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Where to Stream 11 Essential Ken Burns Documentaries

by Judy Berman

Sep. 12, 2017UPDATED Oct. 24, 2017

Clockwise from top left: “Jazz,” “The National Parks,” “America” and “The Civil War.”via PBS

Ken Burns is going to war again. On Sept. 17, he and his frequent collaborator Lynn Novick will return to PBS with “The Vietnam War,” a 10-part, 18-hour documentary exploring the conflict. In anticipation, we’ve put together a guide to the best of his documentaries available online, whether you want something relatively short by Burns standards (under two hours), luxuriously long (eight hours or more) or somewhere in between.

I Want Snack-Size Burns The Brooklyn Bridge in 1932.Keystone, via Getty Images
‘Brooklyn Bridge’ (58 minutes)
Where to watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime, Kanopy or Sundance Now.

Burns’s Academy Award-nominated first feature, from 1981, pays tribute to the Brooklyn Bridge — a majestic feat of engineering that the director frames as a symbol of the indomitable American spirit. While making this documentary, Burns pioneered what came to be known as the Ken Burns effect, whereby the camera slowly pans across or zooms into a still photo. When a viewer at an early screening asked him where he’d found all the footage of the bridge’s construction, he was confused until he realized that those dynamic shots had given her the impression that his archival stills were actually moving images. (The film is often packaged today as the first installment of Burns’s “America” collection.) A courtroom artist’s rendering of the first Central Park jogger trial.Christine Cornell, via PBS
‘The Central Park Five’ (1 hour 58 minutes)
Where to watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime or Kanopy; rent it on Google Play, iTunes or YouTube.

On April 19, 1989, a white, female jogger named Trisha Meili was beaten and raped in Manhattan’s Central Park. As she lay comatose, police arrested five black and Hispanic teenagers in connection with the crime. Despite DNA evidence implicating a different attacker, juries convicted all five of them. Over a decade later, another man confessed to the crime, the convictions were vacated, and the Central Park Five (as the young men had become known) sued the City of New York. Burns shares a directing credit with his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon, on this documentary tracing the men’s prolonged struggle for justice. Through interviews with historians, journalists and the accused, the filmmakers reveal the ways in which structural racism all but destroyed five lives. Martha and Waitstill Sharp departing New York for Europe in 1939, as seen in a photographic still used in “Defying the Nazis.”Sharp Family Archives
‘Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War’ (1 hour 19 minutes)
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix or Kanopy.

Burns frequently profiles historic figures, but “Defying the Nazis” tells the story of two American heroes who never became household names. Years before the United States entered World War II, a Unitarian minister named Waitstill Sharp and his wife, Martha, traveled from their Massachusetts home to Czechoslovakia, where they helped Jews and members of other vulnerable groups escape the Nazis. Burns collaborated with the Sharps’ grandson Artemis Joukowsky to recount their courageous mission in a film that features interviews with people who knew the couple, along with letters read by Tom Hanks and Marina Goldman.

I Want Entree-Sized Burns Agents pouring liquor into a New York City sewer, circa 1921.Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
‘Prohibition’ (5 hours 8 minutes)
Where to watch: Stream it on Netflix and Kanopy.

Nearly a century removed from the ratification of the 18th Amendment, which outlawed the manufacture and sale of liquor in the United States, Prohibition may seem today like an alien concept. But as Burns and Novick illustrate in the first episode of their three-part documentary about the subject, temperance activists were responding to a nationwide drinking problem that many believed had reached catastrophic proportions. This account of the reformers’ ill-fated efforts aired concurrently with HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” and fans of that show will recognize plenty of the historical figures in Parts 2 and 3 of the documentary, which cover the Prohibition Era proper, its ugly side effects and the slow path to repeal. A ranch in Boise City, Okla., on April 15, 1935.Associated Press
‘The Dust Bowl’ (3 hours 43 minutes)
Where to watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime or Kanopy.

Natural, social and political history come together in this two-part account of the dust storms that devastated the American prairie during the Great Depression. Burns digs into the archives, yielding terrifying windstorm footage and striking photos by Dorothea Lange, but it’s his interviews with 26 survivors that drive home the horrors of a tragedy that could have been avoided. Avoiding polemic, Burns subtly builds a case for conservation and government aid to disaster-stricken communities. Jackie Robinson, circa 1945.Hulton Archive, via PBS
‘Jackie Robinson’ (3 hours 46 minutes)
Where to watch: Stream it on Kanopy.

Burns told the story of a national pastime in his 1994 mini-series “Baseball,” a career highlight that isn’t currently available to stream. Fortunately, he revisited the subject in this two-part profile of the athlete who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier. But this isn’t only a sports doc. “Jackie Robinson” follows its subject off the field, illuminating his life as a civil-rights activist, writer and family man. Jamie Foxx gives voice to Robinson’s writings, and Robinson’s widow joins a raft of other distinguished interview subjects, including Barack and Michelle Obama.

Give Me the Full Tasting Menu! Confederate soldiers, as seen in a photographic still featured in Ken Burns’s '‘Civil War’' series.Library of Congress, via PBS
‘The Civil War’ (11 hours 17 minutes)

Burns had already earned two Oscar nominations by the time “The Civil War” debuted, but this documentary series made him an American institution. His first multipart epic, it took Burns five years to make, as he and his research team carefully stitched together archival photos, written accounts, new footage of battle sites and interviews with experts, crafting the definitive TV account of a conflict he has called “the central event in American history.” When PBS aired all 11-plus hours of it in 1990, more than 40 million viewers were watching — and the documentary’s liveliest talking head, the historian Shelby Foote, became an overnight celebrity. American soldiers on D-Day landing on the beaches of Normandy, in France, as seen in a photographic still used in Ken Burns’s “The War.”National Archives and Records Administration, via PBS
‘The War’ (14 hours 27 minutes)

This World War II mini-series from Burns and Novick is as intimate as “The Civil War” is sweeping, a more than 14-hour account of a global conflict filtered through the experiences of four American towns. Instead of relying on experts, the filmmakers spotlight regular American people who actually lived through the war. Veterans from Waterbury, Conn.; Sacramento, Calif.; Mobile, Ala.; and the small farming community of Luverne, Minn., lend personal perspectives to pivotal battles, while interviews with the neighbors they left behind paint a vivid picture of life on the home front. Louis Armstrong, circa 1955.Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
‘Jazz’ (12 hours 30 minutes)
Where to watch: Stream it on Amazon Prime.

Connoisseurs of jazz are an exacting bunch, so it’s no surprise that Burns’s history of that quintessentially American art form failed to impress some of its most distinguished fans. But for curious neophytes, “Jazz” is an accessible introduction to a world that can otherwise seem impenetrable, featuring profiles of foundational figures like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, framed by commentary from experts including Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch. This mini-series doubles as a chronicle of race relations in the 20th century, using the experiences of black jazz icons to investigate minstrel shows, segregation and the Civil Rights Movement. The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.Richard Drew/Associated Press
‘America’ (9 hours 13 minutes)

Any collection of Ken Burns documentaries could be titled “America,” but this particular release comprises his seven pre-”Baseball” features. Subjects range from national symbols (“Brooklyn Bridge,” “Statue of Liberty”) and historic figures (“Huey Long,” “Thomas Hart Benton”) to institutions (“The Congress”) and groups (“The Shakers”). The most purely pleasurable film in the anthology is “Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio,” which uses archival video, audio and ruminative interviews to convey how magical the radio felt to early listeners. The Old Faithful geyser erupting in Yellowstone National Park, in Wyoming.Craig Mellish/Florentine Films — WETA, via PBS
‘The National Parks: America’s Best Idea’ (11 hours 39 minutes)

If you’re looking for visuals that are more stunning than those offered by the more typical Ken Burns documentary, “The National Parks” may be your best bet. Alongside the director’s typical black-and-white photos and talking heads, this lyrical paean to conservation and natural heritage features six years’ worth of beautifully shot footage from parks across the United States, providing both a comprehensive history of the parks and a full-throated defense of their place in American life.
