It's my privilege to bring on one of our nation's pre, if not the, premier historian in our country. Put together a documentary.
It's like nobody else, but this is a little bit different. This is a book. It's a picture book like no other.
It utilizes maybe the best archives outside the Smithsonian in the country. Our America is the name of it, and Ken Burns joins us now. Ken, congratulations on this. Thank you, Brian.
It's great to hear your voice and thank you so much. Yeah, this has been a labor of love for maybe 10 or 15 years. You know, I was taught and raised, grown up by, my dad was an amateur still photographer, and then at college folks were still photographers, not filmmakers, and so they reminded me that the still photograph is the DNA of everything I do, and so I've been thinking about how to do a history of us. You know, I've made films about the U.S. for almost 50 years, but I've also made films about us.
That is the two-letter lowercase plural pronoun, and what I've learned over those 50 years, Brian, is that there's only us. There's no them, and so I was trying to figure out a way, and I realized it doesn't have to be with a film. It can be with a book that starts with the first selfie, the first self-portrait ever taken in 1839, the year that photography was invented, and take us up more or less to the present. I'm in the history business, so the recent present doesn't interest me as much, but to sort of look in single image on a page, minimal captions, the back of the book has much fuller details on all the photographs, and just sort of walk through the beauty of this continent, the variety of the people, the political struggles, the wars, all the things that are us, and to try to put them under, kind of put one arm around them and say, you know, this is who we are, and it's just been, you know, it came out in November, and it's just been going like gangbusters. It's really been exciting because we did work on it at night and on weekends as we're trying to finish all the various films we're working on. So a couple of things. You realize you would have sold a lot more on Christmas. I mean, there's no better book than ever done on Christmas, but maybe we'll make it a perfect Mother's Day gift coming up where an Easter gift is just fantastic. It not only chronicles America's past, but your past on certain things you did.
We have baseball in here, we've got civil war in here, we've got the presidents in here, war is all over this through time. So did you work backwards? Did you work around your documentaries? Yeah, well, I sort of did.
You know, there's a little bit of winking. I think nearly every film I've worked on is there in some way, shape, or form. But what I wanted to do more than anything is have it not be about me, but about the 50 states. So every one of the 50 states is there.
There's a photograph of at least one from the 50 states, and obviously some others have, you know, a few more. But it was a way to sort of say, I've spent my entire professional life asking one deceptively simple question. Who are we?
Who are these strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? And what does an investigation of the past tell us about not only where we were, but where we are and also where we may be going? And so this was a way to do it. I was drawn to photographs that I've used in films. And quite often when I was working with my collaborators, particularly Susanna Deisel, who was my big archival gal for three decades, she would find a photograph that we hadn't seen while we were making the film on, let's just say Jackie Robinson, or a film on jazz or something.
And so we'd put something else in. And it was interesting because if you have one photograph to a page, then the first, which has no accompanying one and the last has no picture, all the others are in conversation, not only with you, the viewer, because with a minimal caption, you're forced to sort of just drink in the photograph, just feel it for the first time. But they're also talking to one another on the opposite page. And so there's some interesting kind of rhymes going, internal rhymes in the book. And what was nice is that because I didn't have time, my day job is really, you know, I'm always working on four or five films at once.
And some of those are super long. This gave this a chance to marinate to incubate over literally years and years so that I could finally, when I delivered the book to Knopf, I could just, I realized that it was hugely about my own process as a human being, as well as a filmmaker, understanding the complexity and the undertow, the beauty and the majesty of us, the story of us. And so it's all there. That's why it's, you know, let's be honest.
It's my America, but it's our because it was made in the spirit of sharing it with everybody, the great natural beauty, as I was saying, and also complicated moments in between, and try to figure out a visual language that we could just talk to each other, all of us and say, yep, that's it. Tug a rope in Putney, Vermont. There's, you know, kids playing guns out in Diamond, Oklahoma, in the midst of the Dust Bowl.
There's still time to have fun. There's, you know, former slaves going to reunion. There's, how should we say it, a lady of the evening from Storyville in New Orleans.
And right across from her are the formidable pillars of the of the Pennsylvania Station. So you've got, there's sort of winks and there are puns and there's love. And, you know, that's basically what I wanted to do is just speak to all the things that we are. You know, it's so interesting. I mean, it goes through our time. It's really about people, but you also have major moments. The construction, we watch Mount Rushmore being carved out. I mean, you see that moment. How many people even know that even exists?
I had a chance to go back there and I saw some of those pictures, but I actually never saw that one. But you just talk about race in America, the separation, you talked about slavery, you talk about segregation, you talk about the people, what they go through. And a lot of kids in this book, too.
Kids then, obviously, probably passed on by now. I mean, is it possible to look through this and not be reflective on how far our country's come? Oh, I think that that's exactly it. How far we've come, how far we've got to go. You know, it's interesting, this idea of American exceptionalism, you know, what that requires if you're going to be the best, say you're the Tom Brady of countries, right? Or you're the whatever it is of a country, you're constantly working on yourself and you're constantly looking and examining and taking stock and always trying always trying to be better. You never rest on your laurels.
You never stop looking how to improve. It's sort of, there are a lot of sports metaphors besides me citing Tom Brady because it's in sports that very early on as kids were reminded of how we don't live up to what the expectation is and we have to get better. And so there is a kind of generous and yet very disciplined, let's be better. So to me, looking at this is not, this is not a criticism. This is a celebration of all that we have been, all of the struggles that we've been through and all of the great promises that we have in so many different ways.
Heroic moments, just as you say, tiny little poignant moments with kids. Sometimes it's just the natural beauty. There's one shot, one whole page. It's just due forming on a pussy willow branch, you know, and you just kind of go, my God, that's stunning. And that's gorgeous. And you can find out, you know, I was remembered when I was in school, people would say God is in the details. And so I always have been mindful or tried to be mindful, Brian, in the work that I've done, that that was true, that you could see, uh, as the poet, William Blake said, the, the universe in a grain of sand, the world in a grain of sand. And you, you understand and appreciate that the architecture of the atom shares a profound similarity with the design of the solar system. And so you begin to understand in our religious teachings, it's as above, so below, um, I have tried to use that in putting the book together, as much as saying, oh, I now need to chronologically walk through the United States.
We never leave the United States. So the foreign wars are represented obviously by a, uh, a soldier kissing his girlfriend or by, uh, something that shows you, you know, a big parade on, on fifth Avenue when they're, uh, heading off to world war one, but you, you, and there is the shot of, of, um, Pearl Harbor under attack. So there there's that thing, but you also understand there's a great deal that's off stage. Of course, you know, I probably looked at 30,000 images to put the 250 or so that are here.
And a lot of them I'd seen before, as I said, the front cover is by my mentor, a still photographer named Jerome Liebling now been dead more than a dozen years. And we miss him terribly, but it's just a kid, you know, on the streets in New York city with this bulbous wheel housing behind him. And he's got threadbare shoes and he's in shorts and he's got a coat in his arm. He's got this rakish hat. He's got a hockey shirt on.
It's just and he's got as much present. I remember I was out promoting us on some TV show and somebody said, what's the most important for a photograph here? And I said, well, I don't know. He says, what about Lincoln? I said, yeah, that last beautiful photograph, you know it well, Brian of that was taken of Lincoln, just the last photograph portrait of him where he's holding his glasses and all the cares of the world.
And you can see the whole, whole history of us. And he's seen, he sees where we are and he sees where we're going. And I said, you know, the great promise of America is that this kid on the cover is as important as Lincoln and vice versa, right?
There's something, Lincoln's just a man, right? This is, he's been through some stuff. He's lost a kid. He's, you know, had a difficult marriage.
He's had ups and downs, lost his mom, you know, all the sorts of things that happen to ordinary people. So when we deify him, we, we make him something less than who he was. And I thought that we were trying to return full value. You know, the cliche is that a picture is worth a thousand words and there's so many billions of them today that I think that their value has been declined.
And I was just trying to say, let's, let's go back and say, this is, let's return full value to a photograph. So the name of the book is called Our America. Ken Burns selected these photographers along with the rest of his staff of these photographs. And he's got a library like nobody else. When we come back a few more minutes, including a little about Ken, you read about yourself personally in the beginning of this book. So I think people would love to know where you got the passion for history and why it means so much and what your dad has to do with it. So I'd love to hear that. And I do love everything in the book from, you see, Edison and Henry Ford shaking hands to little kids playing. So how many books can actually say they're equally as important?
I would argue they are. That's our story. And we used to study it. Now we judge it. I'd like to go back to the way we used to do it. Ken Burns, don't move.
Back in a moment. Hey, Prime members, top Fox shows like The Brian Kilmeade Show, The Five, Fox News Rundown, hundreds of others are available ad-free with your Prime membership. To listen, download the Amazon Music app or visit amazon.com slash Brian Kilmeade. With Amazon Music, you can access the largest catalog of ad-free top podcasts.
Avoid the ads. Listen to your favorite shows ad-free with the Amazon Music app or by visiting amazon.com slash Brian Kilmeade. That's amazon.com slash Brian Kilmeade. Hey, welcome back everybody. 25 minutes after the hour, a few more minutes with Ken Burns. He's got a brand new book out. And I know if you have a passion for American history, you're not going to, your life will be better if you get it, and you're not going to be able to put it down, nor will any of your guests if they come to the house.
Our America is the name of it. So Ken, we know very little about you personally, your history. Your mom passes away early and, and your dad also had a passion for photography. And you also mentioned how it all relates to you seeing him showing emotion for the first time, crying for the first time. You talk about that? Yeah, sure. So the first memory I have is that my dad building a dark room in the basement of our development we lived in in Newark, Delaware.
He was the only anthropologist in the state of Delaware. And I remember the beautiful alchemy of a photograph coming to life. So that stuck with me.
My mom got cancer almost around that same time and heroically survived for almost 10 years and passed away in 1965. And my dad had had had a pretty strict curfew for my younger brother and me, but he forgave it if there was a movie on TV or out at the Cinema Guild or in a regular first run place. And we'd go on a school night.
We'd stay up to one o'clock in the midst of all the, you know, ginsu knife commercials. And one night we were watching a movie called Odd Man Out about the Irish troubles starring James Mason, the Irish troubles from the teens and twenties of the 20th century. And a very tragic film by a great British director, Sir Carol Reed. And my dad just started crying and I'd never seen him cry when my mom was sick or when she died or had her incredibly sad funeral. And I realized right then and there that that film had given him an emotional safe haven, a place that nothing else in his life permitted him to express something. And I was 12 by that time.
My mom died when I was 11, a few months before. And I just vowed to myself right then and there, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to become a filmmaker. And at that point that meant Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford or somebody like that. But when I went to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, which was an experimental school, still is, in its second year in the fall of 71, I ran into all these people who reminded me that what is and what was is as dramatic as anything in the imagination, as dramatic as fiction. And sometimes as we know, and you know, it's more dramatic.
You can't make it up. And so I kind of had my everything, my molecules rearranged by the experiment at Hampshire. And then I found that I'd had this untrained and untutored love for American history. And so all of a sudden, by the time I'm 12, I know what I want to be. By the time I'm 18, I know what kind of that filmmaker person I am. And by 22, I know it's going to be in history. And I've spent, you know, the last several decades doing that and having just an amazing, amazing experience. And I had a moment where I realized that my mom's death, she died on April 28, was always as a kid approaching and then receding.
I could never be present. And my late father-in-law was an eminent psychologist. And I told him, you know, I seem to be keeping my mom alive. He said, well, I bet you blew out your candles on your cake when you were a kid wishing she'd come back. And he said, yeah, how did you know? And then he named three or four, he said three or four other things that I also did too. And he looked at me and he said, well, look what you do for a living.
And I said, excuse me. He said, you wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Jackie Robinson come alive. Who do you think you're really trying to wake up? And I realized the great gift of, you know, in a way, my mother's passing had forced me into this intimate business of resurrection, of trying to bring people that people call the dusty, you know, past, who cares about that?
How is it relevant? And show them how human they were as far back as you can. You know, we just did last year, Benjamin Franklin. We're working on a big history right now of the entire American Revolution and without photographs trying to bring that story alive.
But also to see the way that they speak to us now, how much, how much history is the greatest teacher. So I am a product of tragedy, but what I've tried to do is, is make some lemonade out of the lemon. Unbelievable. And we're all the beneficiary for it. Do you do it, we only have 15 seconds. In doing all this history, are we an exceptional nation?
I believe so. And we just have to keep working at it and working at it and working at it and working at it and never be stealth satisfied. Got it. Ken, congratulations on Now America. Now this is a must read.
And everything you do is a must watch. Thanks, Ken. Thank you. Thank you, my friend. You got to follow him at Ken Burns. Seriously, the book is fantastic. Follow now at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts. These are the stories that keep you up at night. Listen to the show ad free on Fox News Podcast Plus on Apple podcast, Amazon music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-03-11 10:10:35 / 2023-03-11 10:18:15 / 8