Nerd of the Day: Ken Burns

I first discovered Ken Burns as a bespectacled and earnest 8th grader. We had just completed reading Stephen Crane’s THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE out loud in class (and, yes, by out loud I mean OUT LOUD. Mr. Kuka picked a different kid to read each chapter as the rest of us followed along in our own copies of the book. Most of the kids droned on and on, reading the most violent and raw battle scenes in voices so monotonous that I started to slightly hate them. The book, though, was marvelous---perhaps it will be a future book club recommendation!) when our teacher, Mr. Kuka, announced that we were going to watch a Civil War documentar. So, the following week, we spent two hours a day, watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War. I use the word “watching” very loosely, as most of my classmates slept through the riveting and heart wrenching eleven-hour film. Ken Burns made the past come alive for, well for Mr. Kuka and me, since we were the only two people in the classroom who appreciated the film. Not only is Burns a genius filmmaker, but he’s also a gifted story teller and historian. The camera pans over still photographs, actors read authentic letters from the battleground and the home front while a Civil War-era soundtrack plays in the background and the result is stirring. Yes, I cried, sitting in my corner of the classroom, not worried about the other kids seeing me wipe my eyes behind my glasses.

Also, a baseball freak like myself can’t talk about Ken Burns without mentioning what is, in my opinion, his greatest work to date: Baseball. The 18-hour film, which took four years to make was, clearly, a labor of love for Burns:

"We divided our story into nine chronological chapters, or innings, and insisted as much as possible that the past speak for itself through contemporaneous photographs, drawings, paintings, lithographs, newsreels, and chorus of first-person voices read by distinguished actors and writers. We dissected the ballet of baseball with special cameras that ran at 500 frames a second (instead of 24); interviewed on-camera nearly ninety writers, historians, fans, players and managers: employed the services of twenty-one scholars and more than two dozen patient and talented film editors, delighted in getting to know one of the most remarkable men the game or this country has ever produced, Buck O'Neil; filmed for weeks with the gentle and generous people at the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame; and hovered for hours above ancient diamonds in Iowa, West Texas, South Carolina, and a particularly beautiful old park built in a marshy area of Boston called the Fens."

I can just imagine a young Ken Burns (perhaps he was called Kenny by his parents and his brother Ric, who also happens to be a noted documentary filmmaker) spending his weekends at the library, lost between the pages of dusty old history books. Sigh. He’s made a bunch of other documentaries, among them the Oscar-nominated Brooklyn Bridge, Mark Twain, and Jazz. Watch any one of them and I promise you'll be hooked.