These are both strange and historic times we're living in. Who better to explain them than award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, whose documentaries have covered all things American from baseball to country music to the Vietnam War.
In the age of social distancing, WCBS 880's Steve Scott spoke with the esteemed documentarian spoke on the phone to ask him: When we are living through history, do we realize at the time that it's happening?
Are we conscious of history when it's happening?
Probably not, except in periods of extreme crisis, like right now. Most of the time to us, history is that course that we didn't like back in high school and it's a top-down history. It's the history of, in the case in the United States, a series of presidential administrations punctuated by wars, but in fact history is the sum total of our collective experience. We're making history right now, it's just that when we tell a story, which history is mostly made up of, we edit human experience and that becomes our stories and those larger stories become our history.
How do we know during an historic event when we should start keeping that diary?
We keep a diary for ourselves, but it's very helpful for people like me, and people like me in the future. If we do it with that sort of sense of this is important, it won't be very good, but if you just say, 'What I do is important to me and may be important to the people that love me and that I love' then that's okay. Then you have kind of a genuine expression and that's the stuff that works.
We don't know how far we are into this crisis. What is your sense though? Is this historic what is happening now?
Without a doubt, this is huge. We've never seen anything in our lifetimes on the scale of this. This is as great a threat as we've had and that's in fact what makes history, are those kinds of agreements between people unspoken. You know, driving drive down the highway, we're counting on that person coming in the other direction to stay in their lane.
Ken Burns is executive producing a new film that debuts on PBS Tuesday night called, "East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story." It looks at public housing and racism. It's directed by Ken's daughter, Sarah, and her husband, David McMahon.
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