Ken Burns

This article is about the director. For the football referee, see Ken Burns (referee). For the musician, see Kenneth C. Burns.

Ken Burns
Ken Burns, September 2007
Born	Kenneth Lauren Burns (1953-07-29) July 29, 1953 Brooklyn, New York
Years active	1981–present
Spouse(s)	Amy Stechler Burns (1982–1993) Julie Deborah Brown (2003–present)

Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American director and producer of documentary films, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs. Among his productions are The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009) and Prohibition (2011).

Burns' documentaries have been nominated for two Academy Awards, and have won Emmy Awards, among other honors.

Biography

Early life and career

Ken Burns was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, according to his official website, though some sources give Ann Arbor, Michigan, and some, including The New York Times, give both Brooklyn and Ann Arbor. The son of Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns, a biotechnician, and Robert Kyle Burns, at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University, in Manhattan. Ken Burns' brother is the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns.

Burns' academic family moved frequently, and lived in Saint-Véran, France; Newark, Delaware; and Ann Arbor, where his father taught at the University of Michigan. Burns' mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when Burns was 3, and died when he was 11, a circumstance that he said helped shape his career; he credited his father-in-law, a psychologist, with a signal insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive.". Well-read as a child, he absorbed the family encyclopedia, preferring history to fiction. Upon receiving an 8 mm film movie camera for his 17th birthday, he shot a documentary about an Ann Arbor factory. Turning down reduced tuition at the University of Michigan, he attended the new Hampshire College, an alternative school in Amherst, Massachusetts with narrative evaluations rather than letter grades and self-directed academic concentrations instead of traditional majors. He worked in a record store to pay his tuition.

Studying under photographers Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes and others, Burns earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in film studies and design in 1975. At 22, upon graduation, he co-founded with two college friends Florentine Films in Walpole, New Hampshire. As of 2010, there is a Ken Burns Wing at the Jerome Liebling Center for Film, Photography and Video at Hampshire College. He worked as a cinematographer for the BBC, Italian television, and others, and in 1977, after having completed some documentary short films, he began work on adapting David McCullough's book The Great Bridge, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Developing a signature style of documentary filmmaking in which he "adopted the technique of cutting rapidly from one still picture to another in a fluid, linear fashion. He then pepped up the visuals with 'first hand' narration gleaned from contemporary writings and recited by top stage and screen actors", he made the feature documentary Brooklyn Bridge (1981) which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary and ran on PBS in the United States.

Following another documentary, The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984), Burns was Oscar-nominated again for The Statue of Liberty (1985).

Later life and career

He went on to a long, successful career directing and producing well-received television documentaries and documentary miniseries on subjects as diverse as politicians (Thomas Jefferson, 1997), sports (Baseball, 1994, updated with 10th Inning, 2010), music (Jazz, 2001), arts and letters (Thomas Hart Benton, 1988, Mark Twain, 2001), historical technology and mass media (Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, 1991), and war (the 15-hour World War II documentary The War, 2007, and the 11-hour The Civil War, 1990, which All Media Guide says "many consider his 'chef d'oeuvre'").

Personal life

In 1982, Burns married Amy Stechler, with whom he had two daughters, Sarah and Lily, born circa 1983 and 1987, respectively. That marriage ended in divorce. As of 2011, Burns resides in Walpole, New Hampshire, with his second wife, Julie Deborah Brown, whom he married on October 18, 2003.

Politics

Burns is a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, with almost $40,000 in political donations. In 2008, the Democratic National Committee chose Burns to produce the introductory video for Senator Edward Kennedy's August 2008 speech to the Democratic National Convention, a video described by Politico as a "Burns-crafted tribute casting him [Kennedy] as the modern Ulysses bringing his party home to port." In August 2009 Kennedy died, and Burns produced a short eulogy video at his funeral. In endorsing Barack Obama for the U.S. presidency in December 2007, Burns compared Obama to Abraham Lincoln. He said he had planned to be a regular contributor to Countdown with Keith Olbermann on Current TV.

Awards and honors

• 1982 nomination, Academy Award for Documentary Feature: Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
• 1986 nomination, Academy Award for Documentary Feature: The Statue of Liberty (1985)
• 1995 Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Series: Baseball (1994)
• 2010 Emmy Award for Outstanding Non-fiction Series: The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009)

Burns is the recipient of more than 20 honorary degrees.

The Civil War has received more than 40 major film and television awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, the Producer of the Year Award from the Producers Guild of America, a People's Choice Award, a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, a D.W. Griffith Award, and the $50,000 Lincoln Prize.

Style

Burns frequently incorporates simple musical leitmotifs or melodies. For example, The Civil War features a distinctive violin melody throughout, "Ashokan Farewell", which was performed for the film by the musician Jay Ungar. One critic noted, "One of the most memorable things about The Civil War was its haunting, repeated violin melody, whose thin, yearning notes seemed somehow to sum up all the pathos of that great struggle."

Burns often gives "life" to still photographs by slowly zooming in on subjects of interest and panning from one subject to another. For example, in a photograph of a baseball team, he might slowly pan across the faces of the players and come to rest on the player who is the subject of the narrator. This technique, possible in many professional and home software applications, is termed "The Ken Burns Effect" in Apple's iPhoto and iMovie software applications.

As a museum retrospective noted, "His PBS specials [are] strikingly out of step with the visual pyrotechnics and frenetic pacing of most reality-based TV programming, relying instead on techniques that are literally decades old, although Burns reintegrates these constituent elements into a wholly new and highly complex textual arrangement."

In a 2011 interview, Burns stated that he admires and is influenced by filmmaker Errol Morris.

Filmography

 ^= listed with the name 'Kenneth Lauren Burns'

• Brooklyn Bridge (1981)^
• The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984)^
• The Statue of Liberty (1985)^
• Huey Long (1985)^
• The Congress (1988)^
• Thomas Hart Benton (1988)^
• The Civil War (1990)^
• Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (1991)
• Baseball (1994), updated with the 10th Inning (2010)
• Thomas Jefferson (1997)
• Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (1997)
• Frank Lloyd Wright (1998)
• Not For Ourselves Alone: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1999)
• Jazz (2001)
• Mark Twain (2001)
• Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip (2003)
• Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2005)
• The War (2007)
• The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009)
• Prohibition, with Lynn Novack (2011)

Future releases

• The Dust Bowl (November 2012)
• The Central Park Five (2012)
• The Roosevelts (2014)
• Jackie Robinson (2015)
• Vietnam (2016)
• Country Music (2018)
• Ernest Hemingway (2019)

Under Burns's name only

• The West (1996) (Executive producer; directed by Stephen Ives)

Short films

• William Segal (Biography) (1992)
• Vezelay (1996)
• In the Marketplace (2000)

Film roles

• Gettysburg (1993)—Hancock's staff officer

External links

• Florentine Films—Ken Burns's production company
• Ken Burns at AllMovie
• Ken Burns at IMDb
• Ken Burns at MyNorthwest.com
• Ken Burns on PBS
• Ken Burns bibliography
• Speaking Profile—Ken Burns's profile and lecture topics on the Random House Speakers Bureau

Interviews

• Ken Burns interviewed on Conversations from Penn State
• Blue Ridge Country—Ken Burns: The Interview with Blue Ridge County Magazine
• "Ken Burns". WriteTV.org, The Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers, Oklahoma State University–Tulsa. Undated. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• "Ken Burns". Interview, Archive of American Television. October 19, 2007. Archived from the original on July 25, 2011. Retrieved September 23, 2011. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)