"Mainstreaming Ken Burns' Jazz (2001) for a National Audience": (Jazz originally aired on PBS in January, 2001)

Film Reviews | Regular Feature films. Of Michael Bay, director of Pearl Harbor, he had this to say, "tìiose type of filmmakers should be sent running home screaming with rectal cancer," for which he attracted a good deal of publicity. There is an admirable attention to detail and "authenticity " in Enigma, especially in the recreation of Bletchley Park, where the code-breaking team worked with a combination of mathematical genius andprimitive computertechnology. In terms of historical fact, though, the thriller form does create its own problems, attributing much greater influence over events to its central character, Tom, than is plausible. If there was an individual genius who deserves special recognition for his work and influence as a code breaker, it was the mathematician Alan Turing , who was later persecuted for his homosexuality and committed suicide, not the hero figure Tom, played in the film by Dougray Scott. But this is fiction and a thriller at that, so one can't be too purist about accuracy. The point is that in this war film there are no absurd distortions of historical events in the interests of patriotism or melodrama. Harris's tirade against Hollywood can be partly attributed to the film treatment of a previous book, Fatherland. According to him, "the studio bosses consulted the target audiences, 16-21 year old Americans, and discovered that they didn't even know there had been a Second World War let alone who had won it." Such a sweeping statement about ignorance is hard to believe but it does illustrate that what one generation takes for granted as common knowledge barely exists in the consciousness of another . (To draw a parallel briefly with Sokurov's film, it would be less plausible that Russians in their late teens would know nothing of Lenin and Stalin). Perhaps it was with ignorance in mind that Bestor Cram and Mike Majoros created the documentary Unfinished Symphony. This thoughtful retrospective film about the Vietnam War includes some terrible footage ofbarbarity and suffering, and reminds us of the guilt and alienation felt by so many ofthe war's veterans. Borrowing its three-part structure from the soundtrack, Gorecki's "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," the film focuses on a 1971 anti-war protest in Lexington , Massachusetts, by returned veterans. The protest, which resulted in the largest arrest in the history of the state, spurs a greater discussion about civil disobedience within a democratic society. The allusions to Paul Rexgre^s ride from Concord to Boston and Thoreau's "Civil Disobedierrce," written nearby at Waiden Pond, give the debate a historical depth. At the same time, one is made aware that agitprop style protest is also a form of therapy enabling veterans to come to terms with their own personal torments. However, it's hard not to conclude that such a relatively highbrow approach to the subject matter will ensure that this will appeal to a limited, and older, audience. If the intention is to challenge us all to contemplate the legacy of Vietnam , as the film's promotional material suggests, then something more is needed to connect with a younger generation and those new voters who, at the next presidential election, will have been born twelve years or so after the war ended. Of the few films shown at Edinburgh that clearly could be classified as historical, my personal favorite was Gjergj Xhuvani's Slogans. The absurdity of hard-line communism in Albania, under the iron rule of Enver Hoxha, is treated with beguiling wit and charm. What is more, the film seems to work equally well as an allegory about human resistance to the oppression oforthodoxies and the policing oflanguage. This gives it poignancy for societies apart from those behind the old iron curtain. When teacher Andre arrives in a small mountainous village from the capital Tirana, he soon comes to realize that life is largely governed by local apparatchik bullies. At the top of the hierarchy of state-led duties for school children is the construction of slogans out of painted rocks on a nearby mountain side. The new teacher gets a choice of slogan for his new class. He can have either "Hail the Revolutionary Spirit" or "American...