{"id":311,"date":"2014-02-12T08:42:32","date_gmt":"2014-02-12T14:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/?p=311"},"modified":"2014-02-12T08:50:11","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T14:50:11","slug":"past-is-present-ken-burns-ipad-app","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/?p=311","title":{"rendered":"Past is Present: Ken Burns&#8217; iPad App"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/97onxUHpxjY\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In his essay, &#8220;The Art of Fiction,&#8221; Henry James said that all writing has two parts: the idea and the execution. He wrote, &#8220;We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donn\u00e9e; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.&#8221; For more than thirty years, documentarian Ken Burns has looked at American history through his lens. Through the 1980s, his vision of the past developed in films such as <em>The Statue of Liberty<\/em> and <em>Huey Long<\/em>, culminating in his breakthrough series, <em>The Civil War<\/em>. That is the idea. The execution has become just as well-known: the voiceover quoting period sources; the wistful, sometimes jaunty, often haunting musical score; and, of course, the pan-and-scan technique now known as &#8220;the Ken Burns effect.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>With the release of his iPad app, Burns tries to repackage the donn\u00e9e, using technology that did not exist when he began filmmaking. Essentially, the iPad app is a collection of clips from past films, but arranged so the body of his work &#8212; thirty plus years of film &#8212; can interact in new ways. You can view them chronologically, through a timeline, or via a series of playlists each centered in a particular theme, like race or art. This breaks the narrative thread and places you in the realm of the donn\u00e9e.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve watched every minute of Ken Burns&#8217;s work &#8212; often multiple times &#8212; so I know the stories. What I can do, though, is follow the idea &#8212; race, for example &#8212; developed through each of his films. The app is enhanced by new video comments by Burns. In his films, you might watch the ideas develop over ten or more hours. I think of the issue of race, for example, as shown in the <em>Baseball<\/em> series. In the app, he hammers home the ideas in newly-filmed short clips &#8212; this is what I was saying. I can watch four hours of <em>Mark Twain<\/em> and, in the end, grow aware of how funny his writing remains. (Read Finley Peter Dunne to understand how unusual that is.) Here, Burns comes on and says that in a brief summary.<\/p>\n<p>This is a worthy experiment. It would be interesting, in the future, to be able to easily compare other documentarians with Burns &#8212; how a single historical event might be viewed through different lights and shadows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his essay, &#8220;The Art of Fiction,&#8221; Henry James said that all writing has two parts: the idea and the execution. He wrote, &#8220;We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donn\u00e9e; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.&#8221; For more than thirty years, documentarian&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/?p=311\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[40],"class_list":["post-311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pastcasts","category-technology-and-history","tag-ken-burns"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3kcV8-51","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317,"href":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions\/317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pastcasts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}