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Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 125 lines

                                                                                TELEVISION, Page 55

Feats of Progress


Ken Burns, whose new film airs this week, puts the "story" back
in history

By RICHARD ZOGLIN -- Reported by William Tynan/New York


    "Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to
live," said Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker religious
sect, "and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow." It
is no accident that Ken Burns picked the Shakers, who believed
that God dwelt in the craftsmanship of their everyday work, as
the subject for one of his films. Each of his works seems the
labor of a lifetime: a painstaking assemblage of archival
photographs, period documents, interviews and music, welded
together by narration that can soar to near religious
inspiration.

    Burns is best known for his hugely successful mini-series
The Civil War. But this season viewers are getting a chance to
see the full breadth of his talent. His first new work since
The Civil War debuted in September 1990, Empire of the Air: The
Men Who Made Radio, will be telecast on PBS this Wednesday. On
the same night the public network will rerun his
Oscar-nominated 1981 film, Brooklyn Bridge. Two more of Burns'
films will be shown in July, and his entire oeuvre has been
released on videocassette by Direct Cinema.

    There's more to come. Burns is working on a mini-series on
the history of baseball, scheduled to air in 1994. He is
overseeing (though not personally producing) another major
historical series, on the American West. He is also planning a
series of 60- and 90-minute biographies of American historical
figures, such as Thomas Jefferson and Lewis and Clark.

    Burns has firmly established himself as the master film
chronicler of America's past. "We've forgotten," he says, "that
history used to have a popular dimension, that it is in fact
made up mostly of the word story. Professional historians have
found it convenient to speak only to themselves and have
rendered history rather dry or obtuse. And, of course, history
is anything but that."

    Burns is a celebrator of America, but his work goes deeper
than mere patriotism. What fascinates him most is the creative
act, those feats of inspiration and perseverance that move
civilization forward. In Brooklyn Bridge and The Statue of
Liberty, Burns chronicled the building of great structures that
came to symbolize far more than stone and steel. What stands out
most in The Civil War is the men -- Lee, Sherman, Lincoln -- who
shaped events by the force of their vision and eloquence. In
Huey Long, his marvelous portrait of the Louisiana demagogue,
Burns seems attracted as much as repelled by his subject: the
amassing of power can be a creative act too.

    Empire of the Air presents Burns with a tougher subject.
The development of radio was a diffuse process that spanned
many years and lacks the obvious emotional resonance of Burns'
other subjects. Visually, the documentary has neither the
grandeur of The Civil War nor the serene grace of The Shakers:
Hands to Work, Hearts to God. Burns' chief stylistic device here
is a periodic fade to black, an attempt to simulate the
sightless charms of radio.

    Yet Burns makes his subject come alive by focusing on
three crucial people. First is Lee DeForest, who patented the
key invention that spawned the radio age -- the three-element
vacuum tube -- but emerges as something of a self-promoter and
con man. Edwin Howard Armstrong, who made important refinements
in De Forest's invention and battled him endlessly in the
patent courts, is the film's tragic hero: a bullheaded visionary
defeated by people smarter and more ruthless than he. David
Sarnoff, the founder of NBC, is one of those ruthless people ("I
don't get ulcers; I give them," he once said), but he was the
indispensable man who brought radio to the mass audience.
Together, their lives illustrate a seldom-told story: how
creativity and commerce intersect to form progress.

    Burns, 38, has been making documentaries since shortly
after graduating from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. The
Civil War made him virtually a national hero: he has been
invited three times to the White House, received honorary
degrees from eight colleges and turned down several offers from
Hollywood and the networks. "I was flattered," he says, "but I
told them I preferred to stay with public television, where I
enjoy creative control and a sense of a willing home, not a
fashionable home."

    Burns' own home is in Walpole, N.H., where he lives with
his wife Amy (a sometime collaborator) and two daughters. He is a
hands-on producer, sifting through libraries and archives
himself in search of material (joined by one or two
co-producers on each film) and participating in every interview.
The crafting of a Burns film proceeds on two parallel tracks.
On the one hand, film is shot and archival material collected
without regard for what they might illustrate. At the same time,
a script is prepared without regard for whether there are
pictures to illustrate it. The editing process that follows,
says Burns, is "an incredibly difficult horse-trading maneuver,
in which you realize that a whole group of images won't be used
because there's nothing ((in the script)), and a whole lot of
words have to go because there's nothing to illustrate them."

    Burns eventually wants to try his hand at a fictional
movie, probably on a historical subject. "I started off my
career wanting to be the next John Ford," he says. "I was
particularly drawn to the way his films seemed not just to
retell but essentially to be American stories." With all his
commitments, however, he estimates it will be 10 years before
he gets the chance. But as Burns -- as well as his audience --
has learned, patience has its rewards.