Ken Burns, documentarian and guest speaker for the 2015 Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College Convocation, spoke to a full house at the Gertrude Ford Center on Tuesday night at 7 p.m.
Dean of the Honors College Douglass Sullivan-Gonzalez gave a brief introduction before Bruce Levingston, Honors College artist-in-residence, introduced his long-time friend Burns as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time and presented a series of clips from Burns’s various documentaries. Burns, most known for his documentary ‘The Civil War,’ explained his career by saying, “I’m in the business of waking the dead.” The well-known filmmaker has won 13 Emmy awards, two Grammy awards and has been nominated for two Oscar awards. In 2008, the Emmys honored Burns with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
(University of Mississippi artist-in-residence Bruce Levingston hosts award-winning filmmaker, Ken Burns, at the 2015 fall Honors Convocation Tuesday night at the Gertrude C. Ford Center | Marlee Crawford)
Levingston led Burns in an open-ended discussion, asking him about his personal life, documentaries, purpose behind his films and various other topics, such as the removal of the Mississippi state flag from campus, a subject about which Burns feels passionately. Burns praised and encouraged the Ole Miss community on the progress it has made, advising students and faculty on what more could be done regarding civil rights on campus.
“It’s only possible because you guys have made the movement,” Burns said. “You figured out how to have space in your hearts to take out a symbol that is hateful to so many people, and to explain to those people who are claiming to false notions of it that it may not be the thing that they think it is, and that there are many other things that they can hang on to, if they care, truly care, about preserving their history.”
Burns said he doesn’t choose his documentary topics— they choose him. “I’m being facetious, but in a way, I’m interested in how my country ticks,” Burns said. “It’s like a mechanic who lifts up the hood and tinkers in and see what works and what is not working. I look for subjects, or they look for me, that are sort of American history running on all cylinders, where many of these themes are interactive and coexisting.”
His award-winning scores have also played a big part in the way Burns tells his stories. Burns said at one point during the production of ‘The Civil War,’ they were inspired by the score, and began editing to the music. “There’s something authentic, organic about that,” Burns said. Burns received a Grammy in Best Traditional Folk Album for ‘The Civil War’.
Burns said he has not yet found a topic to document in Oxford. He said his films are universal and applied through time. Burns is currently working on five projects that are scheduled to be completed at various times up to 2019. These topics include documentaries about the Holocaust, Vietnam, Jackie Robinson and Ernest Hemingway.
Courtney Simmons, a junior Public Policy major, said, “I thought it was outstanding to have someone here with such an artistic mind, and I really enjoyed the ideas he shared about interrogating the media, not taking things at face value, and really looking in to things yourself. I think that’s something we can all learn form, given our current influx or media from all directions.”
