Although its focus is, for the first time, on an animal and not a person, Ken Burns doesn’t see his new four-hour series “The American Buffalo” as a “departure.”
Like the many acclaimed biographies he’s made over the past 30-plus years, “American Buffalo,” he said in a phone interview, “By focusing on an animal gave us an opportunity to really touch on all quarters of American history in the 19th century and engage in a new and, we think, different way.
“You have Native American people who, as it is pointed out in the film, have a 600-year generational relationship with the buffalo. And the people who took over their land had decimated the buffalo almost to the brink of extinction.
“That is a huge tragedy but also suggests down the line reasons for hope and inspiration. I mean, it’s no accident that the buffalo was recently named as the national mammal. It has captured people’s imagination from the first time they’ve seen one. I think it was a way to tell a complex story.”
Here is also a parallel biography of another magnificent animal that defined the West: The horse.
“I think that this is a pretty unknown thing,” Burns, 70, said. “At least I’ve found since we finished the film and I’ve been sharing clips of it with audiences around the country, that people are super surprised to learn that there had been an earlier primitive version of the horse that had gone extinct.
“And that it was — how should we put it? – the ‘accidental’ release of horses from Spanish conquerors in a battle they had with the Pueblo Indians in Santa Fe in the late 1600s that they lost. As a result, lots of horses were released and within a few generations had converted many of the nomadic but also agricultural tribes to become, as we say in the film, among the greatest equestrians in the world. It changed the dynamics with subsistence.
“That is to say, if you only have dogs pulling you over these long, vast distances in the Great Plains, your focus for your tribe or your group is to just feed yourself. Everybody’s energies are devoted for that almost full time.
“But when you’ve got a horse, a couple of men can go and get enough food for a month almost instantly. That changes the dynamics. It actually converts some agricultural tribes to becoming stationary villages or towns. It’s a pretty amazing story.”
Burns breaks another boundary with his next project: “We’re finishing a film on our first non-American topic, Leonardo da Vinci, which will be next November. And then in 2025 a big mammoth series on the American Revolution — six episodes and 12-plus hours which is the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord. The beginning of the Revolution.”
“The American Buffalo” airs on PBS Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m. and simultaneously is available to stream on the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel and PBS Passport.
