Still photographs are the DNA of everything I do.
Even when the subject is in a contemporary or relatively
contemporary period where you've got a great deal of footage,
perhaps more footage than stills,
stills themselves remain this--
the building block, the essential element
of how I construct a narrative.
And so you'll see in the opening of the Vietnam film,
there's a great deal of footage and disconnected action.
But when we stop to say, this is what it's about,
it's in still photographs.
So what is film itself but the persistence of vision?
It is the physiological limitation of the human brain
to be able to read the fact that we're looking at 24 images
at a 48th of a second filled in with black.
And persistence of vision gives us
the sense of apparent motion.
So it is the still photograph which is the building block.
Now, I've got a personal connection, too.
It kind of fits in to who I am.
And so much of what I do is issued from who I am.
My very first memory, when I was two years old,
is my father building a darkroom.
He was an anthropologist, but an amateur still photographer.
And so it's not too much later that I end up
at Hampshire College in 1971, thinking
I'm going to be a Hollywood film director.
That's what I've wanted to be since I was 12 years old.
But all the teachers there are social documentary still
photographers that remind me, quite correctly,
that there is as much drama in what is
and what was as in anything the human imagination dreams up.
And so they sort of rearranged my molecules
and permitted me to become a filmmaker,
documentary filmmaker, still feeling this sense
that the still photograph, the presentation of an image,
was important.
So what I did is, I took that still photograph and said,
that's my master shot that I would
have as a feature filmmaker.
That has a long shot in it, a medium
shot in it, a close shot, an extreme close-up, a tilt,
a pan, a reveal, inserts of details.
We normally sort of wish we had footage all the time.
And we hold that still photograph at arm's length
until we can get the--
I don't believe in that at all.
I revel in the fact, and you can see even in something
as sort of jangly and contemporary
and disassociated as Vietnam, the still photograph
becomes an anchor and serves part of that same creation
of that same mood.
So to me, that's the DNA.
The second you put two images together,
which is, of course, editing, which is, of course, what
we do in filmmaking, and of course, a film
will have, you know, hundreds and sometimes
thousands of edits in it, you've changed something.
And you have to understand that there is
a reality to shot number one.
Shot number one is, in some ways, the easiest.
It's also the hardest, because this is your first attempt
at a good impression.
And if you blow it, you've already set things a-kilter.
But you put the second shot up there, and all of a sudden,
you're in conversation with each other.
You're in juxtaposition, whether the image is complimentary
or, in fact, a juxtaposition.
So you've got the memory of the first image.
You have the new image coming in.
It's got a different dynamic, compositional range.
By the time you've hit shot two, you're deep into it--
either deep in trouble or on your way to something else.
What is it that you'll do?
That, to me, is what we're doing in filmmaking.
And you have to actually be the master of that.
In radio, it's a wonderfully active medium.
Television's rather passive.
And even movies are, to an extent.
You let it wash over you.
At least you get up, and you go to the theater,
and you share this beautiful communion
with strangers in dark rooms.
But television is a little bit more passive.
Radio, you get to be your own cinematographer.
You get to be your own editor.
You get to be your own casting director.
You get to be everything.
And it's a wonderful thing.
And it's very active.
And so what I've tried to do in our documentary
is to trust the audience to be a little bit more engaged.
And then, what you're doing is, you're saying to your audience,
I'm unafraid of these limitations.
I am going to invest those limitations
with all the possibilities I want and activate
your imagination.
We're not interested in the Ken Burns effect as just this,
zoom in, zoom out, pan.
That, the Ken Burns effect, such as it
is, is an attempt to will a still photograph to life
in the service of complex dramatic narrative exposition.
You know, is the cannon firing?
[CANNON BLAST]
Are the troops tramping?
[SOLDIERS YELLING]
Is the bat cracking?
[BAT CRACKING]
Is the crowd cheering?
[CROWD CHEERING]
Is ice cubes--
[ICE CUBES RATTLING]
--on the glass on the bar in the jazz club tinkling?
So it becomes not just a visual, but an aural experience
in willing them to life, of waking that dead moment
and saying, it is alive.
And anybody can do that.
It's not limited to one person.
If you don't activate your audience's imagination,
you've just said, I didn't really know what to do.
Here's my slideshow-- boom, boom, boom, boom.
And we're not interested in a little slideshow.
We live in a media culture in which we
have begun to exploit the possibilities of quick cutting,
you know?
People would say to me, oh, nobody
will ever watch your films, because they're too long.
And we're in an MTV thing where we have these fast-paced music
videos.
There's a huge difference between
the physiological reception of an image.
If I do one 48th of a second and show you a house,
you'll say, oh, I can see a house.
That's fine.
But the reception of meaning is a different thing.
And so I stay with a photograph.
It's read.
And then I stay longer.
And sometimes, I go to the animation house and say,
I need a 30-second zoom.
They go, 30-seconds zoom on a picture of somebody's head?
I go, yeah.
And they-- and early on, they just
couldn't deal with the fact that you could bring meaning,
and by staying with something, bring
more meaning and more meaning.
And so these things move in lots of different ways.
There's not a kinesthetic movement
to speak of in the still photograph.
But by moving on it, you can give apparent motion.
But more importantly, you can bring movement
in terms of emotions by what you reveal.
So you can take a photograph in the Civil War.
And it may be a tilt up.
And what you're seeing are two revolvers
in the waistband of someone.
And as you tilt up, it reveals an angelic, baby-face kid.
That's telling an unbelievable story, just
in the simplest of pans up from these two
threatening revolvers up to a baby, a baby in this.
And then you could do it-- you could tilt down.
You could look at that baby, this child, that 14
or 15-year-old kid, and then tilt down
and see the revolvers.
And you now have a different form of this sinister threat
or the implied violence in that.
That's all with a still photograph.
And this would be completely familiar dynamic
to Sergei Eisenstein or Martin Scorsese.
They would understand that-- that instead of following
the rules of sort of documentary,
and political advocacy, and that sort of stuff,
I'm following the rules of a feature film.
It's just, I've got different kinds of essential building
blocks.
It's hugely important to realize that because we are using
the limited available resource, you're still not going
to be able to have the footage or the photograph of everything
you're talking about.
You're looking for equivalence in another way, too.
You can find a symbolic moment.
In the Jack Johnson film, for example,
we don't have the car crash that would
kill him at the end of his, I'm happy to say, long life.
We found a photograph of a North Carolina road
with a-- with a telephone pole.
And we know that we could have you imagine what's
going on offstage is sometimes better than actually showing
you what happened.
So those-- you always have to be aware
that you're never, at any moment,
limited, except by your own imagination,
and that you can figure out a way to do it.
And feature films do this all the time.
It is sometimes more horrific in a scary film
to hear off camera what's happening than to see
the actual thing happening.
And all we've done is just say, why
make the documentary a kind of second child,
a sort of poor cousin, to the feature film?
If it obeys the same laws of that, just use the same laws.
You can do what you need to do to tell those stories.
Now, I could have easily done the Vietnam War 99% footage.
I didn't want to.
I felt the still photographs would do something else.
To be able to linger on them, to be able to isolate a detail,
was to do what we did in Jack Johnson's death,
is to just focus on a telephone pole
and realize that the drama was taking place off camera.
And that was perfectly fine.
NARRATOR: Johnson took the wheel of his latest
high-powered automobile, racing north along Highway 1
at better than 70 miles an hour.
Hurtling around a sharp curve near the little town
of Franklinton, he lost control.
The car swerved across the white line
and slammed into a telephone pole.
Fred Scott was thrown clear and survived.
Jack Johnson died in the hospital a few hours later.
He was 68.
You've got to understand that you can liberate yourself
from the tyranny of mere illustration.
That is to say, there's something worrisome, I noticed,
among colleagues and others about approaching the idea
of doing a historical documentary, and you know,
whew, cannot wait to get till there's news reels,
and sync sound, and talking heads.
That's not the way to do it.
That's just mere illustration.
But if you can get into equivalencies,
new ways of having the word and the picture both
relate, but also talk to each other
and have a conversation, and allowing things
to be dichotomous, that you can see that there's contradiction,
that the image may be counterintuitive--
in "The Civil War," in the first episode,
you've got this beautiful dawn shot
of going up a river in Georgia.
And the sun is just beginning to peek over the horizon.
Everything is dark, dark with a beautiful light.
And what you're hearing is this beautiful quote
from Morgan Freeman, reading the words
of Frederick Douglass, who's saying something
about the beauty of America.
But it's checked by this.
And so you're still forced to understand
the beauty of the country.
But in all those dark places, bad stuff is happening.
We've taken you back into a moment on the eve of the Civil
War, where the crux of the issue of slavery
is being brought by an African-American who
has been a slave, has stolen himself to freedom,
and now is trying to describe the failed promise of America.
The image, in all of its benign beauty,
then aids what's going on.
But they're totally contradictory.
And that's an important way to use archives.
NARRATOR: "In thinking of America,
I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky,
her grand old woods, her fertile fields, her beautiful rivers,
her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains.
But my rapture is soon checked.
When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit
of slaveholding and wrong, when I remember
that with the waters of our noblest rivers,
the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean,
disregarded and forgotten, that her most fertile fields drink
daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters,
I am filled with unutterable loathing."
Frederick Douglass.
All of that has a wonderful kind
of counterintuitive effectiveness,
because you aren't merely safely illustrating.
If one and-- if you just do equals,
that's the illustration.
But if you're looking for a moment
where one and one, the beautiful river
shot, but the terrifying quote by Frederick Douglass that
ends with, "I am filled with unutterable loathing"
about the United States, then you've got something going on.
And maybe that one and one--
in this case, the picture and the word--
equal three, something else entirely.
And that's what I think you're looking for.
And that's what art is, is just something else.
That's what we look for in our faith.
There's something else.
That's what we look for in our love.
There's something else.
So it's, to me, throw away your crutches.
Throw away the simple things, the obvious illustration,
and try to achieve something that's-- that's a little bit
more difficult and dissonant.
And you might find new meaning in that.
And I would urge that all the time.