Feats Of Progress

By Richard Zoglin

"Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live," said Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker religious sect, "and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow." It is no accident that Ken Burns picked the Shakers, who believed that God dwelt in the craftsmanship of their everyday work, as the subject for one of his films. Each of his works seems the labor of a lifetime: a painstaking assemblage of archival photographs, period documents, interviews and music, welded together by narration that can soar to near religious inspiration.

Burns is best known for his hugely successful mini-series The Civil War. But this season viewers are getting a chance to see the full breadth of his talent. His first new work since The Civil War debuted in September 1990, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, will be telecast on PBS this Wednesday. On the same night the public network will rerun his Oscar-nominated 1981 film, Brooklyn Bridge. Two more of Burns' films will be shown in July, and his entire oeuvre has been released on videocassette by Direct Cinema.

There's more to come. Burns is working on a mini-series on the history of baseball, scheduled to air in 1994. He is overseeing (though not personally producing) another major historical series, on the American West. He is also planning a series of 60- and 90-minute biographies of American historical figures, such as Thomas Jefferson and Lewis and Clark.

Burns has firmly established himself as the master film chronicler of America's past. "We've forgotten," he says, "that history used to have a popular dimension, that it is in fact made up mostly of the word story. Professional historians have found it convenient to speak only to themselves and have rendered history rather dry or obtuse. And, of course, history is anything but that."

Burns is a celebrator of America, but his work goes deeper than mere patriotism. What fascinates him most is the creative act, those feats of inspiration and perseverance that move civilization forward. In Brooklyn Bridge and The Statue of Liberty, Burns chronicled the building of great structures that came to symbolize far more than stone and steel. What stands out most in The Civil War is the men -- Lee, Sherman, Lincoln -- who shaped events by the force of their vision and eloquence. In Huey Long, his marvelous portrait of the Louisiana demagogue, Burns seems attracted as much as repelled by his subject: the amassing of power can be a creative act too.

Empire of the Air presents Burns with a tougher subject. The development of radio was a diffuse process that spanned many years and lacks the obvious emotional resonance of Burns' other subjects. Visually, the documentary has neither the grandeur of The Civil War nor the serene grace of The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God. Burns' chief stylistic device here is a periodic fade to black, an attempt to simulate the sightless charms of radio.

Yet Burns makes his subject come alive by focusing on three crucial people. First is Lee DeForest, who patented the key invention that spawned the radio age -- the three-element vacuum tube -- but emerges as something of a self- promoter and con man. Edwin Howard Armstrong, who made important refinements in De Forest's invention and battled him endlessly in the patent courts, is the film's tragic hero: a bullheaded visionary defeated by people smarter and more ruthless than he. David Sarnoff, the founder of NBC, is one of those ruthless people ("I don't get ulcers; I give them," he once said), but he was the indispensable man who brought radio to the mass audience. Together, their lives illustrate a seldom-told story: how creativity and commerce intersect to form progress.

Burns, 38, has been making documentaries since shortly after graduating from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. The Civil War made him virtually a national hero: he has been invited three times to the White House, received honorary degrees from eight colleges and turned down several offers from Hollywood and the networks. "I was flattered," he says, "but I told them I preferred to stay with public television, where I enjoy creative control and a sense of a willing home, not a fashionable home."

Burns' own home is in Walpole, N.H., where he lives with his wife Amy (a sometime collaborator) and two daughters. He is a hands-on producer, sifting through libraries and archives himself in search of material (joined by one or two co-producers on each film) and participating in every interview. The crafting of a Burns film proceeds on two parallel tracks. On the one hand, film is shot and archival material collected without regard for what they might illustrate. At the same time, a script is prepared without regard for whether there are pictures to illustrate it. The editing process that follows, says Burns, is "an incredibly difficult horse-trading maneuver, in which you realize that a whole group of images won't be used because there's nothing ((in the script)), and a whole lot of words have to go because there's nothing to illustrate them."

Burns eventually wants to try his hand at a fictional movie, probably on a historical subject. "I started off my career wanting to be the next John Ford," he says. "I was particularly drawn to the way his films seemed not just to retell but essentially to be American stories." With all his commitments, however, he estimates it will be 10 years before he gets the chance. But as Burns -- as well as his audience -- has learned, patience has its rewards.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York