Ken Burns Quotes
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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.
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Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
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I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.
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Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.
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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.
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Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don't believe that Miles sold out but I'm not in a position to say.
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In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?
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History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.
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To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.
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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.
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History's just been made for sale to an inside deal.
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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.
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One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes.
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I grew up certain for a while that I was going to be an anthropologist, until film turned my head.
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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.
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By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.
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The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.
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I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.
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We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
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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.
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I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
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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.
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You know, you meet some people, and do a lot of interviews, and you come across a Buck O'Neill and you know you are going to know him for the rest of your life. The same thing happened with Curt Flood.
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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.