An interesting collection of errors, Barbara.

I can imagine many people looking at this list and calling it "nitpicking."
I would bet Ken Burns would.  Many of them involve photographs that do not
match up with the words of the script--but rather suggest a linkage.

This is where scholarly rigor is important, and the difference between
scholarly work and what Ken Burns does.  Then again, he is not a scholar,
and should not be judged by that standard.

But he should be judged by what he is--a documentary filmmaker. The word
"documentary" seems to me to be a word he interprets more liberally than
others might.  As witnessed by your list.

I would like to propose an error that I think is a bigger one than many of
these.  You point out his error in "A True Story," having the speaker call
him "Mister Clemens" instead of "Misto C______," as written in the text. An
even bigger error is when the narrator of the film says that he wrote down
her words, exactly as she spoke them.  This is an example to me of his
biggest errors:  taking too much at face value. The subtitle of the story
says "Repeated word for word as I heard it." And Burns buys that--the only
problem is that it is not true, at all, as anyone who has examined the
manuscript knows. He made substantial changes. One of the scholarly advisers
for the film, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, notes that fact in "Was Huck
Black?"--so surely Burns could have checked that.

So what? Well, as others have noted, the sequence on "A True Story" was one
of the centerpieces of the whole Burns film. He uses it to make some of his
strongest points about race and about Twain. Obviously he spent much time on
this sequence--but he gets a key fact very wrong. The implications of this
are actually quite important.  If Twain wrote this down verbatim, as he
claimed, he becomes nearly invisible, the artist disappearing and a copyist
emerging. Copying those words from a black speaker, word for word.  All "a
true story."  But it isn't word for word, not at all, and not "a true story"
 in the way he is claiming. Surely the story and most of the words came from
Mary Cord, but just as surely much of the shape of this and many of the
words came from the artist Mark Twain.  The difference is huge to a scholar
or critic--and ought to be, if not as huge, at least important to a
documentary filmmaker.

Nitpicking? I guess that's a judgment call. Twain called his piece "A True
Story." Ken Burns calls his film the same, I am sure.  But neither is
"repeated word for word, as I heard it."
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2002 7:45 PM
Subject: Re: Nitpicking


> John,
>
> The list of errors I've compiled thus far is at:
>
> http://www.twainquotes.com/burnsmistakes.html
>
>
> Barb