Ken Burns - "Sharing the American Experience

Performing Arts Series
Student Union Ballroom (map)
Ellensburg Campus
Central Washington University

TICKETS: Reserved $30 / General $20 / Student $10

An American director and producer of documentary films for over 30 years, Ken Burns is most notable for his PBS television series, The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), and Jazz (2001). The Civil War has been honored with more than 40 major film and television awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and the Peabody Award. Through the extensive use of archival photographs and newsreel footage, Baseball, became the most watched series in PBS history, attracting more than 45 million viewers. In JAZZ, Burns completes his trilogy of American life, finding in the music's lines and phrases and riffs not only a meditation on American creativity, but a joyous and sublime celebration of the redemptive future possibilities of this remarkable republic.

Burns recalls in a filmed interview what the writer and essayist Gerald Early said, " (He told me) when they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. They're the three most beautiful things Americans have ever created." Continues Burns, "His astute comment made me realize that we have worked almost unceasingly for the past nearly seventeen years on a series of projects to honor that statement. Having grappled with many Constitutional issues in our Civil War series (the Constitution's greatest test) and many other films, and having explored our national pastime and its exquisite lessons in our series on Baseball, we have over the last several years struggled to understand the utterly American art form of jazz."

On September 23, Burn's newest 15-hour series, The War, will be aired on PBS stations nationwide. The film is about the American experience in World War II, but instead of ponderous interviews with generals and diagrams of troop movements typical of earlier WWII documentaries, the series will focus on the grunts on the ground and those they left behind in four quintessential American localities-Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota. This time around, talking heads will be limited to eyewitness testimony. According to historian Stephen Ambrose,"More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source." For more information on Ken Burns go to http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/