Muhammad Ali stands over fallen Sonny Liston, shouting and gesturing shortly after dropping Liston with a short hard right to the jaw in Lewiston, Maine. May 25, 1965. From "Muhammad Ali," a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon airing on PBS in September 2021.
Muhammad Ali stands over fallen Sonny Liston, shouting and gesturing shortly after dropping Liston with a short hard right to the jaw in Lewiston,
Just six months ago when I talked to filmmaker Ken Burns about “Hemingway,” he mentioned his forthcoming documentary about Muhammad Ali. Later that day, I talked to Burns’ longtime collaborator Lynn Novick and asked about the Ali project, only to find she wasn’t working on that one. Forty years after his film about the Brooklyn Bridge and 30 after the career-making “The Civil War,” Burns continues to create probing and far-reaching documentaries about American culture with an array of collaborators, including but not limited to Novick. He’s touched on the things that bring us together and tear us apart, conflict and art, and he’s done so in a way that is almost always enlightening.
Ever since “The Civil War” became a hit, Burns has received plenty of micro-criticisms about what is and is not included in his films. But he continues to produce works that offer both concision and enlightenment to those who want to learn about a formidable subject. One issue in the criticism of Burns’ films is the implication that nobody else can address a subject he’s filmed, which is silly.
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Such is clear with “Muhammad Ali,” his new eight-hour film that begins airing Sunday night on PBS, about the famed boxer and activist. Created with co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon, both family members, Burns adds his take to a pre-existing body of great Ali films that have existed for decades. Burns’ “Muhammad Ali” serves more as a heavily researched overview, which the other micro-documentaries – several of which are required viewing for those interested in Ali – don’t.
“Muhammad Ali” captures a Kentucky native dealing with issues of race, faith, injustice, poverty, war and, most poignantly, the passage of time and its effects on one’s mind and body. “Muhammad Ali” tells the story straight: tracing its subject from a reviled upstart to a beloved activist. His flaws are presented as clearly as his strengths.
Q: You offer a montage of photographs between the first Ali-Joe Frazier fight and the Ken Norton fight. And I was struck by how effective still photography was in the film, even for events where video was readily available. Obviously, you didn’t have video for “The Civil War,” but here you did, and there were still these passages that resonated without moving pictures.
A: Yeah, I think for me the DNA is still located in a photograph. I just finished a film for next spring about Ben Franklin. And there’s not a single photograph. There’s no footage. So we use paintings and maps to tell the story, and I think we did a good job with it. This film, we had an abundance of one of the most photographed and filmed persons ever. You go back early with Ali, and you have photos. But also you look at my earlier films about World War II or Vietnam, there’s a lot of video. But there are also a lot of photographs. They might be a flurry of images in a montage to move things forward. But the greatest cataclysm on Earth at the time, World War II, we’re still showing photographs. There’s a physiology in film, where the motion doesn’t allow us to see the individual frames. It’s continuous movement.
Q: Going in, I thought movement was crucial, and it was. But the sound of it, too, is intriguing. The sounds of punches landing is more startling than I remember them watching boxing as a kid. The brutality of the sport comes through.
A: Yes, Sarah and David, my co-directors, and I aren’t necessarily interested in boxing. We’re interested in the human dimension of it. The ways people like Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali intersected with bigger and more important themes of their times. In doing that, you gain an understanding of the sport. I call that the sweet science. You see the brutality of boxing. But you don’t want to cop out – you want to look at it. See its brutality. And I think we have to understand this is an era where so much came to bear. For Jack Johnson, it was the height of this white man’s burden and noblesse oblige. Here things are different. There are intersections between race and sports, faith and politics, all of these things and war. And we have a spiritual journey with this one person, who also had a personal life with family dynamics that were complicated. We wanted this to be a fluid but dynamic portrait of one of the most interesting Americans who ever lived. If you have one of those dinner tables with six or eight people, you want Ali there. Louis Armstrong. Ida B. Wells …
Q: This feels closer to your Hemingway film than the larger umbrella films about wars or jazz or country music. That said, there remains this applicable frame about America then and America that led to then and America now.
A: Yes, there are these dominant themes in this hero’s journey. There’s deep faith, which maybe transcends everything. But also these classic American themes: the freedom he wanted and was initially denied. The courage and bravery. Here’s this kid, he was 20, and white America took statements of his and turned them into something political rather than something spiritual, which is how he gets sentenced to jail.
Q: Years ago I was talking to the musician Waylon Jennings. He was near the end of his life. And he mentioned the one American he admired more than any other was Ali. And I nodded, jotted that down and moved on. But the film is a good reminder that America wasn’t always in his corner. This was a slow process of embracing a figure people rooted against.
A: I hope you mention that because over time people change their minds. And a lot of people came around to Ali, but they pushed back before that. There was divisiveness then as there is now. But our lives are his life writ small. You can see the ways he’d influence and inspire people to take risks all across the world. And he’s representing Black America, for sure. But for a lot of people – I can’t speak about Waylon Jennings specifically – there was a change. And I spent 18 hours trying to say the wellsprings of country music were full of Black music, but it makes sense to me that somebody like Waylon Jennings grew to love Ali. Something about his struggle connected. For some people, that struggle was immediate. Others recognized it later.
Q: There’s a lot of Ali available to viewers on film. But so much is so specific. Here you offer a broader contextual view, and it doesn’t nullify the value of these other films – about his faith, aging and so on. The film about the George Foreman fight in Zaire is perfect, but it’s also different.
A: Correct, that was a glorious fight. And that film captured not just the psychology of the right, but things we thought we knew about Ali. There’s artistry about how he figured these things out. In this case, it’s “get off the ropes, get off the ropes.” And he’s thinking, “Shut the eff up.” People were worried about him coming out alive. But that story takes a 360-degree turn.
Q: I’m intrigued because we talked a year or so ago about Ernest Hemingway. And we have parallel stories: pugnacious and flawed men who worked probably longer than they should have. And neither offers a 21st-century model for how to be a husband.
A: They are different, and there are similarities. One guy died imprisoned by Parkinson’s disease but ended up with this lovely exit where he was appreciated by people. The other, well, it didn’t go that way. There are differences. Hemingway was a serial monogamist, but that didn’t mean he stayed with one person. A third person to consider is Franklin, who was one of the great prose stylists of the 18th century. And a successful businessman, an inventor and self-promoter. One of the great scientists of that age. A brilliant diplomat. There’d be no United States without his diplomacy. And he migrates from somebody with slaves in his house to an abolitionist. He saw these conflicts and tried to change.
You see that with Ali, too, “How do I fit my religion to myself?” He’d been unfaithful to his wives. He’d abandoned Malcolm X and said these horrible things about Joe Frazier. But after he stopped boxing, he tried to perfect himself. He did what Franklin did, to try to be this better person. So you see this evolutionary thing. And I think that’s as real as it gets, these internal conversations where you articulate things that are bigger than your concerns or mine.
andrew.dansby@chron.com