Ken Burns: evaluation

Transcript context

…The metaverse? artificial intelligence? TikTok? What will do it? Well, I think it’s going to be a combination of those things. What you’ve just referred to are technological changes, and I think the proliferation has had a profound effect. But at the end of the day, storytelling is storytelling is storytelling. And I can tell you that when Samuel F. B. Morse developed the telegraph, people were like, “Oh, this is the death of words. Nobody’s going to write letters anymore.” We’ve undergone all these huge technological changes, but at the end of the day, we all, whether we are college professors writing papers for journals, whether we are kids reporting on what happened at our day or documentary filmmakers trying to understand Reconstruction — we’re bound by the same laws of storytelling: Aristotelian poetics. Big, fancy-schmancy, $10 phrase — but it just refers to Aristotle’s Poetics, which is an essay that people either read in high school or in college (or somehow avoid to), but it tells you there’s a beginning and a middle and an end. There’s characters and they have to have development. There’s protagonists and there’s antagonists, and there’s a climax and there’s a denouement. There are no real laws, but everybody knows how it works. We have to learn, with each of the ways we tell our stories, how to tell that story. Yes, we’ll be bombarded. I’m usually very conservative about it: I waited a decade after most of my colleagues switched to computer editing around 1990. I didn’t do it till 2001. And while they had long since abandoned shooting actual film, I didn’t abandon it until 2011 and I still will shoot film now and then to add to the thing. What I didn’t want was the technological tail to be wagging the dog. I didn’t want to be so seduced by the fancy-schmancy stuff that you can do that you miss the fact that the introduction is great, but so does the end of the 10th episode of a 20-hour film? That’s been really important to me: that every single moment have the same attention given to it. That’s what we’ve maintained. Part of it is living in rural New Hampshire and having the time to do it and being insulated from the vagaries of things that attack that. Some of it is being wholly suspicious of technologies that might alter stuff in a way that you didn’t want it to. But at the end of the day, if you don’t know how to tell a story, it just doesn’t work. Whether it’s YouTube with a kitten and a ball of string or an 18-hour series on the history of the Vietnam War — or a gigantic three-volume book about Winston Churchill, say, or whatever it might be. How much of your time do you have to put into managing content, distribution, marketing — things other than actually making the documentaries?…

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