A Trademark Approach to the Past: Ken Burns, the Historical Profession, and Assessing Popular Presentations of the Past.

The article by Vivien Ellen Rose and Julie Corley is a strong criticism of Ken Burns’ contribution to the making of documentary films and his lack of historical professionalism in dealing with the past. The authors of this article wonder about the consequences of historical documentaries, which too often end up blurring the frontiers between historic accuracy, legends and imagination. They also reflect on the role historians could have in that field; how they could use their knowledge and transmit it to broader audiences via mediums like movies. According to Rose and Corley, one of the main problems with Burns is that not only is he molding the historical content transmitted to a general public, but he also brings forward a specific definition of what history making is. His history is made of heroes, and it is their stories that he wants to tell. On that subject, the PBS webpage on Ken Burns is quite revealing. The short introduction on Burns ends with those words: “History made them famous, Ken Burns makes them real”. The “invisible makers” of history are therefore quite obviously kept in the dark once more.
In light of the article, it seems that Burns’s major problem is to take only what can contribute to the story he wants to tell. He leaves aside important elements, focuses on certain people only, and does not take into consideration new research on the subjects. He also uses interviews of historians or comments from them only if, and in a way that fits his purpose. Rose and Corley demonstrate throughout their article the mistakes Burns made in his documentary entitled “Not for Ourselves alone”, which focuses on two leading figures of the 19th century feminist movement in the United States. What worries the authors is not only the fact that Burns does not rely on serious scholarship, but that his work is actually treated as serious research and reliable material. People tend to turn to him and his products instead of turning to historians for answers. If Burns’s productions are as lacking as described in this article (and it is hard to comment this without being familiar with his work), then this indeed raises some concerns. Rose and Corley do not necessarily call for a total rejection of works like Burns’s, but they rather encourage historians to reinvest a field given up to non-professional historians. Professional historians should keep working with documentary makers, but they should also learn to better communicate to broad audiences via different technologies. In addition, they should be more productive in commenting and reviewing those films, not only in savant opuses, but also in newspapers, magazine or on television programs.

A down side of the article however, is that even though most of the points made seem very pertinent, it feels at times too much like a personal vendetta. Is Ken Burns the only person doing historic documentaries? Is he so popular as to embody the entire profession just by himself? Is there anything positive going on in the historic film-making industry nowadays? Those are some of the questions that just kept running through my mind after reading this article…