In response to the ovation that greeted him at the start of his recent Yale talk, critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns described a New Yorker cartoon he keeps on his refrigerator door.
The cartoon depicts two men talking in hell; the caption reads: "Apparently my 200 screen credits didn't mean a damn thing."
Burns has himself amassed an impressive list of credentials on this earthly plain, spawning a new genre of television documentaries on topics ranging from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Civil War to baseball to jazz to such notable historic figures as statesman Thomas Jefferson, explorers Lewis and Clark, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and, most recently, author Mark Twain. He spoke in Linsly-Chittenden Hall on Feb. 7 as a guest of the Sidney Lovett Fellowship at Pierson College.
According to Burns, his work is about America and, as he put it, "what it means to be an American."
In introducing excerpts from the Twain series, which aired a few weeks ago on PBS, Burns read from a prepared speech, in which he invoked the name of the great writer with reverence. Twain, Burns recalled, said of himself, "I am not an American. I am the American."
"He was the apotheosis of what it means to be an American," Burns said. When Twain visited New Haven in 1885, noted the filmmaker, he met and befriended Warren McGuinn, an African-American student who was struggling to stay in Yale despite grinding poverty. Twain ended up paying the young man's entire expenses at Yale, said Burns, adding that McGuinn went on to become a respected lawyer and later in his career a mentor to future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
"In the spirit of Warren McGuinn," Burns said, "I dedicate this speech."
After relating more anecdotes about Twain, many supporting Burns' claim that "Twain was the funniest man on earth," the filmmaker screened excerpts from his latest documentary. The work contained all the hallmarks of a Burns' documentary -- the voice-over narrator, the commentaries from experts, the writer's own words read by noted actors (guessing who the readers are from their voices is part of the fun of watching a Burns documentary), the use of vintage still photographs, the haunting music of a solo fiddle.
After the screening, Burns told his audience that the Twain biography had presented special challenges. Because writing is so introspective and private, it is difficult to depict, he said. (For that reason, Burns noted, he won't try to do a documentary on the Constitution.)
Using still photographs, however, gives him a great advantage in portraying the inner life of his subjects, not just their ideas, Burns said. Although some colleagues prefer film footage, Burns finds it too restricting. "You can say more with stills. They're like a tabula rasa with unlimited possibilities," he said. "You can tell a story with a photograph, but film tells it all for you." In film footage of baseball games, for example, you hear the crack of the bat; you see the player running around the bases -- it's all "done" for you, noted Burns. With a photograph, however, the director can manipulate the story, he said, "If you pan up slowly, say, from the hem of a skirt to a face with a beard, you've told something."
Burns noted that his genre of documentary "confounds prejudices that film is the enemy of good history." He quoted William Faulkner's observation that "the past is not what was, it's what is" as a guiding principal of documentary making. Good history is achieved, he said, when -- as you are watching or reading something from the past -- you're thinking that it's not going to turn out the way you know that it will.
In keeping with his continuing mission to explore the lives and events that define the American spirit, Burns is working on projects about the first trans-continental trip across the United States by car in 1903, the history of the National Parks and the prize fighter Jack Johnson. Noting with alarm that 40% of high school juniors in the United States think that we fought World War II on the side of the Germans, Burns said he is also planning a project on America during that war. He will focus on four or five small cities in the United States and trace how the war affected the people in them.
In closing, Burns said he had been so shaken by the events of Sept. 11 that he questioned his ability to continue making documentaries and wondered why he should. However, he said, citing a speech of Abraham Lincoln, "I realized that America is the only country in the world that was formed by an idea, and that that idea is immutable."
He ended reciting lines from the last stanza of "America, the Beautiful":
"O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!"
-- By Dorie Baker
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