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Into the Deep

April 28, 2010

In the summer of 2008, I had the opportunity to meet the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns and to serve as a consultant for his film on the American whaling industry, Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World.

I’ve been a fan of Burns’s work since watching The Civil War, the documentary series on which he collaborated with his brother Ken Burns, serving as co-producer and co-writer (with Geoffrey C. Ward). Ric is best known for the eight-part series New York: A Documentary Film, which offers a compelling portrait of the city and its cultural history. Burns’s New York remains a touchstone for the Writing New York lecture course that I teach every year with Bryan Waterman: it’s recommended viewing for the course and we show several clips from it in the course of the term. The film’s use of visual materials helps to make the history of New York more vivid for our students, and Burns’s stress on the city’s cosmopolitanism resonates with one of our course’s major themes. In addition, though, our use of the film clips enables the students to meditate on the documentary imperative, to think about the ways in which documentaries use devices such as music and experts to help persuade and about the ways in which fictions (whether on the page or on the screen) can also serve a documentary function.

It was great fun to meet Burns and his team, and to get a glimpse of how Burns puts films like New York and Into the Deep together. And now the film is set to premiere. It’ll be shown on PBS stations  on May 10 as part of the American Experience series. You can learn more about the film by visiting its page on the PBS website and by reading this press release. The website is itself an excellent education resource, with a photo gallery, historical timeline, and bibliography. The film is centered on two events in the history of American whaling: the famous sinking of the whaleship Essex by a whale and the attempt by its crew to reach the western coast of South America by sailing thousands of miles in their whaleboats, and the publication of Melville’s Moby-Dick.

I’ve been invited to a preview of Into the Deep next week at the Museum of Natural History next week. Stay tuned for a subsequent post about the film.

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Best Picture?

February 25, 2010

One of the programs that we’ve been conducting in the residence hall where I live is what we call our “Oscarfest”: we’ve been taking students to see all of the films that have been nominated for Best Picture (and making DVDs available for those that are no longer showing). We used to add in films with notable performances that weren’t nominated for Best Picture, but with that category expanded to ten this year, the only extra film we’re including is Crazy Heart.

At each of the post-film discussions at which I’ve been present, when the talk turns to a discussion of which film should be named Best Picture, the two films that inevitably become the subject of discussion are James Cameron’s Avatar and (his ex-wife) Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. I’ve seen the former twice (in IMAX); the latter is on the docket for a home viewing this weekend. Almost all of the students think that The Hurt Locker should win. They find it “powerful,” “groundbreaking,” and “realistic”; they think it “speaks” to their generation. They think it’s different from other war movies, which they see as action films that romanticize war.

The Hurt Locker may be that good. I’ll write about it once I’ve seen it. But the students’ comments make me wonder what war films they’ve actually seen. At least since Apocalypse Now (1979) almost thirty years ago, American war films have tended to be brooding meditations on the futility of war. Even films that overlay a more archetypal storyline — for example, Oliver Stone’s Platoon — or make use of a more conventional narrative structure — for example, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan — have made it a point to dramatize the ugly violence of war in visceral terms that assault the audience. So I’m wondering if I will find The Hurt Locker any more “gripping” or “realistic” than, say, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001).

Is the The Hurt Locker a breakthrough film in the war film genre? Or is it simply a well-made film that forces today’s college-age kids to come to terms with a war that they’ve taken for granted and about which they have worried less than the Vietnam generation did about its war?

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