KEN BURNS
Filmmaker

My earliest memory is of seeing that incredibly magic alchemy that takes place in a darkroom. When a picture, comes out of nowhere from that spooky red light – imagine what a 3-year old felt seeing that.

My mom died when I was eleven and it was devastating to our family. At that time, my father established a fairly strict curfew but always relaxed it if there was a movie on TV. Even on a school night, I might be up until 2 am for a late movie. I had a sense watching these movies that there was something really privileged in it – it was not just the forgiving of the curfew but I began to understand the real power and force of art – that it had the ability to really rearrange your molecules. I remember watching “Never on Sunday” with my father. I didn’t know it then, but he had seen it before with my mother. Sitting with him there, it was the first time I’d seen him cry.

Later in life, I read something that Tolstoy said about art being a transfer of emotion from one person to another. I started thinking of myself as an emotional archeologist interested in excavating not the dry dates and facts of the past but something more durable, something more usable, something more felt. I think that’s carried with me all my life and it all stems from that moment I remember seeing my dad cry. I realized there was an unbelievable power to the stories.

Ken Burns was born in Brooklyn, New York and has been a director of documentary films for over 30 years. His first film, Brooklyn Bridge, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1982 and he was nominated again in 1986 for The Statue of Liberty. Burns’ other critically acclaimed films include The Civil War and Baseball. His latest film, The War (a documentary on WWII) premiered on PBS in September 2007.

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