Panning and Zooming: The Ken Burns Effect

I'm proud to support a great local arts organization that operates two of the finest independent cinemas in the northeast US, the Amherst Cinema and the Pleasant Street Theater.  Like similar non-profit arts organizations, we must fund-raise through membership and other means in order to present the fantastic program that movie-goers have come to expect and love.  A high point: the yearly Gala - third annual to take place this Saturday evening.

Hampshire College - 1977

During last year's event while guests were seated for dinner, I visited the Men's Room in the Crown Center gymnasium at Hampshire College and, on exiting, began to study a large framed b/w photograph of the Hampshire College community of 1977 all gathered on the grass at the main quad. [For reasons of necessity, HC grads do not identify themselves, I learned from Bert and Liz, by their class (graduation) year, but rather by their entry year: "Entered 1971"].

"There's my [first] wife Amy!" came an excited voice from over my shoulder - and it was the Gala guest of honor, documentary filmmaker (and HC grad '75) Ken Burns.

In The Beginning...

I heartily shook his hand, introduced myself, and ticked off our connections: while at National Geographic TV in mid-'80s my friend and colleague Eileen Opatut had smartly picked up cable rights to a first-ever off-PBS run of Ken's first film, "Brooklyn Bridge;" later my boss at Discovery Channel had traveled to Vermont to attempt - without success - to woo Ken away from PBS and his sweetheart, "long-form" sponsorship deal with GM; and finally that Ken's mentor Jerome Liebling - who built the Hampshire visual arts program and whom Ken has publicly acknowledged many times for instilling the love of storytelling through photography and film - had been living in my home during part of Ken's time at HC (as my dad had a teaching exchange that year in the UK).

Filmmaker Ken Burns

Ken is uncommonly dynamic, bright and intense: highly animated and engaged, really willing to share all manner of insights.  We chatted and hooted together about the difference between making documentary films for TV and for the theater, and about the difference between true documentaries and more "polemic" exercises of late in political film-making.

As we stood before the "Class picture," I couldn't help watching to track Ken's eyes as they scanned and panned, focused and zoomed, while he picked out one old friend after another, and some favorite faculty as well.  There it was: the "Ken Burns Effect!"

Jerry Liebling was in attendance at the event and his photograph of the fence and walk at the Emily Dickinson Homestead in Amherst fetched the highest bid of the evening at the benefit auction.

Dickinson Fence  - Amherst, MA (1980)  Jerome Liebling

 Before he and I parted ways to re-enter the dinner, I also thanked Ken Burns for his "effect," now bundled with Apple iMovie, and its impact at thousands of events - but especially at my parents' 50th Anniversary party.

Later, Ken captivated the dinner crowd in his talk, underlining his passion for the ever-changing American society (Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, Jefferson, Twain, etc.), and describing how Hampshire College had nurtured a life-long drive for creativity and expression.

Burns brought tears to many pairs of eyes when he described, with great magic and rhapsody, a particular transcendental, Emersonian "transparent eyeball" moment* during his time as an undergrad in this, the USA's #1 college town.  Ken had taken the bus uptown to the old/original Amherst Cinema, watched a film - he couldn't recall which one! - and exited the theater... (I paraphrase):

"...now knowing exactly what my purpose would be in life, knowing for the first time who I was becoming! Knowing exactly what I would do, which was to tell stories, to use this beautiful medium to communicate, to feel, and to reach to the heart of things!  It was late at night, and it was snowing softly, and there was no traffic in the center of town, and I ran down the middle of Main Street hollering at the top of my lungs, with my arms outstretched over my head! Hallelujah!"

 * Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball - I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me - I am part or particle of God.... I am a lover of un-contained and immortal beauty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

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Coming in episode II:
My two dates with Kathleen Turner, and a thirty-years-late "Thank You"...