The Ken Burns Style (A Rant)

The following was originally from a few years ago, but I could just as well have written it today. Or, to put it another way, I’d write it now but I already did.

Laura mentioning to me this morning that Ken Burns had been on TV to mark Buck O'Neil’s death and talk about how he’d been passed over for the Hall of Fame set me off on a slightly unrelated rant about how Burns had “ruined documentary history forever.” He’s done this not so much by making sure that his talking-head historians get caught on camera seeming overwhelmed by emotion at the appropriate moments (I actually forgot to mention this), but with his insistence on use of the present tense when describing past events and especially when describing the thoughts, considerations, decisions and actions of historical characters – a practice that I notice has spread to other documentary filmmakers. [And continues, here in 2010.] “McClellan feels that Lincoln has abandoned him.” “Mao sets off on the Long March without his toothbrush, which he leaves as a token for his long-suffering wife.” Stuff like that. You'd think I would actually prefer this mixing of tenses and times, given that I believe everything takes place more or less simultaneously in the present. But I don’t think you can get there from there – you have to make some distinctions clear before you collapse them – you get there from here. That present tense glosses over the fact that the speaker is making judgments and offering necessarily imperfect accounts of something that happened in the past. It turns all events, present and past, into a TV docudrama in which everything is real and unreal at the same time. It sounds authoritative and that’s the worst aspect – that it tends to discourage any awareness that authoritativeness is even an issue. It kills refraction, the sense that events are subject to many possible interpretations. In the name of making the story seem immediate, it actually makes the story very remote, by removing it to the realm of fairy tale. Complete with tear-stained historians, choking up while telling us our bedtime stories.

Sunset, Sunday, 27 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Sunset from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on watercolor block, 16 x 20.

Today I caught part of the new Ken Burns series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea – I think we cable-less, Tivo-less people will want to rent this and make sure we get the whole thing.

I was struck by the following rhetorical question – or poetical question – from John Muir:

Who reports the works and ways of the clouds, those wondrous creations coming into being every day like freshly upheaved mountains?