Burns focuses on America's national parks

Ken Burns has spent the last three decades carrying America's past down from the attic, blowing the dust off old photos and forgotten letters to find out just one thing:

Who are we

?

The answer is endless, and Burns has uncovered parts of it in celebrated PBS documentaries on the Civil War and World War II, on baseball and jazz, on Jack Johnson and Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Now he's found another piece, which he shares in his latest documentary, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, a stunningly beautiful 12-hour, six-part miniseries that begins at 8 tonight on WHYY TV12.

America's national parks "represent our best selves," Burns says, during an interview at the WHYY studios on North Sixth Street, which he visited earlier this month to preview the series. They are nothing less than an affirmation of human equality, "the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape."

Burns still sports a Civil War mop, parted in the middle, and his face remains perennially young. Only the grey flecks in his beard give away his 56 years. On his feet are low-cut hiking shoes that tramped all over Yellowstone.

His work has brought him numerous awards, including 10 Emmys and two Oscar nominations, and the respect of his peers.

Burns isn't the kind of documentarian who talks back to power, says Eugene Jarecki, director of Why We Fight, a film about the American military-industrial complex that does exactly that. Rather, Burns "reminds us of us at our best," says Jarecki, and that gives Americans "the self-esteem to go through the therapy" of dealing with questions like those that Jarecki raises.

"What these films can do best is to encourage Americans to look at ourselves critically, with tough love," Jarecki says.

"I certainly respect him as a filmmaker," says Don Argott, director of the new Barnes Foundation documentary, The Art of the Steal, and Rock School. "He clearly brought documentary films to another level."

Filming The National Parks, which took more than six years, was different than his other films, Burns says, "because of the generalship required to marshal the resources to cover it."

Burns and his crew hauled their cameras from the Gates of the Arctic National Park in northern Alaska to the Dry Tortugas off the Florida Keys, from Acadia National Park in Maine to Hawaii Volcanoes.

And in many of those locations, Burns says, they had to shoot "in every time of day, in every season, from every possible vantage."

Despite the beauty of the resulting images, The National Parks is history, not a nature film or a travelogue, Burns says. "It's a history of the individuals and ideas that made this uniquely American thing happen."

The story he's telling this time "just happens to be set against the background of the most spectacular scenery on earth, and that's not bad for a filmmaker to have."

As usual, Burns has assembled his narrative from photos, from the written words of the dead, and from the spoken words of the living.

Burns' passion for the parks - and for his self-imposed assignment to explain "those strange and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans" - spills out as he speaks.

The description of the parks as "America's Best Idea" comes from the late historian and novelist Wallace Stegner. Early in the first episode, one of Burn's talking heads disputes Stegner, arguing that America's best idea is that all human beings are created equal.

Both are right, according to Burns.

In creating a national park system, Burns explains, Americans were doing something no nation had ever done: setting aside land "not for kings or noblemen or the very rich, as all land had been disposed previous to that, but for everybody and for all time."

The idea that public land belongs to all the people was "an idea as radical as the Declaration of Independence," Burns says.

But the parks are much more than an outdoor civics classroom. People connect with them on an emotional level that can be very intense, says Burns.

"When you stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and you look down and you see that the Colorado River has exposed pre-Cambrian and Vishnu Schist that is 1.7 billion years old, nearly half the age of the planet, the 80 possible years, the four score that you might be given, if you're lucky, seems utterly insignificant," he says.

"And yet in that insignificance, in humility, you are enlarged and connected to all things."

Emotion is the common denominator among the 50 or so people interviewed for the series.

"What it comes down to, always, is intense personal moments," Burns says. "Every one of the 50 people you meet in the film at some point had some transformative moment, call it religious or spiritual, rational, artistic - it doesn't really matter. Something rearranged their molecules, and we found that pretty interesting."

The challenge is to integrate those individual experiences, "people's brushes with immortality," into the arc of an already complex narrative.

As in other Burns documentaries, one person emerges from the interview pack.

In The Civil War, it was historian Shelby Foote, in Baseball, it was the Negro Leagues star Buck O'Neill, in Jazz it was Wynton Marsalis and Gary Giddins.

This time around, it appears to be park ranger Shelton Johnson.

The original intention was to have Johnson talk about the Buffalo Soldiers, the African American cavalrymen who patrolled Yosemite and Sequoia in the early days of those parks.

But as he habitually does, Burns let Johnson keep on talking, and out came eloquent recollections of his experiences as a ranger. "He felt so compelled to tell these personal experiences that we just sat there and let it go and now, he not only takes that beautiful scene on the Buffalo Soldiers and knocks a home run there, he's in every single episode - a kind of conscience of the film."

Burns has his own set of emotions about the national parks.

He recalls a weekend trip at age six with his father, from their home in Newark, Del., to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

His mother was ill with the breast cancer that would take her life a few years later. "Our household was this horrible, grim, and demoralized place," Burns recalls.

Shenandoah was like a balm. There, Ken went through his first tunnel, watched deer scatter at the sound of his father's horn, saw mist for the first time, kicked over logs and found salamanders.

Lying in bed at Yosemite, in 2003, worn out from the initial work on The National Parks, Burns remembered Shenandoah and cried.

"My dad named every tree and butterfly," he recalls. "We had an experience together, out of time."

Burns' intention is to tell a good story, but if his story has any consequences, he hopes this is the main one:

"That every superintendent at every unit of the National Park Service is angry with us because they don't know what to do with all the visitors they have."