Scholars, activists, historians, and political scientists have argued for decades about whether or how much to blame President Franklin D. Once again, Burns shows he is entirely in tune with the sensibilities of those eager to trace a link between the political villains of the past and the people his audience despises right now. and the Holocaust is designed to evoke analogies between the anti-Semitism and threats to democracy prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s with what is going on in America in the present day. He wants to frame this chapter of history in light of present-day racial politics. While Burns does a more than adequate job of providing viewers with a basic understanding of the facts of the Holocaust and America’s inability or failure to help forestall or lessen its toll, his true goal here is something else. and the Holocaust, directed with Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, which aired on PBS in September. That is also an apt description of Burns’s latest effort, The U.S. Baseball is a great series, but it does at times have the quality, as George Weigel put it in COMMENTARY upon the show’s release, of “a 7th-grade social-studies book from a progressive publisher, with lavish illustrations and a very politically correct text.” The same can be said of his Baseball (1994), an 18-and-a-half-hour marathon that primarily emphasized race, highlighting the Negro Leagues and Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier in 1947. At the time, the Burns perspective on the Civil War was a refreshing and vital break from more traditional histories that had mostly hewed to a war-between-brothers approach-a way of portraying the war that largely avoided the enduring effect of slavery on American society. The brilliance of Burns’s sublime Civil War, from 1990, is rooted in the way he weaves dramatic accounts of the battles and the conflict’s colorful personalities into a compelling narrative about racism, slavery, and the struggle for civil rights that would follow its conclusion. He has remained the most important nonfiction filmmaker in America because of the way he and his colleagues use the historical subjects they explore to make points about contemporary political and social issues-points that usually reinforce the preexisting biases of Burns’s liberal viewing audience. But his skill as a filmmaker is not the sole cause of his unprecedented five-decade run of 35 documentaries and documentary series on PBS, dating back to 1981’s Brooklyn Bridge. Ken Burns’s documentaries blend striking visuals of still photos or archival film with colorful and often insightful analysis and narration.
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