Ken Burns
The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Ken Burns reads as The Visionary, a judgment reinforced by the sensibility he brought to The David Rubenstein Show. As a documentary filmmaker, his leadership operates through imagination sustained over long horizons, the patience to see a subject whole before others grasp its shape. He leads by conviction rather than command, drawing collaborators and audiences alike into a way of seeing that feels inevitable only once he has revealed it.
“I wasn't interested in excavating the dried dates and facts and events of the past. The only thing that could hold those shards together was an emotional archaeology, not sentimentality and nostalgia, which is the enemy of good anything.”
“I've made films for almost fifty years about the US. But I've also made films about us — the lower case two letter plural pronoun. I want to reach everybody to remind them of what we share.”
“History is the table around which we can all have a shared discussion of what we want, how we might continue to cohere, and how we can let the better angels perhaps reassert themselves.”
The David Rubenstein Show: “Ken Burns”
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