I Fall To Pieces

Ken Burns’s massive Country Music is powerful, beautiful, and somehow still incomplete.

- Matt Zoller Seitz

KEN BURNS is influential enough to have inspired his own bit of cinema grammar, the Ken Burns Effect, which describes a certain way of panning and zooming over a still photo. But there’s another kind of Ken Burns Effect, a cycle of emotional and intellectual reactions, that viewers may experience yet again as they watch his latest, the 16-hour, eight-part Country Music.

This Ken Burns Effect begins with awe at the staggering too-muchness of a Burns project. In Country Music, it’s not just the running time or the breadth of research materials that impresses (100,000 photos, 700 hours of clips,101 interviews). It’s the typically Burnsian chutzpah of giving a monumental project a plain-vanilla title as simultaneously unassuming and grandiose as Jazz, Baseball, or The Civil War. It’s the endless parade of country, pop, rock, and folk superstars (including Wynton Marsalis and Jack White) and the soundtrack’s treasure-trove jukebox of hits— everything from “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and “Keep on the Sunny Side” to “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces.”

And it’s the intelligence of Burns’s filmmaking, which is sometimes mistaken for mere craftsmanship. Notice, for instance, how he regularly starts his trademark zoom-outs with close-ups of microphones, speakers, Victrola funnels, and transmitters befitting a tale of art spread by new technology. Or how he illustrates the idea of a musical legacy by collapsing past and present: Often, a surviving country star is asked to comment on a song written decades or even centuries before their birth, and they begin to sing the lyrics, and Burns layers their performance over a scratchy recording.