Ken Burns Presents: The West Review At Amazon.
![]() |
Ken Burns Presents: The West Review At Amazon..
Product: Ken Burns Presents: The West Amazon Price: Sale Price Too Low To Display Availability: In Stock |
Compare Prices on Ken Burns Presents: The West
The West
DVD ~ Peter Coyote
Buy,Download, Or Stream Ken Burns Presents: The West! Click Here
When some people spend the word “documentary” they seem to imbue it with an expectation of total objectivity–as if one could eliminate all traces of cultural experience from one’s makeup and gawk a vivid path of ultimate “truth” simply by the act of becoming a filmmaker. Nonsense. We are all a product of our times and of the culture in which we were raised and educated. Documentaries are always, always, always selective. There is no such thing as total objectivity, either in writing or in filmmaking.
That said, this is an enormously necessary exertion to sift through an incredible cross-section of materials and condense them into 12 and 1/2 hours of very viewable, enlightening and often extremely captivating stories. Yes, that’s moral, I said “condense”. The documents available on the history of the West literally beget many museums, and unless you understanding to exhaust every waking moment of your life from the time you learn to read until the day you die as a serious scholar of western lore, you will never rep a complete knowledge of the subject. This is an outstanding difficulty to provide a distillation of the sense and feel of the west from the earliest days of indian tribal inhabitation to the passing of the frontier. To have even attempted that feat in a 12 and 1/2 hour presentation took courage and imagination. Although I have often grumbled to myself about Ken Burn’s relentless imposition of an over-stylized montage technique on the presentation of his documentaries, I have nothing but astonished admiration for his accomplishment in crafting this mini-series. Bravo.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Ken Burns Presents: The West! Click Here
Yes, yes, it doesn’t stammer the whole anecdote of the West. Yes, it is selective. And, yes, there are other things that could have been included. C’mon guys, stop sitting encourage like Monday morning quarterbacks and griping about what is missing from this presentation. Contemplate about what he WAS able to enact! He captured a sense of sweep, a sense of the development of the frontier, and an extraordinarily intelligent impression of the cultural, religious, social, economic and racial collisions that occurred in this substantial plot over a period of a couple of centuries. Salubrious pains, what do you want, blood? If he had never made another movie, this series would unexcited have placed him in the pantheon of American documentarians. No one is claiming that this is the only document you need to exhibit yourself to in order to attain perfect opinion of the history of the West. But it’s certainly one absolute requirement for inclusion in any attempt to understand the subject.
For any collector of Western memorabilia and lore, for any teacher who wants to enrich a class in American studies, and for anyone at all who simply wishes to fetch a sense of the West in our history, this is a must-have status of dvds to add to your collection. It should be available in every school and public library and rerun regularly on PBS. It’s the best thing Burns has ever done–the Civil War series notwithstanding–and those who chirp like diminutive toads that it should have been better are welcome to obtain an inconvenience to declare and compose a version that improves on it. Don’t maintain your breath until that happens.
Now I’m about to suggest a bit of social heresy in this day of 30 second commercials and infinitesimal attention spans. If you really want to obtain the ultimate impact, try total immersion. Determine a rainy or snowy Saturday or Sunday, lay in a goodly supply of your approved food and drink, lock the door and turn your phone off (!), and then do a total viewing immersion. Look the entire series from beginning to waste in one marathon day. And by the method, treat yourself to some solitude. That’s lawful, do it alone; employ one day watching this without having to pay attention to the needs or attitudes or reactions of a viewing companion. Let it surround and soak into your senses. Embrace the barrage of images and sounds. Topple headlong into that unbelievable collection of stories about people and places and events. It will change you. You won’t approach away with total rob of details, but you will do a recent sensory and shimmering appreciation of our history that is geometrically greater than watching it piecemeal with days or weeks intervening between the episodes. Later on, after some time has passed, you can go wait on and notion it again in the self-contained capsules; that time through, you will own the detail. Go ahead, try it. Challenge your mind.
Well done, Mr. Burns! My hat is off to you. And thank you PBS for reminding us that our brains are for thinking.
This is an extraordinary part of filmmaking. This is Ken Burns’ long-overlooked documentary masterpiece about the birth and transformation of the West of America. Every “chapter” is more moving than the last. This doc is also very well-balanced as far as the white Native American points of conception. “The West” spans the devastation and ingenuity new to American History. This doc is completely overshadowed by “Baseball” and “The Civil War,” (IMDB.com has thousands of votes for those two and only about 100 for “The West”) but this is as estimable as it gets. Go West!
Pennsylvania Auto Insurance Quotes
Texas Auto Insurance Quotes
Electronic Cigarettes
Hostgator Coupons
Wedding Album Design

