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Ken Burns Still Has Faith in a Shared American Story
Ken Burns Still Has Faith in a Shared American Story
It cannot be said that Ken Burns is an unambitious filmmaker. He is, after all, a director who has spent 40 years making documentaries about truly foundational American subjects: the Civil War, Thomas Jefferson, jazz, the Roosevelts, baseball, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Vietnam War, country music. The list goes on. (And on. Think of an iconic American historical figure or event, and there’s a half-decent chance that Burns, 67, has made or is currently making a documentary about it.) But Burns’s greatest audacity might simply be his belief that the stories he tells about those biggies — and their attendant ambiguities, hopes and disappointments — can resonate with all Americans, across political or ideological divides. “It’s important for me to speak to everybody,” says Burns, whose documentary about another biggie, “Hemingway” (directed with Lynn Novick), premieres April 5 on PBS, “and to be able to try to remind us that we have things in common.”
In this moment, when there has been such a fracturing of any common American identity, has the project that you’re engaged in — of exploring fundamental national stories that might speak to all of us — become quixotic? That is really hard to answer. There was never a “project.” It was never like, Let’s do this. I’ve made films for more than 40 years on the U.S., but I’ve also made films about “us.” All of the intimacy of that two-letter lowercase plural pronoun and all the majesty and contradiction of the U.S. But the thing that I’ve learned is that there’s no “them.” This is what everybody does: make a distinction about “them.” It’s just us.
I understand what that means from a humanistic perspective but — But I got to sell newspapers, buddy!
But what does saying “There’s no them’’ mean for you practically as an American and a filmmaker? It’s easy to say “It’s just us,” but when you look around and see people willing to engage in racism, authoritarianism — it’s hard not to think that’s them. Is it wrong to do that? “There’s no them” requires discipline. It requires a nonreactive state, which is the state of observation. That’s part of a journalistic discipline. It is a difficult thing to do. You’ve described, in a journalistic question, the impulse to react and make distinctions. I don’t mean to call you into question. I’m not. It’s just that “There’s no them” is a form of self denial, of asceticism, that is important. My neighbor down the street believes in what is called the Big Lie — fervently. Do I make him “them” or do I struggle to not do that? The only answer that I know is, I struggle not to do that.
Does that empathy make it easier for the people promulgating the Big Lie? It is the tortoise handing sneakers to the hare. But I have to believe that eventually that hare, no matter how fast the sneakers help it run, slows down.
In January you wrote an essay for Politico in which you said that people have been asking you whether the assault on the Capitol was the start of something or the end. You wrote that it was neither; it was a moment that gave us a chance to choose how we could proceed. So how should we proceed? And are there historical parallels of other countries making that kind of choice? You know, the events of Jan. 6 and of the last four or five years are unprecedented. At the same time, there are antecedents. We’ve seen the Know Nothings. We’ve seen a Civil War. Father Coughlin. What I amplified with the Politico comments is the sense that we are living through an incredibly momentous time. Lincoln said: “Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide.” He was saying the danger is within. We’ve now come to full realization of that. And superimposed on this critical moment are three viruses. The first is Covid-19, obviously, which has killed 500,000 of us. We’ve got a 402-year-old virus of racial injustice. And we’ve got an age-old human one, which is lies and misinformation. Richard Hofstadter, the historian, has a famous essay called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” That style has always been there, and now we’ve seen it come from the top down. Before Donald Trump, we never had a chief executive so willing to suspend the truth, so willing to promote the most fringe ideas or anti-Semitism and racist remarks. That puts us in an incredibly difficult position. We’ve veered out of our lane so significantly that we have the opportunity for this to be a course correction. It’s hard to see how that happens quickly given the persistence of the disinformation, how politically expedient it is in the short term for that to be promoted. So to answer the first part of your question: Historians make lousy prognosticators — and I’m not a historian, I’m a filmmaker — because while they understand that the past is prologue, all these things represent not history repeating itself but human nature superimposing itself on the seemingly random chaos of events. Ecclesiastes said: “What has been will be again. And what has been done will be done again. There’s nothing new under the sun.” That says human nature doesn’t change, which is scary and also interesting.
Does that make you optimistic or pessimistic? Optimistic. I can’t put my finger on why other than that if you have been aware that we have gone through similar things, there is a sense of power, or maybe the word is perspective, that permits you to have a kind of optimism. In the ’08, ’09 meltdown, I had friends, including people in the financial industry, who would say to me: “Man, this is so bad. This is a depression.” And I said: “It’s really bad, but in our Depression, in many American cities the animals in the zoo were shot and the meat distributed to the poor. When that happens, I’ll grant you that this is a depression.” That was inoculating the Chicken Little in us from a sense of doom. Is that optimism? Maybe. It is perspective.
Is there a belief about America that you held as true in 1981, when you made your first documentary, but that you now hold as false? Of course. The opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. Doubt is the mechanics of faith in a way; it’s testing and not being too sure. Learned Hand — could there be a better name for a judge than Learned Hand? — said liberty is never being too sure you’re right. That’s a wonderful, kind of un-American statement. Because we are certain that we’re right. I am aware that I imbibed, growing up, an exceptionalism-without-question view of us. Which I have spent my entire professional career dismantling — to the place where I then thought I could at least show glimmers of where exceptionalism might take place or has taken place. That’s a bit of a dodge. There’s no real answer here. We have to unsubscribe from the dialectic. I remember Tom Boswell, great sportswriter for The Washington Post — I was interviewing him about baseball’s performance-enhancing-drugs scandal and Barry Bonds. He said that Keats wrote a letter about William Shakespeare saying that Shakespeare had what no one else had in the same quantity, which was negative capability. The moralist in us wants to judge good or bad, and Shakespeare had this ability to withhold that judgment for as long as possible, to understand the complexity. I think I’ve learned how to avoid both the ratification of simplistic heroes and villains and to muddy the water with the shades of gray. It’s the only way in which actual life takes place.
Ernest Hemingway certainly was a complex figure, but he hasn’t exactly been underanalyzed. What is it that you believe you’re adding to our perspective on him — or any of these big topics you take on? With the exception of “Horatio’s Drive” and “Vietnam,” I don’t think we broke new ground. But it’s how you tell a story. With, say, “The Civil War,” there may have been a handful of documentaries before ours, but none of them began with Frederick Douglass’s devastating quote about America, which is essentially, As I look at America’s beautiful rivers and star-crowned mountains, my rapture is checked; when I remember that the fields drink daily of the tears of my brethren and the rivers flow with the blood of my sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing. Race is a central theme of ours, and I’ve been told for most of my professional life, Would you stop talking about it? I had dear friends — conservative, center-right — who would say when Barack Obama was elected, “Now will you shut up?” And I held up the Onion headline after that election: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.” I said, “Wait till you see what happens.” It’s the worst way to be vindicated — on the body of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin. These are missing Americans that diminish us by their absence.
I’ve seen people ask you, given where the contemporary conversation is about race, if “The Civil War” would be done differently if you were to make it today. You’ve said it would, but not how. So how would it be different? I don’t know. It just would naturally be different. But not in any fundamental way. It was important to represent all the different voices that we represented. The most important thing about me talking about race now is to say that I am in a position where I have to be quiet. You have to be quiet. There are other voices that need to speak. The dismantling of white supremacy is not just white people continually talking about the dismantling of white supremacy. You have to shut up and listen. Shut the [expletive] up. So I can be a reporter. I can be an aggregator. I can be a distiller. But I wish the films to be populated with voices that are not my own. And I don’t mean just for representation, which is important, but for how you unpack all these things.
Along those lines, are there stories relating to race — or any subject — that you think are not yours to tell? That’s legitimate, but I’m drawn to what I’m drawn to. I don’t go looking for race, but we have two projects going: One — it’ll be out in September — is a history of Muhammad Ali. We’re also working on a big series which I’m calling “From Emancipation to Exodus.” Reconstruction is the heart of it — actually, the failure of Reconstruction. It’s important that we not resegregate ourselves and our narratives. So, for example, we were taking what was, with the Civil War, a white narrative and saying, Uh-uh. Frederick Douglass has a position of centrality. Spottswood Rice has a position of centrality. People talk about the avuncular Shelby Foote as if he represented a Southern bias. He represented a Southern perspective, and had his own biases, but what’s remembered from the film is Barbara Fields’s comment that the Civil War is still going on and regrettably can still be lost. That’s one of the last moments of the film, and that’s what’s being replayed constantly since Charlottesville.
You bring that Barbara Fields quote up a lot in interviews. But the literal closing lines in “The Civil War” are spoken by Shelby Foote, quoting the bittersweet writing of a Confederate veteran. Do you ever wish you’d switched who got the last word? No. I tried it. It doesn’t work. It took the film out of a historical dynamic and placed it in another one. In the penultimate position, Barbara Fields’s comment works perfectly because it feeds into an ending in which the Shelby Foote quote is a release. It’s like music. Whatever the last note is, usually you sustain it. Barbara’s note wouldn’t sustain and wouldn’t have had the power that it has if it wasn’t buffered by this other thing that permitted you to leave the song, if I can extend the analogy.
There has been an explosion over the last few years of nonfiction storytelling, particularly in podcasts. Is that form interesting to you? Yeah. I don’t have time to listen to them.
That was a very half-hearted “yeah.” It is half-hearted. It’s nothing against the people who do them. It’s like when British people come to me and say, “Baseball is based on our rounders and cricket.” I say, “Yeah, it’s a huge improvement on both.” I’m a filmmaker. My first memory is of my father’s darkroom. I am interested in images. Not the images that oral presentations permit the listener to have — I want to be the decider. I don’t want to in any way discourage or dismiss a podcast, but I like the court I’m playing on. To switch would be to take away half of what I do, which is the visual dimension.
I read that you looked at the idea of doing a fiction feature film. Did you have a specific idea? Please tell me you wanted to direct psychedelic sci-fi. I wish. Or some sex film. That would be something you could write home to your audience about. So listen, by the time I hit college I had seen hundreds of feature films. I wanted to be Howard Hawks. I wanted to be Alfred Hitchcock. Then I went to Hampshire College, and my teachers were all social-documentary still photographers. I remember I took this line that I had memorized from Andrew Sarris’s “The American Cinema” about Nicholas Ray, who directed “Johnny Guitar,” which was written by Philip Yordan. Sarris says, “Philip Yordan set out to attack McCarthyism, but Ray was too delirious to pay any heed as Freudian feminism prevailed over Marxist masochism, and Pirandello transcended polemics.”
Obviously. [Laughs.] I spent high school trying to parse that! Anyway, I went to my mentor my first year at Hampshire — this was before he was my mentor — and I was trying to impress him. I was in his office and said that Sarris sentence, and he walked out from his desk, took me by the elbow, put me out in the hall. So there was my warning. What did I want to be? I realized that I had been born in still photography and that documentary is what I wanted to do. I like my day job, but I am always curious about a feature film. In the ’90s I was working on “Baseball,” and there was a movement afoot to make a film about Jackie Robinson. I’d been called in, probably as an executive producer, maybe a director — it never happened. I don’t have a burning desire. You know, the same laws of storytelling apply to everybody. I can’t make stuff up; Steven Spielberg can. But we obey the same laws of Aristotelian poetics. Everybody does.
Werner Herzog is a documentary filmmaker who has his own set of laws, and I wonder — I’m so glad you said Werner! I’ve been friends with him for 30 years. We were once on a panel at Telluride: D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Michael Moore, Werner and me. Werner in his thick accent stops the proceedings and says, “I am interested in an ecstatic truth. My friend Ken, he’s interested in an emotional truth. You, Michael, with your big belly, you’re interested in a physical truth,” and he turns to Pennebaker and Hegedus and says: “And you: I think you are my enemy. Cinéma vérité is the cinema of accountants.” For Werner it doesn’t matter what rules you violate. If it says “No Jaywalking,” he will jaywalk. It is being to thine own self true, but also providing a truth for everyone else. He showed us this footage of Orthodox monks — the real monks had gone off on a pilgrimage, so he’d gone to the bar and paid these vodka-soaked guys to do what he’d gone to see the monks do. I would tremble before the mighty God that would smite me for having done that. Werner? It’s OK, and God bless him. It’s not OK for me.
But where are your lines in that regard? I’m thinking of that great story Dolly Parton tells in “Country Music” about “I Will Always Love You.” She says that Porter Wagoner told her that if she’d let him produce the song, then he’d let her leave their show to do her own thing. And she says that’s what they did. But Porter Wagoner didn’t actually produce that song. So how do you determine what material that is not 100 percent factually true can be included in the pursuit of greater truth? I do understand that we have to present some leeway with the talking heads to tell something and that we don’t have to be constantly chastising them with “not quite true.” It may be that’s what Porter said to Dolly. It may not be what actually happened, and that may be immaterial in the storytelling required to do that scene well. We don’t then come back and do the “errata,” as Benjamin Franklin called it, or the corrections, as your newspaper does. There are no rules that are printed, but I can tell you that we made a decision in “The Civil War” that to the best of our ability we would never show a dead person on the ground who wasn’t from that battle. But we’re often taking poetic license, not in the conscious, defiant, exuberant way that Werner does, but in a very anxious, cautious way. Half of the “Jazz” series isn’t showing a picture of jazz. If we’re talking about the debut of — I’m making this up — Louis Armstrong when he comes from Chicago to New York, and the image we have is from the year before or year after, we have huge discussions about things like that. Sometimes you just say, “That works.” We’re always going up to a line in which we are painfully aware that if we cross, it goes from poetic license into a form of manipulation if not misrepresentation. We tend to err conservatively.
You’ve talked before about the connection between your work in bringing the past to life and your mom’s death. Is the explanation for what you do that simple? That you’re driven to make historical documentaries because it’s a way of waking the dead? “Driven” sounds too easy, but you wouldn’t be talking to me if my mom hadn’t died. That’s the truth of it. In April, I will have been without a mother for 56 years. That is way too long. Her name was Lyla. The half-life of grief is endless. But it has also been hugely productive. I remember being interviewed in the ’90s by two sociologists about the early death of parents, and their last question was, “What is your mother’s greatest gift?” And I said “dying” and then started to cry. I didn’t want her to die, but I don’t know what I would do without the loss as being the engine of exploration, of confidence, of bravery. What idiot would take on all of these things and think you could do it? It’s pretty absurd. So there it is. But the good postscript to this: Near you in Brooklyn, David, is a little girl who is 10 years old whose name is Lyla. My oldest daughter named her first child after my mother, and a name that was never spoken except draped in black crepe now gets spoken all the time with joy and love.
Do you wonder what your mom would make of your work? All the time. And it just — I’ll start to cry right now. Only because I sort of feel that she must — she’s present. There’s not a day that goes by where I’m not aware of her. But at the same time there has been that friction that has helped me to create, so I can’t help but honor that. I feel very fortunate that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.
Opening illustration: Source photograph by Nathan Congleton/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.