’ new two-part, four-hour probably won’t redefine the identity of , renowned as a documentary chronicler of all things Americana. But it does find the director, working with frequent collaborators and , in markedly different terrain, both historically and culturally. More than that, (we’ll see how many times I write as the title here) finds the team working with a very different visual and rhetorical approach, making a project that isn’t really enlightening about da Vinci as a person, but explores the polymath’s intellectual and artistic processes in a way that’s effectively cumulative and often fascinating.
It remains my consistent feeling that Burns and company are better the more primary source interview subjects they have. It’s why I love , why I think l is underrated and why I prefer and to . But much moreso than recent “minor” Ken Burns docs like or or — smart projects that still felt like they could have come from any number of PBS veterans — gives a clear impression, thoroughly appropriate for its subject, of intellectual wheels in motion.
Guillermo del Toro, who probably isn’t QUITE a modern da Vinci but who possesses a similarly omnivorous approach to knowledge, summarizes the artist’s work as well as the thing that Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and McMahon are attempting here. “The way we absorb the world is all at once, and that’s the simultaneous, gluttonous impact that you get from his notebooks,” del Toro says of da Vinci. Simultaneity .