Known for his contributions to the documentary medium with epic portraits like “The Vietnam War” and “Baseball,” Ken Burns took to the Criterion Closet recently to express his appreciation for narrative cinema and how, for him, “becoming a filmmaker was born in tragedy.” Burns shared that his mother passed from cancer when he was only 11 and soon after, his father introduced him to cinema as a way of coping.
“My dad, who had never cried before in his life — not during her illness, not when she died, not at her impossibly sad funeral — would let me stay up late and watch films,” Burns said, “He’d take me out to the Cinema Guild in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and we’d look at films together of all sorts. 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 thought nothing in his life had provided him a safe haven for emotional expression except film.”
Burns went on to say that Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” was likely his favorite film and described it as “the fastest three-plus hours that I’ve ever experienced in my life.” He followed this selection up with a more lighthearted romp, Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be.”
“It was made in the middle of the Second World War, and yet it has this enduring idea that art, and particularly comedy, the hitting the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the same time, can help to mitigate and reconcile and transcend this particular horror,” he said.
After expressing his early hope that he might be the next Alfred Hitchcock, Burns put forth his admiration for British filmmaker Steve McQueen, whose “Hunger” had a tremendous impact on him.
“I can think of no one who’s better at cinema than Steve McQueen,” he said. “I was at the Telluride Film Festival and saw the, I think, North American premiere of ‘Hunger,’ and I cannot adequately describe the effect that it had on me — the long shots, sometimes lasting 10 or 15 minutes. Just the visual things of swabbing down the urine in the corridors outside the cells as the hunger strike is going on.”
Watch Burns’ entire Criterion Closet visit below.
