Ken Burns annoys me to no end. He makes okay films attached to important subjects, then seems to believe that his film is equal in importance to the subject. When once I interviewed him, he claimed to have singlehandedly revived jazz in America. What a knob. Louis Armstrong didn't need the help of the Boy Wonder.
I'm grinding the olde axe, however, because I just drove back from lunch listening to WAMC's Alan Chartock (who, for the record, I hold in very high regard) interview Burns. He fed the mogwai–he called Burns a genius, and said Burns was the greatest documentarian in American history. That probably just means Chartock hasn't seen the films of Frederick Wiseman, who makes breathtaking documentaries without ever once panning over a still photo, invoking gravitas-laden narration or ginning up over-baked sentimentality. Wiseman also offers succinct and deadly accurate statements about the nature of film without patting himself on the back. He makes much, much better films about smaller, less "important" American subjects, thus accomplishing the "universe from a grain of sand" business that Burns just stated as what he thinks he's doing in his own documentaries.
Hearing Burns blather on with his 50-50 blend of BS and insight, on the other hand, got me thinking about a new theory. The working name is the "Burns Event Horizon." My theory is as follows. An artistic figure emanates a circular field of self-importance. Overlaid upon that is the circle of importance the culture grants the same figure. It seems clear from Burns' autohagiography that early on, the self-importance circle emanated from Hampshire College out to, say, Tokyo. Many years later, a lot of folks seem to have granted him an equally expansive assessment of his cultural importance. This equalizing of the fields, in turn, has prompted a limitless expansion of Burns' self-importance circle, so large that, at this point, the field has circled the globe and met itself, thus encircling the Earth.
My theory postulates that this turning of the circular into the spherical, thus allowing for no square inch of ground to remain uncovered, prompts curious effects in the emanator of said field, much like the infinite gravity one eventually encounters after crossing the event horizon of a black hole. There is no longer a limit, no longer a way to contain Ken Burns' self-importance field. It now contains us.
So here's the big question: if given the chance, would Ken Burns now actually talk forever?
