The Ken Burns Effect (Feb. 27, 2010)
My visit with documentary filmmaker left me feeling even more respectful about his skills as an observer and master storyteller than I was was before meeting with him.
The focus for documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has historically been – history.
Because of his Emmy Award-winning 1990 series on the Civil War and his 2007 series on World War II, his cinematic chronicles of jazz, baseball, Thomas Jefferson and more, the filmmaker has been called the greatest documentarian of the day. In the words of The Baltimore Sun’s David Zurawik, he’s also the filmmaker who “showed us a new way of looking at our collective past and ourselves.”
Not surprisingly, Burns’ own history has played a big part in his artistic vision. That’s only clear in retrospect, though, he says, while sitting behind a project-laden desk in the barn-top studio that’s located behind his home in Walpole, N.H.
“My very first memory is of my dad building a darkroom when I was 2 or 3 years old in the basement of our house,” says Burns. “Very early on, I remember that early magic when you’re in the darkroom with the eerie light and the pictures come up,” he says, recalling times spent beside his amateur photographer dad in Brooklyn, then Delaware and Michigan. “Imagine what that was like for a kid.”
The power of image
His father, Robert Kyle Burns, was a cultural anthropologist who would take the family for the first year of Kenneth Lauren Burns’ life in 1953 to study the culture of Saint Veran, a French Alpine village.
Seeking documentation of that time, Burns reaches behind his desk, where one of his 10 golden Emmy Award trophies looks out like a ship’s figurehead. From a bookcase that holds a bust of Abraham Lincoln gazing down, Burns pulls out an April 1959 edition of The National Geographic. In it is an article by his father chronicling the trip to Saint Veran. Among several of his father’s black-and-white photographs in the magazine is a photo of Burns as a baby, with the caption — “Kenny Burns takes lunch from mother’s hand.”
“This became a kind of iconic thing for me all my life,” says Burns with wonder still in his voice. “I remember seeing him print these photographs.
An aspiring filmmaker, Burns was given an 8-millimeter movie camera for his 17th birthday in Ann Arbor, Mich. And, according to one account, he used it to film an expose of a nearby factory.
He made a “strange, fortuitous” choice, in attending newly created Hampshire College, from which he graduated in 1975. His film teachers there were documentary still photographers Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes.
“They were uninterested in what I was interested in, the Hollywood route,” says the barely bearded, |56-year-old filmmaker, who was dressed in jeans and a sweater over a T-shirt. “Very shortly, I had all my molecules re-arranged and was wanting to make documentary films.”
Burns, who returned to Hampshire College last year to help dedicate the new “Jerome Liebling Center for Film, Photography, and Video,” with a Ken Burns wing, recalls students screening their 8- and 16-mm projects in the same space where Liebling and Mayes displayed their iconic still images.
“Can you imagine what it was like for a 19-year-old to see the heroic, immortal pictures of cadavers that he took, or heroic men working in the slaughterhouses, or any of the pictures that he and she took at that time?” Burns asks. “(They) were just transformational.”
“The power of an individual image — a still image — to convey complex information: That’s what I learned all my life. I think it was amplified at Hampshire, and then applied in what I’ve done. The DNA, the building block, of what we do, is still the image. We treat the old photographs as if they’re live, and we treat the live cinematography as if they’re paintings.”
‘Waking the dead’
If his father’s influence as a cultural anthropologist — along with those Alpine images — planted a seed for how Burns would later examine the societal dimensions of history, living with a mother who battled cancer during his childhood would profoundly affect the filmmaker’s life’s work.
“It took me until I was in my 40s to put it all together,” he says of the impact of his mother, Lyla Burns, the young biotechnician in that National Geographic photograph. “There was never a moment when she wasn’t sick. I mean dying, from (the time I was) 3 on I was immediately forced to confront her mortality and then, by 6 or 7, I was told she was going to die. Then, she died when I was a few months short of 12, a hugely traumatic event.” (His father died in 2001.)
Only in retrospect did a friend make clear the meaning of his creating historical documentaries: “Look what you do for a living: You wake the dead,” Burns recalls. “Then he said, Who do you think you’re really trying to wake up?’
(Burns’ younger brother, Ric, is an award-winning documentary filmmaker in his own right.)
Burns’ films stir voices from dusty diaries and letters. They juxtapose these with panning sepia-tone images so meticulously that Apple Computers has dubbed the technique “The Ken Burns effect” in its iPhoto and iMovie applications. For Burns, it’s a way “to get inside a photograph and resurrect the time in which it was taken and trust that that may be the closest representation we have to the past,” the filmmaker told a PhotoJournalism interviewer.
His genius for “getting inside” a historical photo and resurrecting the era and the moment in which it was taken was sparked by “Brooklyn Bridge,” a film he made after leaving Hampshire.
This first film, made with Florentine Films, was completed in 1981 and was an Academy Award nominee for best documentary.”I was drawn to the story of it,” he says of the landmark bridge. “But I realized, since it’s pre-cinema, that the only way you were going to tell it was through still photography.”
What the filmmaker soon learned, though, was that relying on still images for a motion picture wasn’t limiting; It was as liberating as his Hampshire College education had been.
“When you’ve got some footage of Babe Ruth running around the bases, the only thing you can really talk about is Babe Ruth running around the bases,” said Burns. “But if you’ve got a beautiful portrait, a head shot of Babe Ruth, of which there are many spectacular ones, you can talk about him running around the bases. But you can also talk about his unhappy childhood on the Baltimore wharves, you can talk about his difficult off-the-field life, his problems with wives, money and teammates, you can talk about his celebrity. You can see into a kind of soul.”
Some documentary filmmakers have used re-creations to compensate for lack of historical film footage, but the most Burns has ever done is a segment of just a few minutes in his 1997 Lewis and Clark biography. Instead, he declares, “It is the (ability) of the individual image to present complex information without undue manipulation that I’m interested in.”
Bottom-up history
His approach is what has helped us become interested, as well.
“More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source,” the late historian Stephen Ambrose observed.
His series on national parks was watched by 34 million people, 39 million watched “Civil War,” 38 million watched “The War” and 43 million watched “Baseball” — “just the first time, not subsequent showings, not counting school showings or DVD sales” says Burns.
Growing up Burns never even thought of history as his favorite subject. However, at Hampshire, where his first student project was a film on Old Sturbridge Village, Burns says he realized “just intuitively, that there was this latent, untrained, absolute passion for American history.”
Burns’ real talent is in helping us discover “history from the bottom up,” enlivening it for people who might not ever think of picking up a multi-volume history of a war, or who don’t think they’re necessarily interested in jazz, the Shakers or baseball.
“It’s about people,” emphasizes Burns. “Even in the big series — or especially in the big series — the constituent building block there has been biography. Civil War’ is essentially a series of biographies … For World War II, we focused entirely on a bottom-up view of four geographically distributed American towns using the biographies of the people there as a way to tell about the most complicated event in American history.
“And I think it’s also about race,” he adds. “I don’t like to be very far from that because I do think it’s the central question. Afro-American history is at the center of our national existence.”
For that reason, race has been a key element in nearly all of Burns’ documentaries, from those dealing with jazz and baseball to the Civil War and of course, Thomas Jefferson.
“When you have our creed being written — the second sentence of Declaration of Independence — that all men are created equal,’ but he owns more than 100 human beings and doesn’t see the contradiction, then you know that race is at the center of who we are,” says Burns.
Upstairs, downstairs’
As Burns speaks, a photo portrait showing baseball great Jackie Robinson over his head seems to grow in prominence. It’s one of several posters from the filmmaker’s PBS documentaries that grace the walls of his offices. The framed promotional posters also adorn the walls of his production studios, which are in a Greek Revival house, on a side street in Walpole. Jack Johnson and Billie Holiday, along with Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, look on in each of the rooms, where more than a dozen production assistants, editors, researchers and interns work simultaneously on Burns’ upcoming works.
“There’s something incredibly difficult about how we work,” said Burns, who spent 10 years and more than $15 million making “America’s Parks” and is often involved in the writing, editing, filming and interviewing processes. “Our job is to make it look effortless.”
Along the way, he’s won 10 Emmy Awards, been nominated for two Oscars, won a Grammy Award, a Peabody Award and other recognition.
He travels around the country filming, fundraising, speaking at colleges and to groups. Then, he returns to the tranquility of this town along the Connecticut River. “To be able to come back here is so fantastically restorative. I can come in here at 6 a.m., as I did today, work a couple of hours, then go to the editing room, where I normally work from 8 to 5, then come back here to an hour’s worth of work, and be that close to my kids.” (Burns has three daughters, the youngest of whom just turned 5.
“That close” is the few hundred feet that separate his American Documentary offices and the 180-year-old house Burns moved to in 1979.
This spot next to home is where he and a handful of staffers do desk work on grant proposals, editing scripts, answering e-mails, or having phone conversations on one of the six projects he’s currently pushing ahead. This morning, there was also a phone call with a 13-year-old Somerville girl who’d written to him about her school project on a visit with her family to Denali National Park.
Before heading off to Boston late this afternoon for an interview with historian David McCullough on an upcoming six-or-seven part series on the Roosevelts, Burns heads to the editing room in his production studios, where he typically spends the bulk of his days.
Here, in a space dominated by computers, monitors and editing equipment, he’ll sit beside co-producer Paul Barnes and two production assistants. Each is armed with a 10-page notebook transcript of a filmed interview with Theodore Roosevelt scholar Patricia O’Toole. They are watching her image on a large monitor, to identify, number and bracket “selects” that could find a place in the series. The segments will trace the Roosevelts from Theodore to Franklin and Eleanor. Burns says this project is “a very interesting psychological drama but also, of course, an outward political history of the first half of the 20th century.”
In Burns’ own version of the ’70s television series “Upstairs, Downstairs,” editors, technicians, co-producers and researchers work in each old bedroom of this sprawling, overcrowded old house, with chandeliers overhead, wide-board wooden floors below and baroque molding on the walls.
One former closet has even been turned into an acoustically modified sound studio, with a large microphone for Burns to record the initial “scribe narration” of a documentary’s script, indicating his preferred pacing. It will be used to cue visual images and then it will be dubbed over by a professional narrator.
Bathtub gin to Dust Bowl
In one room, editors are looking over footage of baseball sequences for “The Tenth Inning,” the two-part follow-up to “Baseball,” due to air this fall on PBS.
“Baseball really reflects who we are as an American culture,” Burns says. “I thought, after 2004, wouldn’t it be great to update the series? Because, it continues to be a precise mirror.” The four-hour history of what’s taken place since “Baseball” left off, reflecting the changes in which “we’ve moved away from an African-American narrative to an Hispanic and Asian one (and) embraced the monetary foolishness that’s gotten us into so much trouble and the kind of pharmacological society we’ve become.”
In another room, interns pore over images for a three-part series on Prohibition.
“One’s image is always of Model Ts careening around rain-slicked Chicago streets with machine guns blasting,” Burns says with a smile.
The first episode takes place 100 years before Prohibition took effect, “when a very admirable idea, temperance, drinking less in a country filled with drunkards — masticated into a single-issue, right-wing lobbying effort that resulted in the 18th Amendment.”
The next two “Prohibition” episodes follows “a wonderfully complicated story that reminds you there’s nothing new under the sun, that everything we think is unique today — smear campaigns, contested elections, single-issue lobby groups, unfunded mandates, unintended consequences — are part of human dynamics.”
A third project, for which an intern is indexing computerized 1930s newspaper clippings, is a two-part history of The Dustbowl — what Burns calls “the greatest manmade, ecological catastrophe in American history, superimposed on the greatest economic catastrophe in the history of the world.”
There’s a relaxed feel in the production studios, with some workers walking around in their socks. Many are wearing blue fleece “America’s Parks” vests, yet all of them are pushing forward on “Tenth Inning” and then “Prohibition,” with “Dust Bowl” and “The Roosevelts” ramping up behind.
Beyond those projects are others in the offing: a major series on Vietnam timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 2005, a documentary on country music, and a film on the 1989 Central Park jogger rape case in which five black and Latino youth were convicted for a crime they didn’t commit. (Sarah Burns, the filmmaker’s daughter, is completing a book based on her Yale thesis six years ago on the watershed incident and will be a co-producer of the documentary.)
“No matter how hard people try,” Burns says, “history always ends up being exclusive. I’ve struggled really hard to paint, with as a broad a stroke as I can, without sacrificing specificity and honesty. I want these to be honest, complicated portraits that are unafraid of controversy and tragedy, but also are drawn to the things that animate our souls.”
And people, by the millions, are truly animated by these stories of people.
“I’m stunned by the variety of people who write to me,” Burns says. “It belies the superficial argument that PBS is elitist. I’ve been stunned by the number of people who write who have been moved to change their feelings to some degree about race. I’ve been stunned by how impossible it is to go anywhere in the United States and not end up — in an airport, in a small-town, in a diner — in a conversation with somebody that’s continuing a conversation they think they’ve already been having with me.”
From his small-town director’s perch, where he works to convey the breadth of American history, Burns adds, “It isn’t about celebrity. It’s about the need to tell me that their great-great-grandfather was in the Civil War, that their grandfather played Triple-A Baseball, that their father served in the Second World War, that their uncle was a jazz musician, that they just visited Denali National Park.”
Burns calls people’s eagerness to share that connection with him, “the highest form of compliment.”
– RICHIE DAVIS