places a great deal of faith in America's
perception of it's own optimism and fair play, which is really what
seemed at stake in the 60s and 70s, and was in a sense, what the war was
all about.
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Avatar
average_joe • 2 years ago • edited
The trouble with this documentary is that he is dealing with a modern
event when he narrates his perspective on the Vietnam War.
Many of us can relate to events during the Vietnam War; we lived through
those years. My story and my recollection profoundly differ from what
Ken Burns is depicting. Burns appears to have a distinctly biased view
of how the general population thought of the war at that time. He is
portraying a revisionist interpretation of the War.
No; the protests were confined only to “some” college campuses, not all.
And, there was no other news source then- no Internet or social media.
The media covered the protests generously. The evening news started and
ended with maliciously edited excerpts against the War. While the media
had a decisive role in destroying the Johnson and Nixon administrations,
the public at large favored actions taken by the government. And, so did
the college kids. I was one of those!
Ken Burns wants the viewers to believe a different reality. He ignores
the atrocities of USSR and Red China at that time or their corrosive
influence in North Vietnam. The American public was genuinely concerned
about the red scare during those decades and tolerated the war at least
for that reason.
When Burns produced the documentary on Civil War, there was little
challenge since there were no living eyewitnesses who could narrate a
different story. Perhaps it is safer for him to do a story on the
Revolutionary War. Don’t try to do a story on the war in Afghanistan or
Iraq as actions of a failed Republican administration. Too many people
remember the 911 tragedy.
46020 • 2 years ago • edited
Plus there is the timely value of Burns reminding us all of the insanity
of the Vietnam War as we continue living with our Middle East
entanglements. This war has always existed for our current undergraduate
students--America's perpetual war for perpetual peace has devolved into
perpetual war as a normal state of being.
Bob
How about Johnson ignoring his advisors' estimate that the US had less
than a 1 in 3 chance of winning the war. That was 1965 or so. Nixon may
never have been president had Johnson heeded the advice that was given him.