Burns regales Center for the Arts crowd
Filmmaker says he's drawn to lives of individuals when making documentaries
By
DONNA LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor
Ken
Burns is an idealistic dreamer, imbuing history with a kind of historical
mysticism and making the already larger than life even larger still,
while deepening Americans' understanding of the tectonic shifts in society
and culture that have made them who they are. The much-heralded documentary
filmmaker is forever searching the country's attic trunks, piecing together
its cob-webbed diaries and crumbling photographs into fresh narratives
that, in themselves, may become some of the greatest stories ever told.
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BURNS |
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For
the past 20 years, Burns told a Distinguished Speaker Series audience
April 24, he has attempted to "understand the mysterious inner workings
of that honorable republic known as America."
And
he is uninterested, he explained, in "the old top-down version of our
past" marked by the "dry dates" of history or even a retelling of "white
European crimes." He called himself an "emotional archaeologist," interested
only in what moves him, in what he considers to be true and honest and
suggestive of an "abundance of faith in human history."
Everything
about the War Between the States that was rendered stale by high-school
recitations of battleground facts and figures, Burns etched anew with
his camera in his classic documentary "The Civil War," presenting the
war replete with individual soldiers' tales and the smells, horror,
fear and triumph those battles encompassed.
"I
am constantly drawn back to the lives of individual human beings and
how their ideas and ideals affect American life," Burns said of his
pursuit of the ever-evolving American identity and his obsession that
every film deepen and attempt to answer the question of "who we are."
"A
hero is not perfect," Burns said, describing the inner negotiations
between strengths and weaknesses embodied in men like Thomas Jefferson
and Frank Lloyd Wright, the subjects of two more recent documentaries.
In detailing Jefferson's life, Burns said he sought to illuminate the
"incandescent intelligence" of "a protean genius" alongside his "agonizing
internal contradictions," while maintaining that it is Jefferson who
is "the author of our ability to dream the American Dream." Wright's
stunning success, Burns said, enabled him to become the "epitomy of
excess."
In
"Not for Ourselves Alone," Burns tells the story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony as the leaders of a "political earthquake" that
shook the nation. Their work to win women the right to vote was "the
American Revolution coming to fruition," Burns said, adding that they
are responsible "for the biggest social transformation in American history."
Stanton and Anthony were "wonderfully opposite and equally brilliant,"
he said. The culmination of their work, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution,
mirrored word for word what they had written, Burns noted, reminding
the audience that their achievement took place less than 100 years ago.
Describing
another remarkable documentary that traces the legacy of Lewis and Clark's
westward journey, Burns compared the significance of that journey to
the first moon walk, calling Lewis and Clark "the vanguard of the nation."
His documentary chronicling their perilous and ultimately successful
journey presented special problems he said, one of which was to make
the story compelling.
"There's
not a school child alive who doesn't know they made it back safely,"
Burns said. He and his film crew stood on frozen riverbanks, slogged
through mud and endured 90 degree temperatures "looking, straining and
insisting" on seeing what Lewis and Clark saw, but in many cases their
"pristine views were eliminated, diminished or obscured by progress."
