Ken burns' massive documentary about the history of jazz, which ran on a BBC midnight slot till June, tripled sales of jazz CDs in the US. It is one of the longest single subject documentaries ever shown on British television, and in scale and gravitas gives The World At War a run for its money. Whilst the jazzerati noted its various weaknesses and ellipses, television critics were largely exuberant. The consensus was that this is what quality television should aspire to. It has been seen as a brave, defining statement in Jane Root's new BBC2, aimed at baby boomers with attention spans longer than Channel 4's Generation Y-ers.
It had the same impact in the US. There, Ken Burns is the imprimatur of the Public Broadcasting Service, he is its licence to continue. I bet he's mentioned in the introduction to its annual report. His trademark marriage of the epic and the pedagogic has defined the high style on which much of PBS's often routine programming coat-tails.
Jazz was sponsored by General Motors; a fact that produces a wry smile among documentarists. GM once, indirectly and unwillingly, made a less public-spirited contribution to the documentary form in Michael Moore's 1989 film, Roger and Me. In the 1980s GMs' Chairman, Roger Smith, and his new regime axed 30,000 jobs in Flint, Michigan. The dogged Moore tried to confront him with the social damage done. The film was a hilarious, rage-fuelled letter bomb about how one town became a rat-infested crime capital.
Consideration of Roger and Me casts Jazz in a less flattering light. Moore's film was edgy, filmic and first person, as its title suggests. In comparison, Jazz is aesthetically stolid. It chooses a very conventional explicatory mode and sticks to it. It is vanilla documentary, bloodlessly, grandiosely schoolmarmy. It misses by a mile most of the great things that documentary films can at their best do and falls into all the formula traps. As a vehicle for information, a conveyor belt, it is exceptional and I too will buy more music because of it. But it never becomes more complex than that. It has no shape, no driving energy, nothing pre-intellectual.
Jazz's recent overvaluation raises a perennial problem for documentary and, perhaps, criticism in general. Films which are even halfway good are feted because the great stuff, the electrifying films, are seldom seen-decaying in bad prints, unyieldingly long, resistant to television slots and under-scheduled by art house cinema programmers. It is not only in comparison with the wit and passion of Roger and Me that Jazz falls down. Consider Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On; Viktor Kossakovsky's Wednesday; Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (and his new postscript to it, Sobibor 14th Oct 1943, 4pm); Juris Podnieks' Hello Do You Hear Us?; The Maysles' Grey Gardens, Mikhail Kalatozov's I am Cuba; Marcel Oph?ls' The Sorrow and the Pity; Shohei Imamura's History of Post-war Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess; John Huston's Let There be Light; Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland!; Maximillian Schell's Marlene. Compared to these dazzling documentaries (which, I repeat, are seldom shown), Jazz looks very ordinary indeed.
So what makes the others extraordinary? It's hard to generalise, but I'll take a deep breath and try.
(1) Their shapes are not discernible from the start. Their ends are unforeseeable. They change shape. (2) Unlike planned fiction films, which sometimes steal documentary's clothes for a bit of edge, they have uncertainty built into their structures. (Ken Burns' intellectual surety precludes this.) (3) They avoid "slot aesthetics," the ways in which films are tailored to fit into a television schedule. These include "grabbiness" at the beginning, stating your theme up front then simply repeating it in the body of the film, and resistance to ambiguity. (4) Less tangibly, the movements of these films are contained within them. Jazz moves to the beat of something external (history): it creates no inner pulse and, ironically, no syncopation. (5) These films are "messy," not everything fits the structure (as in point 2). (6) None of them are pedagogic. This should be obvious. If a film sets out solely to impart information, it is no more important that a training video. (7) They are not reducible to what they are "about." This is the old "subject shouldn't be contained within form" rule. (8) They all have action in the present, even when they are relating past events. We must see decisions being made on camera. (9) They all contain some kind of gap, something lost, unfilmable, inexpressible. (10) Their commentaries, if they have one (and most don't), couldn't be stripped off and used as a radio play in itself.
It's remarkable, in fact, how much can be generalised about this random selection of documentaries. What is more, these ten commandments can be boiled down to just two. Great documentaries must build on the uncertainty of the process, and they must not contain their subject matter as a jug contains water; they must be it.
Jazz fails on both counts, so it could be a book, or a radio series. Great films could not possibly, ever, be either. n
