Park School Series to Host Documentary Filmmaker Ken Burns

Award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, who has captured the American spirit in such epic documentary series as The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, will share his expertise with students and faculty in the Roy H. Park School of Communications during a four-day stay on campus. This year’s guest in the Park Distinguished Visitors Series, Burns will also deliver a free public lecture on Wednesday, October 10. His talk, "Sharing the American Experience," is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. in the Emerson Suites, Phillips Hall.

Burns has been making acclaimed documentary films for more than 25 years, and the historian Stephen Ambrose has said, "More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source." His latest work, a biography of Mark Twain, will air on PBS in 2002. Among his dozens of industry accolades, Burns has earned two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a producer of the year citation from the Producers Guild of America, a People’s Choice Award, and a Peabody Award.

During his Ithaca visit October 7-10, Burns will discuss his craft with students, faculty, and staff in a variety of formal and informal settings. He will give master classes on "American Lives: Use of Biography in Documentary Films," "Original Sin: Race in American History," and "Documentary as Career" and will speak in journalism, film, and television-radio classes.

For the landmark PBS presentations The Civil War and Baseball, Burns served as director, producer, co-writer, chief cinematographer, music director, and executive producer. The highest-rated series in American public television history, The Civil War drew an audience of 40 million for its 1990 premiere. The 1994 Baseball used archival photographs and newsreel footage to portray the history of the sport as a mirror of American society. Concluding a unique trilogy of American life and culture, the 10-part Jazz followed this art form from its origins in blues and ragtime through swing, bebop, and fusion.

Burns was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953 and graduated from Hampshire College. At the age of 22 he cofounded Florentine Films in his home base of Walpole, New Hampshire. In contrast to the dry, scholarly style used in most historical documentaries, he adopted the technique of cutting rapidly from one still picture to another in a fluid fashion, complementing the visuals with narration lifted from contemporaneous writings.

Burns began to make a name for himself in 1981, producing and directing the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge. He went on to make The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God; The Statue of Liberty, also nominated for an Oscar; Huey Long; The Congress: The History and Promise of Representative Government; Thomas Hart Benton; and Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio.

In addition to his sprawling series, Burns has created two-part biographies of some of America’s most important men and women, including Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, and Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

The Park Distinguished Visitors Series is made possible by a grant from the Park Foundation. Past visitors have been Jeff Greenfield, political analyst for CNN; Bob Brown, ABC News correspondent; P. J. O’Rourke, best-selling author and leading political satirist; Clarence Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist; and Carole Simpson, ABC News anchor and senior correspondent.