Historian calls work ‘emotional archaeology’

Ken Burns uses Speaker Series to discuss films



TIMELESS—The work of Ken Burns chronicles America’s past. Courtesy photo

TIMELESS—The work of Ken Burns chronicles America’s past. Courtesy photo

Ken Burns is famous as a documentarian whose films on U.S. history are presented on public television, but he has his own term for the work that he does.

“It is a kind of emotional archaeology that we are attempting,” Burns said at the Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks on May 2, “listening to the ghosts and echoes of an almost inexpressibly wise past.”

Appearing as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series of Southern California, the director invited his audience to listen as well.

“Too often as a culture we have ignored this joyful noise,” said Burns, whose films popularized the use of voice-overs to bring to life first-person writings like diaries and letters. This failure to listen, he said, has left us unaware of the power history holds over the present, “and indeed our vast, unknown future.”

The evening began with a 10-minute montage covering Burns’ filmography, from 1981’s “Brooklyn Bridge” to last year’s “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” When the clips concluded, titles for several upcoming films appeared on the screen, including “The American Revolution” and “LBJ & the Great Society.”

Seeming slightly uncomfortable with the laudatory atmosphere, Burns prefaced his speech by saying he lives and works in a tiny New Hampshire village.

“There are fewer people in the town than there are in this room right now,” he said to the nearly full Fred Kavli Theatre.

At home, Burns told the crowd, he keeps an old New Yorker cartoon on his refrigerator. The panel shows three men in hell, surrounded by flames: “And one guy says to the others,” Burns said, “‘Apparently my over 200 screen credits didn’t mean a damn thing.’”

It was an apt lead-in to his remarks, which brooded on the question of how figures from the past are judged.

Burns criticized two opposite, equally inadequate schools of thought: the old, top-down version of American history as “only the story of Great Men,” and newer, pessimistic accounts that present the past as “only a catalog of white, European crimes.” The latter point drew appreciative applause.

In place of these reductive views, Burns championed an honest history that faces up to tragedy while maintaining “an abiding faith in the human spirit.” And he upheld the notion that the United States, for all its shortcomings, seems to have a special part to play in the human drama.

He illustrated this significance with turning points in the lives of famous Americans, including Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, and his fictional alter ego Huck Finn; Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; Frank Lloyd Wright; and Jackie Robinson.

There was also one not-sofamous American, a Tennessee legislator named Harry Burn, who in 1920 cast the deciding vote for women’s suffrage after his mother reminded him, “Don’t forget to be a good boy.”

None of these people were perfect, Burns said—though Robinson, whom he called “a paragon of virtue and character,” sounded close. Instead, it was their determination to overcome their flaws and contribute to society that made them great.

Burns said in his speech that he has “in many ways made the same film over and over again,” and the Q&A session that followed suggested one reason why.

Asked about the influence of his parents, Burns related that his mother, who died when he was 11, had been sick with cancer for as long as he could remember.

When he was almost 40, his father-in-law, a psychologist, unexpectedly revealed to Burns the source of his vocation: “You wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you’re trying to wake up?”

A shiver went through the audience at this self-excavation, the most affecting emotional archaeology of the evening.