ken burns sat down with smithsonian institution david skorton to talk about films. -- to talk about how he uses libraries and are fine -- and archives to research films. they discussed the importance of learning history. this smithsonian library hosted this 40-minute event. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, ken burns and the secretary of the smithsonian, david skorton. [applause] [applause and cheers]

david: so welcome, everybody. we are so glad to have you here. i want to say a few words about the 50th and the library. we have had a sit and listen to nancy thanking everybody. can we please thank her for what she does every day? [applause] every day. [applause] and those of you who know me know that i think libraries are the cat's meow. [laughter] that is from someone allergic to cats. [laughter] it is unbelievably important, more important than ever. it is not the stacks, as great as they are. it is not the books, as essential as they are, it is the people, the information professionals. i cannot thank you enough, not only at the smithsonian but on behalf of a grateful country to put your money into something

like this and put your emotional and moral intellectual support behind an endeavor that is more and more important. i want to mention a couple things about your opening remarks. you said our guest made at least 21 movies. that is specifically correct, but we saw 31 and ar-15 more. let's go over the numbers. -- and there are 15 more. let's go over the numbers. i will thank you not to bring up dillon ripley, who was the sainted secretary in the 1960's. whenever someone mentions him, they say something, then there is a comma and say that was a secretary. [laughter] anyway, this is one of those nights you dream about when you have opportunities that i do. a chance to interview one of my and your idols, ken burns. idol, ken burns. -- [applause]

so i have a bunch of questions here. these are questions that we came up with through a very deep and difficult scientific process. me and another guy made them up. [laughter] if i want to ask these questions, maybe some of you will want to see the answers. why and how did you get into filmmaking? how did this happen? ken: i am the son of an anthropologist and a biology major. my mother is a biology major, contracted cancer when i was two years old and died around, before my 12th birthday. my father had a very strict curfew for my younger brother and me. he for david for me and -- he forgave it for me and we would

stay up until 1:00 on a school night looking at old movies. it was the first time i saw my dad cry was at a movie, "odd man out" about the irish troubles. i avowed at age 12, a few months after my mother died, that i would be a filmmaker. and looking at howard hawks, the great directors of the 1960's, i ended up at hampshire college in massachusetts. all of my film teachers were social documentary still photographers who reminded me correctly there is as much drama in what is and what was then anything the imagination dreams of. by 12 i wanted to be a filmmaker. 18 or 19 i knew it was documentary. by the time i left hampshire, it was american history. i am untutored except for what the public school systems make us take. i have always been interested in who we are as a people that animates the films we made. that is what i have been doing

for the last 40 some years. david: you are doing a pretty good job, i would say. [laughter] did you ever think about making anything other than documentary? ken: i started off wanting to be a feature film maker. important, for me, coming-of-age and for you, a documentary was more often than not a didactic thing. it was expository, telling you what you should know, homework, castor oil. i firmly believed there were exceptions. for me, because i had grown up inculcated with feature films, and knew all about the american past and present and french new wave and japanese cinema, that by the time i was out of high school, i was versatile. i realized the same laws of

storytelling applied to a feature filmmaker as a documentary filmmaker. but we can't make stuff up. i sat down the road with steven spielberg a couple years ago at the archives interviewing him. we talked about that. we felt the same way, the same, you could call it poetics, the same poetics. he can make stuff up and i can't. but the same ordering and pacing is there. i don't make a distinction. i am finishing a film on country music now, excited about it. it will be on next september. brenda lee, a great singer, like many of the people in the jazz series, which you were kind enough to say you had an opportunity to see, i speak -- they speak about the fact that the rest of us in pose -- impose artificial designations on things.

we label this jazz, blues, country, whatever. rockabilly iraq. or rock.illy the musicians themselves don't actually perceive the distinctions in the same way. we do it in order to order our existence and make it easier and go, now i know what he does or what she is playing. in point of fact it is all the same. i have felt that in the community of filmmakers i got to know across my professional life that had been experimental filmmakers like samba package or -- stand barak h or feature filmmakers like clint eastwood or steven spielberg or foreign film makers, that have reminded me we are in the same business, telling stories. we use different palettes or something. i chose american history the way some painter might choose oil as opposed to watercolor or to focus on still life rather than

landscape. do you know what i mean? david: i do. here we are sitting in the national museum of american history, and you do an extremely admirable job telling stories. when you do, going back to your comments about how things don't have to be categorized like music, one of the things i worry about and am curious if this resonates with you, real-world problems don't come into categories. one of the things i have been worried about is a shift in our view of education, formal and informal, toward the stem disciplines because it is important, utilitarian, leads to a better job. i worry about the arts and humanities and social sciences shoved into the second or third row. ken: i couldn't agree more. i am a steam guy, the arts in

their broadly include so many other disciplines. there are two things operating. one is the fact that we are so didacticly preoccupied. we are engaged in constantly pointing out where you are. i suppose by contrast where i might be. red state, blue state, young, old, black or white, male or female, rich or poor, from north or south, east or west, and we forget to select for most of what we are that we share in common. in this rushed specialism to categorize and differentiate, discriminate in the worst sense of the word, we have isolated ourselves. we need the arts and humanities and history and ethics and civics and political science and philosophy more than ever because they become the glue that rebind us back together as a people. when the stem aspects are just

what they are, we neglect to select for something that includes all of us. we become over specialized which is a great danger. we can't speak to each other, exacerbated by the divisions. i am reminded, early in my life, i was trying to raise money. late in my professional life i am trying to raise money. [laughter] i was making a film on the brooklyn bridge, i looked 12 years old and people looked delighted to tell this 12-year-old, trying to sell me the brooklyn bridge, no. [laughter] keep gigantic three ring binders, four inches thick with every rejection i got from that film as a kind of reminder to not get too big for my britches. not to get above your raisin, meaning your raising, your upbringing, not your dried grape.

[laughter] i was with a kind of a, i can only call him a mentor, he was a senior executive at at&t when that existed in lower manhattan in the magnificent deco building. he showed me a working phone with a tv, where you could call somebody and look. it was like buck rogers. david: i remember. ken: you couldn't believe i could be in another room talking to this guy. he said i am really anxious about the future because we have been minting these nda's for the last 10, 15 years. business programs are on tv. people are getting mbas rather than proceeding through liberal arts education and moving into business.

these guys are smart, they know their stuff but don't know anything about ethics, don't know how to write a letter, don't know where they are. i can teach you what you need to know mba wise, but i can't teach all that other stuff. somehow the genie got out of the bottle and we are obligated. in institutions like the smithsonian, the reason why we attract people and your support, not just to start off, happy birthday but to thank you as the secretary did for your support because this is really the front line of our survival. it doesn't seem sexy enough to put it in the hands of librarians, but it is really sexy and important. [laughter] [applause] david: i know you were hoping to get ideas for your next films after this. [laughter] you know a documentary about

librarians wouldn't be the worst thing? [laughter] [applause] ken: after the civil war came out, funding groups would come to me and say what are you working on? i would say baseball and their eyes would glaze over. after one meeting, particularly unsuccessful, the head of a foundation said, ok. as we were leaving, she said, if you ever do something about the constitution -- i wheeled around and said i do it in every field -- film. it is in every frame. she came and saw it. to her credit, they helped fund the baseball series and have been involved. sometimes we often presuppose you have to, and if you have been a parent, that best way is being indirect. if we say we do something on

education or on libraries, you somehow will do it, when in fact it is -- music works. i don't need to tell you not because of the notes, but because of intervals between the notes. david: exactly. ken: sometimes the best work is not the subject matter but the interval of the notes of that subject matter. when you see country music -- i will presume not everybody in this room is an avid fan as i was not. david: i am. >> [laughter] ken: as harlan howard said, three quarters of the truth. when you strip away the next couple stuff, and -- in next couple -- there is a lot of that in jazz, pop, classical, if you get down to elemental things, it is talking about the joy of birth, sadness at death, falling in love, falling out of love, losing someone, feeling lonely, seeking redemption for

forgiveness, or some other thing. that is the basic elemental building blocks of everyone's human experience. pickup trucks, the sixpacks and dogs are jokes, to not deal with tough four letter words like dogs. -- like love. david: beautifully said. eloquence. staying with the music theme, i met a student of film scoring. it is fascinating. in a feature film as you put it, those things have enormous, in my eyes, enormous effect on the audience. i am sure you have seen and done many of these experiments where you play without music and it is different. tell me about your point of view on how you work with a composer. do you do the whole thing, then find one? ken: we are different.

i would like to sort of acknowledge the centrality of wynton marsalis calls the art of the invisible. it is the fastest art form, to -- two notes, it has got you. we have issued the traditional hollywood method of composers. i can speak to that presently. too often soundtracks, not just in documentaries but more often features, are something added at the end. a score is a mathematical term, and they finish the film. they have locked it, then they bring in the composer and literally time with the orchestra or whatever watching on a screen, and it has got to be exactly 27 seconds in 13 frames. we don't do it that way. we recorded our music, usually

sound music of the time, before or early in editing. we will identify a tune we like and play 30 different versions of the battle hymn of the republic or the battle hymn of the right of freedom. we will do it with one hand, two hands, martial, minor key, different orchestrations. we will spend the day. we haven't even started editing. we end up with beds, musical beds of hundreds of selections. the editors are encouraged to use music right away. quite often, as we become attached, we are not going in to score it. this will be the music. we will change the rhythm and pacing of the scenes based on the music. we could shorten a sentence or lengthening a sentence to fit a phrase of music.

the narrator works extra. music is not an afterthought. it is not icing. it is baked in. we know the experience of a horror film without music, it is no longer scary. we hope this organic way -- when i talk to people, two or three questions in, they want to know about the music. ashokan farewell, the only piece of music non-contemporary. film that was not about the music but the music was really important. weh that the anon serious, had one pieces of music. mostly rock 'n roll or just from -- we have mostly rock 'n roll and jazz from the time period, but we also have others looking at really early footage of interviews, not anything in

editing, and they wrote three hours worth of original music out of the kind of modes and -- moods and themes we talked about. i would give a right arm to the end of their process. they watched this and said it was the most satisfying collaboration we have had, trent and atticus, have had. as vietnam was for us so far the most satisfying professional thing. we took some folksongs from vietnam and lullabies, other popular music people would have known north and south that was ubiquitous. we asked yo-yo ma and the silk road ensemble to bend them. it is farther north, but to bend them musically and geographically into this vietnamese place. it was wonderful. we had that experience. all of this is delivered before editing. it was never added to. i have never been with an editor with the film running.

im am the scratching narrator before that happens. i have never gone in with a first-person voice, asked meryl streep to read that while zooming in on her and her husband. we had a lot of our consultants go, where did you get that tape of eleanor? it is called meryl streep. [laughter] ken: she is going places, let me tell you. [laughter] justice kagan: -- or with the case of the soundtrack itself, we have never put it up and changed the music to what -- fit what was on the screen. david: i tried to figure out how you might have done that in vietnam, and now i know and i can win some bets from people. just as a real quick digression, you talked about fundraising. forgive me for that aggression, i have to share a short personal story. when i was a kid, i was going to be a rabbi. my dad was a first-generation american, religious jew from russia. one day i marched in and said i

will not do it, i will not be a rabbi. he said, that is interesting. how did you decide? i said, i found out rabbis have to do fundraising. i will never take a job where i have to do fundraising. [laughter] david: live and learn. i want to bend this back to libraries a little bit. through our extensive research department, we found out that you told a graduating class at stanford university -- my kid is a stanford alum. i will not share the total amount that it cost to do that. it is not really that important is it? ken: a lot of fundraising. [laughter] david: anyway, you told the graduating class of stanford the book was the greatest machine of all. can you enlarge on that a little bit for us? i might have said mechanical invention. that.do believe i think we are always in the thrall of technology, and that

is usually to our detriment. it is a tail that wags the dog, not the other way around. i am sure it was true of the book early on, but i think it has come down to us. i am in the visual medium, but the word was the beginning and we are unafraid of words, and our films are full of words and they come from reading and studying books. i just don't know where there is any other place to begin. i mean, in the beginning is the word. we firmly believe that. i was trying to offer a generation that is so, you know, dependent on this, that there was something else as well. i think everyone knows that deep down, and we all have an experience that is dwindling among many of us, of just that pure pleasure of reading a book on our own time, being our own directors, our own casting agents, our own cinematographers.

that is a wonderful, intimate, private thing that i still think is sacred. when we start off any project, it is always with libraries and archives, you know, educational places where stuff, mostly books, are saved. david: in that regard -- perfect segue to what i was going to ask you next -- what kind of libraries do you use? how do you get to the information? is it local universities, public library? ken: it is across the board. i live in a village in new hampshire. we have a nice, classic new england library that we go to. we will head up the road to dartmouth and avail ourselves of their stuff. but invariably our subject matter is pretty diverse. if you watch the fine print,

slow it down on the dvd, of the credits, it is hundreds of libraries and archives across the country. and so we are visiting them more often than not, and we are spending a lot of time there. sometimes digitizing photographs or graphics, but more often than not it is reading and trying to find primary sources that will help us, and also reading the works of, in many cases, a panel of two dozen historical advisors. david: have you ever had the occasion to use our libraries or archives? ken: on just about every film we have done. i would say it is well more than half that we have availed ourselves. certainly if you added in your sister institutions in this town, on this street, across the street and up the hill, it is every film 100%, with the library of congress and the national archives. david: yeah, there was no special reason to bring those up. [laughter] david: this is the time to go

into my dillon ripley story. [laughter] ken: now that was a secretary. [laughter] david: join the crowd. [laughter] ambrose, then historian, is said to have said, more americans get their history from ken burns than any other source. hmm. what do you think? ken: well, he did say it because i was there when he said it. he wrote it in a letter and some pr person grabbed it. it is a funny thing. i don't know if that's true, but if it is true -- i mean, we need to be getting our history from lots of different places. that's really clear. we have to be getting it from -- to say --loathe mainstream sources. we are beset right now by this notion of fake news, and it is,

academy, andto the people now can dismiss stuff that represents years and years of scholarship, from just saying it doesn't quite jive with what they think somebody's political beliefs are. we work extra hard to not put those in our films. they cannot help, i suppose, but be there by some kind of osmosis , the selection of what we choose to focus on. we took a lot of criticism in the civil war film that we focused on what joshua lawrence chamberlain did on the second day of gettysburg on the extreme left of the union line and ignored other engagements, which is true. and that's what storytelling is. when somebody says, honey, how , you don't say, i ,acked slowly down the driveway avoiding the garbage can at the curb0 [laughter] ken: unless somebody t-boned you at that point, in which case

that is exactly how you tell it. our job is, and it is a team that i represent -- i am a conductor of a pretty extraordinary group of musicians. it is our job to figure out how to tell that story, how to 40tually leave out 9/10 or 39/ -- as we like to say in new hampshire, it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. documentary filmmaking is almost ratio, 39-1.ooting david: my wife is a molecular biologist. she wants to hear those details. i just want you to know that. when she says how was your day, she wants to know all that stuff. but i think that is the exception that proves the rule. i want to get back, if we might, do the humanities for a moment. when you include the jefferson lecture, which was fabulous, amazing, great -- you called the

humanities the glue that allows us to understand how things work and how to get things done. just for a moment, walking away from the issue i raised earlier of the utility of stem and so on, how do we, from your perspective, get folks, especially young people and their parents, to understand that that is the case? i tried exhortation through college presidencies. did not work very well. i chaired a study for the national academy that came out a few months ago where we actually studied whether adding arts and humanities to other curricula, that is integrating curricula, would show advantages in learning outcomes. turns out they do. in medical school, graduate school, undergraduate school. but yet people are unconvinced. do you have any advice on that? ken: i think at first blush i would take one small, tiny corner of the humanities and

civics, which is now a dirty word. it has disappeared almost completely from educational system, which is to our discredit because it is not saying there are 100 senators and 435 representatives, which there are and most americans cannot answer that question. it is about much more complex things about how you do get those things done, how you forge a connection with people looking them in the eye, not in a text or email or on a phone. you, from the dogcatcher and the fire pumper that our town is going to buy or not buy, right up to what took place yesterday. this is a big deal. and i think the reintroduction of that -- the problem is that civics sounds now like a dirty word. my thing would be the answer, and it is not a simple 1 -- it is a simple answer but the solution is not simple. it is stories. we tell each other's stories. as i said in the jefferson

lecture, we tell each other stories to keep the wolf from the door, the wolf being the inevitability of our mortality, that is to say that nobody here is getting out of this alive. and that what we do is we tell stories, in large measure, to continue our own lives, to achieve something beyond this physicalness, to communicate and bond with others in this relatively short passage we have. and to try in the distillation of those stories, that is the maple syrup, to distill the essence of who we are and what we think is valuable and to then find some way to convey that to, as lincoln said, to the latest generation. and that's our task. it is really hard. it is made complicated by that technology. it is made complicated by a political moment. it is a political moment. we have seen it before. everything changes. it will never remain the same. that conspires against that kind of communication.

in the sense of, you know, i've been very fond for decades now , and friends of mine just kind of rolled their eyes, of quoting slusser junior, we suffer from -- who said we suffered today from too much pluribus and not [laughter] ken: i actually have found that over the last couple of months, i have been sort of coming on a different way of approaching that, which is i think the essence of your question, and i apologize if i have taken it off

in a place. but i have spent most of my professional life in a place between the two letter, lower us and itsl uppercase u.s., and all that i have done exists in the places between them. both the idea of us as a "we" as positive sense of being together , but also the u.s. and its possibility and its flaws. i do not think we have been ever been afraid of speaking about that. quite often as we know from life, these things often come hand in hand. war, the subject of many of the films we have tackled is obviously human beings at their worst, but also, it turns out, it is human beings at their best. that kind of push me, pull you tow, contradiction in terms -- winton once said to me at a jazz series that sometimes the opposite of a thing and the thing are true at the same time. and that is kind of the way i roll. i'm looking for that kind of thing. and what you find is that we give it lots of different names. sometimes it is faith, sometimes it is art, sometimes it is reason, sometimes it is

literature, sometimes it is poetry. whatever it might be, it enables us to subsume those two contradictions and produce something bigger at that moment, and that is what we are looking for, where one and one equals three. we spend our rational lives depending on one and one equaling two, and it does, but the stuff that really compels us in our faith, our relationships, our work, is where one and one equals three. i'm interested in that place, that improbable calculus. david: i am going to give you a real quick verbal review of all of your work. you do an amazing job of getting information and emotion across to us without being pedantic. it is a very good skill. people are standing up and looking at me like they want me to stop. but i'm the secretary and who is going to drag me off stage? [laughter] david: i just have one or two more questions. one or two more questions. nancy is writing down, note to self, do not ask this guy to do more interviews. [laughter] david: so last friday, i had the

chance to go to northern virginia committee college, nova, and it's the 10th anniversary of national writing day. had a chance to interact with the students. despite the fact that i was in the ivy league, et cetera, et cetera, i think community colleges are the american dream. it is where most students go to school, it is our best hope for a lot of things in the country, as far as i'm concerned. anyway, it was an interesting panel of which i was probably the least interesting, talking about the linkage between learning, careers, and writing itself. made comments about writing. you have talked about absorption of knowledge and so on. obviously you are very literate and articulate, and you probably spend a huge amount of your time writing or doing things similar to that. what should we be telling our young people about that? ken: this is the key, i think if the book is the greatest mechanical invention, a book is filled with writing and we would

do well to practice it ourselves, with whatever modest expectations we might have, but practice it. but alas, we do not do that today. and we have to figure out some by myistracted as we are profession and by the technological world and the vastness of the internet, which is, you know, a gigantic maw that swallows psyches whole. they sometimes never come back. you know, i have been thinking -- i am going off-topic and i apologize, mr. secretary, but we spent a lot of time in this modern world talking about convenience. and i think convenience is a deadly thing. -- we everything we do want our refrigerators to turn on at -- and defrost things by themselves. we want doors to open by themselves. we want to be able to see things where we are not. we want to be able to not have to do lots of different things.

so i have been practicing not-convenience. i like a cup of tea in the morning. and i live on a hill, pretty high hill, about a mile and half down from my town. down to the town is not as bad as the mile and a half back up, but every morning with my dog i walk into town and walk back up with, as i call it, the most aerobic cup of tea on earth, because it is not convenient. i can make a cup of tea at home, but there is something about actually taking the hour and 5, 6 minutes it takes me to do this that you feel this incredible rush of going against the grain of things, the expectation. i'm very busy. i work very hard. this is not a waste of time. things take place, but it is not a waste of time even if stuff didn't take place. you would experience nature. you would have this ability to stop certain things. i'm with my dog, who is really a great, great guy.

[laughter] ken: i can see over into vermont for most of my trip. i can look down on my town, which looks like a currier and ives blueprint. they never really got the essence of new england. it's wonderful. mean, i has to do -- i have gone off-topic about convenience, but i think it is applying to the same thing. we have to figure out how to engage in other things to retrain us about these forms of communication that will be central to our survival, not just as a republic, which is clearly in a great existential threat, but as a species. david: yes, as a species. ken: period. full stop. david: one last question, and this is from left field, but i want to ask you for a piece of advice. directness and bluntness appreciated. don't worry about nancy's

feelings or anything. if you look at polls of what americans trust, what kinds of institutions we trust, the vast majority of the kinds of institutions we have have plummeted in trust. government, media, the medical profession, much to my chagrin, and so on. libraries and museums and military are the three -- ken: and pbs. david: pbs is up there. pbs is, i consider it a culture institution. my theory -- it is fine if you want to dash. the interview is over, i can't hurt you now. my theory is that these trusted institutions, like the smithsonian but not limited to the smithsonian, should be places where we convene conversations on topics where people are not comfortable hearing each other out or talking. we are trying some experiments. is that right? is this a place that makes -- that you think makes sense? ken: absolutely, and you can see also the way libraries have evolved. there was a point in which there

was a presumption, i would say in the mid-1990's, that libraries were obsolete. you will be able to read a book on your phone, certainly your computer. we're not going to the libraries. but now we find that libraries are kind of the centers of town. they have got access to internet. not everybody has that. they have the latest periodicals. they are sometimes warm. they often have a bathroom. [laughter] ken: there's lots of stuff that is very basic -- three quarters of the truth -- basic to human activity. i think we spent a lot of time talking at people about sort of, let's have a national conversation about this or that. you can't have a national conversation. i can yell at the top of my lungs right now and barely 250 people will hear me. so what you want to do is find institutions and places that foster intimate conversation. so our vietnam series, the last big program that we broadcast on tv, has been out a little bit over a year.

it's been huge. the firstllion people timeout, and it has been on netflix. so people are talking. it is a daily occurrence of my life that someone stops me on the street and says, my husband, my son, my brother, my grandfather, my whomever was there. was there and they have not talked about it, but we made them watch and now they are talking. david: that is so fabulous. ken: that means you want to ignite millions of conversations, not one deep, vast conversation, because it is actually impossible to have that. even with media like television that permits simultaneous stuff going on. david: we believe in that creed completely, which means it must be right. we have an organization here called smithsonian associates that allows amazing outreach locally and beyond.

and then we have 214 affiliate museums in 45 states, puerto rico, and panama. i'm working toward a national day of conversation, which would be local, and see if we can find that. ken: we can use the new media, you can teleconference in an do that. but in point of fact, this is, you know, you're back to aspiring to be a rabbi. the conversions are going to happen one soul at time. and that's our job, is to just turn one person onto this book or this opportunity or this idea or this story. and then the rest will follow suit. the problem is we have allowed darker forces to get a huge head start. and a lot of it is based purely on money and profit. a lot of it is based on the enthusiasm towards new technologies that have to be event to our well and not us to them. a lot of that has to do with just human curiosity. all of that is good, but we have to get back and realize that

there is some eternal truths we have to remember generation after generation after generation. david: you have taught us so much, you will teach us so much. you have done so much for our emotions and minds and hearts. thank you. ladies and gentlemen, ken burns. [applause] >> all i can say after that is wow. please join us across the lobby for a champagne reception and a toast to ken and our 50th anniversary. thank you. [applause]

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