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re: Best Ken Burns documentaries
Posted on 7/16/23 at 9:35 pm to Lsujacket66
Posted on 7/16/23 at 9:35 pm to Lsujacket66
Thumbs up on his choice of narrators as well. Peter Coyote probably the best of superior group.
1
Posted on 7/16/23 at 9:38 pm to Lsujacket66
His last one about how Americans were responsible for the holocaust was insulting and I feel like Ken could go run backwards naked through a cornfield pretty easily.
Posted on 7/16/23 at 9:45 pm to meauxses
I beg to differ. While I like Burns’ specials overall, his anti-war, street protesting days shone through in the Vietnam series. Many Viet vets, like myself, were turned off by his fawning over righteous NVA vets while largely demonizing us.
Posted on 7/16/23 at 10:52 pm to Lsujacket66
My Favorite has always been "The Brooklyn Bridge".
Takes a seemingly straightforward and bland subject and makes it pretty mesmerizing.
Takes a seemingly straightforward and bland subject and makes it pretty mesmerizing.
Posted on 7/16/23 at 11:05 pm to The Boat
quote:
His Huey P Long one is good. It’s neat to hear stories from older people in the 1980s who were part of the administration, the media, who voted for him, or hated him in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
I don’t know about the rest of the country, but Louisiana would definitely be better off in today’s world if he wasn’t killed. He was a corrupt politician that was taken out before his state fully could enjoy his political corruption. Kennedy men are still in the news, yet half the people in this state hate his name, but still cry about JFK. Same shite, different day.
Posted on 7/17/23 at 7:49 am to Lsujacket66
If you're a fan of country music and its history, then his "Country Music" series in 8 parts I believe is great viewing.
It starts with "The Carter Family" and progresses through the years each series and stops before it gets to "Country Pop" crap that is pretty much being produced today.
All the old time greats are featured and the commentary by various stars makes for excellent viewing.
It starts with "The Carter Family" and progresses through the years each series and stops before it gets to "Country Pop" crap that is pretty much being produced today.
All the old time greats are featured and the commentary by various stars makes for excellent viewing.
Posted on 7/17/23 at 7:53 am to Lsujacket66
Civil War made Shelby Foote a millionaire. I could listen to him talk the damn phone book.
Posted on 7/17/23 at 7:54 am to Lsujacket66
Baseball
National parks
He did one on country music - I think it focused on grand ole opera if I remember correctly
National parks
He did one on country music - I think it focused on grand ole opera if I remember correctly
Posted on 7/17/23 at 8:09 am to Lsujacket66
He has a 6-parter coming out in 2025 on the American Revolution that will most likely be good
Posted on 7/17/23 at 8:29 am to Animal
quote:
Civil War made Shelby Foote a millionaire. I could listen to him talk the damn phone book.
His books on the Civil War are great reading. You're right about him in that series. His voice oozed Deep South and his insights to the events were great to listen to.
I also liked the rendering of many of the letters sent back home by the soldiers as they were read by the narrators.
Posted on 7/17/23 at 8:37 am to GetCocky11
quote:
He has a 6-parter coming out in 2025 on the American Revolution that will most likely be good
I’m a little nervous about it not going to lie. Especially since his Benjamin Franklin doc seemed to over highlight certain things because of trendy modern politics.
This post was edited on 7/17/23 at 12:03 pm
Posted on 7/17/23 at 9:01 am to gumbo2176
quote:
Civil War made Shelby Foote a millionaire. I could listen to him talk the damn phone book.
quote:Loved that Burns brought him back for the Baseball series, just so he could tell his one story about meeting Babe Ruth.
His books on the Civil War are great reading. You're right about him in that series. His voice oozed Deep South and his insights to the events were great to listen to.
Posted on 7/17/23 at 9:24 am to LSUFreek
quote:
I may be the outlier here, but I didn't like the baseball one. I think it's his only one that didn't start in linear chronological order and I was lost.
IIRC, they start off like mid-30s then jump from the HR era back to the bunting era & then fast-forwards to the mid-20s, or something like that. I never finished it. I wanted to see how baseball began & how it evolved into America's game, in that order, not in the scrambled order I saw. But that's just me. To each their own.
I recall that it was pretty much in chronological order. Each "inning" (episode) covered a an era/decade in order.
Posted on 7/17/23 at 9:51 am to Lsujacket66
1) National Parks
2) Country Music
2) Country Music
Posted on 7/17/23 at 10:22 am to gumbo2176
Vietnam was awfully slanted. As Ken has gotten bigger and richer, he's more transparent about his biases.
Posted on 7/17/23 at 11:09 am to SoFla Tideroller
quote:
Vietnam was awfully slanted. As Ken has gotten bigger and richer, he's more transparent about his biases.
What's funny is people think Burn's is a leftist now while over the years the modern left has called him a "Southern apologist" for his treatment of the Civil War...and fricking hate him for it.
They're LIVID that his doc has been shown in classrooms across America for decades as the definitive treatment of the Civil War. Classrooms are the purview of their group-think, as they see it.
Once loved, they started to hate him and the doc, once they figured out the narrative and its impact on Americans view of the War. A few snippets of their anger:
quote:
Ken Burns presents a Civil War caused not by slavery, but by a failure to compromise. A war in which the Confederacy fought for a noble cause, and whose heroes include not only Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, but Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest – the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
quote:
In 1996, Robert Toplin published Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond, a collection of nine critical essays about the documentary. Scholars compared it to everything from Homer’s Iliad, to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and many historians signalled their dismay with Burns’s simplistic treatment of the war.
quote:
These debates, however, have had little effect on the popular consensus, and most viewers continue to accept Ken Burns’s version of the war uncritically.
quote:
But The Civil War is long overdue for a reckoning – and a remake. In romanticizing the Confederacy, obscuring the role of slavery, and refusing to grapple with the war’s devastating racial repercussions, the much-loved documentary is complicit in a long tradition of distorting the meaning of the Civil War.
And of course the leftist historians hated Foote:
quote:
The trouble begins with the documentary’s star: Shelby Foote is a southern novelist with a down-home drawl, a gift for storytelling, and a very troubling version of the events of 1861 to 1865. Foote’s account of the Civil War has very little to do with slavery.
Foote speaks of the men who fought for the South as if they were not historical figures, but old friends – a method that made him a fan favorite upon the documentary’s release. It’s also what made him so dangerous as a historical source.
This cozy brand of storytelling allows Foote to create deeply sympathetic portraits of men who fought to preserve slavery. In one of his most alarming assertions, Foote proclaims that “the war produced two authentic geniuses”: Abraham Lincoln, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. The former slave-trader Forrest oversaw the infamous massacre at Fort Pillow, in which Confederate troops murdered an estimated 200 Black Union soldiers who were trying to surrender. Forrest would go on to become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a fact Foote neglects to mention when he thrills at the memory of once twirling the general’s sword over his head.
Everything that Ken Burns gets right in this documentary – the music, the imagery, the storytelling – is powerfully overshadowed by everything that Shelby Foote gets wrong.
quote:
Foote’s presence points to a larger problem with the documentary: its embrace of the Lost Cause. This mythology appears throughout all nine episodes, beginning minutes into the first. The war, the viewer learns, “began as a bitter dispute over union and state’s rights.” Missing from this statement is the fact that the southern states seceded over a very particular state’s right – the right to own slaves.
The documentary also buys into the classic Lost Cause tenet that the Confederacy was doomed to fail from the outset of the Civil War, never standing a chance against the vast industrial might of the North, but fighting nobly to the end.
quote:
The year 2020 has brought a profound reckoning with the Civil War’s legacy – and it is long past time that reckoning reached Ken Burns. His beloved documentary invites viewers to revel in the drama and emotion of the war without ever acknowledging its legacy of white supremacy.
Echoing Keri Leigh Merritt and others, it’s time for a new Civil War documentary: one that honors Barbara Fields’s observation that the Civil War isn’t over – and can still be lost. Every Confederate monument can be toppled, but as long as Ken Burns’s The Civil War is seen as the definitive telling of the story, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Nathan Bedford Forrest will remain on their pedestals.
I think Burns has felt the leftist ire over The Civil War doc for awhile and has been on a mea culpa tour for decades. The Lost Cause is the left trying to get the Civil War doc replaced by another for the classrooms... It ain't happening.
This post was edited on 7/17/23 at 11:11 am
Posted on 7/17/23 at 11:11 am to Lsujacket66
None of them.
He's the master of revisionism. His documentary on country music was hilarious.
He's the master of revisionism. His documentary on country music was hilarious.
Posted on 7/17/23 at 11:20 am to hogcard1964
Cannot believe no one has brought up Jazz.
country music was very good as well.
country music was very good as well.
Posted on 7/17/23 at 1:19 pm to ScottFowler
quote:
Jazz.
Yeah that one is really good. I'm not much of a country music fan, but I've seriously tempted to give that one a watch just because of how good the Jazz one is.
Posted on 7/17/23 at 2:10 pm to Lsujacket66
The Statue of Liberty
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