Ken Burns and the Art of Telling the Whole Story

It is okay to try and simplify the world so that we can understand it and feel like we matter at it. And we have to accept that there is complexity that sometimes we understand and sometimes we don't. Those things have to live together. You know, we make films and they're not additive. You don't build a film, you subtract a film.

We have 500 hours of footage and we get down to 12. And it's it's to do what you're talking about, to kind of simplify in a way, but we also want to leave open this is the mystery of of life that we have been handed. It's not the notes, it's the intervals between the notes that make music, and it's the cut between the shots that make film. It's complicated. These are the words that hang on the wall of Ken Burns's editing room.

These are the words that also capture how he understands history. It's complicated. There are few people whose work has actually shaped how we understand things. And Ken Burns is definitely one of those people. Whether it's our understanding of the Vietnam War, the origins of baseball, or even the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, Ken

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