The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” the latest mosaic from documentarian Ken Burns, is a departure for him.This 12-hour, high-definition jaw-dropper does not involve a journey (like “Lewis & Clark” or “The West”), a conflagration of epic scale (his two war films), or a beloved American pastime (like boxing, baseball or jazz). All of those topics have lent themselves time and again to Burns’ signature form of dramatic reminiscence. In fact, it can fairly be argued that this account of how the U.S. government, in concert with private do-gooders, set aside millions of acres of public land in perpetuity, is the least exciting narrative Burns has tried to stretch into a week of PBS prime time. (It begins airing at 5 tonight on KCPT, repeating at 7 and 9 p.m., with a new chapter airing twice nightly starting at 7, running through Friday.)As the title suggests, this is a film about an idea — the writer Wallace Stegner was the one who attached a superlative to it. And it is a protean idea that Burns, who has been working on the project for more than a decade, cracks open to reveal still more ideas.In tracking the competing notions of how to utilize the country’s ever-shrinking wild spaces, ideas that were enacted, debunked, reshaped and/or reversed over the long period of American expansionism, Burns has ventured out into the relatively virgin land of environmental history. But there is an advocacy side to “The National Parks” as well. Like John Muir, the 19th-century naturalist who reported back to city dwellers on the glaciers that touched the bay in Alaska and the heart-stopping beauty of Yosemite — and whose words open this film — Burns wants to help spark the renaissance that leads to greater appreciation of, and public investment in, our public lands. “One thing we are so tired with is the partisanship, and I don’t mean that in a political way,” he said in an interview this summer. “Everyone is described as red state, blue state, east, west, black, white … we are so dialectically preoccupied that we have forgotten to select that which we share in common. Too much pluribus, not enough unum, Arthur Schlesinger would have said, and I think the parks are about unum.”Time will tell if his film marks the reversal of decades of political and financial setbacks for the National Park Service, whose rise is chronicled in this film. But one thing is clear: “The National Parks” is a more ambitious and difficult work than his others, and it’s one that, I think, can lay claim to being his finest achievement to date.To be sure, there is a great story here, and even better illustrations. Burns gets all the great shots you’d expect him to bring back from multiple trips to Yosemite, Yellowstone, Alaska and other national treasures. And while we’re going down the checklist: that voice from the past, the one whose diaries are read by a lush-voiced actor and are full of the picayune details that make the past come alive? Check. The incredibly articulate academic explainer? Check. And, last but not least, the unheralded Everyman poet that Burns always seems to find to give the whole composition its requisite grace notes? Check that, too.The series begins — after a 10-minute travelogue reel, accompanied by some sweeping narration read by Peter Coyote — with the first big idea: When most of the North American continent was a vast wilderness, you didn’t need national parks. It wouldn’t be until 1864, when Abraham Lincoln was called upon to sign an act of Congress setting aside the eye-catching wonders of the Yosemite Valley in California (which Lincoln had never seen), that the idea of preservation took hold in Washington for the first time.

Posted on Sat, Sep. 26, 2009 10:15 PM

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'The National Parks': Ken Burns’ best

By AARON BARNHART

The Kansas City Star

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The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” the latest mosaic from documentarian Ken Burns, is a departure for him.

This 12-hour, high-definition jaw-dropper does not involve a journey (like “Lewis & Clark” or “The West”), a conflagration of epic scale (his two war films), or a beloved American pastime (like boxing, baseball or jazz). All of those topics have lent themselves time and again to Burns’ signature form of dramatic reminiscence.

In fact, it can fairly be argued that this account of how the U.S. government, in concert with private do-gooders, set aside millions of acres of public land in perpetuity, is the least exciting narrative Burns has tried to stretch into a week of PBS prime time. (It begins airing at 5 tonight on KCPT, repeating at 7 and 9 p.m., with a new chapter airing twice nightly starting at 7, running through Friday.)

As the title suggests, this is a film about an idea — the writer Wallace Stegner was the one who attached a superlative to it. And it is a protean idea that Burns, who has been working on the project for more than a decade, cracks open to reveal still more ideas.

In tracking the competing notions of how to utilize the country’s ever-shrinking wild spaces, ideas that were enacted, debunked, reshaped and/or reversed over the long period of American expansionism, Burns has ventured out into the relatively virgin land of environmental history.

But there is an advocacy side to “The National Parks” as well. Like John Muir, the 19th-century naturalist who reported back to city dwellers on the glaciers that touched the bay in Alaska and the heart-stopping beauty of Yosemite — and whose words open this film — Burns wants to help spark the renaissance that leads to greater appreciation of, and public investment in, our public lands.

“One thing we are so tired with is the partisanship, and I don’t mean that in a political way,” he said in an interview this summer. “Everyone is described as red state, blue state, east, west, black, white … we are so dialectically preoccupied that we have forgotten to select that which we share in common. Too much pluribus, not enough unum, Arthur Schlesinger would have said, and I think the parks are about unum.”

Time will tell if his film marks the reversal of decades of political and financial setbacks for the National Park Service, whose rise is chronicled in this film. But one thing is clear: “The National Parks” is a more ambitious and difficult work than his others, and it’s one that, I think, can lay claim to being his finest achievement to date.

To be sure, there is a great story here, and even better illustrations. Burns gets all the great shots you’d expect him to bring back from multiple trips to Yosemite, Yellowstone, Alaska and other national treasures.

And while we’re going down the checklist: that voice from the past, the one whose diaries are read by a lush-voiced actor and are full of the picayune details that make the past come alive? Check. The incredibly articulate academic explainer? Check. And, last but not least, the unheralded Everyman poet that Burns always seems to find to give the whole composition its requisite grace notes? Check that, too.

The series begins — after a 10-minute travelogue reel, accompanied by some sweeping narration read by Peter Coyote — with the first big idea: When most of the North American continent was a vast wilderness, you didn’t need national parks. It wouldn’t be until 1864, when Abraham Lincoln was called upon to sign an act of Congress setting aside the eye-catching wonders of the Yosemite Valley in California (which Lincoln had never seen), that the idea of preservation took hold in Washington for the first time.

See interviews with Ken Burns, Dayton Duncan and Shelton Johnson at TVBarn.com.

Posted on Sat, Sep. 26, 2009 10:15 PM

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