Ken Burns: A Master of Documentary Filmmaking
KEN BURNS, the documentary filmmaker, was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1953, raised mostly in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is fascinated by United States history, by how restless a people we are, how competitive, always striving, always wanting better and more. Burns loves the phrase from the Declaration of Independence “the pursuit of happiness,” and many of his films are about the myriad ways we have tried to expand our reach and pursue happiness. Among these documentary films are works on baseball, jazz, the Brooklyn Bridge, Mark Twain, Lewis & Clark, Prohibition, World War Two, the National Parks, the Roosevelts, and Vietnam.
But it’s Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary that is his best-known and probably his best work. It first played in September of 1990, nine episodes covering the mammoth subject of the Civil War, telling it as a military story, a political story and a social upheaval.
This nine-part film was a triumph in many ways. It attracted more viewers than any program ever shown on PBS. It launched a new national conversation about the Civil War. After “The Civil War” showed, many college professors found their Civil War history courses heavily subscribed for the first time.
To the classic documentary filmmaker’s problem ‘How do you make something dramatic without film footage?’ Burns attacked the problem skillfully and from multiple angles. He did some of the obvious things: used a first rate script, co-written by the historian Geoffrey Ward and Burns’ brother Ric. He hired a first-rate narrator, David McCullough, to read the script.
Then he cast people with evocative voices to read the words of those who had lived through the war and written of it in letters and diaries. Sam Waterston became Abraham Lincoln; Morgan Freeman was Frederick Douglass; Jason Robards was Ulysses Grant; Garrison Keillor was Walt Whitman; Horton Foote was Jefferson Davis; Jody Powell was Stonewall Jackson; George Plimpton was George Templeton Strong; Studs Terkel was Benjamin Butler.
There was no film or video footage of the war or its people, but Burns made skillful use of thousands of still photographs, from Matthew Brady and others, and used a panning camera to make these still photos appear to move. He used paintings. He used sound effects like birdsong, and the rustling of wind in the trees.
The civil war documentary was masterly in its use of music, with the mournful fiddle tune “Ashokan Farewell” recurring throughout, and deft uses of “Dixie” and “Battle Cry of Freedom” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Shenandoah.” Burns gave us “Marching Through Georgia” as an upbeat march, reflecting the northern view, but also as a lament, reflecting the (white) southern view. The same tune, played at different times and in different moods is a Ken Burns trademark.
Burns consulted historians with expertise in the period, sometimes interviewed them on camera, and Shelby Foote was so compelling with his southern accent, deep knowledge and homely wisdom that, Foote too enjoyed a burst of fame, and even got a few marriage proposals.
Ken Burns worked five years on this film, on a modest budget, and when he was done George Will wrote “Our Iliad has found its Homer.” Ken Burns was 37 years old and suddenly famous.
The triumph was both aesthetic and commercial, and making it was, arguably, an act of civic virtue — but that doesn’t mean the history was first-rate. Several generations of young children used to listen to grizzled Union or Confederate veterans telling their war stories and, in a way, Ken Burns filming Shelby Foote wasn’t so different.
For the person who wasn’t there at Gettysburg, who hasn’t read the literature or thought systematically about the Civil War, what that person wants is to hear a good story, and Shelby Foote tells it. But Burns seemed to swallow Foote’s belief that the war wasn’t really about the justice or injustice of slavery; but about the South resisting the dictates of a meddling Federal government. In Burns’ film, the southern leaders are courtly, the men on both sides brave and honorable, and although the carnage was real and very sad, both sides came together after the war, and made up their differences.
Burns has described his work as “telling American stories without a political bent.” Some philanthropists in Boston, Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine, adore Burns’ work and have decided to help finance it. To which a certain number of documentary film-makers groan, as Ken Burns is already getting far more money from PBS than any of his peers, and doesn’t need the Lavines, and because the Burns films take few risks either in presentation or in point of view.
In a nation so politically and culturally split between left and right, each with its own media sources, some Americans are grateful to Ken Burns for trying to show “both sides” of an issue, to present opposing perspectives in the same work. Burns did the same thing in his documentary on Vietnam, allowing both hawks and doves their say. He saw himself as not taking a point of view and, by doing so, helping to bind up the nation’s wounds on the subject of Vietnam.
But there is simply no way to present the past in a political vacuum; at least implicitly, one must take a political point of view. The photos chosen, the experts consulted, the clips chosen from the interviews with those experts — all reflect certain assumptions about what the past is, who gets to teach us about it, and how persuasive they are.
It’s quite possible that America would be better served by quirkier, more overtly political films coming from multiple perspectives, launched by little-known filmmakers. Yet the Ken Burns ship sails on and its captain regards himself not only as a great artist but as a kind of national healer, and with all this adoration coming at him, you can’t really blame the guy.