Ken Burns
Ken Burns
Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns is an American filmmaker, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs in documentary films. His most widely known documentaries are The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Prohibition, The Central Park Five, and The Roosevelts. Also widely known is his role as executive producer of The West, and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth29 July 1953
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
We strain to listen to the ghosts and echoes of our inexpressibly wise past, and we have an obligation to maintain these places, to provide these sanctuaries, so that people may be in the presence of forces larger than those of the moment.
I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.
Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
Oh, I'm just sitting here dying about it,
I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it.
We want them to stop the current arrangement, share it with the public and hold hearings.
This is what I don't understand, why we're not taught this. I mean, you would be hard pressed to say that there was no machine more important than the car in the last 100 years. Nothing has been more influential in how we live, how we work, what's worked itself into our songs, into our mythology. The idea of a road trip is very much in everyone's life, and this is the first road trip.
Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.
Civics is in fact politics, and politics is how things work not only in the political realm but in every other realm. It may be this simple mechanical glitch that unites everything. This is my philosophy.
The way I work, the interview never becomes larger than the person being interviewed.
I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance.
It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.