15 July 2008

The Story of America Itself

Ken Burns, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, is completing a new film about U.S. national parks.

An Interview With Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan

Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan form a documentary filmmaking team now in the final production stages of a 12-hour film about U.S. national parks. They spoke with eJournal USA’s Alexandra Abboud while in Washington, D.C., to present a preview of the film to National Park Service employees.

Ken Burns ranks among the most well-known U.S. documentary filmmakers, having produced widely acclaimed works, many focused on historic events. His films have appeared on the Public Broadcasting Service, a national television network, to large audiences. His film The Civil War was the highest-rated series in the history of American public television.

Dayton Duncan is a writer and filmmaker with nine books to his credit, including Out West: A Journey Through Lewis & Clark’s America and Miles From Nowhere: In Search of the American Frontier. He has collaborated with Burns on the films The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz.

Question: You have a record of producing films about subjects that loom large in both the national and cultural history of the United States: The Civil War, Jazz, Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery. Are the parks another subject that stands for something larger in national history?

Burns: Absolutely. What we look for in choosing the subject of a film is some entity whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s able to reflect the inherent contradictions in America’s story and also its potential. I think that’s what we’ve been focused on in the body of our work. We’ve pursued this question of space: how we as citizens are defined by our relationship to the land in the United States. We’ve explored this in the history of the West, this incredible intersection where all these cultures clash together. We’ve explored this theme in Lewis and Clark and in Horatio’s Drive, a film about the first cross-country automobile trip. And for the last six years, we’ve been working on a history of the national parks because we think in the story of Americans preserving this land is the story of America itself.

Duncan: Like baseball and jazz, the National Park System is an American invention. When Yellowstone National Park was set aside in 1872, that was the first time in human history that a federal government had decided that a large tract of land, not a city park or public gardens, should be saved and kept unmarred for future generations. It is an American idea and invention. Our film tries to follow this story from the start. Like the idea of freedom, it became one of the United States’ greatest exports. I don’t want to sound too chauvinistic, but I’m very proud of that. 

Q: The park system has been called “America’s best idea” because it represents the first decision by any nation to conserve land in this way, both for the enjoyment of the public and for its own sake. Do you think of the system as an important American export?

Burns: Absolutely. We think this idea of freedom, the actual coalescing of this nation, is actually the best idea. But if you had to put your finger on the best idea after we were formed, you could stop at the national parks and feel quite comfortable. The fact that there are nearly 4,000 parks in nearly 200 countries ought to be an indication of how spectacularly successful this idea is. Sitting here and talking right now, we, as American citizens, own the most spectacular mountain ranges, the grandest canyon on Earth, the biggest, tallest, and oldest trees -- and that’s a pretty great portfolio to have as citizens.

Duncan: It’s an expression of democracy -- that these special places should not become the preserve of the super-rich or of people of title and nobility. These, our most magnificent places, belong to everyone. They’re everyone’s responsibility, and they’re available to everyone. That is a definition of democracy applied to landscape -- the tallest trees, the most magnificent waterfalls, and the grandest canyon. A nation that was able to do that is a nation that was born on the idea of democracy.

Burns: It wouldn’t have happened without that democratic impulse.

Duncan: That is what our film is celebrating.

Q: The parks, monuments, and sites of the National Park System reveal stories about democracy, nature, prehistory, and in the national history, moments of glory, and moments of shame. Which of those many stories are you planning to tell in the film?

Burns: We focus primarily on the creation of the natural parks, of which there are presently 58, and we follow a very complicated and quite dramatic narrative of the story of how they came into being. Most of all, it’s a story about people: people from every conceivable background who sort of forced their government to take notice of a special place that they wanted preserved and have often dedicated their whole lives to doing it.

 

Mount McKinley in Alaska’s Denali National Park is the highest peak in North America.

Mount McKinley in Alaska’s Denali National Park is the highest peak in North America.

Duncan: If you turn over a rock in any national park, what you find is democracy in action. Behind each park is a story of “small d” democracy at its best: people organizing themselves, saying “save this place,” and often convincing an -- at best -- indifferent Congress to save it and protect it. It’s a democratic idea in the abstract, but it’s always individual Americans or small groups of Americans using the lever of democracy to accomplish something that benefits posterity. Thomas Jefferson [the third U.S. president and author of the Declaration of Independence] would be smiling at that notion.

Burns: We follow the obvious characters such as John Muir¹ and Teddy Roosevelt,² but we will introduce you to a couple dozen other really remarkable people who came from every kind of background, ethnicity, race, sex, and country of origin. Our film tells stories of how they devoted their lives to doing this and how their actions intersected with this larger idea that we’ve been talking about.

Duncan: The park system didn’t embrace preservation of historic sites until the 1930s, when the National Park Service -- a fairly young agency -- took on the role of preserving the places in our chronological, historical narrative that follow the birth and evolution of this idea, such as battlefields, the Lincoln Memorial, the National Mall in Washington, the Statue of Liberty. With the inclusion of those kinds of historic sites, the parks came to stand for America itself. The parks embraced the idea of America itself.

In the film, we make this point at places like the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site, where the massacre of Cheyenne Indians occurred; the site of Japanese-American incarceration at Manzanar National Historic Site; Central High School in Little Rock,³ all the way up to Oklahoma City⁴ and Shanksville.⁵ That this idea -- a national commitment to preservation for the future -- finally could embrace even those places where regrettable events occurred so they don’t happen again.

Burns: One of the really important things about our film and the national park experience is this overlay of time. We think of the national parks as these wonderful representations of time, either in the form of these recent historical events or great geological events such as the carving of the Grand Canyon. But as many people point out in the film, it isn’t just the experience of these places alone, it’s who you experience them with. Your experience of the park is often influenced by the fact that your mom and dad took you there, and so it’s very much tied in with your own personal psychology. Then you, as an adult, are taking your kids and are handing down what the historian William Cronon calls “the intimate transmission” from one generation to another of love of place that is embodied in the national parks.

Just as you can go to the cathedrals of Europe and be stirred that it took three centuries for people to build [them] by hand and the dedication of that work, so too the national parks bring you to the sense of all the individual people adding their imperceptible layers to the narrative. And that’s a great story.

Q: What did you find to be the most moving site you visited in the months of filming?

Burns: We have been so fortunate, as friends and colleagues, to collect unbelievable, unique experiences in so many places. I remember floating down the Grand Canyon with my oldest daughter, climbing out, and the exhilaration at the top. I remember arriving in the heart of Denali [the site of the tallest mountain in North America] in Alaska -- after a four-hour drive from Anchorage to the entrance, and then another 90 miles [about 145 kilometers] on a mostly dirt road to the dead-end interior. We set up our cameras for a cloud-covered, time-lapse shot, and for nearly three hours, with bugs around and only sandwiches to eat, Denali suddenly revealed itself. Dayton was with his son, and our long-term cameraman was with us. For me, it was one of those great miracles. 

Duncan: The great thing about this project is that it’s given us a job to go to the most spectacular places our country has to offer. It requires us to be at these places 45 minutes before the sun comes up to watch that transition from nighttime to day. In nature, those are magical, magical moments. We’re focused on getting the great shot, so you’re spending quite a bit of time just silently waiting for the sun to come up. Everything is ready to go when the magic light hits, and you cannot beat that.

The trips with our families take that magical, physical, spiritual moment and add to it because you’re standing there with your son or your wife and children. Hiking the Grand Canyon on Father’s Day with my son is hard to beat. Walking out onto a lava field before dawn in Hawaii with my son and watching the sun come up and a waterfall of lava going into the ocean and creating new land -- that is something I’ll never forget, and I hope he won’t either.

Notes:

1. John Muir (1838-1914) is considered one of the leading U.S. preservationists of his era. He was an advocate for the protection of California’s Yosemite Valley and a founder of the Sierra Club, which survives today as a prominent environmental advocacy group.

2. Theodore Roosevelt served as U.S. president from 1901 to 1909, a period in which the federal government significantly expanded its designations of national forests and monuments, though his term did precede the creation of the National Park Service in 1916.

3. Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, is a landmark of the U.S. civil rights struggle and is now a National Historic Site. A hostile mob protested the admission of nine black students to the school in 1957. President Dwight Eisenhower ordered troops to protect the students, demonstrating federal resolve for enforcement of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of desegregation of schools.

4. The Oklahoma City National Memorial honors the victims and the rescuers of a 1995 terrorist attack on a federal building in that state capital. The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building killed 168 people and wounded more than 800 in the most serious terrorist attack on U.S. soil prior to September 11, 2001.

5.  Shanksville, Pennsylvania, is the location of the Flight 93 National Memorial, now under development, which will commemorate the crash of an airliner on September 11, 2001. The passengers on that flight sacrificed their own lives to overpower hijackers in control of the plane, thwarting an attack on Washington, D.C., downing the plane in rural Shanksville, and killing the 44 persons on board.

The opinions expressed in this interview do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.