Ken burns biography photo animation
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Like Steven Tyler, of Aerosmith, Ken Burns has a summer house on Lake Sunapee, in New Hampshire. The property is furnished with Shaker quilts and a motorboat; every July 4th, a fifteen-foot-long American flag hangs over the back deck. He bought the house in the mid-nineties, with money earned from “The Civil War,” his nine-part PBS documentary series, and its spinoffs. When PBS first broadcast that series, in a weeklong frosseri in the fall of , the network reached its largest-ever audience. The country agreed to gather as if at a table covered with old family photographs, in a room into which someone had invited an indefatigable fiddle player. Johnny Carson praised the series in successive “Tonight Show” monologues; stores in Washington, D.C., reportedly sold out of blank videocassettes. To the satisfaction of many viewers, and the dismay of some historians, Burns seemed to have shaped American history into the form eller gestalt of a modern popular memoir: a tale of wounding and healing, shame and
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The Jefferson Lecture
National Endowment for the Humanities
By Ken Burns
Washington, DC - May 9,
Chairman Adams—Bro—distinguished guests, dear friends and family, beloved colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, good evening. I find it difficult to express what a singular honor being asked to give this lecture is for me. The humanities in general and the NEH specifically have made my life better in immeasurable ways. For nearly all of my professional life—thirty-six of your impressive half century--I have sought the rigorously earned imprimatur of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which in turn has permitted me to practice--and I hope refine--my art, my craft of historical documentary filmmaking. Even when we did not enjoy support from the NEH, we nevertheless, on every project, adopted its strict guidelines, employing the best scholars at every juncture of our multi-year processes, applying difficult, critical thinking to a medium more often content
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Ken Burns on the Art of Storytelling: “It’s Lying Twenty-Four Times a Second”
If you’ve never watched a documentary by Ken Burns, maybe you just haven’t had the time. Ten hours for The Civil War, eighteen and a half for Baseball, nearly nineteen for Jazz; such blocks can be difficult to carve out, even when you’re carving them out for the master audiovisual storyteller of American history. Burns takes on such iconic subjects, and in so doing attracts so much acclaim — including the inimitable form of recognition that is a spoof on The Simpsons — that he seems like someone whose work you should know well, even if you’ve only glimpsed it or heard it referenced. Luckily, filmmakers Tom Mason and Sarah Klein have put together a documentary of their own, one on Ken Burns, that you can watch no matter how packed your schedule. In a mere five minutes, Ken Burns: On Story conveys just enough of importance about Burns’ personal