After two episodes of "The War" on PBS, we're absorbed by it, and are learning new things about that huge war and our involvement in it -- yet, I think it doesn't move with the same emotional weight that the Civil War series had. There's a storytelling element that isn't quite here. The Civil War had layers and layers of detail about people, much of it from their letters, or from historians, or from the wonderful commentators that Burns had (think of Shelby Foote). We got to live more of that series in our own imaginations.
Here, we're relying on the massive documentary footage. Of course. Yet, it's mute. The stories of the men and women who lived through the scenes are powerful, but somehow filtered by distance and time. The narration doesn't quite color the scenes.
You could say that Burns's more literary approach for the Civil War better fit the era, but I think it has more to do with the power of the literary word when telling history, when telling stories, whether from fifty years ago or a hundred fifty years ago.
A side note: the music for this series doesn't thread its way through as elegantly as the Civil War's music did. The music was identifiable, rich, and evocative. It was immediately recognizable and was repeated as codas and themes. With this series, we have big band music, alternated with occasional piano dirges and what sounds like a Japanese stringed instrument. It's not quite connecting the scenes and narrative.
It's a huge achievement, and I want to see the rest of it. But it's a different experience from the Civil War.
2 comments:
Maybe we are tired of Ken Burns?
Do you know that in Apple's iPhoto, one of the modes you can select for presenting a slide show is the "Ken Burns Effect"?
The lack of historical commentary is a significant difference from the Civil War series, I agree. Maybe "The War" is still too much of a force affecting very current events to admit non-polarizing comment?
There is that thing about media you mention, too. For the Civil War we have mostly literary documentation and some photographs. Imagine the richness of material from WWII, all that film, audio--very different temperature.
I wonder where we are going with this? When a Ken Burns of the future assembles a documentary of a now current event, there would be all that blogged content to consider...
I would think that Burns could handle the "polarizing" aspects of the commentary. I wonder if it simply wasn't the time issue -- how to work in some colorful historian/commentators into this huge epic and still make it marketable.
It's been noted that future historians will have a surfeit of material to wade through -- trillions of emails and images and blogs stored on billions of drives around the world. How will they manage that? They'll have to focus on fragments -- the NY Times will still be very important.
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