SAN JOSE — We see a small man sitting in a large, overstuffed chair, and the chair seems to be winning. Often described as elfin, the man is 60 now but still possesses the most totally awesome set of bangs in show business. For an hour, he sits and talks, hardly moving. And yet our perspective of him constantly changes — panning left, panning right, zooming in and out — in a way that is vaguely annoying. We hear an actor’s voice, one we sort of recognize and sort of don’t — maybe F. Murray Abraham, somebody like that.

“My mother died of cancer when I was 11. There wasn’t a moment when I was growing up that I didn’t know she was dying. But it wasn’t until later, when I went to the movies with my father, that I saw him cry for the first time. Movies had an emotional power that allowed him to do that. I decided then and there that I would become a filmmaker. What I wanted was to be Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford or Howard Hawks.”

Who he became, instead, was Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker acclaimed for such PBS blockbusters as “The Civil War,” “Baseball” and “Jazz.” In town to receive the Steinbeck Award at San Jose State University Friday evening, Burns conducted a master class for students and alums of the school’s Television, Radio, Film and Theater Department — or what department chairman David Kahn described as an “intimate conversation” — on a campus stage at the Hal Todd Studio Theater.

The audience consisted of about 50 people, many of them film students, although not all of them were as familiar with Burns’ 12 Emmys, two Oscar nominations and Peabody Award as you might imagine. “I actually had never heard of him before,” said Chloe Uyehara, a senior film major, “so I had to do some research. But all my professors were talking his work and his Oscars, and I figured I would just come in and be open-minded. I’ll have to check out some of his work now, for sure.”

Burns was quick to point out that, despite the three decades (with pledge breaks) he has spent telling the American story, he never took a U.S. history class in college, and only did so in high school “with a gun to my head.” He took Russian history at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. “I’m not a historian,” Burns said. “I’m a filmmaker.”

But in acknowledging Burns’ role as a Jon Stewart-style popularizer of history’s complex tableau — reducing World War II, for instance, to seven bite-sized episodes — historian Stephen Ambrose said, “More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source.”

Burns prefers to call it “emotional archeology.” His unwillingness to venture beyond America’s borders for stories, he said, stems from being “hopelessly provincial.”

Despite the vast American panorama that has been Burns’ canvas — the Brooklyn Bridge, Thomas Jefferson, the national parks, Mark Twain — the thread that unites them is also the one that nearly unraveled the country: “Race has been the subtext of all my films,” he said, before conceding that the pursuit of that theme led to the greatest disappointment of his career. Burns was convinced that no one was better qualified than he to make the definitive film about the towering figure of the U.S. civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. “I am the person to do this,” he recalled telling himself.

One day, a letter arrived from King’s heirs saying the same thing. He went to Atlanta to discuss his dream project with the family. But after several meetings, Burns realized he wouldn’t have the absolute control over the film’s content that he demands. In addition to demanding that Burns leave out King’s “robust series of extra-marital affairs,” and an incident of plagiarism, he told the class, the family wanted money. “It was like a Third World bribery situation,” he said.

He conceded having a visual style that has become recognizable — most computer slideshows utilize what’s called the “Ken Burns Effect” — and acknowledges it’s a style that involves filming still photographs “energetically.” He said documentary filmmakers bring their biases to their work, and that they shouldn’t be confused with truth.

In terms of bias, he said Michael Moore “is not that different from Leni Riefenstahl,” the Nazi director of “Triumph of the Will.” He added that the prevalence of closed-circuit cameras and smartphones has created “a kind of Big Brother society.”

Speaking quietly, Burns held his audience spellbound as he recounted the many surprising facts he learned while making “The Civil War” — that Mary Todd Lincoln’s brothers fought on the side of the Confederacy; that Abe Lincoln loved the tune “Dixie”; and that when Lincoln was assassinated he had Confederate currency in his pocket. Burns said he is currently editing a “mammoth” history of the Vietnam War that is filled with similar astonishments.

The session was filmed by students and will be presented to Burns, presumably after the director’s static image has been enlivened by adding the Ken Burns Effect.

Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004. Follow him at twitter.com/BruceNewmanTwit