Ken Burns

Known for DirectingBorn 1953-07-29 (age 72)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.Read more

Movies & web series

Baseball: The Tenth Inning

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

This Week

Interstellar

The U.S. and the Holocaust

The Vietnam War

The West

The Unmaking of a College

Muhammad Ali

De la poussière et des hommes

The Gene: An Intimate History

The War

Baseball: The Tenth Inning

Jackie Robinson

The Dust Bowl

Prohibition

The National Parks: America's Best Idea

Benjamin Franklin

The Simpsons

Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History

Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself

The Civil War

Leonardo da Vinci

Hemingway

East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story

Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip

Thomas Hart Benton

Firing Line with Margaret Hoover

The American Buffalo

Lewis & Clark - The Journey of the Corps of Discovery

Jazz

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony

Country Music

Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio

Baseball

Thomas Jefferson

The Problem with Jon Stewart

Frank Lloyd Wright

Brooklyn Bridge

Late Night with Conan O'Brien

The Congress

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

The Mayo Clinic

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

The Central Park Five

Mark Twain