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Ken Burns on History and Truth By Sheridan Hill (c) 2003
Filmmakers, film buffs and historians alike have become familiar with a jazzy style of making documentary films now known as the Ken Burns approach. Burns' documentaries for the Public Broadcasting Service use an omnipotent third person narrator and a chorus of established and famous actors reading off-camera the diary entries and newly unearthed stories of his subject theme. He digs up never-before-published photographs and fills the screen with them, using close-ups, pans and tilts to revel inside the photograph. "I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama," Burns said in an interview before his visit to Guilford College, North Carolina. "Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style. The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed." In
1981, Burns received an Academy Award nomination for Brooklyn Bridge
and went on to create a series of heavy-hitting films on America, including
Th He enjoys breaking new scholarly ground and filling in the gaps in existing history, a good thing for Americans since many of us have learned more history from Burns' PBS films than from books. He and his staff check obituaries, death certificates and funeral records for possible descendants and make hundreds of cold calls to plumb memories and locate family scrapbooks of letters and mementos. "With Horatio, we were able to come up with details that even most scholarly historians of the automobile had not found, including letters that Horatio had written home each night to his wife in Vermont. That made our film. It created a bottom-up portrait of this man and the symbols for which he stood." "History is malleable," Burns said. "A
new cache of diaries can shed new light and archeological evidence can
challenge our popular assumptions. I subscribe to William Faulkner's view
that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now. To
engage history is to ask questions about the past." "We saw the Civil War as a paradox of love and loss. If we assume a posture that only sees aerial views of war, we might lose a sense of what took place. General Schwartzcoff once told me that he ordered his senior command to see The Civil War to remind them that those arrows on the map were real human beings." Film documentarian Ken Burns talks with Southern Biographer Sheridan Hill about history and truth. Copyright renewed annually Sheridan
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e Civil War, The West, Baseball, Jazz and the most recent,
Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip. Burns' involvement is
whole-bodied: producing, directing, writing, shooting film and selecting
music.