Masters of Documentary: Ken Burns
Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than forty years. Since the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The Statue of Liberty, Huey Long; Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, The War, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, Jackie Robinson, Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War, and, most recently, The Vietnam War.
Future projects include films on the history of Country Music, Ernest Hemingway, Muhammad Ali, The Holocaust & the United States, Benjamin Franklin, Lyndon B. Johnson, The American Buffalo, Leonardo da Vinci, the American Revolution, the history of Crime and Punishment in America, the history of Reconstruction, and Winston Churchill, among others.
KEN’S FILMOGRAPHY
Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)
The Statue of Liberty (1985)
Huey Long (1985)
Thomas Hart Benton (1988)
The Congress (1988)
The Civil War (1990)
Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (1991)
Baseball (1994)
The West (1996)
Thomas Jefferson (1997)
Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997)
Frank Lloyd Wright (1998)
Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1999)
Jazz (2001)
Mark Twain (2002)
Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip (2003)
Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2005)
The War (2007)
The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009)
The Tenth Inning (2010)
Prohibition (2011)
The Dust Bowl (2012)
The Central Park Five (2012)
The Address (2014)
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014)
Jackie Robinson (2016)
Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War (2016)
The Vietnam War (2017)
The Mayo Clinic: Faith–Hope–Science (2018)
In long-form historical documentary. Ken says the idea should be so compelling to you that you are willing to sacrifice comfort and stability in orde get it made. You should expect difficult decisions that seem almost designed to create high anxiety. Also, expect mistakes, and plan for the turning of problems into learning opportunities. There are many specialized trades in filmmaking, such as writing, editing, cinematography, sound desi and fundraising. To be a director you need to wear all of these hats, and more. Educate yourself broad in the skills of filmmaking, but don’t let any one thing dominate.
The term cinema verite (truthful cinema) refers to a movement in documentary filmmaking that began during the 1960s. This simple intervention was actually quite a shift from the “fly on the wall” approach of direct cinema, in which the filmmakers role is limited to that of an observer, waiting for action to unfold naturally before the camera lens. Today, the terms cinema verite and direct cinema are often used interchangeably to describe a style o filmmaking that feels “real” and that follows impromptu rather than scripted action.
Ken Burn’s filmmaking grows out of a different tradition: documentary as historic chronicle. Rather than capturing raw footage of unfolding drama and present-day events, Ken draws his material from archives, both public and private. When no historical footage exists, he brings still photographs to life by adding subtle, motivated movement in combination with music, sound effects, and the spoken word. Sometimes a narrator will interpret the photo, or an actor will read from diaries, letters, memoirs, speeches, newspapers, and more. Where no footage or photos can be found, Ken finds a poetic image that resonates with the material in unexpected ways.
“The questions that you investigate must engage and attract your core interests, and to that extent you must first examine and hold a mirror up to yourself before figuring out your project. The first sign that you have found the right story is that the idea drops down from your head and into your heart. Wholehearted commitment is necessary when choosing a film project that may take anywhere from a year to a decade or more to complete.”
Stories that capture the heart are those that reveal some-thing central to people.
ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS
1. Where is the universal in the particular, and the particular in the universal?
2. What are the granular and personal details that connect directly with human experience?
3. What are the aspects of that story that cross borders and language barriers, and that connect your subject at an emotional level with a broader audience?
Is there an article in the newspaper that relates to your project? Cut it out and file it.
Have you written a draft of narration or dialogue? Print it out and file it.
Thought of some great questions to ask your first interview subject? Jot them down on a scrap of paper and file them.
EPISODE 2:
Your Story is Not the Same As your Subject
The subject is the monolith - the fact. A manipulation of an aspect of that subject that you are trying to stitch together into a story. A huge evolutionary process in which you cannot possibly conceive what it looks like at the end at the beginning.
Try to make sure that the lines of communication are continually open or at least reopened when they are broken between the story and facts of the subject that you are committed to trying to bring back in some "new" way.
Quote from Ken Burns: “The art is in the manipulation.”
For example, times when entertainment outweighs the facts; the times you make decisions of omission that actually are detrimental to important truths of the subject that should be surviving. So, you have a continual centering of what you are trying to do - all the time in relation to the facts.
The second you get away from the subject matter, then the art, the entertainment or storytelling can overwhelm and sometimes capsize the truths and the complicated of what the real subject is telling you.
You want to cast as wide a net as possible in every area. For example, buying books, reading books, adjusting the goal posts of the episodes; you decide to include; where you want to get to; what do you need to do. You are learning and the writing begins to shape a narrative.
Meanwhile, you are casting a really wide net out interviewing people. Trying to figure who to talk to and what they have to say and get as much as we can from them. You want the writer to be able to write a story about a particular event without worrying about whether there is a photo of that event.
Go into an archive and bring all the images you are drawn to compositionally because they are good photos and because of what they are showing and not worry about whether you can fit them in. Does this create huge problems in editing? Yes, it does. Because sometimes, you end up with writing for which there is no images and then you must figure something out. And sometimes you got a lot of images for which there is no writing and you are creating a new scene. That's great because then you are not just illustrating - you are showing this or you are showing that. You begin to have a "freedom"
to "range" around.
If you never stop researching or you never stop writing, then your process flows into one another - its organic. So, you collect as much as you can and see what is talking to you. When you begin to put stuff in collision, it will begin to talk to you.
Anchor Your Story In Facts
The greatest challenge for a documentary filmmaker is to make sure there is not too much daylight between the subject (the thing you're interested in) and the story of that subject you are trying to construct and tell. If there is too much daylight then the entertainment has won and the first casualty is the truth. You must hold yourself to the standard. Double check and make sure you have citation for where that thing came from and what source it was and be always interested to hear more scholarship about something. The outcome of something may not change over a number of years but the scholarship associated with it may change - take advantage of it. For example, people may think one thing happen but it could be exactly the opposite - you must be able to prove it (with cables, testimony, etc.).
Good Research Should Change Your Mind
The only preparation you need is to open, to read, to investigate, to explore, to discover - not be too sure you're right. If conventional wisdom tells us that something happened a certain way and everyone is familiar with the way that something happened, then what is the story you can tell that is different but with the same result as that conventional wisdom - rearrange the molecules! Get a lot of different perspectives. You can extend that and realize that an opposite point of view of the same event can actually be true. Opposite perspectives can be used to help define even more your point of view in telling a story.
Escape the Black Hole of Conventional Wisdom
To liberate your story, you have to escape the specific gravity, the dark matter, the black hole of conventional wisdom which say Its just like - this - this and - this. The first thing the documentary
filmmaker must do is “understand your baggage – and check it! We tend to think we know a lot about something but find out that we don't really.
Go beyond the conventional wisdom and learn new facts. Include perspectives that no one has thought of including that are a part of that event. Truths that have not been included. This method complicates things making it hard to tell the story. But when you tell it, then you have a story that is "possible."