Trash -- Ken Burns
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Ken Burns is the premier auteur of the extended television documentary. Catapulted to fame by his series on the American Civil War, he has racked up success after success with his fearlessly protracted Baseball, Jazz, and The Roosevelts. Burns aficionados, however, regard the under-appreciated Trash, his meticulous and comprehensive history of the Eurotrash aesthetic, as his greatest work.
Pinpointing Eurotrash’s genesis in Eisenstein’s decision to film the final ten minutes of Ivan the Terrible, Part II, in color, Burns' Trash carefully analyzes the fits and starts of the movement’s early development – for example, Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra and Godard’s Masculin Féminin – its apotheosis in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers and Peter Sellars’ production of Handel’s opera, Giulio Cesare, and its eventual decline, epitomized by Showtime’s The Tudors. A high point of Burns’ 36 episode series is Episode 18, a heated discussion by cinéastes Herakles Ó Meara, Vivien Sjurd Sólyom and Vohu Manah Rostam Krizman about whether Kiss Me Kate can be considered as part of the Eurotrash canon.
Here is a section from Episode 23 of Trash, which is devoted to the controversy that embroiled the Eurotrash movement in the 1980’s, over the degree to which Franz Schubert’s sexual identity crisis influenced his work.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Ken Burns is the premier auteur of the extended television documentary. Catapulted to fame by his series on the American Civil War, he has racked up success after success with his fearlessly protracted Baseball, Jazz, and The Roosevelts. Burns aficionados, however, regard the under-appreciated Trash, his meticulous and comprehensive history of the Eurotrash aesthetic, as his greatest work.
Pinpointing Eurotrash’s genesis in Eisenstein’s decision to film the final ten minutes of Ivan the Terrible, Part II, in color, Burns' Trash carefully analyzes the fits and starts of the movement’s early development – for example, Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra and Godard’s Masculin Féminin – its apotheosis in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers and Peter Sellars’ production of Handel’s opera, Giulio Cesare, and its eventual decline, epitomized by Showtime’s The Tudors. A high point of Burns’ 36 episode series is Episode 18, a heated discussion by cinéastes Herakles Ó Meara, Vivien Sjurd Sólyom and Vohu Manah Rostam Krizman about whether Kiss Me Kate can be considered as part of the Eurotrash canon.
Here is a section from Episode 23 of Trash, which is devoted to the controversy that embroiled the Eurotrash movement in the 1980’s, over the degree to which Franz Schubert’s sexual identity crisis influenced his work.