Burns brings ‘ the muted archive’ to life in The Dust Bowl
Documentary maker spent months finding witnesses to devastation
The Dust Bowl, as Ken Burns sees his commemorative documentary about the men, women and children who suffered the dust storms that wreaked devastation across the North American prairie in the Dirty Thirties, is a paean to human perseverance in the face of monumental odds.
It’s a tale of “the greatest man- made ecological disaster in American history,” Burns told reporters in Los Angeles this past summer. The 10- year apocalypse that swept the Oklahoma and Texas grain belts, heralded by hundreds of dark, dry blizzards that caused an untold number of deaths, many of them from a previously unknown condition called “dry pneumonia,” was the result of a calculated, man- made decision to replace the sweeping fields of buffalo grass that blanketed the Southern Plains with wheat.
When drought inevitably came, coupled with the everpresent prairie winds, it rearranged the landscape. The Dust Bowl struck during the middle of the Great Depression.
The Dust Bowl premieres Sunday on PBS with a two- hour segment called The Great PlowUp, and concludes Monday with Reaping the Whirlwind.
More than any other film Burns has made with historian Dayton Duncan, his longtime collaborator, he intended The Dust Bowl to be an oral history, populated less by historians and experts than the witnesses who were there, who lived through and survived those terrible days.
They are nearing the end of their lives now, but they were children and teenagers then. Their memories are as raw and direct as if this had happened yesterday.
KEN BURNS DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER
“They are nearing the end of their lives now, but they were children and teenagers then,” Burns said quietly. “Their memories are as raw and direct as if this had happened yesterday.”
Burns always worries, whenever he embarks on one of his film projects — whether it’s The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz or, now, The Dust Bowl — that he won’t find that one anecdote that will encapsulate the entire epic in a single image.
Inevitably, through dogged research and simply knowing a telling image when he sees one, he ends up having to select from many. In Sunday’s opening instalment, Burns recalls the image of then president Franklin Roosevelt, who, after winds whipped up giant clouds of dirt from a wide swath of counties in Oklahoma, Texas, southeastern Colorado and northwestern Kansas, “was able to swipe a finger on his desk at the White House and come up with Oklahoma.”
Over its two nights, The Dust Bowl features the testimony of more than two dozen survivors.
“We were lucky to find them,” Burns said simply.
Burns has honed his own film making style over generations of talking and, more importantly, listening to ordinary, everyday people — witnesses to history. Burns’ film making technique is simple, he admits, but it works.
“As you know, we take old photographs and silent news reels, and try to will them to life. That’s what we do for a living. We try to shake a moment out of that arrested image of a still photograph, the muted archive.”