Ken Burns’ amiability is evident early. He thanked me for attending a small press availability for his new series – The American Revolution (six two-hour episodes a decade in the making, due on the BBC later this year) – before we had met. He thanked me again later on for a question I asked in the Q&A before we sat down to talk. None of this was for show. It comes naturally, and may explain how he gets half of Hollywood to lend their voices to his films and help make them what they are: the definitive records of America’s national events.
When you do sit across from him, he is eager to answer your question, and eager also to extend and encapsulate his points when he does. He has an irrepressibility – almost a sense of duty in trying to give you something worth writing down. Perhaps he just knows a lot and wants you to know it too. His vim, undimmed at the age of 73, is inherent in his face. I doubt it would have been repressed wherever he had ended up. But he ended up in the right place for it to find free rein: a village in New Hampshire (Walpole; population: 3,633), where he has lived in the same house for 47 years.
“I take a walk every morning, three miles or so, and I can’t begin to tell you how many filmic problems I’ve solved, how many other kinds of things I’ve solved – letters I’ve written in my head and not sent, ideas I’ve had for speeches or poems, or solutions to the film – because of the space to do that,” he told me. “Nature is a really accurate mirror, and you can’t fool anybody when you’re there.”
In 1979, aged 26, Burns was offered a job at the public television station in New York City as an in-house producer, but the rent was already rising on his apartment in Chelsea, Manhattan. He’d shot much of the footage he needed for a documentary on the Brooklyn Bridge. “It was either get the job and watch that film just collect dust, or move to someplace where a lot of friends had moved after college – the hippies, who had become weavers, midwives and bookstore owners up in southern New Hampshire and Vermont. I moved up there, and that made all the difference. The city is designed to distract you from the truth of who you are.”
Stanley Kubrick moved to Hertfordshire in 1965 and never left. Warren Buffett has worked out of Omaha, Nebraska, all his life. Both men felt they benefitted from living in relative obscurity. Wall Street, Buffett has said, would have overstimulated him. Kubrick just found Los Angeles unproductively competitive. If Burns had stayed in New York, he may never have developed or stuck to his stately style of filmmaking, a style most documentarians, as Burns readily admits, think “hopelessly antiquated”. Not that Burns thinks he has only ever used one part of the palette.
“If you went to the Musée d’Orsay – and I don’t mean to equate myself with Cézanne – but you would stand in the middle of a room [of his paintings] and you would see they were all made by the same artist. You can look at my stuff, and they’re all mine. But then you notice that one film has no first-person voices, whereas another one is entirely first-person voices. One film may have only witnesses to it, no scholars. One film may have only scholars. One film may have a predominance of live cinematography, as the [series on] national parks does, because there are no photographs. Others may be entirely photographic. There is one recreation in the entire [American] Civil War series” – which made Burns’ name for good when it came out in 1990 – “and that is a horse hoof, whereas this film has hours and hours of us filming in an impressionistic style. So I don’t feel that I’ve kept [to] the same thing.”
Burns completed his film on the Brooklyn Bridge soon after moving north. It was his first feature documentary, and duly Oscar-nominated. The film inaugurated his lifelong professional bond with PBS, the American public broadcaster, whose support has kept him in work and renown ever since. Is such a life, I asked him, still possible? Any young documentarian is now competing with the past and present of everything on YouTube and Netflix, along with all the video output increasingly produced by publishers of all kinds.
“I don’t know. I’d like to believe [so],” he said. “The telegraph came out in the first half of the 19th century and people said it’s all over, nobody’s going to write a letter again, this technology is going to overwhelm us. It felt equally Herculean a task to get a film done, let alone be nominated for an Academy Award, back then.”
The most successful people are always moving onto the next thing while their competitors remain stuck on the present. Burns is no different, though he doesn’t characterise his restless energy in quite such terms. “I’ve got a sign on my desk. There’s a theatre impresario, long dead, named Tyrone Guthrie, from Minneapolis. He said we were looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of again.” Burns has always found something new to be pushed by.
“People say, what’s the hardest film to make? And I said, the first one, Brooklyn Bridge, and then obviously the Civil War, because it was the first multi-episode one. And then it was, well, baseball was hard. Well, jazz was even harder, because music, which is normally background, is now background, middle ground, foreground, hyper-ground. Then it was Vietnam, for sure. We had to juggle all of this stuff.”
Now it is, or was, the Revolution. The story itself is worth the price of admission. In the opening episode – which covers the two-decade-long build-up to the first shot fired on Lexington Green in 1775 – you glimpse the lives of the future founding fathers.
A young George Washington is left irate after being denied a Royal Commission by the British in 1755. Are Americans, he asks, to be deprived the status of British subjects? A yet younger Thomas Jefferson is one of many ambitious land speculators curtailed by a British proclamation in 1763 that declares all territory west of the Appalachian Mountains off-limits to colonial settlement. Ben Franklin, 60, testifies before the House of Commons in 1766, warning the British that their nascent attempt to tax Americans will provoke a rebellion. Samuel Adams – he of the eponymous lager – captures the future spirit of Boston. “If our trade may be taxed, why not our lands? Why not the produce of our lands and everything we possess or make use of?”
The conflict was global from the start. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 – in which would-be revolutionaries dumped 45 tons of British tea into Boston Harbour – was precipitated by the looming bankruptcy of the East India Company. The Company’s solvency was essential to London: it paid 7 per cent of the government’s revenues in taxes on its tea trade, and its private army held off French designs in north-east India. London made a deal, allowing it to offload a glut of its tea supplies in America and avoid export taxes on the trade – albeit by levying a tariff on American buyers. “There must always be one tax to keep up the right [to tax the colonists],” as George III wrote in a letter to Lord North, his prime minister, a year later. “I approve of the tea duty.” The Americans did not.
The Boston “Patriots” who despoiled the Company’s tea reserves famously dressed themselves as Native Americans. “Every school child in America knows that,” Burns told me. “But why are they dressed as Indians?” Not to shift the blame, as is in the legend, he argued. “They’re making a statement that we’re aboriginal. This is a huge break. It’s December of 1773, and [they are saying] we’re no longer of you. It’s the beginning of contemplating divorce. These are little, tiny, small moments, and they’re happening in different ways, in Virginia and in Georgia and in Boston.”
The British err in thinking the other 12 colonies will stick with them when they move to crush Massachusetts and close the port of Boston until the despoiled tea is paid for. Instead the action unites all 13 against them. The First Continental Congress convenes in Philadelphia within a year and calls for a cessation of trade with Britain, along with armed resistance. “The die is cast,” the King writes to North. “Blows must decide… we must either master them or totally leave them.”
The greatest misconception about the American Revolution, Burns stresses in his series, is that it was simply a war of Americans against the British. In reality, it was a savage civil war among Americans themselves. Committees of Safety were established in every hamlet after the first Congress. Thousands of committeemen spied on neighbours, read mail, scrutinised merchants, and demanded oaths of loyalty. Those who refused were shunned and harassed. American “Loyalists” viewed these Patriot committees as tyrannical mobs. Their righteousness was only evident in retrospect.
Burns’ mother died when he was young. He was 11 and she had been living with cancer for eight years. In 2016, in a commencement address at Stanford, he spoke of her death, the threat of bankruptcy it posed, and the way their neighbours at the time had collected $120 to help the family endure. His mother was dying, but “that hot June evening was a victory.” Burns had, he told the students, “spent my entire professional life trying to resurrect small moments within the larger sweep of American history… to wake the dead.”
I asked him about the small stories of the Revolution that captured him, and set off his irrepressible interest in everything he had found. Then he took a step back. “These small moments, could Hamlet exist without Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Yes, but if they’re not there, it’s not the same sort of thing. A top down version [of history]… has its own tyranny. The academy quite rightfully rejected that at the end of the Second World War. I mean, look what happens in painting. It goes from representation to abstract expression. Jazz goes from swing to Bebop.” Post-war intellectual culture veers from Freudianism to Marx and back. “It turns out,” Burns suggests, “narrative is all right [as in top down histories]. You just have to have a complete narrative. It has to be interested in asking questions about everybody’s story.”
One small moment in particular captured me. On the night of August 29, 1776 – shortly after the Americans had declared independence, with little assurance that would last – the British had George Washington’s army beaten back in Brooklyn. They were on the verge of taking it captive when, in a foreshadowing of Dunkirk, the British general (Howe) paused. He expected his brother, commanding a British fleet, to trap Washington from the rear, but a storm blew in, keeping British ships in bay. An American Colonel, John Glover of Marblehead, then ferried Washington’s 9,000 men across the East River to Manhattan in the still of night, aided by a providential fog. The British took New York, but Washington’s army survived.
The Revolution, in Burns’ telling, sets off the narratives of American history that have since played out over 250 years: the Declaration of Independence firing a transformation in thought that freed the slaves and emancipated women, after some delay. The Revolution applied to “white men of property, free of debt,” as Burns puts it. “But guess what? You’ve opened the door if you see these truths as self-evident. No longer are we [only] having an argument between British citizens. We’ve now broken them out into natural laws. Then slavery is over. It’s going to take us four score and nine years, but it’s over.”
Jeff Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic had hosted the initial Q&A with Burns. Goldberg, who has sharpened the magazine into a stout defender of American institutions under attack from Trump, had offered his own throughline of American history since 1776. He cast the Constitution (written in 1789) as a set of “vaccinations against tyrannical monarchy. We’re now literally experimenting with how good these vaccines are. That’s what this whole period is. They made these vaccines 250 years ago, and this is a test of whether they actually fight the infection of populism.”
Burns was less easily drawn on modern parallels. He is not a polemicist but an artist after all, or “a storyteller”, in his more modest phrasing. He shared my amazement at the 1776 fog that saved Washington and America. “You can’t make this stuff up. I think that’s really important: good history is never being quite sure it turns out that way. I’ve had people write me beautiful letters about how they watched the Civil War series and went into the scene at Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln is assassinated, and thought that maybe this time the gun won’t go off. At the end of [episode] five [in this series], the British take Charleston. As a filmmaker, I go: I don’t know whether we [the Americans] are going to make it. That, I think, is what you want to have. You hang on these moments.”
[Further reading: The passion of Will Self]
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