in san francisco. that began the entire paper spun scheme that allowed chinese living in the united states to say that they were born here in the united states and that they had children in china, and they would like to sponsor those children in china and family in china to come to the united states. so a number of chinese came during the post 1906 earthquake period, including my father. >> this weekend watch c-span's cities tour to oakland, beginning saturday at noon eastern. and sunday afternoon at 2:00 on american history tv on c-span 3. the c-span cities tour, working with our cable affiliates in visiting cities across the country. next, award-winning film

maker ric burns. he explains why films are so riveting and spoke at the national museum of american history in washington. this is about an hour. [ applause ] >> chris, thank you very much, and it really was chris who had the energy and foresight to make this happen. and we're appreciative of you and the team that's gotten this together. when i watch movies, i'm learning about life, finding fun and sometimes sadness and receiving instruction from the stories on the screen. we all use movies to understand ourselves. as a child growing up in colorado, for me, it was westerns. i was captivated by the greats of john ford and sergio leo nay.

i was hooked on a historic time. and that time for me was very real. film transports us all to another time and place and leads us to explore and learn so much more. the unbelievable terror of landing on normandy's beaches in "saving private ryan" made me read more. the battles in "glory" brought us to the epicenter of the struggle over the meaning of freedom. our visitors walk into this museum with many preconceived ideas about their history, and so much comes from the visual and emotional life of the films that they have seen. and we have to either understand and reenforce our visitors' knowledge or help them find the truth behind the historical myths that they and we all carry. but it is so clear that film's elemental to the way americans see american history. we're thrilled that you have

joined us for the opening day of our inaugural history film forum. we're so pleased to be working with our partners at the national endowment for the hugh hand -- humanities. we at the museum are dedicated to an important mission, using our collection of national treasures to make our shared history come alive. history must be made appealing for millions of visitors who visit us physically and online. we bring a coherence to american history and knit together compelling stories, narratives and experiences around fundamental american ideals and ideas. such as freedom, opportunity and democracy. we hope that our visitors leave with an eagerness to become moren gauged in our history, which is more essential than

ever. in many ways, that's what great films and film makers do when they explore history on the film. whether it's a blockbuster film set in the past like ron howard's "the heart of the sea." or "the pilgrim", or one of our many programs from pbs and the smithsonian channel. millions of you have drawn into stories of our past. that affects how we understand history in our world today and helps inform the future that we're actually all creating together. this wonderful theater was renovated with the support of warner bros. in 2011 to be a tait of the art space to show nearly every kind of film. and in a year since its reopening we've screened some brilliant films. yet despite the i am men's popularity of history films and the seriousness with which film critics are now taking teaching

and interpreting history, there is no dedicated place to explore the value of film as the tool for learning history. and that is exactly what our history film forum is here for. to convene groups of audiences and groups of experts to probe the state of narrative and documentary historic film. it is certainly fitting that we're partners with the national endowment for the humanities, which is such an influential force in supporting films and film makers. with the neh, we hope we will screen new narratives and documentary films hosting important lively conversations and creating signature experiences well into the future. to tell you more about the neh and to introduce our keynote speaker it's my honor to introduce our friend, the chairman of the national endowment for humanities, rowe

adams. rowe has a philosophy degree, and was former president of bucknell of college. welcome, and thank you for supporting us. [ applause ] thanks, john, and good afternoon, everyone. i'm thrilled to be here and to join all of you for the opening of this wonderful new series, the history film forum. what a great idea and what a wonderful place to be sharing these films with all of you. we're very honored to be working with the smithsonian, especially to present the festival and this museum in particular, which is so close to the mission of neh. these four days of films and panels promise to be a rich ex-moration of how film conveys history of the american people and how films have shaped the way we see our nation and ourselves. this year, as i think most of

you know, the neh is celebrating our 50th anniversary. so here is an interesting piece of data. since 1965, the neh has funded more than 800 documentary films, bringing the best of humanities research and stories to the american people i think in that 800 films we've committed something like $136 million to documentary film making. we've got to be the biggest investor of documentary films in the united states. [ applause ] one of the most effective and entertaining ways to present history and to share it with the public is through documentary films, and that's why we're so committed to this medium. neh supports films that highlight the pivotal chronicles and highlight stories like the pilgrims. it's my great honor to introduce

ric burns, one of the nation's most respected and accomplished documentary film makers. ric's production company has garnered 13 national emmy nominations, three dupont awards, two peabodys and the eric bono prize. some remarkable accomplishments. his films bring history to life through unforgettable characters, powerful archival material and groundbreaking scholarship, through rich, dramatic storytelling, neh is proud to have a long history of supporting ric's films, to name just a few, "coney island", "the donner party."

"we shall remain", "into the deep." neh also funded public engagement around the recent broadcast of "death of honor", a moving exploration of the history of disabled veterans, and if you haven't soeen this latest film of ric's, please do. ric has explored a wide range of topics and has brought these to a broad public. tomorrow night "the pilgrims" will screen here as part of the history film forum project. "the pilgrims" breaks new ground by complicating what has become the american origin myth. from thanksgiving to plymouth rock, the sweeping film presents a seminal if not misunderstood

view of american history. one familiar in its broad outlines but unfamiliar in its rich detail. it is grounded in the currents of the 1700s. the film premieres november 24th and again on thanksgiving day. i want to acknowledge other key players, from "steeplechase", bonnie lafey. the editor, roceditor, robines .

la -- a number -- i hope you will join us for the screening of "the pilgrims" tomorrow at 7:00 followed by a question and answer session with ric and jeff. but for now, please join me in welcoming one of our nation's most acclaimed documentary film makers, ric burns. [ applause ] >> thank you so much. i can't tell you how moved i am and pleased i am by your words. i also can't tell you all what a pleasure it is to be here for the opening of the history film forum. it's such an incred bring great idea. i can't believe it hasn't been done before, and i know it's going to take off. i have to say that with respect to history and film, other than my two boys, simon and adam and

my wife bonnie, and i know though will be crushing to hear to my three dogs, maggie, rosie and fiona, history in film making are the things that matter most to me in my life. they're the things that have given me greatest joy and wonder and meaning and challenge for more than 30 years now. so given all that to be here under the joint auspices of the smithsonian on the one hand an extraordinary institution, the one that has for 150 years sought to interpret the artifacts of the human and natural world and of course the national endowment for the humanities on the other hand. this extraordinary federal agency, which for 50 years has done more than any other organization in america to further the understanding and dissemination of the humanities and to support the making of historical documentary films.

given that combination, i yours can't tell you what it means to be here and for us to be able to launch our film tomorrow night on "the pilgrims" all but three films have been supported by the endowment for humanities. my calculations are roughly that every dollar from the neh li en leverages three to five. it's in this crucial engine for documentary films since ken first started his first film and ken's career is equally inconceivable without it. so bro, thank you for that and to the people here, it's such a team partnership to the american experience, to the wida people, to my steeplechase clan there,

to my college roommate, michael. susan, thank you for being here. i'm here to talk with you this afternoon about history and film. history and film making. if you go onto the website for the history film forum you'll find a comment from alfred hitchcock in whenich i acertificata certifica real forces and events in people and episodes of history. whether fiction or nonfiction. the historical films are the most powerful medium for conveying the meaning and power and drama of history. the most powerful medium for bringing to life in a compelling way the true stories of the past. so, with all that in mind, i want to talk with you a little bit today about where that power comes from.

about how and why film and therefore history films, history on film can be so powerful, so compelling, emotionally and intellectually. i also want to talk with you a little bit about some of the pit falls and limitations of the medium of making history on film, about what historical films are best at doing and what they're perhaps less well suited for. finally, i want to say a few words at the end about the moral obligation which i take to be crucial about historical films on historical topics, historical documentaries themselves, the obligation they have to their audience, about so. ways that obligation can be defaulted on and how at their very best, history films have a deep and abiding kinship between the processes of history itself and the deep forces that film can give access to. in the process, i'm going to tell you everything i know about historical documentary film

making, and before anybody gets worried, it's not going to take that long. for that reason and more and by way of illustrating some of my remarks, i'm going to show three brief clips all of them supported by the endowment, all of them on the american experience as well, a film on coney island which we did in 1991, on the american whaling industry in 2010, and a clip of our film of the donner party in 1992. i've been assured think have a hook and they're not afraid to use it. so to start at the beginning, history and film obviously have a few things in common. they both unfold in time. both are subject to the iron law of temporal sequence, the law of before and after, first one thing happening and then another, in that order and not the reverse. having said that, of course, the process of real time unfolding of any film is ridge idly linear

and uni vocal. film -- history itself is always multiple and multi-various. always many things happening at once. that's why can one of the many dangers is the danger of reduction and simplification. the rendering of things that are intrinsically multiple and complex, sung lar, linear, single-stranded in a way that things in history never are. this is a huge problem. and let me say right now up front, film better have something incredibly powerful up its sleeve to compensate for this huge limitation and deficit or it's in huge trouble. the good news is that it does. but more of that later. of film emerged from the white heat of the industrial

revolution in ways that are fascinating and suggestive to me. even before the first motion picture cameras were invented there were precursers that go back to the stifl war, the caldron, the blood-soaked factory floor from which film and history in america at least seemed to have merged. it's not too much to say that virtually everything important about america, american history and culture and everything about film itself as a form have their roots about 150 years ago in the war. film historians pointed out long agatha well before the moving picture frames were invented, by 1865, the american landscape was being framed and referenced in a linear way by the railroad and telegraph. to look out to the regularizing frame of a train window as it made its way west or to see the

immakeable march of telephone poles, but to see the technology of film itself ink baiting in the womb. the still photographer eer woul take this relationship between framing and motion a joint step forward in the two decades after the civil war. through the patronage of a railro railroad baron. photographs of a prized racehorse, proving incontrovertibly that all four of the horse's hooves are at one point off the ground. he grasped that if you printed these images on a photographic plate, and he did, and then rotated that plate in front of a

powerful, strong light source, you could create a primitive illusion of movement, he called this curious device a sow prak scope. the invention relied on persistence of vision. one way or another, it had a huge impact on a whole generation of inventors, so that looking back now, no one's surprised that in ten years of experiments in human and animal locomotion, the motion picture camera was born in france and in thomas edison's studio in west orange, new jersey. but history and film, actuality and motion pictures had come face-to-face. in one way or another, for the last 120 years, in parallel,drome like, mesmerizing and interpenetrating ways, history and films have been

intermingling ever since. in what is to me the loveliest of all sim ettries, the first motion pictures themselves were called just that. actualities. enough for the first motion pictures simply to stare and wonder at the real world in motion. for thomas edison and his cohorts understood 70 years ahead of time what andy warhol discovered in the 1960s that reality itself, if you look at it nakedly enough without any adornment is completely mesmerizing. so what those first films did was simply gaze at the world, at the real world and show reality in motion. trains moving, people passing on the street on a onn on windy da. buildings being constructed. reality and moving.

age. actual life and the actualities that captured it were one and the same thing, completely fused together. here at the turn of the 20th century, at the very moment of freud and the dawn of psy psychoanalysis were imposed upon unanother. as if reality were dreaming or dreams themselves were becoming realities. we can feel this interpenetrating fusion of history and film and the processes they engage in so many films from the time. these earliest films which have mysterious eyes wide open, eyes wide shut double life have become historical documents in themselves. equally powerful both for the luminous kinetic surfaces they document and for the deep historical processes and forces they attest to, which brings me to the first clip i want to show you this afternoon.

the brief four or five mincey against from the film my colleague s and i made on the history of coney island, at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, at a time when just at the birth of film itself coney island itself was bursts onto the american scene as the most modern place on earth. mixed and commercial and democratic. the fact is, we simply couldn't have made this film or captured and conveyed the transfiguring his stotorical work at coney is without edison's actuality contained in the like rare of congress, 15 short films from the first years of film history. the scene is from the climax of our film when the powerful and transforming forces of modernity

unleashed at the 20th century were coming to an extraordinary climax, forces that would prove equally dree ative and destructive and for which the power of electricity was a perfect metaphor. could we roll this first clip in. >> when it was at its most popular, it most perfectly reflected its culture, and, you know, part of that was it showed people what they wanted to see or what they wanted to think their country was going to become. and i think part of that was just the excitement of electricity. ♪ >> dreamlands never became as popular as lunar or steeplechase. but its cascade of lights completed a skyline unlike anything else in the world. conn c coney was more than three big amusement parks. it was a city. the newspapers called it the

"city of fire." >> with the advent of light, the city of fire went skyward from motion. thousands of growing sparks illuminating the darkness. translucent pattens of fire in love with the beauty of their own reflection in the water. it was beyond conceiving, beautiful. >> while significant month freud

was working, coney island became the unkvs its age. much of what people found there scared them. but they came. everybody came to coney sooner or later. on a warm, september night in 1909, sigmund freud himself could be found in connie island, contemplating dreamland. >> the brazen voice of the island became -- on the eardrums. like a pulse of fever. the beeping horses and flying cars are met more physicaled and the doorways of endless concert

halls and drinking places one glimpse faces like the unspeakable phantoms of a dream. >> thompson and dundee's private herd of elephants roamed through the park. one of their fair favorites, helped build luna but had a bad future. she had killed three men in three years. one of whom fed her a lighted

cigarette. it was clear that topsy had to go. when she finished off carrots filled with cyanide, it was announce d she would be hanged. when the aspca protested they had another plan. now thomas edison's men came over from new jersey and set up two huge electrodes. dundee and some handlers led topsy to the platform. when she balked, they offered her keeper $25 to help. but he refused to take part in the murder of his 6-ton charge. finally, the grumpy elephant hooked up, lek troids on the right forefoot and the left rear

and throuew the switch. it took 10 seconds. there was no noise. >> you know, there's something in this scene that i've always been, horrific as it is, obviously particularly pleased about that has to do, i think, with the relationship of history and film. you know, in the film,

immediately following the scene of topsy's electrocution in january of 1903, which was captured on film by thomas edison's colleagues who served as dock men tear yans and elephant killers, we placed in our film a scene from may 1911, eight years later when dreamland, the third and largest and most extraf gant of the parks of coney island burned to the ground on the night before opening day, when a fault in the electrical wiring ignited one of the worst fires in brooklyn's history. the unmistakable implication in our film is that dreamland burned down as retribution for the fact that thomas edison electrocuted topsy. interesting to me, no one has ever objected to this completely fabricated and historically inaccurate story at the core of our family, a conceit that in fact underlies and drives and

propels the entire narrative and structure of the film. let me say, in the interest of full disclosure, dreamland was not burned down as pun shallment for topsy's murder. an amusement park did not die for conney island since. we understand about the ambivalent and transforming forces at work in the culture of the time. forces in equal measure creative and destructive, pleasurable and painful for which the primordial fire seem to be metaphors. after the burning of dreamland, the world itself began to burn down, and, as it did, something began to happen in culture and in history and film. as audiences increasingly wanted something other, something more

and perhaps also something less than just moving pictures showing moving realities. motion pictures themselves fan moving in two directions simultaneously. they began to be increasingly dramatic and overtly fictional and began to take on overtly historical subjects, often one at the same time. and so of course in 1915, 20 years after the motion picture camera was invented, 60 years after the civil war and exactly 100 years ago this year, "birth of a nation" was produced and released to the public, if not the most infamous historic film of all time. looking back over the course of this last century, it's possible now to see a few patterns and begin to take stock. an enormous commercial success,

"birth of a nation" sparked massive controversy and dissension from the start. thomas dickson, the author of "the clansman" arranged for a screening of the film at the white house in 1915. it is like writing history with lightning, president wilson reportedly said, and my only regret is that it is also terribly true. meanwhile, across the country, african-americans, the naacp and many white americans too denounced the film's racist depictions of prid tory black men running amok during reconstruction. in the end, the only historical value of one of the earliest full-length feature films based on history, relied on its power as a toxic historical artifact in and of itself, tragically symptomatic of its time, accepting to the deep and

abiding racism at the culture of jim crow america. but the movie was still a tide of lightning, of course. just not of a kind that illuminates, but instead, of a kind that shocks and burns and kills. one way or another, i think it's true to say that the most powerful medium in human history was under way. so having alluded in this way to one of the ways history and film can go terribly wrong, i want to spend some time here talking about what film can do right that can make up for stark and obvious limitations. i'm a historical documentary film maker of course and therefore speak from that point of view, not as a feature film maker but as a producer of non-fiction film, everything i am going to tell you equally applies to fiction and

non-fiction films alike, hollywood feet eatures as to historical documentaries. so here's the five minutes where i tell everything i know about documentary film making. it's intrinsically a narrative art form. no matter how long or short they are, films like rivers are always stories. they flow, they unspool, they unfold, and they do so from within. and we know though from the physical form of film itself. which runs to the camera at 24 or video camera 30 frames per second irreversibly. and is meant to be played back at 24 or 30 frames per second irreversib

irreversibly. i can tell you no director ever wanted you to stop his or her film while you were watching it. remember in this context that directors are called directors for a reason and that the word director is a near angram for dictator. they want you to experience things as they have arranged them. obediently in order. the first and primary challenge of every film is to figure out what the story is. the story is not the same thing at subject matter. it is the experience of that subject matter unfolding in film time in the hearts and minds ofity audience, and discovering each time out what the story is for your film is difficult because of this. films don't really happen where they seem to be, up on the screen. they really happen inside

audiences. the chain of events of the film and film maker is really manipulating is the chain of events not on the screen but unfolding inside each and every member of the audience. now unlike the sounds and images up on the screen, it's hard to see and hear exactly what's going on inside the audience. that's why making films is harder than it sometimes seems. it's also why the only ability a director or film maker really has to have is to be a sounding board, that is to be the first member of the audience for his or her film, even before a single frame has been shot. it follows from this that all successful film projects begin, even before they're written or shot, with some powerful, visceral, gut reaction to the raw materials of the story on the part of a writer or director, and i firmly believe that that gut reaction is really the first version, the first draft, the first cut of the film. whatever it is about a subject

that helplessly arouses, is what will remain from the first to the last and sustain an interest on the part of the audience. their is the spark. the electricity, the lightning at the core of all films. of in one's head is a limited use in determining what is interesting in this respect or what the story is. it's one's heart and instincts and feelings senthrough the acs that count. films are made using a faculty located somewhere between, except for pornography, between the middle of the breast bone and the bridge of your nose, not higher. and that the head, the cerebral cortex is really useful only for

remembering and keeping track of what aroused interest. and what failed to do so. another crucially important, equally self-evident and all king ex-financi exis tension -- an experience so powerful that whether consciously or not the audience willingly confuses or conflates the experience it's having in the present with what it might have been like to live through an experience in the past. put it one way, a shadow and light and music happening now becomes the basis of our sense

of what happened then. this willing fiction, this cheerful collusion by which the audience conpires in its own duping is the basis of all historical documentary films. and there's something else. because the events in a film are temporal, linear and nondispersive, that is because you can't go sideways, you can't slow them down and go back when you're watching a film, it must be clear the first time it's seen and heard. it must be and rehenceable to and melt instantly within the eye, the eerks the mind and the heart. even if the information is obscure, incomplete or mysterious, it must be clearly, distinctly and intentionally obscure, incomplete and mysterious. if not, the audience is lost and leaves in mind and body. films to be successful must

arouse interest in more than what is happening up on the screen. in the most immediate and literal sense, we need to believe that the world presented to us by a 16 millimeter or 35 millimeter frame of light extends in all directions beyond what we're seeing. in addition from the first frame to the last, we need to believe in and care about things that are happening behind what we see on the screen, before what we see on the screen and after what we see on the screen. this more, this more than what is up on the screen which films must always evoke, moves in two directions at once. far out into the real world, past and present, beyond the confines of the film and at the same time far inward, into the subjective experience of the individual beings attending to the story. again, if a film doesn't arouse and sustain our interest in concern in all sorts of things

that aren't hang in froppening of us, we become board and leave. arousing is what a movie does, that's why queer' constantwe're saying to ourselves, i wonder what's going to happen next. film is a bastardized hybrid form, intrinsically impure and longing to be something else. and i've felt for a very long time that if a film could die and go to heaven it would want to come back as a piece of mikes, the purest, most transkenldant art form of all. music itself are scored like the notes in a symphony. each with timbor and effect.

i think it follows from everything i've said and that i've been saying that film is not only a narrative art form but an ecstatic form as well. in the root sense of the word which comes from the greek, ecstasis, which means literally outside the self. film must take you outside yourself. it must transport you willingly beyond where were you when you sat down. it must then return you to yourself changed. so it's for all these reasons that film is particularly capable i think of getting at or deploying two of the things that any presentation of hayestry must accomplish if it wants to engage and hold the attention of an audience. film, it turns out, singular and reductiontive as it is, frame by frame is a medium extraordinarily well suited to joining two vastly different scales. the epic and the intimate. it can provide evocative details of real flesh and blood people,

who they were, where they came from, what their character was and what drove them on. and it give context shaping upon those lives and present a broad, powerfully illuminating th synthesis of those forces. the mystery and power of individual human beings, and the mystery and power of processes, to the humble and concrete details of human beings who once lived and to the vast web of forces that shaped and interconnected the seemingly disparate circumstances of those lives. what's striking to grasp is that ditch as they are on the surface, both these domains, the epic and the intimate, the personal and the historic, bring us i have close to the power of things felt but not easily seen. the things that are for all intents and purposes invisible

but that we still strongly sentence and feel and affect us powerfully nonetheless, that is they bring us close to the unseen mystery of human inferiority and broad historical forces, to the dream like power of interior life and the dream like power of vast historical process. that's the promise of history and the promise of film. and the challenge of both, the merging of the intimate and the impersonal, the dream like power of interior life and the dream like power of process. and the only way i know how to do that is by telling a story. a form which more than any other stitches together the seen to the unseen, the present to the past and future, the invisible inner life of real people who have lived and struggled and dreamed to the unseen but totally felt web of forces impinging upon and shaping those lives. the processes at work whether we see them or not, in the forces that unfold around us u if a

fill is done well, the mystery of the outer world and the mystery of the inner world, many of the topics are about moments wheth when the forces of history and the power of imagination collide in a transformative way. given what they share in champion, a toehold on and basis in reality, and given how they diverge in history's multiplicity, i think it's true to say an enormously creative and sometimes distorting tension, defining relationship exists at the heart of history on film, a relationship between fact and fiction, history and imagination, thought and feeling. between reality as it is on the one hand and what we feel compelled to do about it. nothing in my view better exemplifies this crucial and defining relationship between

fact and fiction, history and imagination at the core of all history films than the first film being shown here at the history film forum, ron howard's "in the heart of the sea", based on the chronicle of the history of the whale industry, the doomed voyage of the whale ship which left nantucket and never returned. the real historical event their fiction film is based on, like the book itself which is nonfiction can almost be thought of as the paradigmic moment. the reality that's most spectacular episode, the sinking, and herman melville's

biographical account, and moby dick. all of which converge in or emanate from the searing, real-life story of the essex and its aftermath. by the 1920s, herman melville had been dead for 30 years. his reputation had long since sunk deeper than the doomed whale ship and revived in the 1920s. in 1926, a 100-minute long silent film, the seabees, based on moby dick, starring john barrymore was made. a huge commercial success. ahab, oddly, lives in this version. as a companion piece, part prequel and part sequel to the incredible story you'll be seeing tonight, i want to show you a second clip from the film my colleagues and i worked on called "into the deep."

no story in the anales of american history goes further out or deeper in in the ways i've been trying to describe than the story of american whaling and the extraordinary story of the essex and herman melville. it's a history of the american whaling and whaling's most notorious catastrophe and what herman melville made of it. this scene picks up in 1841, 20 years after the essex went down whether young herman melville first went to sea. can we roll the second clip? ♪ >> in the waning days of december 1840, a restless, 21 year old, one-time schoolteacher from upstate new york arrived in new bedford, looking for work on a whale ship. on december 25th, he went on

board a whale ship and nine days later set sail for the south pacific. my life, he later said, began that day. ♪ herman melville was a young man adrift.