KEN BURNS: 'We're in Perhaps the Most Difficult Crisis in the History of America'
- The Guardian, Sept. 19, 2022. By David Smith in Washington. - Ed.
- In a new docuseries, the film-maker looks back to the Holocaust and U.S. apathy to make links toward where we are right now.. -
Burns is driving in heavy traffic, trying to get from New York, where he was born, to New Hampshire, where he lives and works in bucolic splendour. He made the move in 1979, not to service a grand masterplan but out of financial desperation. “I was making my first film and starving and rent was going up in New York City and I couldn’t afford it,” the documentarian recalls by phone. “I found the connection to nature incredibly important for this labour-intensive work that we do.” But when Burns' debut film, Brooklyn Bridge, was nominated for an Oscar, friends and colleagues assumed that he would move back to New York or try Los Angeles. He surprised them. “I made the biggest, the most important professional decision, which was to stay.
“I live in nature. I walk constantly and do a lot of letter writing and speechwriting and script writing and script fixing and editing in my head and that’s very helpful. And I happen to live in a particularly beautiful part of the country.” Perhaps it is no accident that Burns settled in New Hampshire, a state that inspired Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a quintessential play about the American experience. Something in the New England air has helped him produce epics on The Civil War, The War (about the second world war) and The Vietnam War; cultural studies of Baseball, Country Music, Jazz and The National Parks; profiles spanning The Roosevelts, Hemingway, Muhammad Ali and Benjamin Franklin.
Now comes The US and the Holocaust, a 3-part PBS series directed and produced by Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein & written by Geoffrey Ward. Over 6 hours, it examines America’s flawed response to the Nazis’ persecution & mass murder of Jews, asking what could have been done differently to halt the genocide. Voice actors include Liam Neeson, Matthew Rhys, Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep, Werner Herzog, Joe Morton & Hope Davis. It may be Burns’s most didactic film yet as it ends provocatively with images of Dylann Roof, who shot & killed 9 African American congregants at a church in South Carolina; white supremacists marching with flaming torches in Charlottesville, Va. chanting “Jews will not replace us!”; the killing of 11 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; & the storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Donald Trump supporters on 6 January 2021.
“We were obligated to do that because the way we mount this series is we begin with antisemitism in America and racism and the pernicious slave trade and xenophobia and nativism and eugenics,” he explains. “We’re obligated then to not close our eyes and pretend this is some comfortable thing in the past that doesn’t rhyme with the present.” Burns has been sounding the alarm about the threat to American democracy since a commencement address at Stanford University in California in June 2016. Six years and one Trump presidency later, he is more worried than ever. After 3 previous great crises, I think we’re in the 4th and perhaps the most difficult crisis in the history of America. The 3 being the civil war, the great depression and the second world war, the institutions were not under assault as they are today and that makes the fragility of Benjamin Franklin’s statement, ‘A republic, if you can keep it,’ all the more relevant...
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/19/ken-burns-interview-holocaust-docuseries
= new reply since forum marked as read
Hope he shows plenty of Nazi flags being flown that day and asks if this is direction we want our Country
headed in. Burns is exposing the R party for what they really stand for.....FASCISM.
