Fighting the good fight

WALPOLE, N.H. - Notice something different about your current Bank of America statement? "Bank of America is a proud sponsor of THE WAR, a Ken Burns film," it says, in even bigger print than your balances.

Or reach for an orange. It might be one of the 25 million that bear a message urging citrus lovers to watch "The War," Burns's seven-part, 16-hour documentary about World War II, which begins airing on PBS next Sunday. WGBH will broadcast it locally.

"If you make a good film and nobody knows it's on, was it good?" Burns asks, sitting in his office in a converted barn behind his house in this small New Hampshire town. "The answer is no."

Ever since an estimated 40 million people watched "The Civil War" on PBS in 1990, each successive mega-documentary from Burns has been a very big deal: the 18 hours of "Baseball" in 1994, then the 19 hours of "Jazz" in 2001. There have also been eight (relatively) smaller documentaries, on subjects from the American past including the rise of radio, Lewis and Clark, and heavyweight champion Jack Johnson.

"The War" has gotten a buildup bigger than all of them put together. PBS and the series's corporate sponsors - General Motors and Anheuser-Busch, as well as Bank of America - have spent an estimated $10 million publicizing the documentary.

"We've mounted the biggest promotion campaign in our history for 'The War,' " says John Boland, PBS's chief content officer, in a telephone interview. "We really think this is a pivotal moment with Ken Burns's series."

If "The War" is a pivotal moment for PBS, it may also be a pivotal moment for Burns, 54. The world of broadcasting has changed enormously over the last 17 years. So has the world of documentaries. Michael Moore's "Roger & Me" seemed like a fluke back then rather than the start of a major career. Former vice presidents weren't winning Oscars. YouTube and webcams hadn't been invented.

"Documentary has never been stronger," Burns says. "It's a golden, golden age." He cites Moore, Errol Morris, Frederick Wiseman, Andrew Jarecki's "Capturing the Friedmans" as examples - "and all the other different things in between."

Yet Burns has remained seemingly constant amid the documentary explosion. There's his chaste visual style, with its best-known feature, the stately, loving scrutinizing of still photographs. There's the special tone and flavor of his films, at once celebratory and skeptical (so much of the skepticism having to do with race, no less abiding a theme for Burns than it was for Faulkner). Above all, there is his mining of the American past in pursuit of what Burns calls "emotional archaeology."

"It's not excavating the past for its dry dates and facts and events," Burns says, "but for some higher emotional thing that might be helpful. I feel all of the stuff, going back to [his first film] 'Brooklyn Bridge' [in 1981], has been an attempt to give that sense of who we are. I feel with 'The War' it's the most significant."

In the new series, Burns has organized the excavating geographically. "The War" focuses on four communities - Luverne, Minn.; Mobile, Ala.; Waterbury, Conn.; and Sacramento - showing the impact World War II had on each place and both civilian and military residents.

Burns also made a conscious decision to tell "The War" from the inside and the bottom up. "If you weren't in this war or waiting anxiously for someone to come back, then you're not in this film," Burns says. The emphasis is wholly on participants rather than experts (there's no Shelby Foote equivalent in "The War"), and those participants are GIs and everyday people rather than the brass and civic leaders. "Roosevelt and Churchill cross the stage, but it's only cameo appearances," Burns says. "You're there - no longer distracted as the History Channel would have you be by celebrity generals, strategy and tactics, weapons and armaments, and all things Nazi."

"The War" has already occasioned controversy. Hispanic groups complained last spring about Latino veterans being ignored. Burns agreed to incorporate accounts from them. Member stations, wary of Federal Communications Commission policy on indecent speech, were concerned about a few instances of obscenity. PBS has announced it will distribute two versions of "The War," one of which has four objectionable words edited out.

Such controversy is unusual for Burns. He long ago became a cultural brand name: the two syllables "KenBurns" invariably spoken in tandem, like such other pure products of America as "JohnWayne" and "BigMac." Revered by some and mocked by others, Burns is even a marketing tool. The "Ken Burns Effect" is Apple's name for the feature included on its iMovie and iPhoto programs that allows users to pan across and zoom in on photographs.

Burns, who neither endorses the software nor receives royalties, admits to being amused that his style should garner such recognition. "I feel honored that people feel they can say they know what a Ken Burns film is," he says, "even if it comes as spoof or satire. God knows, if you've watched 'Saturday Night Live' or 'The Tonight Show' or 'The Simpsons,' I've been lampooned."

Burns is too canny not to appreciate the value of being made fun of. It's easier to listen to - and not be intimidated by - someone you can laugh at. And holding an audience is very important to him. In person, Burns combines the roles of storyteller, preacher, and, yes, salesman. It's not that his manner is contrived or flamboyant, not at all, but that he uses everything he's got - and it's a lot - to get his message across.

"He's a most impressive man," says Samuel Hynes in a telephone interview. Hynes, an emeritus professor of English at Princeton, was a Marine combat pilot during World War II. He served as a consultant on "The War" and appears on camera in several episodes. "I've been in Ken Burns's war longer than I was in my own," he laughs. Hynes calls Burns "a complete master of everything: smarter and quicker than anyone else in the room."

That quickness extends to his speech. Burns speaks rapidly, in a reedy, slightly gulpy voice that's at once conversational and urgent. His eloquence, which is considerable, is effectively three-dimensional. As he speaks, his eyes light up. His arms extend in graceful gestures. His head bounces on his long neck.

Burns isn't short, but a wiry frame belies his height. He seems that much more wiry because of his energy and intellectual passion. There are circles under his eyes and flecks of gray in his beard. Otherwise, he seems almost alarmingly boyish and a bit androgynous. Those qualities give him an innocent, nearly otherworldly aspect: the Eagle Scout as shaman, the kid next door as Patti Smith.

Don't laugh at the Smith comparison. The documentarian and the rock star share a similar missionary fervor as well as a narrow build. Burns conveys a sense of lightly leashed intensity. It's the intensity that enables him to keep undertaking these vast filmmaking campaigns, island-hopping his way through the American past. Just as important, it propels him as he drums up sponsorship money and returns for round after round of promotional appearances.

"I've never seen him not promoting a movie," chuckles the film historian David Thomson during a telephone interview. "And I've known Ken quite a long time."

"We're supposed to complain about [promotion], and it is tough," Burns says. "But I like it, and I like running a business, and I like working with other people, and I like writing speeches. . . . Maybe that requires a little bit of P.T. Barnum. I plead guilty to that evangelical requirement, that I don't just be a good filmmaker but I have to go out and sell it and get people to watch."

Burns is not unlike a presidential candidate in both the demands he subjects himself to and the ambitions he entertains. The bust of Lincoln that sits high up in his office looks less like memento or prop than fraternal artifact. The difference is that the election cycle he faces is constant, and there's no two-term limit.

Burns recently extended his agreement with PBS through 2022. The list of films he envisions making would seem delusional from anyone else. A six-part series on the national parks that's scheduled to run in 2009 is in the final stages of editing. Burns plans to update "Baseball" with a "10th inning." Other projected subjects include Prohibition, Franklin Roosevelt, the buffalo, the Central Park jogger case, Reconstruction, the Vietnam War ("for 10 years from now," he says, with an approach similar to that of "The War"), and the subject Burns says he was "hard-wired" to make a film about, Martin Luther King Jr.

The defining event of Burns's career remains "The Civil War." It was a civic broadcasting event, something that reached beyond the screen and resonated in the larger culture. How many others have there been? The Senate Watergate hearings, "Roots," not many. That's a daunting act to follow, let alone try to top.

"Quite frankly, I'm looking for that moment again," Burns says. "It doesn't have to happen to me. I want it happening with my country. . . . In 1990, there were, what, 40 channels on, and we were still at the tail end of that time when everybody knew what was going on. Johnny Carson talked about 'The Civil War' every night in his monologue, and the ratings went up night by night. And that felt good, not just as a filmmaker and the beneficiary of books and tapes sold. It felt good, as being part of this population."

Burns may see himself as a citizen first, but artist comes in a close second - not historian or scholar. "I'm a filmmaker; I'm not a historian," he says.

"I've chosen to work in history, if that's what it is, the way someone might choose to work in oils as opposed to watercolors, or did still life instead of landscape. The last time I took a course in American history was in 11th grade; that's when they hold a gun to your head and make you take it. I had no idea there would be this harmonic convergence. History is like my Mont Sainte-Victoire. It's the thing that I keep returning to."

Cezanne had his mountain, but in describing his goal as a filmmaker it's something else Burns seeks to climb. "We treat each scene as if we're Eisenstein at the Odessa Steps. You know, somebody said, 'What do you want to do in this film?' I said, 'Make the best film ever!' What other answer is there? Of course you don't, but that's what you want to do."

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.