Large chunks of the series are better than anything Burns has previously done, and that’s saying something. “Ken Burns’’ has become such a cultural brand name that people overlook how he earned that status. The man is a superb filmmaker - not just documentarian, but filmmaker, someone who integrates image and sound, motion and emotion, as well as any director currently at work in America.
As a sheer act of organization, “The National Parks’’ is a phenomenal achievement. The other series all unfolded chronologically, as this one does, too: from the setting aside of Yosemite Valley in 1864, for “public use, resort, and recreation,’’ up to the present. So the creation of the best-known parks will figure in specific episodes (Acadia is in episode three, for example), but it’s the development of the parks as a whole that drives the series.
In Sunday night’s broadcast, we see the emergence of the parks idea, with Yosemite and then Yellowstone (the first “national’’ park, since the federal government initially designated its administration to California). Monday night Theodore Roosevelt charges to the fore, and Mount Rainier, Crater Lake, and Mesa Verde are incorporated into the system. Tuesday night the National Park Service is formed, and so on.
If chronology provides the series’ spine, the land itself is its flesh and muscle. The primary emphasis is, as it has to be, on space far more than time. Required to do vastly more location shooting than in any of his previous series - don’t worry, there’s also plenty of Burns’s stock in trade, moving the camera over archival photographs - he shows he does space awfully well. It helps that Burns has 84 million acres to choose from, including some of the most magnificent places on the planet: Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Zion, Denali (the list is breathtakingly long).
