88 new york |september 16–29, 2019
ken burns is influential enough to have inspired his own bit of cinema gram-
mar, the Ken Burns Effect, which describes a certain way of panning and
zooming over a still photo. But there’s another kind of Ken Burns Effect, a cycle of
emotional and intellectual reactions, that viewers may experience yet again as they
watch his latest, the 16-hour, eight-part Country Music.
This Ken Burns Effect begins with awe at the staggering too-muchness of a Burns project.
In Country Music, it’s not just the running time or the breadth of
research materials that impresses (100,000 photos, 700 hours of clips,
101 interviews). It’s the typically Burnsian chutzpah of giving a monu-
mental project a plain-vanilla title as simultaneously unassuming and
grandiose as Jazz, Baseball, orThe Civil War. It’s the endless parade of
country, pop, rock, and folk superstars (including Wynton Marsalis
and Jack White) and the soundtrack’s treasure-trove jukebox of hits—
tv / theater / popPHOTOGRAPH:SONYMUSICARCHIVESThe CULTURE PAGESCRITICS
Matt Zoller Seitz on Country Music ... Sara Holdren on Betrayal ...
Craig Jenkins on Post Malone’s Hollywood’s Bleeding.COUNTRY
MUSIC
PBS.I FalltoPieces
Ken Burns’s massive Country
Music is powerful, beautiful,
and somehow still incomplete.
TV / MATT ZOLLER SEITZ everything from “Will the Circle Be Unbro-
ken?” and “Keep on the Sunny Side” to
“Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces.”
And it’s the intelligence of Burns’s film-
making, which is sometimes mistaken for
mere craftsmanship. Notice, for instance,
how he regularly starts his trademark
zoom-outs with close-ups of microphones,
speakers, Victrola funnels, and transmit-
ters befitting a tale of art spread by new
technology. Or how he illustrates the idea
of a musical legacy by collapsing past and
present: Often, a surviving country star is
asked to comment on a song written
decades or even centuries before their
birth, and they begin to sing the lyrics, and
Burns layers their performance over a
scratchy recording.
Even more haunting is how both white
and African-American musicians will talk
about the multicultural nature of country—
a blend of African, European, and Latin
American traditions—and then Burns will
cut to a photo of a group of revelers playing
and dancing together, stay on the imageJohnny Cash in 1960.