If journalism resigns itself to being a “first draft of history,” Ken Burns’ popular PBS documentaries, written by Lynn Novick, have increasingly aspired to—and achieved—a coveted status as popular historical canon. This has, in part, been accomplished by Burns’ choice of cozily American subject matter—jazz, baseball, the Brooklyn Bridge—as well as the calming effect that time and distance provide when it comes to more difficult, inflammatory topics like the Civil War. His success is a rare, fraught feat.
But how would Burns’ earnest, middlebrow glosses on American history, forever panning slowly across sepia-tinted photos, treat a more contemporaneous, contentious event like the Vietnam War? The answer can be found in a 10-part, 18-hour opus that for the first time ventures outside Burns’ previous editorial and narrative comfort zones. The Cold War lead-up, decade-plus of intense air and ground combat, and subsequent years of national shame/guilt over the war affected the second half of our 20th century like nothing else.
Teasing out a coherent, honest through-line of such a momentous, highly charged topic is ambitious, to say the least, and Burns rises to the challenge in many ways. Most notable among them: a dedicated effort to include the voices and experiences of the Vietnamese who suffered and/or fought Americans, to create a much more complete, insightful portrait of the war. But in the striving to present all sides and simply lay out the facts for the viewer, Burns nonetheless pulls his punches when it comes to assigning blame and culpability for the disastrous war. As a result, he has produced a sometimes daring, sometimes schmaltzy, richly detailed yet ultimately flawed film about the tragedy and horrors that the United States brought upon itself and inflicted upon Southeast Asia.
http://fair.org/home/ken-burns-vietnam-war-an-object-lesson-in-the-failures-of-the-objective-lens/