Ken Burns Unearthed an Old Print of His First Film, ‘Working in Rural New England,’ and Is Streaming It Via PBS
25.07.2023 - 16:13
/ variety.com
Addie Morfoot Contributor On the brink of turning 70, Ken Burns will release his very first film, “Working in Rural New England,” which he made as an undergraduate at Hampshire College. The 28-minute docu will be released July 25 on UNUM, Burn’s American history digital platform on PBS. About Old Sturbridge Village, an outdoor history museum in Massachusetts that re-creates life in rural New England from 1790 through the 1830s, the docu was commissioned by the museum in 1973.
The film served as Burns’ senior thesis at the liberal arts college in nearby Amherst, Mass. Accompanying the doc on UNUM is a pre-recorded conversation between Burns and New York Times literary critic A.O. Scott.
“It in some ways does not look like a Ken Burns film,” Scott says during his conversation with Burns. “It’s moving images in the present day, in color. So, it doesn’t immediately say to a modern viewer, a film by Ken Burns.
There are no pans across black-and-white photographs. But as soon as I got into the first few minutes (of the film) I thought well this is completely a Ken Burns movie. These actors for Sturbridge Village are in a sense doing the work that the still photographs would do in your later films.
They are carrying you into and putting into motion a historical reality.” The doc, shot on 16mm ektachrome, was shown at Old Sturbridge Village’s visitor center for school groups and general visitors on a rotating basis through the ‘70s and part of the ‘80s. “I was lamenting that the film didn’t really exist,” Burns says. “They only had a scratched-up copy that they had shown by a projector.
Then, a few years ago, I found a release print that hadn’t been projected. So, we scanned it and basically recreated it. It doesn’t look
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