Ken Burns
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Ken Burns is an American director born in Brooklyn, New York, the most influential documentarian in the history of American public television, celebrated for sweeping historical documentary series built on his distinctive technique of slowly panning and zooming across archival photographs. The Civil War, an eleven-hour series combining this technique with evocative narration and period music, became one of the most-watched programs in PBS history and established Burns as America's foremost popular historian on film. Baseball, Jazz, and The Vietnam War extended his format to other defining threads of American cultural and political history, each characterized by extensive archival research and a deliberately measured, elegiac tone. The so-called Ken Burns effect, referring to his signature photograph-panning technique, became so widely recognized it was later built directly into consumer video-editing software. Burns's sustained, historically comprehensive documentary chronicling of American life has made him one of the most influential nonfiction filmmakers in television history.
Ken Burns
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Ken Burns is an American director born in Brooklyn, New York, the most influential documentarian in the history of American public television, celebrated for sweeping historical documentary series built on his distinctive technique of slowly panning and zooming across archival photographs. The Civil War, an eleven-hour series combining this technique with evocative narration and period music, became one of the most-watched programs in PBS history and established Burns as America's foremost popular historian on film. Baseball, Jazz, and The Vietnam War extended his format to other defining threads of American cultural and political history, each characterized by extensive archival research and a deliberately measured, elegiac tone. The so-called Ken Burns effect, referring to his signature photograph-panning technique, became so widely recognized it was later built directly into consumer video-editing software. Burns's sustained, historically comprehensive documentary chronicling of American life has made him one of the most influential nonfiction filmmakers in television history.
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Ken Burns
1953-07-29 · Brooklyn, New York, USA
Ken Burns (born 1953) is a highly celebrated American documentarian who gradually amassed a considerable reputation and a devoted audience with a series of reassuringly traditional meditations on Americana. Burns' works are treasure troves of archival materials; he skillfully utilizes period music and footage, photographs, periodicals and ordinary people's correspondence, the latter often movingly read by seasoned professional actors in a deliberate attempt to get away from a "Great Man" approach to history. Like most non-fiction filmmakers, Burns wears many hats on his projects, often serving as writer, cinematographer, editor and music director in addition to producing and directing. He achieved his apotheosis with The Civil War (1990), a phenomenally popular 11-hour documentary that won two Emmys and broke all previous ratings records for public TV. The series' companion coffee table book--priced at a hefty $50--sold more than 700,000 copies. The audio version, narrated by Burns, was also a major best-seller. In the final accounting, "The Civil War" became the first documentary to gross over $100 million. Not surprisingly, it has become perennial fund-raising programming for public TV stations around the country. Burns arrived upon the scene with the Oscar-nominated Brooklyn Bridge (1981), a nostalgic chronicle of the construction of the fabled edifice. The film was more widely seen when rebroadcast on PBS the following year. Though Burns has made other nonfiction films for theatrical release, notably an acclaimed and ambiguous portrait of Depression-era Louisiana governor Huey Long (1985), PBS would prove to be his true home. He cast a probing eye on such American subjects as The Statue of Liberty (1985), The Congress (1988) (PBS), painter Thomas Hart Benton (1988) (PBS) and early radio with Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (1991) (PBS). Burns returned to long-form documentary with his most ambitious project to date, an 18-hour history of Baseball (1994), which aired on PBS in the fall of 1994. He approached the national pastime as a template for understanding changes in modern American society. Ironically, this was the only baseball on the air at the time, as the players and owners were embroiled in a bitter strike.