Kenneth Lauren Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American filmmaker, known for his style of recording archives and photographs in a documentary. His famous documentary series include The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), National Parks: Best Ideas of America (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014), and < i> Vietnam War (2017). He is also the executive producer of both The West (1996, directed by Stephen Ives), and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015, directed by Barak Goodman).
Burns' documentary has earned two Academy Award nominations (respectively for 1981's Brooklyn Bridge and 1985's Statue Of Liberty ) and has won several Emmy Awards, among other awards.
Video Ken Burns
Early life and education
Burns was born on July 29, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, Lyla Smith's son Burns, biotechnics, and Robert Kyle Burns, at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University in Manhattan. Documentary filmmaker Ric Burns is his younger brother.
The Burns academic family moved often. Among the places they call home is Saint-Và © à © ran, France; Newark, Delaware; and Ann Arbor where his father taught at the University of Michigan. Burns's mother was found to have breast cancer when she was three and she died when she was 11 years old, a situation she said helped shape her career; he praised his father-in-law, a psychologist, with significant insight: "He told me that my whole work is an attempt to get old people to go back to life." Well read since childhood, he absorbed the family encyclopedia, preferring fictional history.
After receiving an 8 mm film camera for his 17th birthday, he recorded a documentary about the Ann Arbor factory. He graduated from Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor in 1971. Refusing reduced college tuition at the University of Michigan, he attended Hampshire College, an alternative school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where students were assessed through a narrative evaluation rather than a letter grade and in which students made concentration academically self-directed rather than choosing a traditional majors. She works in a record store to pay her school fees. Studying under photographers Jerome Liebling, Elaine Mayes, and others, Burns earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in film studies and design in 1975.
Maps Ken Burns
Florentine Films
In 1976, Burns, Elaine Mayes, and college classmate Roger Sherman set up a production company called Florentine Films in Walpole, New Hampshire. The name of the company was borrowed from the home town of Mayes, Florence, Massachusetts. Another student from Hampshire College, Buddy Squires, was invited to replace Mayes as a founding member a year later, and the trio then joined the fourth member, Lawrence "Larry" Hott. Hott, who was not really welcome in Hampshire, but worked in the films there, started his career as a lawyer, after attending a New West Law School nearby.
Each member works independently, but releases their content under the name of Shared Florentine Films. Thus, each of their company's "subsidiaries" includes Ken Burns Media, Sherman Images , and Hott Productions . Burns's oldest son, Sarah, is currently also an employee of the company.
Careers
Burns worked as a cinematographer for the BBC, Italian television, and others, and in 1977, after completing several documentary short films, he began work to adapt David McCullough's book The Great Bridge about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Developed a distinctive style of documentary filmmaking in which he "adopted the technique of rapidly cutting from one still image to another in a fluid and linear manner [and] then twisting visuals with the 'first hand' narration collected from contemporary writings and recited by stage actors and top screens ", he made the feature film documentary
Brooklyn Bridge (1981), which earned Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary Film and ran on PBS in the United States.
Following another documentary, Burns was nominated again by Oscar for The Statue of Liberty (1985). [1] The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984). Burns often collaborates with writer and historian Geoffrey Ward, especially on documentaries like The Civil War ,
Burns has gone into a long and successful career directing and producing well-received documentary films and documentary miniseries on subjects as diverse as arts and letters ( Thomas Hart Benton , 1988); mass media ( Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio , 1991); sport ( Baseball , 1994, updated with 10th Inning , 2010); politician ( Thomas Jefferson , 1997); music ( Jazz , 2001); literature ( Mark Twain , 2001); war (World War II 15-hour war document The War , 2007); environmentalism ( National Park , 2009); and the Civil War (11 hours The Civil War , 1990, the All Media Guide says "many consider it 'chef d'oeuvre'").
According to section 2017 at New Yorker , Burns and his company, Florentine Films, have selected topics for documentaries scheduled for release in 2030. These topics include country music, Mayo Clinic, Muhammad Ali, Ernest Hemingway, American Revolution, Lyndon B. Johnson, Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, American criminal justice system, and African-American history from the Civil War to the Great Migration.
Personal life
In 1982, Burns married Amy Stechler, with whom he had two daughters, Sarah and Lily; marriage ended in a divorce in 1993. In 2017, Burns resides in Walpole, New Hampshire, with his second wife, Julie Deborah Brown, whom he married on October 18, 2003. He is the founder of a nonprofit Room to grow that helps immediately become a living parent in poverty. They have two daughters, Olivia and Willa Burns.
Burns is a descendant of Johannes de Peyster Sr. through Dr. Gerardus Clarkson, a doctor of the American Revolutionary War from Philadelphia, and he is a distant relative of the Scottish poet, Robert Burns. In 2014, Burns appears in Henry Louis Gates Finding Your Roots where he finds the shocking news that he is the descendant of a slave owner of the Deep South, in addition to having a lineage tracing back to the American Colonial of faithful Loyalty during the American Revolution.
Burns is a quilt collector who likes dodging. About 1/3 of the blankets from her personal collection are being shown for the first time at the International Quilt Study Center & amp; Museum at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Revealed: The Ken Burns Collection includes 28 quilts and will be seen until 13 May 2018.
Politics
Burns is a long-time supporter of the Democratic Party, with nearly $ 40,000 in political donations. In 2008, the Democratic National Committee voted Burns to produce a preliminary video for Senator Edward Kennedy's August 2008 speech to the Democratic National Convention, a video described by Politico as his "Burns-crafted Reverence" Kennedy] as modern Ulysses brought his party back to the harbor. "In August 2009, Kennedy died, and Burns produced a short speech video at his funeral.In support of Barack Obama for the US presidency in December 2007, Burns compared Obama to Abraham Lincoln, saying he had planned to become a regular contributor to Count back off with Keith Olbermann on TV Today.
Awards and honors
- 1982 nomination, Academy Award for Documentary Features: Brooklyn Bridge (1981);
- 1986 nominations, Academy Award for Documentary Features: Statue of Liberty (1985);
- 1995 Emmy Award for Exceptional Informational Serial: Baseball (1994);
- 2010 Emmy Award for Extraordinary Non-fiction Series: National Park: America's Best Idea (2009).
The Civil War received over 40 film and television awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards (one for Best Traditional Folk Album), Producer of the Year Award from Producers Guild of America, a People's Choice Award, Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award, a DW Griffith Award, and a $ 50,000 Lincoln Prize.
In 2004, Burns received the Roger Horchow Award for the Greatest Public Service by Private Citizens, an award given annually by the Jefferson Awards.
In 2010, there was Ken Burns Wing at Jerome Liebling Center for Film, Photography, and Video at Hampshire College.
In 2012, Burns received the Humanities Medal of Washington University International. Medals, given every two years and accompanied by a $ 25,000 cash prize, are given in honor of someone whose hard work in scholarship, journalism, literature, or the arts has made a difference in the world. Previous winners include Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk in 2006, journalist Michael Pollan in 2008, and novelist and nonfiction writer Francine Prose in 2010.
In 2013, Burns received the John Steinbeck Award, an award given annually by Steinbeck's eldest son Thomas in collaboration with John Steinbeck Family Foundation, San Jose State University, and The National Steinbeck Center.
Burns is the Grand Marshal for the Pasadena 201 Roses Parade on New Year's Day in Pasadena, California. The National Endowment for the Humanities chose Burns to provide Jefferson Lecture 2016, the highest US federal government award for achievement in the humanities, on the subject of race in America. In 2016, he also gave an opening speech to Stanford University that criticized Donald Trump. He is the recipient of the 2017 The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal at Vanderbilt University.
Style
Burns often use simple music or melodies. For example, The Civil War features a distinctive violin melody throughout, "Ashokan Farewell", performed for the film by his composer, fiddler Jay Ungar. One of the critics noted, "One of the most memorable things about The Civil War is the haunting, repetitive violin of a violet whose thin note of power seems to somehow conclude all the paths of that great struggle."
Burns often give life to still photographs by slowly enlarging an interesting subject and panning from one subject to another. For example, in a photograph of a baseball team, he may slowly shift the players' faces and come to rest on the player who is the subject of the narrator. This technique, perhaps in many professional and home-based software applications, is called "The Ken Burns effect" in Apple iPhoto software applications, iMovie, and Final Cut Pro X. Burns stated in an interview in 2009 that he initially refused to mention his name associated with the software because of his attitude of rejecting commercial support. However, Apple chief Steve Jobs negotiated to provide Apple Burns equipment, which Burns burned to nonprofit organizations.
As a retrospective note of the museum, "Its PBS special is not very much in line with the visual fireworks and frenetic pacing of most reality-based TV programs, relying only on techniques that are literally decades old, even though Burns reunites its constituent elements into textual settings which is entirely new and very complex. "
In a 2011 interview, Burns stated that he admires and is influenced by filmmaker Errol Morris.
Movieography
- Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
- The Shakers: The Hands to Work, The Heart to God (1984)
- The Statue of Liberty (1985)
- Huey Long (1985)
- 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 Tenth Inning (2010)
- Thomas Jefferson (1997)
- Lewis & amp; Clark: Travel Corps Discovery (1997)
- Frank Lloyd Wright , with Lynn Novick (1998)
- Not For Yourself Only: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (1999)
- Jazz (2001)
- Mark Twain (2001)
- Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip (2003)
- An Unforgiven Silence: The Revival and Fall of Jack Johnson (2005)
- War (2007)
- National Park: America's Best Idea (2009)
- Prohibition , with Lynn Novick (2011)
- The Dust Bowl (2012)
- The Central Park Five (2012)
- Yosemite: A Gathering of Spirit (2013)
- Address (2014)
- The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014)
- Jackie Robinson (2016)
- Opposing the Nazis: The Sharps War (2016)
- Vietnam War (2017) (with Lynn Novick)
- Upcoming release
- The Mayo Clinic (2018) PBS Sept 25th-26th
- Country Music (2019)
- Ernest Hemingway (2020)
- Stand-up Comedy (TBA)
- Ken Burns - Executive producer
- West (1996) (directed by Stephen Ives)
- Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015) (directed by Barrack Goodman)
- Short movie
- William Segal (1992)
- Vezelay (1996)
- In Marketplace (2000)
- Movie role
- Gettysburg (1993) - Hancock staff officer
- TV Series
- Mindy Project - Season 3, episode 11 ("Christmas") - as herself
- Ken Burns at AllMovie
- Ken Burns on IMDb
- Ken Burns on Twitter
- Ken Burns on PBS
- Ken Burns bibliography
- Ken Burns in the Library of Congress Authorities - with 54 catalog records
- Ken Burns was interviewed on Conversations from Penn State
- Ken Burns: An interview with Blue Ridge County Magazine
- "Ken Burns". WriteTV.org, Author and Author Center of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University-Tulsa. nd
- Ken Burns video interview on Archive of American Television
Note
References
External links
Interview
Source of the article : Wikipedia