Baseball

The society of the spectacle takes shape…  Burns is certainly a romantic, a liberal, and longwinded, but that doesn’t hold this back from being the absolute monument it is remembered as today… he wants to argue that baseball is this eccentric + eclectic outgrowth of America’s development during and after the Industrial Revolution, but I think Burns has the “lame” or “boring” prefix attached to him in the zeitgeist (not only due to length but also) because he isn’t pointed enough—instead he leans on this (kinda pretentious) wide net he casts, capturing everything between said romanticism and labor history to feign objectivity (which is just kinda silly in a documentary both maintaining a folksy lineage and full unsubstantiated stories, mythical or plain inaccurate) It’s a good argument and is made cohesively/correctly, certainly not the strongest it could be, but that’s more a problem of how we consume sports than how Burns portrays its internal history… still, it’s ultimately a work made for fans of baseball, so it never questions why you, the viewer, watch baseball… it rarely ever tests the viewer’s comfort in significant ways even when it talks about the heinous exploitation and segregation involved in baseball’s history, there’s no call to action (duh), it’s merely an overview (not a critique) that always codifies and most often protects the institution being surveyed… it’s more focused on putting you in the shoes of fans or figures in the times and conditions they faced, flexing the sport’s political/soft power muscles, embroiling the viewer in coinciding social dynamics, controlled and academic care for the material, and individualized torch passings between eras, focusing on difference over time rather than forming direct constellations between exploitation + segregation then and modern iterations now (especially as stadiums become more exclusive and youth sports become increasingly stratified) In terms of documentary filmmaking involving archival footage, there isn’t really anybody near Burns’ level… some truly inspired editing and sequencing choices littered throughout the work, everything from humor (Babe Ruth riding a fucking cow) to history (cut from first HOF class to KC Monarchs) to horror (the hollow hallways tied to the morphine story)… the Ken Burns Effect may be annoying on iMovie, but attaching the effect to Burns couldn’t be a better fit, nobody can move a camera through a still photo like he can and, further, can take the same photo, run the camera through it in a different direction, and covey an entirely separate tone… I think something very impressive about Burns that isn’t often mentioned is that he rarely hides anything in the subtext, everything is built to be digested in one go, it isn’t necessarily a positive thing (often feels like when he talks about one thing—some dominant old NL team—he’s tabling another thing for another time—segregation and black barnstorming—without portraying much of any implicit intersection besides the occasional, but welcome, hard cut) but it’s something he strives to be and succeeds so completely If I could describe this work in a word it’d be “based” because even though it might not be perfect, it’s so within itself and so confident that you just have to respect it and feel inclined to enjoy it even if it isn’t your usual cup of tea We should be eternally grateful that people like Buck O’Neil existed, incredible orator and ambassador, if I ever got a little bored and heard his voice I instantly shot up and tuned back in