On Music in Film - Ken Burns

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2007/09/27/Ken_Burns_in_Conversation_with_Robert_Stone

Celebrated documentary filmmaker Ken Burns gives his take on the use of music in movies.

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Ken Burns' most recent documentary film project, The War, tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of more than 40 men and women from four quintessentially American towns - Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and Luverne, Minnesota - who experienced and helped to win the most extraordinary war in history.

Woven largely from their memories, the narrative unfolds as the war unfolded - month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt.

The film series explores the most intimate human dimensions of a worldwide catastrophe that touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America demonstrating that in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives.

From Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps, the companion book to this fall 2007 PBS series, The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945 by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, includes all the iconic events as well as those of prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and those who struggled simply to keep families together while their men were shipped off - NYPL

Ken Burns has been making films for more than thirty years. In 1981, Burns produced and directed his first film for PBS, the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge. His other films include Huey Long; Thomas Hart Benton; Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio; a trilogy including The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz; Frank Lloyd Wright; Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; Mark Twain; and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.

Burns is currently producing and directing a six-part film series on the history of the National Parks which will air on PBS in 2009. He is also working on a history of Prohibition and an update to his 1994 epic Baseball.

His current film, which premieres in September on PBS, is The War with a companion book he co-authored with Geoffrey C. Ward entitled The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945.

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[HardikG121]

very well spoken and creative man. I was lucky to have received his autograph

[mgayford]

@shenelle43 From what I've read he doesn't have a background in teaching or academia, although his father was a professor. He is an excellent speaker though.

[shenelle43]

I haven't studied Mr Burns' background, but I imagine at one point in his life he was probably a teacher, perhaps a professor? He is definitely an orator.

[reejking]

YouTube film makers can put his advice to immediate use. Ken Burns says to lock the picture first, and then mathematically match the music to the scene. He said he had 230 versions of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame." Fitting fragments of those recordings to each visual scene becomes a science. I found his comprehensive response very educational and useful.

[McGrenzer]

Mr. Stone almost looks like he regrets having asked the question in the first place. Burns' answer is certainly comprehensive... and six minutes long.

[rolandrog]

huh? I scored when I heard The Word is Love. Its the word I'm thinking of, Love. I love to score.