The sprawling, novelistic documentaries of Ken Burns seem antithetical to the digital age. But with the release of a new app last week, the filmmaker, whose brand has become almost synonymous with PBS, has demonstrated that even 12-hour movies composed almost entirely of archival footage, photographs and talking heads can be transformed into a lively, interactive experience.

This isn’t to say that Burns films aren’t lively, but their distinctive energy derives from the meticulous layering of interesting details. They are methodical, precise and, while often fascinating, extremely slow-moving. Wisely, Burns has not attempted to transition his comprehensive library, unfettered, into the app space, where few people would have the patience to sift through its 136 hours of total runtime on a mobile device. Instead, the app, as conceived by Burns’ longtime friend and fellow director Don MacKinnon, presents an entirely new way to experience his body of work.

“There is no such thing as history,” Burns proclaimed in an introductory video to the app, which is currently available only for iPad. “The past and all time is just random events that take place. A chaos. However, over the course of time, we see things emerging. Not cycles but patterns.”

Even at their epic lengths, Burns’ films have always felt perfectly controlled in their attempts to isolate those patterns within the chaos, with every image, quote, music cue and even voiceover actor chosen with careful consideration. With the Ken Burns app, the director has taken the next step in that lifelong pursuit, attempting to find patterns between the patterns themselves. Pulling from a 23-piece ouvre that includes titles such as “Baseball,” “Jazz” and “The National Parks,” he has created hour-long playlists of curated clips, organized under six overarching headers from American history: innovation, race, politics, art, hard times and war.

“It’s short clips from our films, grouped by theme and time, to see the ways in which the collisions of a scene from this film and a scene from that film, made 20 years apart, suddenly interrelate in a new way,” Burns continued. What this allows us to do is to see the ways in which the warp and woof of history has meaning today.”

Using a fluid interface designed by digital agency Big Spaceship, the app’s most intriguing element may be the chance it affords to see how historic patterns from Burns’ disparate films congregate around specific time periods. Touch 1869 for instance, and a clip-cloud composed of “The Civil War,” “The West” and “The National Parks” arranges itself, moments from each film syncing up in parallel formation. Of course, users of the app can also watch each of the playlists straight through, or view clips a la carte.

With nearly 140 hours of total Burns footage available, reducing it all to six collections of clips, each playlist an hour long or less, may seem like a cheat to diehard fans, especially at the app’s price point of $9.99. But Burns, who is allegedly working on seven new documentaries at the time of this writing, has promised regular updates with new playlists and footage. And anyway, the connectivity of history is the draw here, not the chance to view 12-hour films in their entirety on a tiny second screen.

With its innovative format, the Ken Burns app demonstrates not only how other “old media” content sources, such as museums and film archives, might upgrade their wares for modern consumers, but provides a potential model for entertainment media as well, such as that supplied by TV networks. As Burns as created for the nation of America as a whole, many TV shows have an entire, nuanced, fictitious history of their own. To cite just one, imagine a “Simpsons” app with clip playlists broken down by year, character, theme, storyline, or even location. Click on a year and see how key moments from the show informed and enhanced each other across the given season. It would have the potential to be a geek-out bonanza for devotees, though only a brand as special as Ken Burns would benefit from such engagement, let alone be able to provide it.

Tags:


  Save as PDF