Ken Burns Speaks About 9/11 at Kalb Report
BURNS
Keene Sentinel
Lauren Katims
Boston University Washington News Service
9-11-06
WASHINGTON- On September 11, 2001, Ken Burns sat in his office in Walpole, N.H., and turned on the TV to see the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center. He didn’t believe it was happening – the idea of such an attack on America seemed inconceivable.
Five years later, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker misses seeing those images. He doesn’t miss the tragedy, but what the tragedy gave us – a sense of community, he told a packed room at the National Press Club on Monday, Sept. 11.
“There is a hunger for a sense of where we’ve been that is innate in all of us,” Burns, 53, said, appearing on the Kalb Report, an interview show. “We wish to be together again. We have to find our footing.”
A 28-year resident of Walpole, Burns has completed 18 documentaries, including his most famous, “The Civil War,” “JAZZ,” and “Baseball.” He knows he will do a documentary on 9/11 one day, but not for 25-30 years, he said.
“You think the past is fixed, but it’s malleable,” he said. Time allows for a sharper view of the subject, a better understanding of the importance of the incident. Motioning with his hands for emphasis, he said that 9/11 was the first time Americans felt vulnerable.
“Who would have thought this day five years later we would be where we are,” he said. “That’s why you need the passing of time to figure out exactly what these things are about.”
For the past six years, Burns has been working on a World War II documentary that will air on PBS next September. The film tells the story of the Second World War from the American perspective. It will follow the “so-called ordinary people,” onto the battlefields. “We follow these men into hell,” he said.
His goal is to correct what he sees as a lack of historical knowledge regarding the war today. He said that when asked, many high school students say that the United States fought with Germany against Russia. He added that the war was “necessary,” a fact that people need to understand.
In every one of his films, Burns asks the question: “Who are we Americans as a people?” The sense of community that 9/11 gave us is what Burns thinks Americans need right now, he said. But it seems that a tragedy is the source behind the togetherness.
Americans are “dialectically preoccupied,” Burns said. Everything in our environment assigns people as one thing or another until they are divided into a bunch of “independently-operated persons,” he said.
“Lincoln is still right saying we will die by suicide,” Burns said.
Burns thinks one of the main sources of separation in America is race, a theme in all his films, that will be with America as long as there is a country, he said. “I’m intolerant of intolerance,” he said. “How can you love your country without loving what it stands for?”
He said one day he would like to do a documentary about President Bush because he thinks people have misjudged him. However, Burns usually avoids politics in his work. He said he is “very liberal” after growing up in a liberal home, but makes it an “obsession” to keep it out of his films.
Burns moved to Walpole after he graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., because most of his friends headed to that area. “I moved to a beautiful place, and it turned out to be the best professional decision I’ve ever made,” he said.
The small-town life allows Burns to concentrate on his art. What he does is “so intensely labor intensive,” he said, that the solitude of Walpole permits him to focus on his work.
Burns has thought about making a documentary about the history of Walpole called Home, which would explore “the universal and the particular,” though for now he has a full plate with three upcoming films.
Now that his two older daughters are in college, he lives with his is wife and 19-month old daughter “in the most beautiful area of the country,” he said. And he never plans to leave.
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