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Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary


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I've heard a lot about this, and this seems like an important review of it: 

 

 

Quote

The Insidious Ideology of Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War
Burns and co-director Lynn Novick take a "many sides" approach to history at a time when "many sides" is a tool of obfuscation.

 

Thoughts? Burns is a pretty well-regarded director with some significant past works, and that's all I know about him.

 

 

 

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I've only made it through the first part that premiered on Sunday night. I enjoyed it. As a counter-point to the complaint in the article, maybe it is an attempt to combat the fact that "history is written by the victors." The first part didn't make a hero out of Ho Chi Minh, but it did explain his background and rise. 

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I've watched several Ken Burns documentaries and there are a few more I'd like to watch.  But I don't have weeks of my life to dedicate to his slow-paced delivery of what could be riveting work.  We watched The Roosevelts, and learned some fascinating things about Teddy and some about FDR, but we couldn't finish it.  Fourteen hours was just WAAAAAY too much time to dedicate to that subject.

 

 

Same with his WWII documentary, The War.  Not only was it ponderously slow, it focused on very minor issues and battles and completely glossed over tremendously important but otherwise not-well-covered battles.  Two of the most egregious were Midway and the Battle of Leyte Gulf.  When you're spending 14 hours on a deep-dive documentary about World War II, you absolutely have to cover these pivotal moments. 

 

So no, I haven't watched his Vietnam piece, and I'm not sure I'm going to.  I'd rather watch his Baseball film.

 

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I like Ken Burns material.  With it one requires patience & time  that many of us don't have (including me).  He dives into history like a good author -  much detail and much story telling along the way. I tell my wife a good history book is like a novel only true (or at least we hope the material is represented properly).  A good historian will paint the picture in  your mind so that you are experiencing it and visualizing it in a way  you can relate to and understand. Burns does the same thing with video.  I have his Dust Bowl series and it was interesting.  However, most of us have a mind set based on TV shows solving every problem in an hour's time or a movie in two hours, that makes it difficult to sit through the hours of story telling that Burns does.  So, I have to pace myself and set a side a certain time during the week and try to spread it out over a series of weeks so that I'm not overloaded with info and then loose focus.   I once did an 'all weekender' viewing of one of his series in full and at the end of the weekend, my wife was angry at me for time wasted, I was tired, and I couldn't remember much of it due to the overload. 

I have a huge one volume book on Vietnam - it will be interesting to see how it compares to the Burns series. 

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I have only watched the first episode.  I found it really really good.


One part of it I found fascinating was how he showed what was taking place in the late 1800s ultimately came to be what caused the entire conflict.  

The history of Ho Chi Min was very interesting also.


I missed last nights episode. (totally forgot about it).  I wish PBS would air last nights episode sometime the next day for the people who missed it.  Now, I'm basically screwed of being able to watch the second episode until sometime in the future when the series is aired again.

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OK....I found that they have all the episodes on line so I'm able to be caught up.

 

This show is fascinating to me.  I love history, especially history of military conflicts....specifically, what causes them, how they are carried out, what lead to the result and the lingering effects.

 

With all of these, the Vietnam war is fascinating.  So far, the show is up to about the middle of the Johnson term and the military build up and bombing has started.....and things are falling apart.  Two things are interesting here when comparing it to now:

 

a)  The politicians involved have no clue what they are doing.  It's like they are throwing mud against the wall and seeing what sticks.  

 

b)  The lying from the government on what they are doing.  Now, this is particularly interesting to me, because up till Trump, the government has been at least fairly open about what they are doing with troops.  They would announce when and how many troops are deploying, how many in theatre....etc.   HOWEVER, Trump campaigned on how stupid it is we advertise what we are doing militarily.  So....now we have a much less transparent administration with these things.  

 

Flat out, I don't trust anything this administration does and to me, that's an extremely dangerous position to be in with a psychotic hot head like Trump.

 

 

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