A Conversation with Ken Burns

I might be mistaken, but I believe PBS released all of Ken Burns' documentaries on DVD around the same time. I say this because every one I've seen (four and counting) has included the same interview, "A Conversation with Ken Burns", as a featurette¹. I must have watched the conversation four or five times now. The sad thing is that I haven't tired of it yet.

It begins with Burns quoting a columnist, Gerald Early, who said, "I think there are only three things America will be known for 2,000 years from now, when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music, and baseball."

That's the short answer to the question that Burns tries to tackle with every documentary he makes. The question being, "Who are we?" "We" being Americans. He must believe Early is on the right track because his two longest films are about jazz and baseball.

One of my favorite parts of the interview is when he responds to the comment that some people find his documentaries rather long. He says that he's been criticized for that and he thinks some critics are, frankly, "pissed off". They know they're going to write the same length review for his eighteen-and-a-half-hour documentary on baseball as they are for a thirty-minute sitcom (with commercials) and that makes them angry.

The interviewer then remarks that people aren't trained for the pacing of his documentaries, referring to how Burns likes to spend several seconds focused on an image before cutting to the next one. Burns replies that MTV has taught us that the human eye is capable of receiving a multitude of images in a second, but he would argue that images shown in such a way don't have meaning. This leads to my favorite quote of the interview...

"All meaning accrues in duration. The things that we are all proudest of - the work we've done, the relationships we have - occur in duration. It's the thing we've given our best attention to and we realize, in the end, the only thing we have is our attention."

If nothing else, I want to take away from my repeated viewings of the interview that concept of "best attention". Whatever I'm doing, be it reading or writing, working or playing, living or loving, I want to give it my best attention because I want it to have meaning.

Anyway, Easter weekend is here and today is Good Friday. For those who observe Easter: Happy Easter! And for those who observe Fridays²: Happy Friday!!

¹ It's easy to spot a featurette in a group of features. It's the one with long eyelashes, blonde hair and a white dress.

² You never know. There's always one or two who don't.