Thanks to Martha Day for posting the list of articles on Ken Burns. I've just read Jane Censer's article in American Quarterly (June 1992), and disagreed with her conclusion that ""The Civil War", as an inadequate teaching aid, is representative of visual presentations which are invaluable for conveying the sense and "feel" of the past, but "cannot give insights into some topics (such as ideas and ideologies)." To refute this generalization I'd cite Peter Cohen's "Architekture des Untergangs = The Architecture of Doom" (1989, distributed by Icarus Films), a complex and thought-provoking film that argues that Nazism cannot be understood simply as a political phenomenon: it considers Nazi atrocities a logical extension of an attempt to create a more beautiful world. According to the Nazi aesthetic, art was to serve as the basis of a new civilization, providing the means, through extreme violence, of bringing beauty back to the world, to counteract the miscegenation and degeneration that had defiled it. Hitler's eccentric cultural ambitions, his associations with artists and architects, with opera (particularly Wagner) and antiquity are thus seen as the source of an absurd ideology that was transferred into a hellish reality, where anti-semitism became a form of pest control (quite literally, in a Nazi documentary from the time), art was linked to hygiene, and Nazi medicine provided the aesthetic means to purify the corpus of the German "Volk", culminating in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Cohen presents a complex historical thesis, to my mind quite successfully. His re-interpretation of the essence of Nazism uses extensive documentary materials (photographs, newsreels, etc.), in a way that makes an interesting comparision to Burns' "Civil War." Perhaps Cohen is more of a historian, while Burns is a mythmaker, his seamless narrative presenting itself as the "truth", a documentary record of the Civil War as it really was, rather than a complex and contradictory phenomenon that has to be theorized for it to make some kind of sense. **************************************** Philip Jackson [log in to unmask] National Library of Australia ****************************************