JLT/JLT

Ken Burns, Auteur

It is an odd mystery why, when film critics and serious cinephiles discuss the most significant American filmmakers working today, and particularly the best documentarians, one rarely if ever hears mention of Ken Burns. Over four-plus decades of expertly crafted work, Burns has aided us tremendously in better understanding and appreciating his subjects, ranging widely from Jefferson and Franklin to the US Civil War to jazz to baseball to the creation of the National Parks system. Stylistically and thematically, his filmography is thoroughly cohesive and uniformly solid. Burns' signature style is as instantly recognizable –– and ripe for parody –– as any filmmaker ever.

Yet while Burns' stylistic approach has seemingly changed little over his prolific career, his extended explorations of what is distinctive and peculiar and interesting and inspiring and troubling in America's cultural and political history have become more incisive and provocative in his excellent recent work, especially Ernest Hemingway and The US and the Holocaust. The former (directed with longtime collaborator Lynn Novick) is both a rigorous deconstruction of one of American literature's most (self-constructedly) "mythic" figures and a very timely reflection on how to deal with "problematic" public figures who produced brilliant, vital art but also said and did some pretty terrible things. The latter film (with Novick and Sarah Botstein) seriously challenges much of what we think we know about what (and when) the United States and its leaders knew and did during the years of the Third Reich and the Second World War.

At what appears to be nearing the end of the age of US global dominance, with the "genius" and "dream" and purported exceptionalism of America more embattled or rejected (within and without) than perhaps ever in its tumultuous history, Burns is creating patiently drawn portraits at once wistfully elegiac and soberly critical.