Ken Burns: The Power of Stories and the Kinship of the Soul

By Shlomo Maital

     After decades of boring my students with theories and numbers, I learned at long last to teach them key ideas about innovation through stories.  This is why I am a huge fan of Ken Burns.

       Burns is a documentary filmmaker who pioneered a radical innovation — creating a documentary film by cutting rapidly from one still picture to another, with first-hand narration read by top actors, and stunning background music.  His film The Civil War uses this technique powerfully and is unforgettable.  In an age when our young people love and demand rapid-fire video images, e.g. TikTok, Burns’ stills give us time to view and reflect on what we are seeing. 

       Burns, as a young college student, could have gone to University of Michigan on reduced tuition (a family member taught there).  And Michigan is a great school.  But he declined, and instead enrolled in little Hampshire College, in Amherst, MA., because there, students are guided through ‘narrative evaluation’ rather than letter grades, and where each student creates a self-directed academic concentration instead of a traditional ‘silo’ major. 

         Would he have achieved greatness, had he studied ‘inside the box’ at Michigan? I doubt it.  I envy him.   I studied within boxes.

           In his recent Commencement address at Brandeis University, Burns said this: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s point of view.  [quoting novelist Richard Powers].  The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

            This helped me understand the power of the Old Testament.  A collection of truly great stories. (As I wrote earlier, a child’s version of Bible stories is my six-year-old grandson’s favorite book).  Stories we can each relate to and learn from.   Stories that show all sides of the Biblical characters’ selves, good and bad. 

           In his Brandeis address, Burns solved a mystery I have long puzzled over – why the Yiddish stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, about life in the Eastern European Jewish shtetl (village) fascinated even, say, Japanese,  and in the end won a Nobel Prize?    

             “…the stories spoke of the kinship of the soul,”  Singer once explained. 

             The kinship of the soul.  Great stories reflect it.  And we all are quick to recognize it, even if the setting is as alien as the Polish shtetl.