One of the marks of an artist is his or her ability to take something that we think we know inside and out and then show it to us in such a way that we see it in a totally different light. The great artists also often evoke a deep emotional response in us as part of that process.
Ken Burns, public television's documentary filmmaker laureate, does that with Baltimore Orioles legend Cal Ripken in his new production, "The Tenth Inning," set to premiere Sept. 28 and 29 on PBS.
Burns and his co-director, Lynn Novick, showed clips from the new film and fielded questions from staffers at The Baltimore Sun last week. Burns played to the hometown crowd, and one of the clips he showed from the new film featured Ripken, who has a starring role in the four-hour sequel to Burns' 1994 documentary "Baseball."
Confession time: As much as I love baseball, by the time Ripken tied and then broke Lou Gehrig's streak of 2,130 consecutive games, I was so sick of the media commotion, I just wanted it to end. I was sick of all the "Holy Cal, patron saint of the lunch-bucket and blue-collar brigade" stuff as well.
I watched, of course, because that is what a media critic and baseball fan does. But I didn't feel much, even as Ripken took his victory lap around Camden Yards.
But on a rainy afternoon at The Sun, with only a little over two minutes of their film, Burns and Novick made me appreciate Cal as I never had — and they managed to even get me a little choked up as Ripken jogged through all the confetti and flashing camera lights one more time.
I'll save the full review for September, but the Ripken segment is a perfect snapshot of several of the elements that make Burns our greatest living documentary filmmaker. (And I say that with all due respect to Frederick Wiseman after screening his superb 38th production, "La Danse," a three-hour backstage look at the Paris Opera Ballet, airing at 9 p.m. Wednesday on PBS.)
Take Burns' remarkable ability to marry word and image — particularly when he's doing the brickwork of biography to set up a big narrative moment in a film.
" Cal Ripken Jr. never wanted to do anything but play in the major leagues," narrator Keith David says as "The Tenth Inning" starts to define Ripken. "The son of a Baltimore Orioles coach, he often wore his Little League uniform to bed so he could be ready for the next day's game."
As those words are spoken, the screen fills with a snapshot of Ripken as a young boy at the beach with three other children — all of whom are at play in the sand and dressed for it.
Little Cal Ripken, meanwhile, is wearing an Orioles uniform and squinting into the camera — looking as serious and out of place on the beach as a kid as Richard Nixon looked as an adult in the famous picture that showed the brooding president walking alongside the Pacific Ocean in his wingtip shoes.
The faded beach photo is the perfect Kodak image to show the singleness of purpose that drove Ripken into the record books. Burns and his crew found the Ripken family image and expertly framed it in the film so that I could instantly comprehend the seeds of character that took Ripken, the boy, and forged him into the man who would save the game of baseball after its disastrous strike season. No one does biography like Burns, and it took this outsider to make me appreciate a Baltimore baseball hero in new ways.
"Cal Ripken is in many ways a savior of baseball because of his remarkable behavior in those dire months after the devastating strike of 1994," Burns says. "He seemed to want to win back the faith of the disappointed fan base one fan at a time, patiently signing autographs when other stars seemed above that. But he also helped with his play and his bat, not just breaking baseball's ancient 'iron man' record, but with a passionate, gritty form of play that wooed disappointed fans as much as anything."
Though the New England-based filmmaker is a longtime Red Sox fan, Burns says his deepest baseball roots are in Baltimore.
"This is where I saw my first baseball game in 1959," Burns says, explaining that his paternal grandparents' home in Mount Washington was the family's gathering place for summers and holidays. "It was at Memorial Stadium. I was wearing my Pony League uniform and my mitt, sitting in dead center field and thinking home plate was a mile and a half away — and had nothing to do with what I was doing there. I had no idea who was playing or what was happening, other than that I was thrilled to be at a major league baseball game."
And he sees the city as a part of the larger sociological story that he and Novick told in the nine-part "Baseball" documentary that debuted in September 1994, when the strike had shut down the game.
Ticking off such themes as immigration and assimilation, labor and management, popular culture and advertising, Burns says he and Novick wanted to take "Baseball" beyond the box scores and wins and losses. "Baseball" was also about the "birth, decay and rebirth of great cities," he says.
"And there is no better example of that than Baltimore and the way Camden Yards so helped to bring some vitality back to the inner city, to downtown," according to the 56-year-old filmmaker.
In the Ripken segment of "The Tenth Inning," there is another stunning Baltimore image — this one looking down on Camden Yards on the night of Ripken's 2,131st consecutive game. It feels as if you are gazing in from another planet or some sort of Olympian height as a hero achieves a moment of transcendence. And all the warriors pause in their battle to stand back and look on in awe at what one of their kind has accomplished against all odds and the capriciousness of the gods.
No one frames still photographs like Ken Burns. And thanks to Ripken's accomplishment, Burns turns his lens on Baltimore in "The Tenth Inning." Make an apppointment to be there in front of your TV this fall. Given the sorry state of the current Orioles, it is as close to baseball glory as Baltimore fans are likely to bask in for a long, long time.