Ken Burns about America: "We are a strange and complicated people" | Television and radio

MBirthday gifts are quickly thrown away or forgotten, but a gift given to a 17-year-old Michigan high school student on July 29, 1970, changed American television. Ken Burns received an 8mm camera, first step on a path that made him such a revered character in the documentary that, five decades later, his birthday will be celebrated this year with a full day of his work on the PBS network.

If 66 seems to be a weird birthday, it's because, at the more conventional celebration of last year, Burns was locked in the editing of his latest eight-part series of 16 hours, Country Music, which will be released in September. This work forms, with Baseball and Jazz, a loose trilogy on American iconic sport and culture. These series constitute a balance in time of peace with another thematic trio: The civil war, the war and the Vietnam war, which revise with great authority the conflicts in which America was engaged between 1861-1865, 1941- 1945 and 1954-1973.

What did Burns learn by choosing his retrospective? "Although the stories that I have told extend from the 18th century to the 21st century, all have asked a deceptively simple question: who are we? This strange and very complicated people who likes to call Americans. I had the privilege of working for 45 years in the space between this two-letter plural pronoun "we" and its capitalized equivalent in my country: the United States. The opportunity not to tell only a traditional descending story – Winston Churchill in the war room – but the ascending history of what it is to be on the battlefield or in the street. "

Although Burns had already had an impact on documentary films – Brooklyn Bridge and The Statue of Liberty were both nominated for the Oscars – his decisive work began in 1990 with the transition to the long history of television. fight between north and south on slavery. For Burns, this was the only place to begin his grand project of historical self-badysis. "It was," he says, "the greatest existential threat to the United States. We were founded in 1776 on the premise that all men were created equal. But, four years and five years later, four million Americans belonged to other Americans. "

Critics, with their cataloging habits, badumed that Burns had begun to create a war trilogy. But the filmmaker protests: "It really was not the case. There was no agenda. I've been attracted to topics with emotion: I'm finishing something and my eyes are attracted to something else. When The Civil War series was over, it was so moving to work on this story – even though we were 150 years away – that I promised myself never to shoot another film about the war. Then I realized that my next series, Baseball, was actually a sequel to The Civil War. Although people still look at me as if I were crazy when I say that. "

Such looks reverberate through my perplexed silence over a phone line up to the Burns office in New Hampshire. He explains, however, that "the first real breakthrough in race after the Civil War" took place when, on April 14, 1947, Jackie Robinson left for the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African-American to face the Major League. Baseball.

Working on baseball, Burns decided that jazz was the best soundtrack in this story: "And I realized that even though I had grown up listening to jazz, which pleased my father, I Was terribly ignorant of what that was and its racial significance. . So for me, Civil War, Baseball and Jazz are a kind of war trilogy. "

Upon Jazz's release in 2001, Burns was still waiting to honor his commitment to never formally document another US conflict. "Then I learned that 1,000 Americans a day, World War II veterans, were dying, and I realized that these memories would quickly disappear. I also discovered that many high school students thought we were fighting with the Germans against the Russians. I was so stunned by this blatant ignorance that I decided to shoot the film on World War II. Then, even before we finished this project, I decided to do Vietnam, which took almost 11 years. "

The projects take a lot of time because of the exhaustive collection of documents – "For Country Music, I had 101 interviews representing 175 hours of conversation and 1,500 photographs" – and the perfectionist badembly of the final film.

"Many of my colleagues in this area," says Burns, "will do some research for a while, then write a script that will tell you about shooting and editing. We never stop doing research, never read, look for photographs, write. Nothing is etched in stone. I have in my writing room a neon, in cursive script, which says: it's complicated. Although most of the editing process is inherently subtractive, the last thing we do in the editing room is to add something. "

After reviewing the Civil War after attending the Vietnam War, I was struck back by the audacity Burns had shown to ensure that the previous series did not contain any of the elements – live witnesses , contemporary news footage – which helped make the latter so impressive. . Had he feared at the time to fill only 11 1/2 hours of television with a story from a pre-cinematic era? Abraham Lincoln, confronted by a whole series of lower and lower generals, said: "We must use the tools we have. "Each film was an exercise of saying," How do we do that? "Sometimes it can be a tyranny for too much footage, sometimes in Vietnam and baseball we use photographs, even if the film was available."

Burns is nervous with filming formulas. "I consider the style as the authentic application of the technique. And there are dozens of techniques that could be used. In simple terms, I have eight basic elements: four visual, four auditory. At any time, we have the possibility of visual interviews, talking heads, live cinematography, photographs, cinematographic films. On the auditory level, we will have a narrator in the third person; a third-person voice choir, reading the newspapers or love letters of the time; a complex sound effect trail in Hollywood style; and music, which is recorded before editing. "

Availability, however, should not dictate use. The first three images of country music, documenting a subject with extensive film and television archives, are two still images and one painting. Jazz and country music have another technical feature: "In documentary making, music is usually that important thing, but always in the background. So there is a beautiful shock in the music that suddenly reaches this hyper-ground just in front of you. This has happened to us several times during the Jazz and Country Music Edition. "

The measure of Burns' thoroughness is his attitude towards "lower thirds", the captions at the bottom of the screen, the identification of speakers. Burns gives the work they were doing at the time we got it, so the reporters who later become famous novelists are identified with the job title on their press card at the time. This is probably a way to avoid hindsight and stay in the present. "Absolutely, in the series on World War II, we interviewed a woman who was a widow, but we used her maiden name because at that time she was the sister of the brothers we were talking about. is only in the last episode of the film, when she gets married, that we use her married name. "

In the first episode of Country Music, which describes the geographical extent of the form, even the superstars are identified by their origin (Dolly Parton, Tennessee) rather than by their identity.

Yet, even for a producer as scrupulous as Burns, the challenge is to live in a time when President Trump invented the idea of ​​"alternative facts" and where online posters are increasingly considering the idea. history and news as a matter of opinion. Is this disturbing for a documentary filmmaker? "As a citizen of the world, it is worrying, it is that we see not only the willingness of people to hide themselves, but their technological ability to do so. But a large majority of your readers – and my viewers – are still interested.

"In anticipation of what we thought would be our most controversial film, The Vietnam War, we brought together what we called our war room made up of Republicans and democrats, opposed to the debate, who were good at extinguishing fires. We did not need to use them because we were extremely faithful to the facts. If you do that, people trust you. We tried to show that there could be more than one truth at war. "

In a speech delivered to graduates of Stanford University in California in 2016, shortly before Trump became the Republican candidate, Burns warned that the star of reality TV had "a complete lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that Predictably, point fingers, always get it wrong … Commonwealth sentiment, shared sacrifice, trust, is an integral part of American life, erodes quickly, stimulated and amplified by an amoral Internet that allows for lie three times around the globe the truth can begin.

Three years later, Burns says, "Everything I said, I'm really sorry to say, came true." But, as a historian, does he see in the 45th president an aberration or a continuation? "I think it's unprecedented, which makes it so dangerous. And yet, he embodies certain trends and attitudes in our history – anti-immigration, anti-black, a kind of protofascism, concealment, all that. We have never been so struck by a general manager. And that seems to be what's in the Earth's drinking water as you watch the rise of Boris Johnson, the rise of dictators in Turkey, Hungary and the Philippines. There is a tendency to suggest that you can be aware of the truth – and I do not think you can do it. "

Burns' accidental war trilogy is about to become an informal quartet, with a planned series on the American revolutionary wars of 1775-1783. "I do not want, as we tend to do in this country, to make it a superficial event and disinfected among a few dozen whites in Philadelphia, but to cover everything that was happening from New Hampshire to Georgia, has remained faithful to them. to Britain, to African-Americans, to British soldiers, to American officers. And so, although I never want to make another war movie, I do it because that's where human beings come out most, for better or for worse.

• Ken Burns Day is on PBS July 29th. Country Music airs on PBS from September 15th.