Ken Burns Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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.”
-- Ken Burns -
“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.”
-- Ken Burns -
“The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.”
-- Ken Burns -
“The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement.”
-- Ken Burns -
“By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.”
-- Ken Burns -
“History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.”
-- Ken Burns -
“We all think that an exception is going to be made in our case and were going to live forever. Being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that thats not going to be. Story is there to remind us that its just OK.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I don't think that there has been a film that I've done that hasn't been influenced by libraries and archives.”
-- Ken Burns -
“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.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.”
-- Ken Burns -
“History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.”
-- Ken Burns -
“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.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever.”
-- Ken Burns -
“It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.”
-- Ken Burns -
“In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.”
-- Ken Burns -
“No one was more important to the game of baseball in the last half of the 20th century than Henry Aaron and no one writes about that supremely talented man, that tumultuous time and this treasure of a game better than Howard Bryant. Together, they are an extraordinary combination, and the book Bryant has written gets to the heart of the complicated and dignified, patient and consistent genuine hero that is Henry Aaron.”
-- Ken Burns -
“The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.”
-- Ken Burns -
“I wake the dead. I bring Jackie Robinson and the Roosevelts to life. Who do you think Im trying to wake up?”
-- Ken Burns -
“You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.”
-- Ken Burns -
“When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.”
-- Ken Burns -
“When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.”
-- Ken Burns -
“You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.”
-- Ken Burns
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