Ken Burns
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Ken Burns Finds New Audience with “Past Is Present” App
“There is no such thing as history,” Ken Burns says at the top of this short promotional clip for his new iPad app, Past Is Present. It’s more like a series of recurrences: “not cycles, but patterns.” To help the average eye better examine such connections, Don MacKinnon conceived, directed and produced this interactive exploration of common threads in Burns’ work. Clips from the likes of The Civil War and Baseball are grouped by both theme and time period, allowing its user to make scenes “20 years apart, suddenly interrelate in a new way.” Burns offers up interviews and his own clip assemblies, determined by […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Feb 10, 2014 -
Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s The Central Park Five at TIFF
It was horrific. One April night in 1989, a woman was jogging through New York’s Central Park when she was beaten and savagely raped. She lost 75% of her bodily fluids, lay in a coma for days and her face was pulverized so badly that friends identified her by a ring on her finger. Police picked up five black and Latino teenagers, secured confessions and launched one of the ugliest trials in New York’s history. Newspaper pundits and Donald Trump called for the death penalty. Even the African-American community turned their backs on the teens. After all, they were savages. […]
by Allan Tong on Sep 14, 2012
