In Burns’s view, conventional narrative—“and then and then and then”—is “about as good a thing as has ever been invented.” He contends that the catastrophe of the Second World War caused academic historians to lose confidence in narrative, and to be drawn instead to Freud and Marx and to “semiotics and symbolism and deconstruction and postmodernism and queer studies and African-American studies and feminism.” A challenge to “top-down, great men” history was welcome, Burns said, but these alternatives “were like blind men describing one part of the elephant, very accurately.” From the start, he said, he “was intuitively practicing something that included all of that.”
Stephen Ambrose, the popular historian, is said to have remarked that “more Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source.” (PBS and Florentine Films often use the line as a promotional blurb.) After the success of “The Civil War,” some academic historians praised Burns, but others lamented his popular reach, and accused him of sappiness and nostalgia. In a collection of essays by historians about “The Civil War,” Leon Litwack noted how the last episode jumps ahead to the gatherings of Union and Confederate veterans, at Gettysburg, in 1913 and 1938: the effect is “to underscore and celebrate national reunification and the birth of the modern American nation, while ignoring the brutality, violence, and racial repression on which that reconciliation rested.” Eric Foner, similarly, wrote that “Burns privileges a merely national concern over the great human drama of emancipation.”
Burns, in a 1994 interview, said that the academy had “done a terrific job in the last hundred years of murdering our history.” He told me that criticism of his work was at times “gratuitous and petty,” or powered by jealousy.
He recalled two documentaries that had inspired him. One, a portrait of Gertrude Stein, by Perry Miller Adato, from 1970, used actors, reading quotations, alongside a narrator. The other was “City of Gold,” a Canadian short from 1957: the camera moved across archival photographs of the Klondike gold rush of the eighteen-nineties, and transitioned, almost imperceptibly, to near-motionless contemporary footage. On his first viewing, Burns said to himself, “Oh, I know where to go with that.” He spent much of his twenties and thirties in photography archives, with a camera pointed at photos attached, with magnets, to an easel. (He could pan and tilt, but zooms were too unsteady. These had to be done by a specialist, expensively, at an animation table, frame by frame.) Burns wasn’t alone in treating photographs this way—one thinks of the opening titles for “Cheers”—but the technique came to be associated with his work, and was later named for him. In 2002, Steve Jobs invited Burns to visit Apple, and demonstrated a new iMovie feature that engineers were calling the Ken Burns Effect. Jobs asked if Apple could keep the name, and Burns agreed, as long as the company supplied equipment to some nonprofit groups and to his own office. The two men became friends. Burns often stayed with Jobs in Palo Alto; Jobs’s daughter interned at Florentine.
