KEN BURNS FOCUSES ON VIETNAM WAR
Ken Burns talks about his new 18-hour epic, premiering Sept. 17
Ken Burns thought he knew the Vietnam War. “I came into this thinking that this was something I lived through.” But a decade spent collecting the human stories behind the conflict, photographic research and filming interviews for his new 18-hour, 10-part PBS series taught the storyteller otherwise.
Ken Burns has a peculiar way of locating humility in the biggest, most successful projects of his career.
The 64-year-old Brooklyn native, who these days resides in the tiny town of Walpole, N.H., is best known for his meaty, influential documentaries such as “The Civil War,” “Baseball” and “The National Parks” — all of which first aired on PBS before evolving into perennial-favorite holiday gifts and fixtures on media shelves.
But like many nonfiction writers, Burns finds that the hardest part of crafting his epic-length documentaries is not the reporting. Collecting thousands of hours of text and photographic research and filmed interviews is something he could do in his sleep.
Rather, it’s the editing that terrifies (and thrills) him most — and the inevitable deadline that forces him to let go of his constantly evolving work.
“We want to be able to share with you what happened, but do it in a way that represents not the totality, but as many different perspectives as we possibly can,” Burns said during a visit to The Denver Post last month to promote his new 18-hour, 10-part series, “The Vietnam War,” co-directed by Lynn Novick.
The metaphors that Burns uses to describe his impartial tone — not having a thumb on the scale, not having an
ax to grind, not acting as an umpire — extend to his basic storytelling.
“In the editing process in the last year, we were removing adjectives and adverbs,” he said of “The Vietnam War,” which he and Novick began working on in late 2006. “(We) didn’t need them. That was like scaffolding and false work of a building. Once you’ve got the internal structure down you can take away that stuff. You don’t need to point out what is obvious.”
Also obvious is the impact “The Vietnam War” has had on Burns. When it premieres on Rocky Mountain PBS at 7 p.m. on Sept. 17, the series will represent not just untold hours of painstaking revisions, but also a full decade of Burns’ and Novick’s lives spent sorting through courageous, heartbreaking, uplifting and frequently contradictory human stories from a war with eerie parallels to today’s political climate.
“I came into this thinking that this was something I lived through,” Burns said. “I grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., a hotbed of opposition to the war. I thought I knew what had happened. I grew up way too early because of Vietnam and other things — (the) Kennedy assassination, Cuban missile crisis. I watched the news. I read the paper. I thought I knew. And I came into this project and knew I had to let go of whatever baggage (and) points of view that I might have had. But I didn’t realize how instantly I’d know how little I knew.”
About 58,000 American troops died in the bitterly hazy war, which raged in the Southeast Asian country from 1955 to 1975, along with 3 million Vietnamese troops (North and South) and civilians in and outside of the divided region. Simply cueing up Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower” and running a newsreel of student protests and bedraggled, marsh-bound soldiers with cigarettes dangling from their lips wouldn’t cut it.
“We knew that we were diving into some pretty rough ter- ritory, but we also knew that people have just sort of ignored Vietnam,” Burns said.
Pushing aside conventional wisdom about the war, Burns and Novick tapped not only two dozen scholars and dozens more U.S. military veterans (with “intensely refined Bsmeters,” as he put it) but also civilians, protesters and former soldiers, politicians and ordinary people from both North and South Vietnam.
The results, based on more than an hour of clips that Burns screened at the University of Denver last month, seem to offer a far more agnostic, intimate and enthralling take on the war than past media portrayals — benefiting, of course, from more than four decades of removal from the actual events.
Nearly 80 on-camera interviews, video footage, photographs and a rich soundtrack (including songs by the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, and a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch) immerse the viewer in diverse perspectives on the war, from U.S. military bravery and sacrifice to routine and absurdly ineffective bombing sorties, or harrowing supply runs made by courageous Vietnamese women under the cover of night.
Through it all, Burns and Novick don’t take sides.
Being such a relatively recent event, at least compared to Burns’ other projects, the Vietnam War offered a surfeit of photographs and footage for Burns and Novick to wade through.
“When we want to say something important, we stop and do it in still photographs, and yet there are many iconic images from that war that bubble up to the surface that are just part of our superficial understanding of it,” he said. “That needed to be treated in a very serious, in-depth fashion.”
The familiar photos include one of a young girl who was napalmed over more than 30 percent of her body, running down a road naked because the South Vietnamese air force had mistakenly bombed her village. Or the image of an impromptu assassination by pistol of a North Vietnamese spy in the heat of the Tet Offensive on the streets of Saigon.
“These images become superficial-ized, and we’re trying to return them to their dimension,” Burns said of the alternately gruesome, heartbreaking and inspiring images. “At the same time, we’re very mindful that we want to bring along a broad national audience. There will be people who are drawn to this just because of the war aspect of it, and people who are drawn to it for the political things, for the homefront.
“We’re emotional archaeologists ... and that’s, in the end, what you want to have, something that just doesn’t float on the surface. That has dimension, but with that dimension comes a kind of visceralness and immersiveness that, at times — particularly in our Tet episode (Episode 6)— I think people will want to watch it with somebody they love.”
A good chunk of Burns’ success can be attributed to his savvy salesmanship, including boilerplate responses that he sometimes repeats word-forword in interviews, his language carefully designed to tickle the ear.
But not for a moment does one doubt his sincerity. This is effective promotion from an old (and Emmy-winning, Oscarnominated) master, not an ego trip to another paycheck.
“Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. I’m in the business of those rhymes, but I don’t focus on them when I’m making the film,” Burns said. “I’m telling the story. It’s hard enough to tell a complex, interbraided, intertwined narrative of 79 on-camera people and dozens of other people who are involved ... and carrying that testimony like a Gold Star mother, like a delicate vase through the ten years of this production.
“It’s only afterwards, in this period where we’re out in the world trying to let people know about it, that we struggle with a metaphoric description. How do you talk about it? ... It’s no longer my film, it’s no longer Lynn’s film. It now becomes whoever receives it, and whatever their responses are will be true for them.”
John Wenzel: 303-954-1642, jwenzel@denverpost.com or @johnwenzel