I was born into the middle of the Vietnam war – by the time I was 10, it seemed to me that it had always been going on – and like a lot of people of my generation, I am intimately familiar with its slang and its acronyms, while pretty sketchy on its origins. But, in this case, the talking heads are survivors (from both the US and Vietnam), a large proportion of the pictures move all by themselves, and the music is the sort of acid rock that seems to go well with scenes of fire and smoke. The Vietnam War bears many of its epic predecessor’s hallmarks: talking heads, sonorous narration (Peter Coyote, who has Emmy-winning form in this area), period music and a meticulous approach to sequential narrative. In fact, the “Ken Burns effect” is the name commonly used for the editing software option that allows you to pan and zoom across still photographs, mimicking the technique so extensively deployed in his most famous documentary, The Civil War. He shares the directing credit with long-time collaborator Lynn Novick, who probably isn’t getting enough attention for her contribution, but Burns’s name is so indelibly associated with a certain style of film-making it’s almost an adjective. The release of a new 10-part Ken Burns documentary is always a big deal, although this one seems particularly timely. Let’s stop looking at the Vietnam war through the prism of subsequent events, it says.
This sequence drags the viewer back in time, beyond some indeterminate point where history takes on the imprint of inevitability.
In the opening sequence of The Vietnam War (BBC4), grainy footage rolls backwards: bombs fall up, riot police back away from protesters, villages and draft cards reconstitute themselves out of the flames.
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