Ken Burns

Ken Burns on Everything: A Story of Us

The history has a quiet yet powerful impact an always. We are not only shaped by the monumental events like wars, inventions, or revolutions but also by the subtle almost unnoticed choices that spread out like the rings formed by a stone thrown into the water. When we use the word everything, we do not mean the cold void of the universe but the human experience that we have been sharing — the ways we have created, destroyed, and created again.

Ken Burns has been telling the American story in a slow process of gathering the parts together — one picture at a time, one voice at a time. However, if we turn that lens wider, if we try to embrace everything, we will find out that the real story is not just about the countries and the rulers. It is about the people — ordinary, strong-willed, inquisitive, and sometimes even contradictory people — who are discovering and living somehow through the centuries’ blurriness.

Beginnings: The First Sparks

All was wrapped in darkness at the very beginning of everything. Then a spark came — perhaps not the divine one, but the one that could not be avoided. Stars emerged, atoms turned into planets and among this cosmic wander some planet got the very basic of all elements — air. Eventually life came out of that breathing, and with life, memory.

The first thing that humanity did was to remember. The imprint of a hand on a cave wall was not meant to beautify the walls; it was a proclamation that said: I exist. The hand was the first mark made. Since then every subsequent generation made its own mark — a tool, a song, a myth, a city.

In Ken Burns’ terms civilization is a very long and slow conversation with the past. The fireside tales of the first people turned into scriptures, then into philosophy, and lastly into science. Each leap forward was accompanied by the preceding gentle sounds. In the grandest terms we are a species that loves and even sometimes gets obsessed with continuity.

The Threads of Progress

Progress has always been the most favorable myth of all — the idea that with each passing century we are getting to perfection sooner. But, history, when narrated rightly, uncovers a much more intricate storyline.