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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 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 Bridge, for example, is the finest film yet made on architecture. 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 , 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. '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 . 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 , 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. The idea that there is nothing in the past that isn't really worth bringing back, unless it's addressing the present. And that's what I found in all of these things.

Ken Burns: But the documentary question just evolved. We did Cinema Verite, mostly at Hampshire. Somehow I moved into doing historical works. I made a film for Old Sturbridge Village, which is the colonial Williamsburg of New England, using diaries. And using some voice over narration, but mostly Cinema Verite and a combination of diaries. And the first thing out of Hampshire that I began was this Brooklyn Bridge, inventing the wheel as we went along.

Terrence Rafferty: What did you find particularly satisfying about working in that way? Did you experience a real sense of discovery, when you started working on the historical material?

Ken Burns: Yes. There is the sense of coming into an, at least to separate it, coming into an American mainstream, represented by the historical subjects. That there was a resonance, there was a particularly emotional transformation that took place in me when considering these topics. This was not superficial history. This was lifting up the rug of history, getting in, seeing the dirt, that something as magnificent as the Brooklyn Bridge could have been polluted and corrupted at times, by Boss Tweed. And seeing that it was made all the more magnificent by that participation, that these objects in our present were rich with their past. Literally. That it Aug 6, 1991 3 was possible to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and be bombarded, not just with the particles of the present, but the particles of the past.

Terrence Rafferty: And all of that was immensely satisfying. It also formerly was a way to work without investing too much ego. I love Errol Morris's films and I completely agree with you about where the documentary form is right now. Actually in 1985, about the time Huey Long came out, Vincent Canby wrote in The Times that we are seeing the same predictable shit from Hollywood. But look at what the documentary crop has been from Huey Long, on a traditional form, to Streetwise, which was almost a theatrical film but still documentary. The form was not this narrow, roll your eyes, educational broccoli, but in fact this wide area, in that maybe the feature film that somehow suggested us a great range of possibilities, was quite narrow.

Ken Burns: There was a sense that I could invest this with the same honorable, which is a good nineteenth century word, in not too fashionable use now, but an honorable way of returning to the subject of not putting myself in and yet being as present as an artist, I hope, in the final project. In every frame as something as highfalutin and loud as Thin Blue Line was. It should be noted as a kind of parenthetical after thought that the same man who edited Thin Blue Line edited The Civil War. Paul Barnes and he came from Thin Blue Line, and the paranoid anxiety of that to this three years in the trenches with The Civil War.

Terrence Rafferty: I should say, when I say to use every available resource in a documentary film, that's excluding recreations.

Ken Burns: Yes, yes.

Terrence Rafferty: And dramatization.

Ken Burns: Well, it's funny though that, visually. Because the soundtrack, I have sneaked up on these supposed lines that one draws in the sand, in terms of what is tolerable, what is too much, what is arty or whatever. Because, for the most part, the imagery is pristine, it's live cinematography taken at precisely the same moment that the battles took place, 125 years later. Clouds, moons, old photographs, authentic paintings and talking heads discombobulated from their environment to speak, hopefully, knowingly, searchingly, emotionally about the subject. But the soundtrack has, since Brooklyn Bridge as you know, been made up of a tapestry of voices that are some of the best performers interpreting this material. And it's in that way that I get away with a lot of stuff.

Terrence Rafferty: Right. And weird ambient noise as well. Dropped in.

Ken Burns: Yes.

Terrence Rafferty: Why don't we take a look at one of the... Your first... The first film that drew peoples attention to Ken Burns Aug 6, 1991 4 was an hour long documentary on the Brooklyn Bridge. And the part that we're going to see... Would you like to set this up, Ken? No. I will set this up.

Ken Burns: Well, one thing, before you set up Brooklyn Bridge, I have to set up the apparent and patently apparent absurdity of having a retrospective at age 38, of your work. Coming here... I mean, I can remember when I was making this film on the Brooklyn Bridge. I started working on it in 1977, which is 14 years ago. Can you imagine what I looked like 14 years ago? People said this kid is trying to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge. No one would give me any money but there is some satisfaction in so far as if you look at all the press about The Civil War, there is a sense that I was born yesterday. And that the historical documentary film was born with the civil war. None of which is true and for me, it was born more or less with Brooklyn Bridge.

Terrence Rafferty: Right. I think it's time to take a look at Brooklyn Bridge. We have a short clip from it, and then we will talk about it.

Ken Burns: We were so poor in that day that the guy who was doing the optical titles misspelled Georgia O'Keeffe and then said it was our fault, we had to live with it. There are two F's in O'Keeffe.

Terrence Rafferty: Why did you... I mean, was the Brooklyn Bridge... I mean, this was your idea, was to do a film or had someone suggested it to you?

Ken Burns: In 1977, I read a book, a non fiction story of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough, called , in which he seemed to be doing in this non fiction form, exactly what I was interested in exploring as a result of this Sturbridge Village experiment. Which was a very strong sense of the past as animated by first person voices, diaries, expansive sense of the social fabric of the places, as well the larger political with a small P considerations. And indeed McCullough, who is now a fairly regular feature on public televisions, first narration was for this film. And I had to really work on him to convince him to do that.

Ken Burns: It's interesting that the clip is really... The Brooklyn Bridge is really divided into two halves. The first one is the story of how it's built in which there are old photographs, sound effects, music, first person quotes and narration. And the second half, which is really a phenomenon of just this film and the film, which considers a poetic and iconographic and a secondary life of the bridge. Culminating in what, for me, is a fairly important declaration of principles, like Orson Wells and Joseph Cotton and , as they begin the chronicle and tack up their principles at the end of this film. The last word is by Arthur Miller who I was meeting for the first time that day and who would go on to become a first person voice of Boss Tweed in the film. But he said, the city is fundamentally a practical utilitarian invention and suddenly you see this steel poetry sticking there and it's a shock. It makes you wonder what else we could do. Roebling really aspired to do something gorgeous. He could have built another Manhattan Bridge but he didn't. He really aspired to do something gorgeous.

Ken Burns: So it makes you think that maybe you too could add something that would last and be beautiful. And that, if Aug 6, 1991 5 you want a declaration of principle, is the idea that you could leave something that wouldn't necessarily have your name written all over it. And wouldn't necessarily be flamboyantly formalistic. That is, it could be a bridge that could get traffic back and forth between Brooklyn and Manhattan and yet do something more. And I think if you want to very easy encapsulation of what I'm doing is to try to make something that has a practical utilitarian purpose. These are basically just educational documentaries. It's broccoli. But hopefully there's something about the sauce that makes it good tasting. Our president not withstanding.

Terrence Rafferty: Yes. I remember the horror in school when you're being shown an educational film. Or a film strip as they-

Ken Burns: Yes. A film strip.

Terrence Rafferty: - Referred to. Yeah. Arthur Miller isn't precisely the last word in Brooklyn Bridge.

Ken Burns: No. Bugs Bunny is. After the credits. Bugs Bunny pays somebody to...

Terrence Rafferty: I mean, the reason why I chose this clip, and your films are fiendishly difficult to excerpt because there's such a rhythm and flow in them, and the ideas all... I mean, it helps to have seen the whole construction sequence, for example. I mean, you've seen this built, this bridge being built and going up, and you've witnessed the whole human drama of it. And then in the second half... I mean, the reason why I chose this excerpt was because it shows... I mean, the bridge as represented in as many different ways as one can imagine. Photographically as it was many years ago-

Ken Burns: It's still the most painted, photographed, written about, man made object in the world.

Terrence Rafferty: Right, right. And this was the moment in the movie when I really felt this accumulation of meanings, that gives... I don't know. I mean, the next time you walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, you're going to feel it.

Ken Burns: There's something going on when we talk about all these films that is supposedly in documentary films, the word is the enemy of the picture. And that is just not the case in my thing. When you say it's hard to excerpt, it's because these are the driving narratives, almost wall to wall talk, or wall to wall oral information. Whereas so often a documentary film is really a sequence of images. It's also not political, because when you do find a documentary film, which is wall to wall talk, it's essentially plowing a very narrow furrow, that we can loosely describe as being political. Lacking any formal glitz, which Errol brings so wonderfully to his films and that paranoid tension. He's basically, in Thin Blue Line, telling a 60 minute story.

Ken Burns: And that's too bad. What we looked for in their other films, and what we assume going in that documentaries don't have, is this ability to what I've been calling lately, to triangulate. That is, I can know where you are sir, the distance between me to you, if I know the distance between Terry to you. And this is triangulation. And Aug 6, 1991 6 we talk about the resonances that come out of the bombardment of different facts. Whether it's on a visceral level of image and word, or it's really just two different meanings.

Ken Burns: I really believe that the documentary form, or at least that one that I'm exploring, has the possibility for as many layers of meaning and emotion to a crew, as in any feature film. And that I go looking, exploring, , as I've probably beat to death lately, this idea of being an emotional archeologist. That history is not just dry dates and facts, but a persistent looking for that resonance, which sparks meaning, perhaps, wading throughout the construction to get to the point where someone, after the fact is responding to this. Or maybe for some people at that moment that Washington Roebling overcomes this physical limitation of the bends, and creates it. Or for many people, when a Victorian housewife takes over and makes the bridge a reality. Many other points in the film in which that can happen.

Terrence Rafferty: Right. And that's what so moving about it, is the feeling as if you're seeing the whole process. I mean, obviously it's not the whole process. You're selective but it's a coherent narrative that does, I think, deep in our appreciation of something that, certainly if you live in New York, in a sense, every now and then you will look at the bridge and think, "Oh my God, it's so beautiful." But it is, as you say, and as Arthur Miller said, mostly utilitarian people actually use it.

Ken Burns: Well, it becomes a great metaphor for the documentary film because when we look at the history of documentary in this country, particularly say from Harvest of Shame on. Documentaries have been not themselves. They have been what they have suggested. Because even... I mean, Harvest of Shame is not a great documentary. It just happened to be politically correct, in the best sense of the word, at the time. Motivating thought and actions and societal discourse. Which is great. And one of the functions that we acknowledge as a documentary.

Ken Burns: The art of the documentary is a little bit difficult to mine up. When we say that we say, in the nook of the north, and you start there and there's something about it, but even how many people have seen the nook of the north? It just becomes a buzz word. Then later on-

Terrence Rafferty: Half of it is staged anyway.

Ken Burns: Is Errol Morris, is Thin Blue Line more the current events subject of Randell Adams being released, or is it the stylistic performance of Errol Morris? Somehow a real good discussion of the documentary, which I've yet to hear, involves the consideration of an aesthetic detached from whatever political impact it's had. And Civil War has certainly had a tremendous political-

Terrence Rafferty: Right, right. But there are these shadings of the way in which one uses fact or non fiction, let's say. The reason why I talked initially about historical documentaries being a particular form is that historical documentaries... I mean, documentaries are as various as any other kind of form. People think of

Aug 6, 1991 7 documentary as if they're all the same. Your films have virtually nothing in common with the Thin Blue Line, or even Paris is Burning, or-

Ken Burns: Lodz Ghetto.

Terrence Rafferty: -Lodz Ghetto for that matter.

Ken Burns: Even though it has first person voices [crosstalk 00:27:42]

Terrence Rafferty: That's right. That's right. They're as various as any kind of non fiction writing. As different as criticism from biography or whatever.

Ken Burns: But somehow we have lost a language of talking about it, or maybe we've never had it. We certainly developed a language of talking about cinema in the dramatic form.

Terrence Rafferty: Right.

Ken Burns: But we've yet to develop it in a documentary form. And so the criticism which has been the principle agency for interpretation, is woefully lacking. You read and Walter Goodman talks about the themes, and has no idea what the elements that you've bought to there. He gave us a perfectly great review for The Civil War. One that you live and breathe for, but he chastised us for not listing the dozens of researchers. My brother and the writer Geoff Ward and a couple of other people who were credited did all the research. It was that kind of man power effort and not the ABC thing, where you have 400 picture researchers.

Terrence Rafferty: Right. I think we can just cite Walter Goodman as being unusually stupid in that respect. I'm always very happy to bash other critics. Because it seems to me impossible to think of The Civil War or to look at The Civil War or Brooklyn Bridge or any of the other films that we will see excerpted tonight, and not think of them as being in some sense just hand made. And that's a... Obviously that's a characteristic that you strive for.

Ken Burns: Well, I take an immense satisfaction in having the films bypassed, in a way, each year because they're not as loud as Thin Blue Line. Because I know that in each cut, at each image, and unusually among documentary film makers the principle cinematographer on my films too, every archiable picture in my films, I've photographed. And in some films like Brooklyn Bridge or , or Huey, 99% of the live cinematography as well, just the interviews I've done, that this is a real and hand... I mean, you said hand made but every cut is a decision and I just love the invisibility of my presence, after the fact, because that's where there's no imposition.

Aug 6, 1991 8

Ken Burns: In fact, I would suggest, I don't want to beat Errol to death at all because I really love his films, as diametrically opposed, is that the one thing in the way of Thin Blue Line is Errol Morris. Only because of how loud his presence is. And too often, I think, that, and this is just purely subjective and personal point of view, what is mostly in the way of documentary film makers are themselves in the process of making it. I'm there. You're here tonight because you feel me in these films in ever place. The emotion that you feel is the emotion that I felt and wished to transfer. So it's not that I'm not there, it's just a different kind of there, there.

Terrence Rafferty: Yeah. I mean, you feel a kind of intimacy in the discourse that... I mean, in some ways it's more like, it's almost more like reading than it is like watching the film. And I don't mean to denigrate it but-

Ken Burns: I had this great letter from a woman. After The Civil War a lot of the PBS stations ran it the five nights that they originally did it, and then the next Sunday as they're wanting to do, replayed it but the whole 11 and a half hours, at once. And she looked at it and then went into her studio and listened to it the second time, and wrote me this letter and sent me the painting that she painted in her studio. Saying I got almost as much out of listening to it as I...

Terrence Rafferty: It is in some ways so much like the pleasure of reading. That fullness of significance. What do you think that specifically filmic about it? Why are you not a historian? A literary historian.

Ken Burns: Well, I think that if I had been born in another generation I think I probably would have evolved to becoming a historian, but a writer first. I would tell you that I was a writer and that I just happened to have chosen historical subjects to write about. The word is not an enemy here. My principle collaborator over the last eight or nine years has been Geoff Ward, who is a distinguished historian, who does not worry, nor do I tell him to worry about whether there's any images to fit what he's writing.

Ken Burns: So first of all, we go off and we develop a script independent from the image collection, which is all my responsibility. And I'm getting it, not worrying there whether there's a scene that Geoff's written. So that what you have is a very complicated thing. I think, describing what the visual thing is about, is harder to do. Other than it is the subtle accretion of this huge body of information from subjects that are here to usually be held at arms length. Old photographs. We usually look at old photographs and we turn them. And we control the amount of time they are on.

Ken Burns: We feel a little bit of ambiguity about them. And I'm suggesting that they are as close as we will ever get to that past. Perhaps even made a little bit closer if on the soundtrack you're hearing an authentic, or as best as I can do, authentic reading of a letter or a journal or a diary or a newspaper account. Without the over the top stuff you get in hackneyed things. You know, "War is hell." William Tecumseh Sherman. In our film Arthur Miller never said, war is hell. A, William Tecumseh Sherman never said war is hell. He said war is all hell and we made sure that our narrator said war is all hell, William Tecumseh Sherman once said and with that aim he marched through Georgia.

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Terrence Rafferty: It was Arthur Miller who said war is hell.

Ken Burns: Right. But we don't go over the top of those voices and try to look for a combination. But central to everything that I've done is an appreciation of the power, and this is all from Jerry [inaudible 00:34:10], the power of the single image to convince. Whether it's live or whether it's archival, to convince. That you realize that it suggests a reality, which is possibly as full as our present. And if indeed we are doing our job right, the themes and the stories, particularly the stories that we have initiated, are reminding us how much history, the stories of the past describe us. That is speak to a present.

Ken Burns: Nostalgia is very easy to understand. Nostalgia is a love of a dead past. It's the antiquarian's involvement with something that cannot be had. It can be purchased. It can be traded, and sold at auctions, but it cannot be had. The history is the present day consideration of what went before. Not so that we can decide what went before, but so that we can tell ourselves in a gigantically precise mirror who we are right at this moment. So The Civil War is about all of the things that we are not. Just as the Brooklyn Bridge is as well.

Terrence Rafferty: Well, I think at this point, maybe we should look at yet another kind of film of Ken's, which is a biographical film. And we have a clip from Huey Long, which is a feature length documentary on the wife of one of the most astonishing political figures in American history.

Ken Burns: Amen.

Terrence Rafferty: A populist, near demigod, old... No. He was a demigod.

Ken Burns: The Boris Yeltsin of the museum.

Terrence Rafferty: Exactly. What was it about Long that made you want to make...

Ken Burns: I was just looking at that and I was realizing that it's the fact that we often want to choose so simply a yes or no response, particularly in politics, particularly in history. Particularly in documentary, in that he offered the clearest example of how it's impossible to choose. This film is made up of testimony of people who are rabidly opposed to Long. Hodding Carter's mother says there wasn't a Saturday night when we didn't talk about killing Huey Long. This beautiful woman looks like Katherine Hepburn in a high backed chair, sitting in the garden district of Louisiana, and she means it. And by the end of the film you're with her. You know why. You know why that is.

Ken Burns: And at the same time Harold and Myrtle Bigler on the Atchafalaya River, who we, by the way, go back and Aug 6, 1991 10 see... Harold has died a year ago but we see Myrtle every year. It's been seven or eight years, we don't miss going to see Myrtle. Or Betty for that matter. It's the fact that it's much more complicated as what I was saying. I've realized that here that this is a real classic example of the kind of emotion that can come out. The sympathy that we feel, it's just too easy to reduce things in the present political terms, in the past political terms, to cipher, this ability to make them so symbolic that they lose what is meaningful for us. Did you hear Shogun Farewell?

Audience: Yeah.

Ken Burns: I could hear the buzz. I was in the middle, the last month of editing Huey Long when id already decided to do The Civil War. And one of the session musicians had sent me an album he and other members had done, relatively undistinguished album except for the fourth cut on the first side, which was Shogun Farewell. And it just knocked my socks off, and I said that would be the theme for The Civil War but I couldn't resist, I couldn't wait five and a half years. So I snuck in [inaudible 00:38:21] Huey Long. I get mail from that. Whenever people see Huey Long they go crazy because of it.

Terrence Rafferty: Well, to me, it proves that you can use your own films as archival material.

Ken Burns: Yes. Do it all the time. Musically especially.

Terrence Rafferty: That's right. And there are bits in the Brooklyn Bridge that turn up. The Statue of Liberty-

Ken Burns: There are, yeah. I think I was telling to Terry on the phone the other night that somebody is going to end up doing a PHD of all the... Like falconry and county denisons. The inner relationship between all these films would be a fun thing to unravel and trace. Because I deliberately put in, that's my one loud, or perhaps quiet fun, is interrelating all the films. And there's a reference at least to two or three other films in every film.

Terrence Rafferty: I mean, the reason why I chose that clip really was because of those particularly beautiful dissolves from the old photographs to the people as they're the old people, as they currently look. And these are all people, or several of them at least, are people that we've seen before in the film.

Ken Burns: Yes.

Terrence Rafferty: And-

Ken Burns: And those are all their baby pictures basically.

Aug 6, 1991 11

Terrence Rafferty: Right, right. And it's the only, in a way, the only showy effect.

Ken Burns: I was just going to say that, well with the time lapse, the reading of the poetry by Hart Crane and the time lapse that accompanies that, and the dissolves, are about as far out as I get. There's always, at least in 90% of the films, there's some form of time lapse. Sometimes, in the case of the Shaker film, it's a two minute, the light falling on a particular house. In the Brooklyn Bridge, in the Statue of Liberty, in Congress, it's much more manic fun, use of time lapse. In the Brooklyn Bridge a full moon rises between the towers as Frank Sinatra sings.

Terrence Rafferty: Well, certainly, in the Hart Crane passage, it matches the manic over abundance of Cranes language.

Ken Burns: Well, there's a great point-

Terrence Rafferty: That's the other reason why I chose that clip. I just wanted to make everybody listen to Hart Crane.

Ken Burns: Which is a great poem for one thing. We were doing time lapse photography and we had to do it by hand instead of getting what's called an intervalometer that allows you to do it. So it's very crude, and you can even see some fash frames there. But that... The sort of randomness, the accidental quality of it is wonderful. And when night comes he's finished a phrase and then it comes up again and he says, I think of cinemas. And it's one of these great moments that when you're in the editing room and you're timing where it happens, and it's one of these great gifts.

Terrence Rafferty: Well, as disgracefully showy as it is, those dissolves... As disgracefully showy as they are, I really do think that... They're beautiful because... Also, because of the passage that's being read in them, which is all about unfulfilled hopes and the passage is... The spoken passage is about the passage of time. These dissolves seem to really crystallize for me something really important about historical documentaries. And about the kind of film that you do.

Ken Burns: Yeah. It's one of my most favorite moments in the film, is the use of that. And also the Hart Crane thing. Because the one thing that's... In a feature film there is intention at the meeting, and more important, maybe not so much intention but there's preconception at the meeting of every image and word. Because the script is the God of the production. But here, and I just saw the Lodz Ghetto film recently that you like so much, there's a collection of imagery that's going on here, and there's a collection of words and talking heads and worries about structure that aren't decided in the beginning. And there's a kind of horse trading that goes on in the course of editing, so I've got, in Brooklyn Bridge, thinking back 12 years, I've got rolls sitting in the editing room that say, time lapse.

Aug 6, 1991 12

Ken Burns: I've got rolls that say, live cinematography specific bridge. Live cinematography night from New york. Rolls that are just endless shots. 50, 60, 70 shots on a roll. And I'm faced where am I going to put Jack Unterecker’s description of Hart Crane? Before or after we have his reading of it? And how do we get to it? I've got this picture of Hart Crane, and I've done this, I've panned from the bridge to his face, a year ago. Just, when somebody handed me the photograph, and suddenly that all comes together. Not that quickly. It's not a process of almost immediate intention. It really... And I think one thing you have to understand about documentaries is how random it is, how much it is made in an editing room, through trial and error. And most of what I do is wrong. 99% of what I do is wrong. It's the wrong choice. The only skill-

Terrence Rafferty: I didn't want to say that but...

Ken Burns: The one skill you can look to is the ability to realize it was wrong and try to find a solution.

Terrence Rafferty: All your films are shot on 16's.

Ken Burns: Right.

Terrence Rafferty: 16 millimeter and you do edit them with physical strips of film.

Ken Burns: Yes, we do. We touch it and-

Terrence Rafferty: You touch the film?

Ken Burns: I had a really great metaphor working at... A cosmological one that a painter deals with pigments and color on quite a cellular level, that's what makes colors, is cellular interaction. And the paint gets on him or her and hands and there's really a tactile relationship to the material. Film is a cosmology removed. It's molecular. You deal with this sensitivity of light and chemicals. And we really gone down to a less touchable sort of form. It's molecular. But you can still hold the product of this. You can cut it. You need to physically tape it. You put it around your neck. You hold it in your mouth as you bring something else in. It can cut you. And that happens. It just doesn't get on your clothes in that way.

Ken Burns: Video, boo, hiss. Is the next removed cosmology. It's electronic. It's atomic. You don't ever touch it. You don't ever see it. You don't do anything to it. You see merely a shadow of it. You never have a sense of its ness. And you don't get to cut it. And in fact the most difficult thing in video, is one of the easiest things in film, which is when you have laid a sequence down and you say, "Oh, that shots not on long enough." To add a little bit more, that much more film, which is four frames, which is a sixth of a second, is just you go do it. You do it and you adjust the soundtrack and you're there. Video, you have to lay everything back down again. Go Aug 6, 1991 13 back to your roles and add four more frames, and then you go... Takes an hour and then you go, "Oh, didn't work."

Ken Burns: And what happens is you begin to not make those close decisions, so it favors rapid cutting, and it favors the less precise use of a duration of an image, which is critical to this. That's the building block. Somebody, a great man, told me as an editing thing that a shot should last as long as it lasts. And in editing you spend all your time worrying and wondering how long the shot should last. And it'll tell you. And you have to listen and that's not always as easy as it sounds.

Terrence Rafferty: Zen editing.

Ken Burns: Zen editing, yeah.

Terrence Rafferty: But you obviously really feel like you need that physical, tactile-

Ken Burns: Oh, absolutely.

Terrence Rafferty: I'm sure the reason why I was asked to do the zen was I was the last writer who actually writes longhand. It's not on the computer.

Ken Burns: Shelby Foot does too.

Terrence Rafferty: Well, good for him. I guess the next picture I want to take a look at was another biographical film about Thomas Hart Benton, which, when I was researching this I have to admit, I left that until last because I've never been interested in Benton, as an artist, and I was afraid I'd be bored. And in some ways it was the greatest revelation to me of all of your pictures, because I was riveted for 90 minutes. It's a fascinating picture of a very, very peculiar American artist. It has this in common with Huey Long, in that they're both unclassifiable figures. I mean figures that are not easily explained by left or right or modern or traditional or any of the categories. And therefore, I think, are unusually resonant.

Ken Burns: Most of my film subjects have been in the 19th century. The manipulation of the still photographic archive with first person voices. I've become increasingly interested in biography as a way to give access, not just to the person, and it's very important that they defy that easy conceptualization. Because in their difficulty, both these men pretend to be something they are not. And ultimately suffer the consequences of that inner lie. Despite the fact that they make our world a lot more enjoyable. Not just because of their bombast and their personality but because of the confusion they cause in us. The yes and no that they hit simultaneously.

Aug 6, 1991 14

Ken Burns: But the 20th century subjects don't have Huey, Benton and the Empire of the Air, which are biographies in the 20th century, don't have first person voices. They often have huge accompanying set of witnesses, talking heads, that do it. But mostly they're about the untouchable contradictions that these people... And Benton really snuck up on me. Geoff Ward hated his work and didn't want to do it. He thought that would be bad. I said I'm delighted you hate it. I had remembered his work as being the image of manifest destiny in high school history text books. But it was the life that mattered. The life that mattered. And he definitely is one of those figures that gathered a lot of contradictions and paradoxes.

Terrence Rafferty: Well, you can't be interested in American history if you don't have a taste for the really weird.

Ken Burns: Right.

Terrence Rafferty: The clip we will show from Thomas Hart Benton-

Ken Burns: The really important American figures decay, have half lives. And what they give off, that radioactivity that they give off transcends in the most direct way, the merely functional historical intellectual didactic consideration of their lives. That is to say, we can be moved in the consideration of a lot more difficult subjects under the surface, if we are willing to let them in. Thomas Hart Benton drives art critics crazy because he did his best work and then didn't, like Rothko or Jackson Pollock, have the curtesy of dying right away.

Ken Burns: And instead lived another 45 years to see his art go way out of fashion then come back up, go out of fashion and at the end coming back up again. And so his life is the razors edge that any artist runs, not only failing his own work but failing himself, internally. I couldn't believe that... I thought I was going to start off making a film about this grumpy, cantankerous personality, just as I thought I'd have the real Broderick Crawford. And indeed in Huey, we had hoped to include parallel clips of All the Kings Men. But if you try to put All the Kings Broderick Crawford next to Huey Long... I mean, he's diminished.

Terrence Rafferty: He's just not strange enough.

Ken Burns: Yeah. The only person that survives is Robert Penn Warren throughout that film and his great animated rhetoric.

Terrence Rafferty: Anyway, let's take a look at the clip from Thomas Hart Benton.

Ken Burns: The unidentified museum curators of my very good friend , who is the descendant of all the Adams's of this country, and who interested me in this story of Thomas Hart Benton, and you've seen him more than five or six times before this moment in a little bit closer views, clearly in front of a nude. Which you Aug 6, 1991 15 have not seen another nude of Benton so there's this growing, wouldn't you say, anticipation of what it is that Henry is in front of. And then all of sudden it turns out to be sitting in front of Persephone. Just his hairline discretely below the gist of the painting. It's one of my favorite moments.

Terrence Rafferty: And you see the callousness of the film maker. You just identified this man as a friend of yours, and you get a wonderful cheap laugh off him.

Ken Burns: That's right.

Terrence Rafferty: Well, documentaries can be fun too. So when you asked PBS for the funding for the 15 hour history of pornography...

Ken Burns: Yeah, well. The film actually begins with the F. word that I thought for sure that they would be upset with, and they ran it. I guess this is how you can... If Errol Morris had had it in Thin Blue Line it would have been beeped out but I could get away with it because it's just an educational film. About a painter.

Terrence Rafferty: Have you ever had any trouble with PBS or with... I mean, documentary film makers have to write incredibly long grand proposals to various agencies and-

Ken Burns: I haven't. It's mainly because on one level I am in perfect sync with where I get most of my money, which is the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the state agencies. It's just the thing that animates me in film making is the thing that they're most anxious to get out in their public programs. Which is a sense of history not being didactic. And so there is a wonderful correspondence there, but it isn't easy. I'm doing the history of baseball right now and my proposal was four times longer than Civil War because I need to prove to the pedants that baseball is a legitimate form of historic expression, as the Civil War is more obviously.

Terrence Rafferty: I used to sit on NEH panels-

Ken Burns: And they're pretty deadly. These are not hugely big budgets but they're bigger than most independent documentary film makers work with, and require the agency, the larger agency of public television and its connection, not only with the National Endowment for the Humanities but the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, private foundations of which you sponsor tonight, the MacArthur Foundation, was also one of mine. And have been really great supporters of independent work for a long time.

Ken Burns: And also corporations and in my case, the great, glorious irony is that the underwriter for not only The Civil War, but Empire of the Air, the upcoming baseball and several other projects I have going, is the negative subject of Michael Moore's documentary, Roger and me, which is General Motors. Who, from my point of view, were unbelievable. They have a tremendous interest in history, have absolutely no interest in telling Aug 6, 1991 16 me how to make films. They have nothing, they don't come into the editing room, they don't have any say so, they don't approve anything, they don't even... I am not even required to show it to them up until six weeks before air time, to give them an opportunity to take their name off, if they want. But not take their money back.

Ken Burns: It's an amazing thing and they're great because they also put a lot of money into educational stuff. So schools get the series-

Terrence Rafferty: I guess that didn't just quite make it into Roger-

Ken Burns: It didn't make it into Roger and Me, and they of course, once Warner Brothers bought Roger and Me, it became... The story was a David and Goliath sort of thing, in the publicity that it tended what is a very funny film. But it was really Warner Brothers-

Terrence Rafferty: And very much in your style.

Ken Burns: It was Warner Brothers fighting General Motors in this very interesting fashion, through this vehicle of Michael Moore. And I would get asked constantly, didn't they underwrite it to counteract the publicity? No, because they had underwritten it four years before Michael Moore was even on the scene. And then I always added that if I had made it, I would call it, Roger and I. And that would be my didactic contribution to it.

Terrence Rafferty: Subject rather than object.

Ken Burns: That's right.

Terrence Rafferty: But is there ever any self-censorship that goes on? Projects that you feel like you would love to do but you would just never be able to get funding for?

Ken Burns: It hasn't happened yet. Though I say the closest would be this Empire of the Air, which is incredibly, especially in its denouement, critical of corporate America. I'm actually surprised that General Motors is still on the ride because it is a damning indictment of what corporations do to individuals in the twentieth century. At the same time our popular myth making apparatus is... Like, radio and television and film, pro port that the individual is the single most important thing. And we feel this to be true in our souls, in our writing, in our criticism, in our films, in our documentaries, seemingly reflect this. But in fact the history of the twentieth century is the subservience of the individual to the larger entities.

Ken Burns: For example, this film, Empire of the Air, tells the story of three individuals, Lee DeForest, and David Sarnoff. You've probably heard of David Sarnoff. Edwin Howard Armstrong's name Aug 6, 1991 17 should be as well known as Thomas Edison's. And the reason why it's not, is that is to say his scientific contributions to radio are as great as Edison's is to the light bulb. And we use his inventions every day. The reasons why he's not, is a particularly dark twentieth century fable. Which is what drew me.

Ken Burns: But no, I have yet to feel restrained by the choice of subjects. I feel that that's... That's again what documentaries are. They're controversial, political, big and little P. I'm not interested in that because I think that those will all get made, and we can argue over Death of a Princess, or the Palestinian thing that caused so much bru-ha. But really these aren't very good films. They are all interesting subjects but there're not-

Terrence Rafferty: I mean, they are all a function... A function of news.

Ken Burns: That's right. And they issue out of-

Terrence Rafferty: And they have that value of showing you what is going on and what it looks like.

Ken Burns: I'm almost perversely interested in... I'm planning to make a film on Lewis and Clark which for all intents and purposes is adult... but it's one of the great stories that we have. And Thomas Jefferson, these are some of the subjects... . They're people that seem safely dead. But offer us... I heard these two kids talking, or somebody told me this story. Two little girls, two or three years old, saying, now that the dinosaurs are safely dead we can say that they are ugly.

Ken Burns: It's a really... It's the best, best kind of sense of what history is about. Being able to pursue the people who can't pursue you.

Terrence Rafferty: Do you want to violate chronology and show that dead from Empire of the Air?

Ken Burns: Sure.

Terrence Rafferty: Just talking about it.

Ken Burns: Can you show Empire of the Air?

Terrence Rafferty: We do have-

Ken Burns: I think there may only be one projector able to- Aug 6, 1991 18

Terrence Rafferty: He's probably not... Okay. We can't because we only have one projector. Because you insist in working in 16. What was it like approaching the vast subject of the civil war?

Ken Burns: It was amazing. All of these other films really, literally led to it. All of the films seemed to suggest... And I come to my love of history completely naively. I get off on stories, and they excite me. I am possessed. But I have very little training so what seems obvious to most people that the civil war is the central event, had to really be impressed on me, in a direct way. And it came through-

Terrence Rafferty: You just thought it was real interesting.

Ken Burns: All the others... Exactly. It came through all the other subjects. And that's how we did it. And everybody said don't do the whole thing. Just do one aspect of it. And I just didn't want to have black history month, or women in , or what an interesting guy Abe Lincoln is, or this that-

Terrence Rafferty: Okay.

Ken Burns: It seemed that all of the other films had been patches in a quilt that could make up something that could be American history. And that the central patch, the largest patch, is the civil war. And it was missing. And needed to be done. And that that is a really good way of understanding it. And it's also a sense too that we are dealing with the closest we have to an Homeric, operatic form here in television. As pernicious as the medium is, in causing a history, or historical amnesia, as responsible as it is for forcing us to live only in the present, it does have this ability to combine and animate the past. Walt Whitman wrote after the civil war, wrote this wonderful sentences. He said, future years will never know the seething hell, and the black infernal background, that countless minors scenes and interiors of the succession war. And it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books.

Ken Burns: And 50,000 books later, it's true. There's something missing in every civil war thing. You can read Lincoln, but you can't hear him or see him. You can see him in a picture book, but you can't hear him. And you don't know exactly how he said it. You can read a description of the battle, from the aerial view, or from an individual soldier and get an entirely different battle. But there was this possibility that the very agency, which had delivered us away from a vernacular of history, television, had the ability to, and film, had the ability to reclaim it. To put it back in in this grand operatic or Homeric sense. This is the electronic campfire. But this is, nevertheless, a way in which the spear carrier has as many verses as the God. And that's an important aspect of the telling of history. And it's particularly important now, in a modern age, where we suffer all of this question about multiculturalism and the new social history. Which tended to throw out the old stuff, rather than find a way in which they can coexist. And strangely in this, essentially, superficial mediums, superficial in terms of the amount of intellectual information you can communicate, they can coexist.

Ken Burns: That you can have the old history of the state, Abe Lincoln and the generals versus Jeff Davis and his Aug 6, 1991 19 generals, alongside the whole new history that tells you that Harry Beecher Stowe and Harriet Tubman and Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton, had something to do with this. That Frederick Douglas and anonymous black soldiers had something to do with this. That Sam Watkins and Eliza Ambrose had something to with this. And that beyond that their music simply and authentically recreated, had something to do with it. And the most direct visual evidence that we have of that period, the photographs, not only have something to do with it, they can be opened up and be made to reveal a reality that, as Whitman said, never got in the books.

Terrence Rafferty: It was a superbly documented war, I mean biographically. And when you work on nineteenth century subjects you do have the great advantage of the fact that people wrote letters. I wonder if films like yours will be possible of the history of us, because-

Ken Burns: I must tell you-

Terrence Rafferty: Did we write letters? Will our faxes appear on screen? I don't know.

Ken Burns: My sense is that going at the current rate, no. But there's something really amazing about what the civil war has done now, as a cultural phenomenon. The Civil War, the series, has done, is that I've gotten thousands of letters from people, mostly women, who throughout, id say 60% women, who throughout the production said, I'm not interested in the civil war. To which I would say, but I'm making it for you, not for that demographically complete 45 year old male, who follows military history.

Terrence Rafferty: Civil war buff.

Ken Burns: A civil war buff. A buckle collector who is interested in the regiments and has missed the story. I was saying they'll come along with this, but I am making it for you. The same with baseball. I'm making it for the person who is not a baseball fan. That engendered so much great literature that I get still, it's now over 11 months since the series went off, and I get hundreds of letters a week just written to me, New Hampshire. And they come. And I got a letter the other day, which is very short, I mentioned this to you, I haven't read it to you, but I would love, with your permission, to interrupt at this point, because it's to the point about whether down the line we'll be able to do this.

Ken Burns: My sense is that good history, or history itself, begets history. That is to say this series provoked a response. The civil war was a great traumatic event in our childhood and as any psychiatrist knows, dealing on an individual, when that subconscious is riled, you respond. The country was reminded of its collective traumatic experience. It's true if you got off a boat from Haiti yesterday or you came over on the Mayflower, or you founded this country 2000 years ago. It is still the moment. I got this letter. And I've been carrying it around. is here and this letter is here.

Ken Burns: It says, "Dear sir. Again I am watching The Civil War. Enthralled, inspired, heartbroken. So much to think Aug 6, 1991 20 about, so much to feel. The eloquence of ordinary people resounds. It humbles me. Such dignity in the archival faces of my people, who were enslaved, but who never surrendered their souls to slavery. I hear the Southerners who not only kept my ancestors in bondage, but fought to the death to do so. And I hate them for that. Then the choir sings, do you, do you, want your freedom? A good question, for we are not yet truly free. None of us. To achieve that, white America must abandon its racial conceits. And I must abandon my hate. They must change, and I must forgive, for us both to be free. Lincoln was right. Malice toward none, charity for all. So at the end, I wonder. Does my white counterpart, hearing that choir, realize that the final question is meant for both of us? Do you, do you, want your freedom? I know what my answer is. I will wait for him."

Ken Burns: And that's representative. It's just an amazing thing. So I think that in some ways there's the letters of the 90's, that supposedly don't exist.

Terrence Rafferty: I mean, I can't imagine an artist getting a more satisfying response to-

Ken Burns: I was asked by TV Guide, in July, to write an article for them, in the front of the guide, about the response to The Civil War. And I decided I would just do it all in letters. That I would segway between letters. So I went to the draw, I picked out one letter of the alphabet, the G's I think. Which was a stack this thick. And in the first top eight letters wrote the entire thousand word article for TV Guide. And just went "Whoa." I mean, I've answered them all and I've read them all, and I filed them away but I didn't realize that you could literally write a whole story for a national magazine from the first eight letters of the one file, chosen at random. Because they all had this poignant... Even the negative ones have this sense of being possessed by the negative force of memory.

Ken Burns: That memory that didn't produce Robert Penn Warren and and Walker Percy and William Faulkner. But that produced the love and resilience of the Southern Cross and the Dixie Flag and the pernicious racism that still exists.

Terrence Rafferty: A lot of what people are responding to in The Civil War, the reason why it's gotten that incredible level of response, is that we do sense in watching it, or at least I did. There's almost this real love for the documents. And for the letters, for the way... You often will use the same, hate to bring this down to the mundane technical level, semi technical level, but the same photography over and over and over again. But the resonances are different every time.

Ken Burns: That's because of the note, it's very musical. That's because that note is a beautiful note and it can come back and be sounded again in a different chord, and that's important. And remember it goes back to the... The constant theme that's going on here is that documentaries are usually the expression of an already arrived at end. Whether it's Errol, or it's Harvest of Shame, or whatever. And here you're saying that there's something more, that the content is the most important thing. Period. The film maker, his manipulation, however artful, I might get excited about, it is still secondary to the fact that this is about the civil war. I'd be

Aug 6, 1991 21 just as happy to talk, not about film making, not about documentary films, but talk about the civil war, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or the Shakers, as any of them.

Terrence Rafferty: And you can get responses like that, in which you can see that someones emotions, and someones understanding of the world, have been complicated and deepened.

Ken Burns: Yes.

Terrence Rafferty: That's what everything should do, but certainly more documentaries should.

Ken Burns: You want to leave something that does more than the sum of its parts. You're a bridge. You're stone in compression and cables in intention. And yet it's the most gorgeous bridge, I think, that's ever been built. And we respond emotionally to anything. A log over a stream sets the heart a flutter. Yet there's something that went into this and the meaning is compounded once you know how it was built. So that no longer is it just stone and compression, cables and tension, artfully done and a beacon to artists and writers and poets for a century. But something more that's fantastic history, so that it's been paid for in every joint.

Terrence Rafferty: Let's take a look at one perfectly formed part of The Civil War. We do have a clip from that. I'm sure you've all seen it but it's certainly worth seeing again.

Ken Burns: There's always a sense when you see that, that all of this, particularly biography, but also the pursuit of history is this effort, its self discovery, however personal it might be. There's always a question that's animated my larger work as I've described it as, trying to answer a simple question, who are we? As people. Who are we, Americans? And these bridge builders, or religious sects or demigod politicians or soldiers in the war. And then at an intensely personal level this sense, who made that? Who am I? That comes out of everything. I can hear that every day. That letter. It doesn't lose it.

Terrence Rafferty: You still feel the same kind of relation... I mean, it's not finished work-

Ken Burns: No, it's not. It's definitely not. I remember, it's funny looking at it now because the song is now so part of me that I've lost, in many ways, the ability to separate what the piece of music means. But I do have recollections of many of filming, many of the images, which is of course a very rote process, months before the synthesis of the film began. And I remember being at the library of converse and filming the interior of an officers tent, doing two or three shots and about to take it off the easel and put on another one, when I realized that I could do another shot from the candle, up to the wall. Freeform, rather than tilt or pan or zoom. But I could just go diagonally rather loosely. And at that time, I didn't know what that meant.

Ken Burns: Then this wonderful, almost ecstatic moment in editing, when faced with literally 150 hours worth of stills, Aug 6, 1991 22 saying, what do you put for Sullivan Ballou's letter? To realize that when he's talking about the debt that he feels to the previous patriots of the revolution, those who have gone before us, that there's something in that image on the wall that suggest earlier battles. Not the present one. Suddenly that association could be made, however correct that is, that may just be a picture of him or his father, or unrelated. But it became possible and for me that's one of the most interesting moments in the film. And a really good access to the process, is to sit there with literally hours of inventory of images, and say, what do you show?

Ken Burns: I have a picture of Sullivan Ballou, a rather crude lithograph, which I didn't show. Because he becomes unimportant to the series of photographs of couples that make it much more to the point, than having it interrupted by something as ordinary as the man who wrote the letter. I mean, it's really true. It doesn't need Sullivan Ballou there.

Terrence Rafferty: You said something that's mysterious and intuitive in the way those images are put together. A lot of people have used still photographs in films before, but very few film makers get that sense of caressing the image.

Ken Burns: There's also another simple thing, is that I have a romantic interest, a sentimental interest, an emotional interest, which is usually countered to the documentary flow. It's unabashed. That's an element of my life. And so that sentiment, that emotion is a way of responding to materials. "Hey. Why don't we put pictures of couples here?" "Good idea, Ken. Which ones?" And now the music is changing, lets go back to the battle where this took place, the cannon out on Manassas, which we've seen at long generic shots, it's in fact the shot that's begun the entire film. At the beginning of this episode, 99 minutes before. 20 minutes ago at Manassas it's poised there as you're hearing about the battle. But now we can return to it and go into its particulars almost in a Blakean sense, that the universe could be found and not in a grain of sand but in a blade of grass.

Ken Burns: Or a link of the chain. Or in any mans picture. This is the stuff. And very romantic.

Terrence Rafferty: Documentary at its best does. When you see the contemporary, the fresh footage, in this context, I don't know. Everything seems... The soil seems richer. Everything seems... All that history seems to have seeped into those images.

Ken Burns: Yeah. It is my belief that these emotional connections, however they are promoted by the film maker, promoted by the selection of the film maker, promoted by the intrinsic meaning in the material itself becomes glue. It makes those events stick. And that's all we want it to do. We don't want the fact to pass dry and brittle. In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. You need to have the connection. And that's what this emotional archeology-

Ken Burns: - second rate man, that exults as a general, a man who went on to become the first imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. This is not a film that's just resorted to the magnolia and Spanish moss kind of syndrome of the civil war. But has for the first time, promoted blacks as active dedicated participants, that have brought in Aug 6, 1991 23 women as not passive bystanders. That has added a lot of things, so it's unsentimental in its historiography though it steadfastly refuses to present anything but story as the fabric of the piece.

Terrence Rafferty: So you're trying to pass off this radical notion that you can be lucid and complex and emotional at the same time? It won't wash, Burns.

Ken Burns: That's it. Let's leave now. Somebody write that, you got that down?

Terrence Rafferty: Do you want to show a bit of Empire?

Ken Burns: Let me show you a little bit of this-

Terrence Rafferty: And then we will take some questions after.

Ken Burns: This is the first answer print, which is like showing your rough draft of the most recent film that I finished called Empire of the Air, which is a long complicated story. Do you know Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the Tom Stoppard play? That's Hamlet off stage. Everybody knows the golden age of radio and Amos and Andy whose in this and all of this sort of stuff. But I was interested in this back stage story of three very complicated men. Lee DeForest who invents the thing called the vacuum tube. Doesn't really understand it. Probably pirated a lot of his previous inventions. Is always one step away from the law, but yet if you read the history books, he's the father of radio.

Ken Burns: Edwin Howard Armstrong who I told you before, is a man of four or five seminal inventions that we use every day, every time we turn on the radio or television, get anything from satellite communications. And David Sarnoff was the brilliant marketer who saw the possibilities of these essentially hobbyist toys, and transformed it into first, the radio industry and then later, helped to pioneer the television industry. These men would be great stories and this would be a great story, in and of itself, if it wasn't for the essential tragedy that they spent nearly their entire lifetimes, not enjoying the fruits of their labors, but warring with one another.

Ken Burns: I've just taken an early battle about an hour into this film, between... DeForest has begun the longest patent suit in history, against Armstrong. Trying to get... Armstrong's first great invention is called the regenerative circuit, which allows DeForest audio on to. None of this technical information is interesting or necessary for you to understand. He just sues Armstrong, claiming that Armstrong's magnificent invention is really his all along. And this monomaniacal way. And then Armstrong, who you've learned has this love of heights. He's always promoting himself by climbing up towers. It's an amazing story, and I'll just let you look at it. Just a few minutes here. If you could roll it in

Ken Burns: Thank you. Aug 6, 1991 24

Terrence Rafferty: And we should all go home too.

Ken Burns: Yeah. It's really late.

Terrence Rafferty: Anyway, Ken. Thanks a lot. It's been great fun for me and thank all you for coming.

Ken Burns: I couldn't imagine better company.

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