Click link below picture

.

The filmmaker wants his new documentary, “The Vietnam War,” to bring the country together. Can anyone do that in the age of Trump?

Last December, after Donald Trump had won the presidential election, documentarian Ken Burns told me that he was feeling like “the optimistic Frodo in Mordor.” Burns has a tendency to describe himself and his work in sweeping, sometimes self-congratulatory, language, and this would not be the only time he likened himself to J.R.R. Tolkien’s small, unlikely hero, entrusted with shepherding something valuable through dangerous territory. Yet if Burns presents his career as a popular historian in lofty, even epic, terms, he’s not alone in thinking of himself that way.

When Thomas Vallely, who served as a Marine in Vietnam, was trying to decide whether to work with Burns on his ambitious new history of the Vietnam War, Vallely’s son Charlie came up with a convincing argument in favor: “Ken Burns decides what America thinks of itself.”

In fact, audiences don’t always agree on what Burns’s idea of America is. Critics have charged him both with peddling feel-good stories about the past and with an “obsessive” focus on racism, with shying away from partisan politics and with venerating progressivism. Still, to debate precisely what Burns thinks about America is to concede the larger point: that Burns occupies an unusual role in an exceptionally polarizing time.

.

Vietnam

.

.

Click link below for article:

Ken Burns “The Vietnam War” PBS documentary tries to unite America …

.

__________________________________________