This article is part of The Poynter 50, a series reflecting on 50 moments and people that shaped journalism over the past half-century — and continue to influence its future. As Poynter celebrates its 50th anniversary, we examine how the media landscape has evolved and what it means for the next era of news.
For some, Ken Burns’ films don’t just retell history. They are history.
Beginning with his 1981 directorial debut, “Brooklyn Bridge,” Burns has built a remarkable body of work — some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made. He captivated 40 million viewers with “The Civil War,” helping turn a documentary series into a national event. He offered a window into the work and turbulent life of one of America’s most famous authors, Ernest Hemingway. In “Jazz,” he taught us about the history and syncopated rhythms of a uniquely American genre. Most recently, he and his team brought us the six-part series “The American Revolution,” about how America was founded.
“More than anything else, he brought the art form of documentary filmmaking to the masses,” said Jack Powers, a professor in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. “He lives at this nexus of filmmaker, artist, journalist, historian. He lives right there, right at this little weird spot.”
Burns has been widely credited with shaping how Americans come to understand their own culture and history.
With this kind of work comes, you’d imagine, a great responsibility. Documentary films educate audiences and often shed light on underreported subjects. They can challenge our preconceptions.
But for Burns, this assumed responsibility is not one he thinks about. He says he set out to be a filmmaker, and that’s what he became.
“The filmmaker tells good stories, and I happen to work in history the way a painter might choose to work in oil, or watercolor, or do still lifes as opposed to landscapes,” Burns said. “And what’s, of course, synergistic in the extreme is the fact that the word ‘history’ is mostly made up of the word ‘story.’ Plus ‘hi,’ which is a good way to begin a story.”
His focus, Burns emphasized, has always been on the specific work at hand. In his editing room, he has a neon sign that reads, in lowercase cursive, “It’s complicated.”
This message reflects Burns’ approach to filmmaking. For one, Burns said, the facts should always take priority over the art.
“There’ll be plenty of time to do the art, but we have to be totally devoted to getting the facts right, even if those facts are often contradictory and destabilizing of an already good scene. So we are devoted to taking what most filmmakers — when a scene works, don’t want to touch it — and touching and messing with it.”
Sarah Botstein, a documentary film producer who has worked with Burns since 1997, said that over the course of his nearly 50-year career, Burns has become synonymous with history and storytelling for “all kinds of people, all kinds of ages, with all kinds of backgrounds.”
“We work very closely with the different scholars and academics and thinkers and writers and public intellectuals who are in our films, and also behind the scenes, helping us get the history right and then turning those films into educational materials for the public television network and system,” said Botstein, who also co-directed “The American Revolution.”
Geoffrey C. Ward, a historian and scriptwriter for many public television documentaries about American history, first met Burns when he was working on a film about the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, better known as the Shakers.
At the time, Ward had recently been let go from a magazine job. Someone had recommended him to Burns, who was looking for an adviser for the project to fulfill a requirement from the National Endowment for the Humanities. That led Ward to New Hampshire to view a rough cut of the film.
“And then on the way back to the airport, he asked me if I’d ever thought of writing for film,” Ward recalled. “I had nothing else to do, so I said, ‘I always loved historical documentaries.’”
Burns mentioned he was planning a film about Huey Long, the Louisiana governor who was assassinated in 1935. Thus began a collaboration that now spans more than four decades.
The role of journalism in historical documentaries cannot be overstated. It often becomes primary source material for historians, who then bring their expertise to documentary films. Ward himself has relied heavily on journalism when writing scripts for the historical documentaries he’s collaborated on with Burns.
“I’m a great admirer of journalists. I’ve known some, and I admire more. They are reporting what’s happening, and they’re saying things about it. And they may be wrong, because the first draft is never the final draft, but they provide vivid impressions of what happened,” Ward said. “They’re trained to do that, and their language gets into all of our shows, and it’s essential to it.”
But there is a difference between journalism and what Burns does. In his interview with Poynter, the filmmaker referenced the famous quote attributed to the late Philip L. Graham: “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.”
“It’s a wonderful phrase, but I’d like to suggest that nobody ever turns in a rough draft,” Burns said. “And I’m not in the rough draft. I’m in the polished shine.”
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, right, tours the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, on Nov. 2, 2013, while working on his documentary series about the Roosevelt family. Burns is known for extensive historical research and the use of primary source materials in his films. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Burns said his work entails reaching years beyond a subject’s conclusion to marshal the full range of scholarship about it. From that, he makes not just journalistic choices about what to include and which sources to rely on, but scholarly ones as well. These factors all come in addition to telling a good story.
“As I said, we’ll always let the facts rule,” he said, “and those are facts that are both journalistically informed and also scholastically informed.”
When it comes to the role of journalism in his work, Burns points to scholars who often draw on journalism to inform their insights long after events have passed.
“I think more than pretty much anybody I can think of in the second half of the 20th century, Ken Burns and his team have created the historic conscience of the United States,” said Jane Kamensky, the president and CEO of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, who also served as a scholarly adviser and on-camera expert for “The American Revolution.”
In the fall of 2018, Botstein and fellow producer David Schmidt visited Kamensky in her Harvard office to discuss the beginnings of the film. Kamensky recalled them asking if she had the bandwidth to serve as a historical adviser for the project. It was an easy yes.
“I was in graduate school when ‘The Civil War’ came out, and that was the soundtrack of the lives of a generation of history-minded people,” Kamensky said. “So the opportunity to be involved — and also to involve students — in a project that was going to be of such obvious significance to the way that we understand the story of the beginnings of the United States was incredibly compelling.”
In Kamensky’s view, documentary filmmaking at the level practiced by Burns and his team at Florentine Films, which turns 50 this year, has the power to reach a mass audience. Last December, PBS made history, entering the Nielsen Streaming Top 10 for the first time based on the number of minutes viewers spent watching “The American Revolution,” which had premiered a month earlier.
“They’ve never been engaged in clickbait or in storytelling for the sake of storytelling,” she said. “They’re doing storytelling for the sake of keeping the fabric of the American experiment strong.”
Filmmaker Ken Burns poses at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27, 2019, while promoting his documentary series “Country Music.” Across dozens of films, Burns has explored the people, events and cultural traditions that have shaped the American story. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)
It took Burns’ team about a decade to make “The American Revolution.” According to Botstein, the projects move through phases: early research, shooting, writing, interviewing and, finally, editing. Even then, the team continues shooting and researching and writing until the moment they deliver the drives or upload a show to public television.
“Ken is enormously disciplined. I think that discipline filters down to all of us,” Botstein said. “We’re all very dedicated and energized, and we get really into the work we’re doing.”
Botstein described the creation of the films as a fluid and flexible process from beginning to end.
“These films are very handsewn. There’s a story behind every frame of the film, and that’s the magic of collaboration and the dedication of all the people who work on the projects.”
Powers of Ithaca College acknowledged this may be unfair to say, but until Ken Burns, there was a perception among many Americans that history was boring.
But what Burns did, according to Powers, was make history feel alive.
“He made it real. He made it come to life,” Powers said. “I think his greatest trick of all is using first-hand sources. … He went directly to letters, directly to speeches, directly to diaries, directly to photographs. And I think that made it real in a way that other documentaries didn’t.”
Filmmaker Ken Burns attends a preview of the “Discovering the Civil War” exhibit at the National Archives in Washington on April 27, 2010. Burns’ landmark documentary “The Civil War” helped bring historical storytelling to a mass audience. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Then, of course, came what’s often referred to as the “Ken Burns Effect,” a video editing technique that pans over and zooms in on static images. Burns said Steve Jobs coined the term.
The filmmaker said he was taught almost entirely by still photographers and had always understood the power of a single image to convey complex information.
“What I’m trying to do is not only look at and trust that that was a representation of a once very alive scene, and how to film it in a way that … energetically explores the landscape of that photograph,” Burns said. “That’s using the tools of a feature filmmaker with a master shot, a wide shot, a medium, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, an insert of details. And then you also want to listen to the photographs, and think: Is that cannon firing? Are the troops tramping? Is the bat in the stadium cracking? Is the crowd cheering? What is it that animates and wills to life, what is considered a kind of inanimate object?”
These are techniques that Powers said we recognize today.
“What he did was he incorporated them in such a way that they became real to us,” he said. “So it was no longer a stale reading of history. It was, instead, a lived moment that we all seemingly got to experience.”
With media now so fragmented, Burns was asked what future documentary filmmakers would rely on to tell their stories.
He didn’t hesitate.
“I think we tend to always assume that we don’t know where to go. We will go to those files. We will go to those letters. We’ll go to the online newspapers. We will depend on journalists, and we will depend on the next line of defense: the scholars who interpret the events, and the specific materials that they deal with.”
Yes, he acknowledged, the sources will change. He no longer shoots film, for example, or edits analog.
“But the films come out looking very much similar to the films I made 45 years ago. It has nothing to do with formula or rubber-stamping. It has everything to do with style,” Burns said. “You don’t want technology to be the tail that wags the dog. You want to use the technology in the service of pursuing a truth, as best as you can determine, and one that acknowledges, as the neon sign says, that it’s complicated.”
For decades, Burns has collected antique American textiles. In his barn, he has a place called “Quilt Alley,” where the work of fiber artists hangs.
To Kamensky, it’s no accident that Burns collects quilts and flags.
“He thinks about the weave of us,” she said. “And sharing these stories at a high level, to a huge public, keeps that fabric strong.”
