Ken Burns's Story of America's National Parks

Storyteller Ken Burns

Credit: Credit: Christian Kozowyk

PrintEmail

Login or register to leave a comment.

Average: Select ratingPoorOkayGoodGreatAwesome

No votes yet

Producer/director Ken Burns likes to describe his work as “emotional archaeology.” Beginning with his first film on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Burns has produced compelling, surprising, complex stories on seemingly well-documented subjects—22 projects in all.

His newest film, “National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” a six-part (12-hour) series, began airing on PBS stations on September 27. Ian Aldrich, Editor at Large at our sister publication, Yankee magazine, reached Burns at his office in Walpole, New Hampshire. Glean some insights into the man and his craft. Excerpts:

"A story is the superimposition we human beings make on events to make them understandable. A story is a way we distill experience, and stories will always be the way we do it. A blog is somebody’s story, right? God help us, but it’s somebody’s story."

"You take on the topic not because you know something about it, but because you don’t know something about it. It has a kind of a siren call—it interests you, it fits into what you’re thinking about. As I’ve said, I think we’ve made the same film over and over again. We’re just asking the simple question, Who are we?"

"[Our films] are evolving things. I don’t have anybody saying, Make it shorter, make it longer, change this, change that. We get to make it."

"It’s not unusual to have 20 drafts of a film before we’re finished. We’ll begin shooting at the same time we begin writing a script, unconcerned if there’s a line [missing] in the script or whether we can get from paragraph two to paragraph three on page 23 of episode 7."

"We also record our music early in the process so that it becomes an organic element as important as those words, as important as those photographs, as important as the commentary of the people we interview. That fluidity permits discovery, real art, to take place, a real synthesis of things."

"[Moving to Walpole, New Hampshire,] is the single greatest professional decision I’ve made. [It’s] where I first thought, quite correctly, that I could live inexpensively, but it has also provided me with the kind of nest necessary to do the work, [and the ability to] draw on people who are not necessarily filled with all of the formulas for filmmaking but who can adapt. I need a lot of time [and] the insulation that a life in New Hampshire and New England provides to make these films."

"Anybody can shoot old photographs. Anybody can record period music. Anybody can write a certain way and have first-person voices and have third-person voices, which we do, but I think [that ours are] authentically engaged in the service of something higher in each production. What emerges is style—and I certainly think these films have a recognizable style."

"Each film is the best that I could put into it at that time. If you don’t like the film, it’s all my fault, and that’s what I like about it."

"History is mostly about stories, and I think it connects us to the eras—not just the accumulation of facts, but sometimes the accumulation of really contradictory feelings."

"[America] is this Garden of Eden that Thomas Jefferson thought, after he sent Lewis and Clark to explore, would take hundreds of generations to fill up. When we did it in less than five, there was this kind of Yikes, boy, what are we going to lose?"

"Out of this incredible relationship to the landscape was spawned a kind of democratic response, an Emersonian and Thoreauvian response that you can worship God as you feel, not in cathedrals made by man, but in cathedrals made by nature."

"If you think that we could have done without the national parks, just imagine what the rim of the Grand Canyon would be like with McMansions all along it—no access, or maybe a tiny path that permits the public to a tiny view. But it’s not [that way]. It’s completely clear. It’s the grandest canyon on Earth and it’s [with] amazing foresight that we were able to arrest our acquisitive and extractive energies, which are a part of what made America great: Let’s dam that river, let’s mine for gold, let’s dig a tunnel for even more gold, let’s chop down those trees . . ."

"We’ve been able now, as the idea of the national parks has evolved, to leave them as a vignette of wild America, and that has huge psychological as well as civic and historical repercussions."

"What we’ve done is evolve the idea [of the national park] so that it isn’t just about scenery. It’s about wildlife. It’s about species. We would have lost the buffalo—period, end of statement, extinct—had there not been a Yellowstone National Park."

"We take [our national parks] for granted. Most Americans think that the Park Service has always been there to take care of them, but the Park Service doesn’t show up [in the film] until halfway through our third episode, and it raises questions. How did it come about? Who was taking care of [the parks]?"

"Well, it came about usually [through] individuals—people you and I have never heard of. Not just the John Muirs and the Teddy Roosevelts and the John D. Rockefeller Jrs., but many other people from every conceivable background and ethnicity who dedicated their lives to saving the parks. It was African-American buffalo soldiers in Yosemite and Sequoia national parks in the late 19th century because there was no one [else] there to stop the poachers and the vandals and the errant tourists. It’s a really great story, and it’s just one of hundreds that we tell."