Ken Burns has been aptly described as "America's Storyteller." He might also be described as America's pre-eminent conversationalist. For the past 25 years he has been carrying on a deep and probing conversation with Americans about America. Perhaps more than anyone else today, he's a man listening closely to America's conversation with itself.
The primary core of Burns' richly layered cinematic art is conversation. Much of the narrative of his films is pieced together from the many extensive interviews he does with various luminaries while creating a film. The historical letters that are read into the film narratives by actors are written correspondence, conversation by mail.
So it was perfectly fitting that when Burns appeared at the Chicago Theatre before the 120 participants in the Tauck-Ken Burns Chicago Event, it was in the form of a conversation.
At previous Tauck-Ken Burns events, such as the Civil War event in Washington D.C. and the Jazz event in New Orleans, Burns' appearance took the form of a keynote address followed by a chance for Tauck guests to have a personal conversation with him in a receiving line.
At the Tauck-Ken Burns Chicago event last week, the keynote address by Burns was substituted with an interview of him by Jennifer Tombaugh, Tauck's president. Tombaugh and Burns sat in chairs on either side of a small table in the middle of the stage with a film screen behind, on which some excerpts of Burns' films were presented. After Burns addressed the questions asked by Tombaugh, he took questions from the audience.
After the interview Burns mingled with guests at a special reception in the ornate lobby of the Chicago Theatre. It was during the week of the debut of Burns' newly released series The Roosevelts and Burns' schedule is packed with events in various cities on top of his normal filmmaking activities.
The guests at the reception were visibly excited at the opportunity to participate in a conversation with the illustrious filmmaker. Burns' importance is hard to overstate. In 1990 with the release of The Civil War Ken Burns changed filmmaking. The 11-hour film series changed what documentary filmmaking was and what it would be henceforth. The Civil War not only changed the way Americans see their own history; it became a part of history itself.
With a series of monumental documentary films that began with "The Civil War" and proceeded with the 19-hour "Jazz" and many other works of varying scales, he accomplished things that had never been done before. He expanded the range of what a documentary film could be. He elevated documentary filmmaking to a new, higher level.
Many of the techniques he used were not strictly new. But though he used the range of standard documentary film techniques, in his hands they were extended and enriched. Interviews with experts were not new to documentary film, but Burns brought the practice to a new level with the quality of the interview subjects selected, the probing intimacy of the interviews, the extended range of the subject matter and even the lighting of the set and the angles of the shots.
He expanded the range of documentary material that could be drawn into a film, and stretched the possibilities for how that material would be incorporated. He used dramatic readings of letters and other writings by actors highly skilled in bringing out the full meaning of the words. He expanded the emotional range of documentary film.
Burns reached farther and deeper for the historical documents he used to make the viewer intimate with the history that was being revisited. He made history breathe and pulsate with life.
With all due acknowledgement of all the predecessors who brought the documentary film form to the place it was when Burns found it, it seems irrefutable that he expanded it from there. Documentary film as we have seen in the decades since the debut of "The Civil War" is a different, broader and deeper artistic medium than it was before.
One of his innovations came to bear his name as "The Ken Burns Effect." It referred to his use of still photo images in a roaming, searching, moving way. Though the technique was not strictly new to filmmaking, Burns adapted techniques from dramatic filmmakers like Hitchcock and put them into the documentary form.
I asked Burns for his own assessment of the changes he brought to filmmaking when I interviewed him in New Orleans at the Tauck-Ken Burns Jazz event last year.
"There was always a kind of advocacy/political documentary world," he said. "There was also, for lack of a better word, an educational world. And the educational world seemed like homework. I had always believed in the art of documentary and I always believed in telling complicated stories. I just didn't know that my interest would intersect with something I'm untrained in, which is history, and that it would sort of change the way people saw the presentation of history, that it didn't need to be expository. It wasn't homework. But it could be complicated, nuanced stories.
"And the success of The Civil War was phenomenal in 1990, a kind of watershed moment, not only because it's still the highest-rated film in the history of PBS, but it woke people up to something. And I think it made room for lots of other films to be made, not just the ones that I've done, but lots of other great films and also not-so-great films that others have made."
I asked him if he thought, as I did, that he personally introduced innovations to the form.
"We all stand on the shoulders of other people," he said, "but I really pioneered a kind of restless and exploring camera over the surfaces of still photographs, rather than holding them like a slide show at arms' length, sort of treating them the way a feature filmmaker might. I also think that using first person voices instead of the voice of God/third person narrator also helped add something to it, and the complicated sound effects tracks, period music, live cinematography that owed itself as much to painting. It's interesting. I wanted to take the motion pictures and treat them like paintings and take the photographs and treat them like they were alive, and we'll listen to them as well as look at them and explore them. All of those things together changed things."
(for the full text see "Ken Burns on Film, Jazz, History and America")
Burns has made some 25 films now and some are as long as 19 hours. He has already produced a tremendous volume of material and is still cranking out films at a head-spinning rate.
He mentioned at least six films that are at the moment either in production or pre-production. Today Burns has himself become like one of his characters, a modern industrial magnate, overseeing a production facility that cranks out movies at blinding speed, almost too fast to keep up with.
Burns made history, changed the form of film a quarter century ago. How do you follow that? It is given to few to revolutionize an art form more than once in a lifetime. Having been there and done that a quarter of a century ago, what is Burns to follow it with?
He is obviously choosing to spread the legacy as far as he can, to continue to produce films that explore the history of the soul of America. He continues to look at different aspects of American history and focus on different figures and events. He is building a body of work that is becoming the definitive cinematic portrayal of American history.
He positions himself as a storyteller, not a sage. He is a seeker, not a proselytizer. He told Tombaugh in her interview that he goes into these projects with an open mind, not knowing when he starts what he wants to portray, but only discovering it during the process of inquiry and creation.
In addition to building his body of work he is stepping out on the world stage, assuming a public posture that no documentary filmmaker has done before. He has become an icon himself, a celebrity, an historical figure.
Though he still looks like maybe a 20-something or so, Burns is 61. He says that while most people are thinking about slowing down at his age, he feels like he's just getting started. His output would tend to confirm that. His production rate is probably greater than ever. With a tremendous body of work already behind him, he is turning out new films and series at a fast clip and will probably to continue doing so for many more years.
Another significant way that Burns is stepping into territory that is unusual for a filmmaker, if not unique, is his partnership with Tauck, the tour operator. Launched in 2010, this partnership has resulted in Ken Burns American Journeys and a series of Tauck Events Featuring Ken Burns.
The merging of filmmaking with tour operating might seem a stretch, but to Burns both come down to storytelling.
"When we make our films we have an opportunity to see things not only the way folks normally see it but see it from the back door," said Burns. "If you've ever gone through the kitchen of a hotel to get to something, you're given another view of that hotel. And we've been able I hope to share with folks a little bit of that other view of things, so it's not just the usual landmarks. Or they are to see them from a different perspective.
"If you've ever been to Mount Rushmore it's nothing like the postcard. The postcard of Mount Rushmore is frozen in its iconic sameness, foreheads not moving. But if you go there, you just go half a mile off this way and all of the sudden all you see is George Washington. And then you go back this way and you've got a different perspective on that. And I think what we've tried to do and what [Tauck has] always done in [its] nearly 90 years of existence is: How do you see something from different angles and how does that enrich an experience?"
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