Ken Burns Regis Dialogue Formatted

Ken Burns Regis Dialogue with Terrence Rafferty, 1991 Bruce Jenkins: Good evening. Let me welcome you. I'm Bruce Jenkins, the film video curator here at the Walker Arts Center. This is our first MacArthur dialogue for the fall season. It's also the very first time we've honored a non-fiction filmmaker with, not only a dialogue evening such as this, but also a fairly full scale retrospective. Bruce Jenkins: I just have to say, at the beginning, we have just gotten back from the printers these absolutely gorgeous brochures. They'll be at the back as you head out, so please take one. I think it's really the most complete material back matter on Ken Burns' work. So I urge you, don't forget to pick one of these up at the end. Ken Burns, of course, is no ordinary documentary film maker. In slightly more than a decade under the banner of his Florentine films, he has completely transformed our notion of no fiction film making, as well as giving us, I think, a much deeper appreciation of our own culture. Bruce Jenkins: This series is as much to show that there is life after The Civil War, which was an extraordinary success, as there is extraordinary film making before The Civil War. Those of you who were lucky enough to see on either PBS or occasionally, in screening, some of his earlier films, know that Brooklyn Bridge, for example, is the finest film yet made on architecture. Huey Long is maybe the most memorable portrait of an American politician I know of, and certainly the liveliest narrative I've seen in many a year about a true American original. Bruce Jenkins: We have the good, good luck of having with us Ken, who has been traveling an extraordinary amount to complete work on a new film, which we can conclude our series with, Empire of the Air. As well as to continue production on a long awaited film on baseball. Which I'm sure will be a complete knockout when it comes out. The final film of this season is Empire of the Air and it's in about three weeks time it'll be the first public screening of the film. We'll see a little piece of it tonight. I urge you to come if you can, for as many of the sessions as you can make it to, because the films, even on 16 millimeter, are so much more interesting and engaging, and visually rich than when they're regrettably packaged on television or video. Bruce Jenkins: Joining Ken tonight in this dialogue session is, I think, maybe the reigning new voice in American criticisms. It's the man who took the mantle from Pauline Kael at The New Yorker, who has actually been writing for The New Yorker since 1984. Prior to that he wrote for Sight and Sound. The Nation, The Atlantic. Writes on books and on film, but currently is the film critic at New Yorker, Terrence Rafferty. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to welcome together here for MacArthur dialogue, Ken Burns and Terrence Rafferty. Terrence Rafferty: Okay. Well I guess I'll... I'm going to start off... Oh. I should probably pull this a little closer. It's a real pleasure for me to be here today with Ken Burns, who is one of the finest documentary film makers, one of the finest film makers, period, in America. And, I'm going to talk for a couple of minutes and probably embarrass Ken in some ways. But I want to... I think it's an amazing and unremarked fact about this strange moment in Aug 6, 1991 1 American cinema, that probably the only area of American cinema that's really healthy right now, is the documentary film. Terrence Rafferty: God knows, Hollywood movies aren't doing it. Even the independent films that we often look to for something more interesting than the standard Hollywood fare, but I've probably seen more good documentaries in the last four or five years, from American film makers than any other kind of American movie. Kens film, The Civil War, the showpiece of American documentary at this moment. But there have been films such as Bruce Weber's, Let's Get Lost. Jennie Livingston's, Paris is Burning. Errol Morris's, Thin Blue Line. There's an extraordinary film by Barbara Kopple called American Dream, which I don't even think has a distributor yet. There's a wonderful picture by Alan Adleson and Kathryn Taverna called Lodz Ghetto. Al Reinert's For All Mankind. I mean, these are... This is a list of three quarters of the best American films of the last four or five years. Terrence Rafferty: I mean, something is going on here. I think one of the reasons why Ken's work is so extraordinary is that he, to me, encompasses a lot of elements of the documentary tradition. Many of these other pictures are interesting in very formal ways but Ken, I think, is a documentary film traditionalist. Which is to say a film maker in his work that the movies subject is paramount. In which the artists point of view isn't explicitly announced. And the movies formal devices don't call attention to themselves. Terrence Rafferty: In films like The Civil War and the earlier films that will be shown in this retrospective, you'll see a variety of different sorts of documentary techniques, including ones that many other film makers these days tend to scorn. Such as, a scripted voiceover narration. Talking heads. That is to say interview people who are being interviewed, and who are actually identified in the film. You don't have to guess who they are. One of the things I most appreciate about Ken Burns movies is that, not only will he identify them on screen, he will then identify them again later on, acknowledging that you might have forgotten who they are. So you don't have to feel stupid. And nobody wants to feel stupid. Ken Burns: We spend hours guessing at which point in the second time that you identify them, we need to do it- Terrence Rafferty: Right, right. Because I've found that you're invariably right. Just at the moment when I'm asking myself, "God, who is that guy?" There is the graphic, and I'm eternally grateful. But the pleasures of these films, and you'll, in the retrospective and we will have clips tonight from many of these, you'll see films from as far back as the early eighties, from the last ten years or so, and you'll see the things that you saw on The Civil War, were there right from the beginning. In Brooklyn Bridge. And these pictures are not willfully eccentric, as say Errol Morris's documentaries are. They're not personal essays in the way that some other documentary film makers are. Terrence Rafferty: They use all of the resources available, in the service of the story. And in the service of the real subjects of these pictures. I think it's important to remember that the kinds of documentaries that Ken Burns makes, are a particular sub-species of the documentary form. And it's the historical documentary. This has very different sorts of means, and effects, from movies that have more current interests. I mean current affairs, political Aug 6, 1991 2 sorts of documentaries. The historical documentary, as in movies like The Sorrow and the Pity, or Shoah, these are always about the continuity of things. They're about the persistence of the then in the now. They require a certain reverence... Reverence is maybe the wrong word but certainly a respect for tradition, and a desire to deepen our experience of the everyday and to complicate it. And to show us where we've been as a way of seeing where we are. Terrence Rafferty: I guess I'd like to start off this conversation by... I mean a documentary film maker is... It's a weird occupation. It's a strange thing to have to put on your passport. Why documentaries? How did you get into this? Ken Burns: Well, it's funny. In some ways Minneapolis is key to it. I went to college in 1971 called Hampshire College, fully intending, I thought, to become the next John Ford, or failing that Howard Hawks. I wanted to make films about America, stories about America that would be rich with music and larger themes. I didn't want to be showy or flashy, I wanted to have meaning and emotion in the films. And have superb soundtracks, that was important. Scores. And I ran into a man who had just spent 20 years teaching at the University of Minnesota, named Jerome Liebling who is a social documentary photographer. Who would shoot any kind of flamboyance, again in formalistic concerns, but was interested in proving to me right off the bat, that there was as much drama in what was taking place. That is in the real world, as there was in anything in the works of the imagination. Ken Burns: And I was really, almost naively won over to this point of view, and combined it with a latent interest in history, that had been there. Never been formally trained, all of my secondary education is with film making and photography. But combined that to begin to make historical documentaries invoking what Barbara Fields quoted as, William Faulkner's dictom at the end of The Civil War, that history is not was, but is.

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