Ken burns

There is probably no American documentary filmmaker more respected than Ken Burns. From his landmark 1990 series about the Civil War to his most recent work that has explored everyone and everything from Ernest Hemingway to country music, Burns has established himself as a fearless chronicler of stories that illuminate the nation’s history, sometimes in ways that viewers might find uncomfortable. His 2005 documentary about the African-American boxing champion Jack Johnson, Unforgiveable Blackness, was a fine example of the filmmaker turning his gaze on a subject that many might have preferred be left obscure, and it won him an Emmy for Outstanding Directing as a result — one of fifteen that he and his films have won to date.

Ken Burns made his name in 1990 with The Civil War, the justly celebrated 11-and-a-half-hour documentary series that gave America’s proudly niche PBS channel the biggest ratings in its history. Since then, he’s tackled several other big American subjects like jazz, Prohibition and Vietnam; and all without ever changing his style. In contrast to, say, Adam Curtis (another ambitious film-maker whose methods have remained unchanged for 30 years), Burns’s documentaries take an almost defiantly considered approach, forgoing anything resembling self-regarding flashiness in favour of such old-school techniques as knowledgeable talking heads, careful chronology and straightforwardly appropriate visuals.

If I had been told that Ken Burns’s next PBS extravaganza would be a documentary film about a 20th-century American novelist and, even more improbably, had been asked to guess his (or more likely her) identity, my last choice might well have been Ernest Hemingway. This is partly because there seem to be so many more eligible Burns subjects (Richard Wright, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison) but largely because Hemingway, man and novelist, seems especially uncongenial to the Burns sensibility: his fiction doesn’t tell us very much about America; he remains in bad odor in women’s studies departments; his Great White Hunter persona must surely spell a painful three episodes for ‘viewers like you’. First, the bad news.