>On Wed, 17 Jan 2001, Dennis Perrin/Nancy Bauer wrote:
> > The problem with Burns, apart from tone, is one of pacing.
>> He tends to go deep in the early installments, and
>> oftentimes comes up with very rich material.
>
>I not only dislike Burns for his own work, but for the
>pernicious influence he's had on the whole genre of PBSish
>documentaries. He created a style that was
>commercially successful and now nearly everyone else apes the
>style.
You mean the combination of period photos, archival footage, talking heads, & music? I don't know whether Burns can be credited with "creating" the style, though. Wasn't this style already in existence before Burns' rise to popularity?
I do agree with you that the commercial success of Burns probably has & will continue to exercise a conservative influence on documentary film-making.
Innovative styles of documentary film-making employed in Isaac Julien, _Looking for Langston_ (1988); Marlon Riggs, _Tongues Untied_ (1991); Barbara Hammer, _Nitrate Kisses_ (1992); etc. deserve to gain wider recognition & more air time, but they are -- sad to say -- not likely to become as popular as Burns' works any time soon.
The only truly popular documentary film-maker who is both stylistically innovative & politically on the Left may be Michael Moore. I sometimes show to my students the aforementioned works by Julien, Riggs, & Hammer; James Klein, Miles Mogulescu, & Julia Reichert, _Union Maids_ (1976); Barbara Kopple, _Harlan County, U.S.A._ (1976); Lorraine W. Gray, _With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade_ (1978); Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, & Pierce Rafferty, _The Atomic Cafe_ (1982); Errol Morris, _The Thin Blue Line_ (1988); Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky, _Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills_ (1996); etc., but I've never met any student who had seen any of these works before taking my class. Not even _The Thin Blue Line_, which has been relatively popular & readily available in most video stores (I think). I have, however, had a good number of students who had seen _Roger & Me_.
Arthur Dong's _Coming Out Under Fire_ (1994) can't be called stylistically ground-breaking, but it is a compelling documentary, in that Dong chose his interviewees (who are ordinary Americans, not expert talking heads) very well.
Yoshie