Few filmmakers have shaped the American documentary landscape as profoundly as Ken Burns. Over the past five decades, his meticulous storytelling, anchored by archival photographs, haunting voiceovers, and an unflinching gaze at history’s complexities, has redefined how audiences engage with the past. Yet, in a rare and introspective moment, Burns recently revisited the “tragedy” of his creative origins during a visit to the Criterion Closet—a hallowed space where filmmakers and cinephiles alike explore curated selections of cinema’s most enduring works. What emerged was not just a reflection on his craft, but a poignant meditation on the paradox of art: how beauty often springs from pain, and how the seeds of a legendary career can be sown in uncertainty and loss.
The Criterion Closet: A Portal to Cinematic Memory
The Criterion Closet, a revered archive of cinematic masterpieces, has become a cultural touchstone for filmmakers to share their influences, obsessions, and formative cinematic loves. For Burns, stepping into this space was less about nostalgia and more about confronting the ghosts of his artistic upbringing. As he browsed shelves lined with classics like The Battle of Algiers and Shoah, he paused, holding a copy of Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity—a seminal Holocaust documentary that shaped his understanding of historical storytelling.
“This film taught me that history isn’t a series of facts, but a mosaic of human emotions,” Burns remarked. “But it also reminds me of how I stumbled into this work—how my beginnings were marked by a kind of tragedy I couldn’t articulate at the time.”
A Reluctant Auteur: Burns’ Humble Beginnings
Burns’ journey into filmmaking was anything but predestined. Born in Brooklyn in 1953 and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he grew up in the shadow of his father’s mental illness and eventual suicide when Burns was just 11. “Loss was my first language,” he said. “I didn’t know it then, but that grief became the undercurrent of everything I’d later create.”
His early fascination with still images began as a coping mechanism. “I’d lose myself in old photographs, imagining the stories behind them,” he recalled. This obsession led him to Hampshire College, where he studied under photographers Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes, who encouraged him to see the narrative potential in static visuals. His first film, Brooklyn Bridge (1981), was a 58-minute labor of love shot on a shoestring budget. It earned an Academy Award nomination, but Burns dismisses it as “a fluke of youthful ignorance.”
“I had no idea what I was doing,” he admitted. “I was just trying to make sense of my own loneliness. That’s the tragedy—thinking you’re faking it until you realize the faking is the craft.”
The Weight of History: Finding Voice in Silence
Burns’ films are renowned for their ability to breathe life into historical figures, but his early struggles were defined by a search for authenticity. In the Criterion Closet, he lingered over Kurosawa’s Rashomon, a film that interrogates the subjectivity of truth. “Kurosawa understood that history isn’t monolithic,” Burns noted. “But as a young filmmaker, I was terrified of getting it wrong. What if my voice wasn’t worthy of the stories I wanted to tell?”
This anxiety reached its peak during the making of The Civil War (1990), his groundbreaking nine-part series. Critics initially dismissed the project as quixotic; funding was scarce, and Burns often worked 20-hour days. “I’d stare at Mathew Brady’s photographs of battlefields and feel the weight of every soldier’s ghost,” he said. The series’ success—it drew 40 million viewers and transformed PBS into a cultural force—was overshadowed for Burns by a lingering sense of inadequacy.
“I remember sitting in an empty editing room after we finished, thinking, ‘Is this all there is?’ The tragedy isn’t failure—it’s realizing that success doesn’t quiet the doubts.”
Mentors and Mortality: The Shadows That Shaped Him
Burns’ reflections in the Closet kept circling back to the mentors who guided him—and the mortality that haunted them. He singled out Harlan County, USA (1976), Barbara Kopple’s gritty portrait of a coal miners’ strike, as a turning point. “Barbara showed me that documentaries aren’t about answers—they’re about questions. But she also taught me that this work costs you. It seeps into your bones.”
He recounted a formative moment with his mentor, filmmaker Ric Burns (no relation), who once told him, “The stories we tell are the ones that refuse to let us go.” For Ken, this became a double-edged sword. His 1994 film Baseball, a sprawling 18-hour ode to America’s pastime, was born from his desire to connect with his estranged father, a once-aspiring pitcher whose dreams dissolved into mental illness. “I kept thinking, ‘If I could just understand this game, I’d understand him.’ But some doors stay locked.”
The ‘Tragedy’ of Creation: Art as a Mirror of Scars
When pressed to define the “tragedy” he associates with his roots, Burns turned to the films that shaped him. He pulled down Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), a neorealist masterpiece about a father and son navigating postwar poverty. “This film is perfect,” he said. “But perfection is a lie. The beauty is in the cracks—the moments where the filmmaker’s vulnerability bleeds through.”
For Burns, those cracks are personal. His 2012 film The Central Park Five, which examines the wrongful conviction of five Black and Latino teenagers, reopened wounds from his own adolescence. “I grew up in the ’60s, thinking I was progressive, but I was complicit in systemic silence. Making that film was an act of penance.”
He likened the creative process to “stitching together scars.” “Every film I’ve made has a piece of my DNA—the loss of my father, the fear of irrelevance, the guilt of survival. That’s the tragedy: You can’t separate the art from the ache.”
Legacy and Letting Go: The Paradox of Permanence
As Burns prepared to leave the Criterion Closet, he paused at the door, glancing back at the shelves. “These films outlive us all,” he said. “But what haunts me is the idea that my work might become a relic—a time capsule of my limitations.”
His latest project, a documentary on the American Revolution, has forced him to confront this fear head-on. “How do you tell a story about rebellion when you’re aware of your own complacency?” he wondered aloud. “Maybe that’s the point. The tragedy isn’t in the flaws—it’s in pretending they don’t exist.”
Epilogue: The Alchemy of Pain
Ken Burns’ journey—from a grief-stricken boy clutching a camera to a bard of American history—is a testament to the alchemy of turning pain into purpose. In the Criterion Closet, surrounded by the ghosts of cinema’s past, he offered a parting thought: “The films that last aren’t the ones that hide their scars. They’re the ones that make you feel the wound—and the fragile hope of healing.”
For Burns, the tragedy of his filmmaking roots isn’t a burden to outrun, but a compass. It guides him, still, toward the stories that hurt, the questions that unsettle, and the imperfect beauty of a craft built on listening—to history, to others, and to the quiet echoes of a boy who found salvation in a single, unwavering truth: The light always comes from the darkroom.