By William LaRue
Staff Writer
When he put together last year's documentary series "Baseball," filmmaker Ken Burns says, he tried not to create heroes or villains.
Instead, even the racist Ty Cobb and the flawed Babe Ruth were presented in ways not meant to "judge as much as present the variety of human existence," Burns told an audience Monday night at Syracuse University.
But when it comes to judging television, Burns is more than happy to throw a bitter inside pitch.
He cited statistics showing that 40 percent of U.S. high school seniors believe Americans fought as allies with Germany in World War II, and that most of the students surveyed could not identify the half-century in which the Civil War took place.
"In my opinion, it's film and television that's mostly to blame. I know that sounds strange coming from a filmmaker," Burns said.
"Television has equipped us as citizens to live only in an all-consuming and thereby forgetful disposable present blissfully unaware of the historical tides and movements," he said.
Burns, 42, spoke for more than an hour to about 800 people in Goldstein Auditorium at the Schine Student Center. It was his first stop on a fall lecture tour at about 10 colleges and universities.
Dressed in jeans and a sports jacket, Burns stood at a lectern reading from a prepared speech.
The man who created 1990's "The Civil War" and 1994's "Baseball" on PBS spoke softly but with an urgent pace, describing why he chose filmmaking to teach people about history and its social significance.
As the nation has gotten older, Burns said, history has evolved from its focus on the great pageant of the past to statistics "sounding like reading of the telephone book."
History should be a "magnificent tension" between science and art, he said, with facts presented in a compelling manner.
He spoke of the fondness Americans have for repeating utterances of New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, who once said, "Ninety percent of hitting is mental; the other half is physical."
"For many of us, we are brought to our history in just this fashion -- story, memory, anecdote," Burns said. "These emotional connections become a kind of glue, which makes the most complex of past events stick in our minds and, particularly, in our hearts."
The problem with television, he said, is that it almost never treats the present with any context or perspective.
Even news shows focusing on serious issues tend to shoot for entertainment over understanding, Burns said.
"Except for rare moments of great national trauma -- assassinations, elections ... or pure sport, like baseball -- television confers nothing in return but the potentially lethal light in our living rooms and in our minds," he said.
Burns has been making documentary films for more than 15 years -- work that has included directing, producing, writing and filming on "The Civil War" and "Baseball."
Both films were critical as well as popular successes, especially the Civil War documentary, which is the most-watched series in the history of public television in the United States.
In his remarks Monday, Burns criticized those in Congress who want to cut government funding to public television and other arts groups.
He noted that a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities was the seed money that led to private funding to complete "The Civil War."
"Let me say the marketplace could not have made -- and to this day could not make -- my Civil War series or the baseball series, or indeed any of the films I have worked on," he said.