Known for his contribution to the documentary medium With epic portraits such as the “Vietnam War” and “Baseball,” Ken Burns took Criterion Wardrobe recently to express his appreciation for narrative cinema and how, for him, “become a Film maker was born in tragedy. “Burns shared that his mother left cancer when he was only 11 years old and shortly after his father introduced him to cinema as a way to deal with.
“My dad, who never cried before in her life – not during her illness, not when she died, not at her impossibly sad funeral – would let me stay up late and watch movies,” said Burns, “he would take me out To the cinema in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and we would watch movies together of all kinds. And I got my education there and decided to become a filmmaker when he showed me one night Sir Carol Reed’s “Odd Man Out” and my dad cried . And I believed that nothing in his life had given him a safe haven for emotional expression except film. ”
Burns continued to say that Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” was probably his favorite movie and described it as “the fastest three-plus hours I have ever experienced in my life.” He followed this selection with a more lighter rush, Ernst Lubitsch’s “to be or not to be.”
“It was done in the middle of the Second World War, and yet it has this lasting idea that art, and especially comedy, meets” yes “and” no “at the same time can help to mitigate and unite and exceed this special horror, he said.
After expressing his early hope that he could be the next Alfred Hitchcock, Burns produced his admiration for the British filmmaker Steve McQueenwhose “hunger” had a huge impact on him.
“I can think of no one who is better at the cinema than Steve McQueen,” he said. “I was at Telluride Film Festival and saw it, I think, North American premiere of” hunger “, and I can’t describe the effect enough on me – the long shots, sometimes lasted 10 or 15 minutes. Just the visual things with to swing down the urine in the corridors outside the cells when the hunger strikes are in progress.
Look at Burn’s entire criterion visit below.
