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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

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GM Pulls The Plug On Ken Burns

Bruce A Johnson | 03/10

I guess we should have seen this coming.

With the tanking of the US auto industry, pullbacks on advertising and charitable giving had to be in the works. First it was Tiger Woods and Buick parting ways; now we have the announcement that GM, the primary sponsor of Ken Burns’ documentaries for PBS for the last 22 years, would not renew their contract with Burns’ Florentine Films when it expires this year. (Here’s a New York Times article.) This wasn’t any surprise to the organization, who knew almost a year ago that their funding was getting yanked.

I interviewed Ken Burns once, during the promotional push for his series “Baseball.” I set him up in the stands at Milwaukee’s old County Stadium, and he was a great, engaged subject. He even signed the bill of my cherished Red Sox cap (a relic from my college days at Boston University). Here’s hoping that new funding is in place or on the way. I know a lot of documentarians that either dismiss Burns’ style as stodgy, or just envy his success. No matter - his is a form with much substance, something to be emulated, not brushed off.

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Ken Burns films, as well as those of his brother Ric, have led me to suggest, every time I see part of one, that the Association of Moving Image Archivists have an annual award dedicated to the least honorable use of archival footage. They’d own that award.

If you want to see how an historical documentary can be made working within the funding and other painful restraints of PBS, look no further than Eyes On The Prize. Those filmmakers (led by the late Henry Hampton) were scrupulously honest in their use of archival film. The event shown couldn’t just be “illustrative” of what was represented, it had to be footage of that actual event, shot that day—no faking. (Obviously there is no motion picture of the Civil War, I know that…)

The recent fascination with 16x9 has led the Burnses and others to reframe 4:3 material to fit the wide screen. While this is controversial in the case of generic old footage (why not pillarbox?) it reached a peak in Ric Burn’s film about Andy Warhol. Working from mediocre old transfers of some of Warhol’s films, Burns cropped them to 16x9. In doing this, he destroyed many of the complicated frames (and these were locked-down camera shots that may have lasted 33 minutes, so the frame was very intentional) because for some reason he felt that his compositional skills trumped Warhol’s.

Whatever you may think of Warhol (Drella is a good nickname) he was very specific in how he framed both films (these were earlier films where he was active in the shooting) and his art.

I won’t even bother with discussing the problems many historians have with Burns’ work—but they aren’t universally beloved.

Me, I only make films when I can be there when things are happening, and don’t believe in interviews, but if one is going to make historical films, Eyes on the Prize is inspirational. Burns’ work will teach you about fundraising and (self) promotion. Choose your inspirations carefully.

As for having a signed Burns baseball cap, really, that’s far more than we wanted to know about you, Bruce. Too much information!

Jeff Kreines

(OK, I’m a cranky cinema-verite purist out of the MIT Film Section, so there’s no way I’d ever appreciate Burns’ work. )

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