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“You wake the dead.”
Ken Burns offered that succinct description of his filmmaking at the Edinburgh Intl. Film Festival on Friday, where the veteran documentarian dug into the craft behind bringing history to life and
made a claim for the ensemble assembled for his latest epic, “The American Revolution.”
“I think this film is the best cast in cinema. Period,” Burns said with a smile, describing the six-part, 12-hour series, which draws on some 400 first-person accounts voiced by 61 actors, including Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Damian Lewis, Tobias Menzies and Matthew Rhys.
Hanks alone voices numerous historical figures in “The American Revolution,” while lesser-known performers sit alongside marquee names. The actors’ job is to make words left on the page feel dimensional again.
Burns traced that impulse back to a remark from his late father-in-law, a psychologist, who connected his filmmaking to the death of Burns’ mother when he was 11.
His father-in-law told him, “Look what you do for a living,” before arriving at the diagnosis: “You wake the dead.”
Since the early ’80s, Burns has captured the American story in a style as simple as it is masterful. Whether the subject is the Civil War, Prohibition or Jazz, he shapes a narrative around the voices of the time, giving an intimate portrait of subjects that in other hands can become grand and unwieldy.
Sentimentality and nostalgia are “the enemy of anything good,” Burns said. Instead, he pursues what he calls an “emotional archaeology.”
That means approaching a still photograph with the grammar of feature filmmaking: “a master shot, a long shot, a medium, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal,” while building the sounds that might surround it, cannon fire, marching soldiers, the crowd cheering.
The aim, he said, is to “will that single image alive.”
Burns told the audience he’s interested in questions more than answers. “The human question for each of us is: Who am I?” he said. For the United States, he said, the question of “who are we” is “deeply complicated.”
A neon sign in his New Hampshire editing room states the governing principle in lowercase cursive: “it’s complicated.”
Burns was on particularly lively form, ricocheting between Twain, Shakespeare and Keats — and, aptly, given the Baptist church setting of Central Hall, Ecclesiastes: “What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun.”
That biblical idea, alongside Twain’s notion of history rhyming, also explains Burns’ pursuit of an evergreen quality in his documentaries. He resists imposing contemporary political arguments onto the past, preferring audiences to discover the echoes themselves.
Central to that is Keats’ idea of “negative capability”: allowing contradictions to remain in tension rather than forcing history into a neat moral binary.
Burns’ decision to sit on a trove of Obama interviews and to cut material from “The American Revolution” that felt too on-the-nose in the Trump era reveals a documentarian resisting the current moment in favor of waiting for the right one.
