Our own Ken Burns moments

I am a big Ken Burns fan. Ken Burns makes PBS-aired documentaries on big subjects - baseball, jazz, the civil war, WWII. And starting Sunday September 27, 2009 - there will be "National Parks". While Ken Burns' lens may focus on the larger themes in this country's experience, he leisurely and lovingly builds up his stories from small, personal experiences. Experiences such as those our parents and grandparents might have had.

Interviewed about his new documentary: "The National Parks - America's Best Idea", Ken Burns explained why biography is so important to history:

It has become the fashion that biography is dismissed as hagiography or hero worship and we turn to other forces for explanations – economic, political, social forces that affect events, and they certainly do. But it is so interesting to see, particularly in our history, that individuals do matter, that people can come across something and be a catalyst for change.

Ken Burns is still that curious, quiet kid who discovers an old shoe box of black and white photographs in his grandparents' attic and who holds them, and stares at them, until he has almost willed himself inside the picture. And look! Over there in a box is a bundle of old letters tied with string. Hard to make out the writing ... but what do they say? Wait, are those 8 mm film rolls? I wonder if there's a projector around here...

And so his documentaries unfold using personal history and the artifacts of passed lives to recreate an earlier time and experience. They show that the places and events that our grandparents knew as personal were actually part of a broad current and shared experience.

In the video biographies we make, visits to National Parks often feature as important, formative experiences. In a project we delivered just today, Roger Peck first visited Yellowstone National Park as a child in 1934 (that's him with the bear). In 1949 he returned with his wife-to-be (properly chaperoned of course) and posed in front of that deer antler house (see below). In 1961, he went back again with his own two children. Roger learned to became a naturalist from his parents by visiting wild areas like Yellowstone. And he taught his own children about the wild at that same park years later. And now, at the age of 82, he has preserved his past - including his images and his memories of national parks - in a video biography


Ken Burns inspires us all to preserve our own family history. As accomplished and as polished as his films are, he pulls them together from the simplest of ingredients: photographs, letters, memoirs, interviews, contemporary video of places - all things available to us all. He shows us the ease and simplicity of preserving family history by blending these elements together into a compelling and important story. And he makes us realize that our own unique experiences - aggregated together - constitute the broad flow of history and culture in this great land.

"National Parks" has more contemporary footage than most of his recent documentaries. If the preview material is any guide, it will be a feast for the eye and the emotions. Watch video clips from the documentary. And it should be a prompt for us to go looking through those attics!

You can all kinds of surprises in old cupboards: Family History in Grandma's Wardrobe.