Ken Burns has made a career out of creating gripping cinematic portraits of American history. Whether he is making movies about baseball, Mark Twain, or the Civil War, his work is meticulous, accessible, intelligent, engaging, and often enormously moving. Though his work on the past focusses heavily on still photographs, he manages to make history move and breathe with his use of sound, his gorgeous landscape photography, his dynamic manner of filming images, and his use of eloquent talking heads -- the most charismatic of which, most will agree, is The Civil War's endlessly watchable southern historian, Shelby Foote.
This Sunday, Burns' most recent project premieres on PBS. A fifteen-hour, seven-part documentary about World War II, The War promises to be another vital addition to Burns' growing body of cinematic Americana. Read about it, and learn more about Burns, who describes his latest work as an "epic poem," here.