Anybody watching Ken Burns Nat. Parks?

gco

gco

Veteran
Been watching the Ken Burns National Parks series every night this week. Not exactly perfect but very good. Stunning cinematography and some really fascinating history revealed. There is definitely a ton of research behind this effort. No doubt park visitation is going to spike next year.
What I could not stop noticing was the slight jitter in almost all of the frames. It's almost as if the cameraman never took his hand off the camera at full zoom. I mean you would see a beautiful pan across a river in a canyon to a rock outcropping where the pan stops and the frame is left jittering. Not the motion, just the frame. Slight but always there. It was really noticeable at the beginning of a chapter where you see a landscape jittering behind the title heading. Anyone else notice this or am I seeing things?
 
I've only been watching bits and pieces (damn client deadlines and baseball keep getting in the way of my PBS!). I haven't noticed that jitter, but that doesn't mean anything with the way I was distracted while watching it. I haven't been disappointed though. The guy set the bar pretty high a long time ago, and he continues to deliver.

I met him when he was screening a rough cut of The War a few years ago. An extremely gracious man. But when I was on a shoot this spring with Tom Brokaw, Brokaw (who is apparently good friends with Burns), said that Burns has apparently been hammered by the economy like everyone else. His funding has been slashed.

Maybe the Parks Service can send him a little something on the back end...
 
I've really enjoyed this as well... if I start it I can't stop watching until it's over.

This type of history doesn't usually capture my interest... but I've found it to be incredibly interesting... especially the people behind each park... and the opposition they had to overcome... and the reality of what would have happened if those key people hadn't been there... at that point and time.

Every time I've seen one of those famous black and white photos... of a bunch of men standing on a gigantic STUMP... all proud of what they had done in cutting down something so amazing... my heart sinks about the nature of humanity (the majority anyway)... in trying to get whatever they can for themselves with such ignorance... and to hear the story of the people who obsessed in overcoming this ignorance is very uplifting.

There's a beautiful piece of land not too far from me... called "klondike park"... which WAS a private residence... attached to a quarry... and I believe it was donated to the state, as the owners realized what a treasure they were living on. If you don't think the national parks WOULD have been private property that 99.99999% of us would never get to see... then you need to watch this documentary to see how that really would have been the case, had it not been for the vision and drive of a passionate few... to ultimately benefit the many.
 
I saw a couple of jittery shots last night, but I didn't notice it before that. I figured there must have been something in the environment that prevented the camera from being totally stable, since a lot of the shots were perfect.

And yeah, things said here cover it pretty well. Amazing stuff. It makes me want to go on my trips to see a couple of them even more.
 
MattinSTL said:
Every time I've seen one of those famous black and white photos... of a bunch of men standing on a gigantic STUMP... all proud of what they had done in cutting down something so amazing...
Click to expand...

Matt, I conpletely agree with the spirit of your post. Without protection, all of these lands would be onwed by individuals or corporations.

But there is another side to a picture like that. These men were not all capitalists without conscience. Some did what they did for survival, or for the sheer challenge of it. In a forest with countless acres of giant trees it is hard to imagine that you could use it all up. Cutting down a wonder like that seems like a mindless and selfish blight to us now, but to them it may have been something else entirely. Even if it were not strictly for survival, imagine growing up a logger (a respected and necessary ambition at the time) and being faced with such a monumental challenge as cutting down something of that size with a hand saw.

I'm not saying that greed was not behind much of what happened. But not everyone who picked up a saw was wrong to be proud of what they did.
 
The world was very different at the time. Industrialization was still the wave of the future, not something to run away from. Those national parks weren't the only places with wildness to some extent; huge portions of the country had that, so no one thought of them as something that had to be protected. Now urban sprawl has made us a lot more conscious of the importance of those areas. People weren't greedy enough to cut down the last Redwood, they just weren't thinking in those terms. And they needed a job.

This documentary showed the birth of the conservation movement as well as the parks themselves. The culture at the time told people they were masters of this wide, untamed land and should treat it as such. People hadn't really been told they should protect it. Now that's part of the mainstream culture, so we're in a very different place mentally than the majority could have been when the parks were first starting out.

I think of John Muir were an American, he never would have developed like he did. His respect for the parks came from his personal convictions, his spiritual beliefs and his past; specifically, being from a country that has been developed to some extent for thousands of years, where places like that just don't exist in their primal state. He saw the other side, and so respected more what we could have.

I'd also like to point out that I come from a place where the loggers and environmentalists have been at war for a while, especially since our major logging company (now gone) was purchased by a Texas businessman and switched to a non-sustainable overharvesting plan. There have been allegations of murder and attempted murder numerous times. I've heard a lot from both sides of that issue, including a lot of extremists. And there is something to be argued on both sides, at the very least if different assumptions are made about underlying values.
 
It's possible that the jittering is a creative decision instead of a technical error. I think it's Deakins who always likes to somehow personally support his static shots to give them a slightly human feel.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying the documentaries. I'm behind though. It's hard to watch 2 hrs a night.
 
Jim Brennan said:
I'm not saying that greed was not behind much of what happened. But not everyone who picked up a saw was wrong to be proud of what they did.
Click to expand...

I wasn't so much referring to the actual "saw-men" as I was referring to the company. I realize that throughout history... people have to do what they have to do to survive... and the average working man isn't usually afforded the luxury of visionary choices.

There was a great fight over the grand canyon as well... They showed a company building right on the rim... Many people wanted the ability to freely develop the rim for companies and housing. If things had gone that way... and we had old photos of carpenters building such structures all along the rim of the grand canyon... I wouldn't blame the carpenters.

I was just trying to make a point about humanity... and ignorance isn't necessarily an individual thing. When I see those images all I can think is there's nothing to be proud of... even though those guys were in a peer group... in a period of time... and doing their best to survive.

It's all good man... I just wanted to encourage some more viewers of the doc... by saying that it's not just about the parks themselves, but about the vision of a very few people... who could see well into the future.
 
Yeah, I had a hankering to see it and it gave me a case of the jitters......Doh!

In all seriousness, though, I have a new found appreciation for John D. Rockefeller. What a benevolent giant. Had it not been for him and others whose names I had never heard of who had the financial means, probably most of those places would not have been preserved. Teddy Roosevelt is high on my list too. I especially liked the story of him rushing off on his horse one morning to go see a group of sheep coming down a precipice with his face still half full of shaving cream. Also, the details of him pulling a ruse on his Yellowstone entourage so he could get away for a private camping trip with John Muir to pick his brain were out freaking--standing.
 
Last edited:
I've got it all recorded and have watch three nights. It is really good. Ready to grab a camera and go to some national parks now!
 
MattinSTL said:
I've really enjoyed this as well... if I start it I can't stop watching until it's over.
Click to expand...

Same here. I'm really loving this series, even as much as his last one, The War, which was freaking amazing for someone like myself (I'm a bit of a WWII buff).

The stuff about John Muir and his quest to keep nature from being screwed up forever by dimwits, and his trek into the wilderness with Teddy Roosevelt needs to be made as a feature film someday.

I think I might get this series on blu-ray, as the cinematography is excellent.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top