The speechifying was typical Burns an earnestness that never quite rises to the level of fiery oratory, but it doesn’t have to.
Current NEH Chairman William Adams provided an introduction so fawning that if Burns’ own inspiration, Honest Abe, were to suddenly appear, he’d think it was his own.įilmmaker Ken Burns speaks onstage during the press conference for ‘Jackie Robinson’, a film by Ken Burns. It was all pomp and circumstance at the Kennedy Center: a military color guard trooped in, backstopped by a huge American flag waving on a rear screen. Nowhere was the NEH’s deification of Ken Burns more in evidence than last May, when he was invited by the institution to deliver the annual Jefferson Lecture, the NEH’s “highest” honor, given for intellectual achievement (which also carries with it a cool ten grand honorarium). Even in the realm of length-driven documentaries it’s hard to see Ken competing in the same stadium as Frenchman, Marcel Ophuls, still one of the world’s greatest masters of the genre at 88.įrankly, I’ve done my due diligence and stayed with a Burns episode for a few minutes before getting too squirmy at which point I remote it over to Bravo or HGTV for a more entertaining, less taxing experience (I find Flipping Out’s Jeff Lewis the perfect antidote to an overdose of Ken Burns). Stringing together hours and hours of talking heads, stitched together with a maudlin banjo track and monotonish narration does not make a documentary great. Knowing something about the history of the documentary I’ll buy Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) but when it comes to contributing to the art of the genre I’d say Ken plays in the minor leagues compared to contemporary filmmakers like Alex Gibney or Errol Morris and with a nod to the past, pales before the contributions of innovators like the Russian Dziga Vertov, the Scotsman John Grierson and Americans Robert Drew and the brothers Maysles.
0 kommentar(er)
