Ken Burns on exhibiting the darkish components of US historical past

Forward of his upcoming PBS documentary, The American Revolution, acclaimed film-maker Ken Burns tells BBC particular correspondent Katty Kay about his distinctive method to chronicling US historical past, from battle and battle to baseball and jazz.

Titles like Brooklyn Bridge, Prohibition and The Mud Bowl could conjure visions of classroom classes and by-the-book recitations of info, however portraying historic occasions in an approachable – and enthralling – method has grow to be US documentarian Ken Burns’s trademark. For the reason that Eighties, he has introduced historical past and tradition to audiences in a method that textbooks merely can not.

Burns’s physique of labor has earned him two Academy Award nominations, two Grammy Awards and 15 Emmy wins. At his house in Walpole, New Hampshire, US, the acclaimed documentary-maker tells BBC particular correspondent Katty Kay that, like most creatives, he has extra concepts than he is aware of what to do with.

“Your head is likely to be stuffed with 40 or 50 subjects, as my head is at all times crammed up, however when one [topic] drops all the way down to your coronary heart, you realise it is firing on all cylinders,” Burns tells Kay.

These subjects have ranged from jazz to baseball, and from the granular, resembling a chronicle of Leonardo da Vinci’s life and work, to the expansive, like 2009’s The Nationwide Parks: America’s Finest Concept.

“I do not need to inform you tales about what I do know,” he says. “I would slightly share with you a means of discovery. So, I dive into issues that I do not know sufficient about.” His subsequent space of exploration is the 18th Century: his six-part, 12-hour sequence, The American Revolution, is because of air on PBS on 16 November. This month marks the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Battle of Independence, which started within the 13 colonies of British America in 1775, and continued for a few years, culminating within the founding of a United States of America.

“The American Revolution is likely one of the most essential occasions in human historical past,” Burns instructed PBS forward of particular screenings for college students and lecturers throughout the US. “We went from being topics to inventing a brand new idea, residents, and set in movement democratic revolutions across the globe.”

With regards to historical past, Burns says he doesn’t subscribe to the favored view that it’s at all times doomed to repeat itself, deferring to the opinion of the Nineteenth-Century Spanish-American thinker George Santayana. “Those that can not keep in mind the previous are condemned to repeat it,” was Santanya’s remark, in reference to the Holocaust. “It is [a] beautiful phrase you’d want can be true,” says Burns. He additionally factors to the well-known quote that’s attributed to US writer Mark Twain: “Historical past does not repeat itself, however it does usually rhyme.”

Burns does not gloss over the uncomfortable components of US historical past, mentioning that, for him, being patriotic doesn’t suggest erasing the previous; for example, the truth that Benjamin Franklin owned slaves. “He knew it was unsuitable, and he saved doing it,” Burns says.

“At first, rising up, I had a form of idealised model of my nation. I really like my nation. I do not know anybody who loves their nation greater than me. I make movies in regards to the US, however I make movies about us.”

Burns tells Kay that he believes it may take time for a narrative’s significance to be understood. “I have been interviewing Obama about his administration, and the longer I wait to try this movie, the higher it is going to be, due to the angle that the passage of time will give,” Burns says.

When requested in regards to the breadth of his work, which ranges from biographies of single people to international occasions, Burns says that he might be laser-focused on the duty at hand. As Burns wraps up The American Revolution and the forthcoming Obama undertaking, he says that he has greater than sufficient materials to final past “the 2030s” – and, particularly, he has his eyes set on a historical past of the US’s Central Intelligence Company (CIA).

“Anyone requested of Duke Ellington, who’s definitely our most prolific [composer, with] perhaps 22…, 2,300, 2,400 compositions, what crucial one is. He stated, ‘The one I am engaged on now.’ And to me, that is how we really feel.”

Influential with Katty Kay airs on Fridays at 21:30 ET on the BBC Information channel.