Ken Burns’ newest documentary, The American Revolution, debuts Sunday

The American Revolution is a new documentary that will premiere for a two-hour episode, In Order to Be Free, on PBS at 8 pm on Sunday, November 16, with 5 subsequent episodes airing on consecutive nights through Friday, November 21. It feels like an apt time to reflect on the origins of our nation, especially as the United States approaches its 250th birthday. I can think of no better guide through this than Ken Burns, the co-director and producer of this documentary.

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Listening to Mr. Burns in interviews, it is clear that he lets his insatiable curiosity guide him in his relentless pursuit of a representation of the story of our past. At 72, Burns sounds like he is far from retiring. “I’ve been working on this for 10 years. People say, aren’t you bored? I go, are you kidding me? I’m grief stricken. The only thing that’s keeping me from sobbing is being able to talk to you and other people to say, this is a great story. You have to hear this story.”

Some would describe Mr. Burns as the preeminent documentarian of our time, especially as a chronicler of American history. While he has directed or produced more than 40 feature documentaries, covering myriad topics, the obvious companion piece for this new work is his 1990 masterpiece, The Civil War.

Those of us of a certain age remember when “event” television did not always revolve around reality shows and sports. Roots; Shogun; Holocaust; Rich Man Poor Man; these miniseries captured our attention, when water cooler talk was more than a metaphor. On September 23, 1990, for the first time a documentary, The Civil War, captured that national zeitgeist. Debuting to 13.9 million viewers on that Sunday night — with nine episodes airing over five nights — this was a television presentation that changed the way we think about documentaries.

In approaching that documentary, Burns needed to find a way to make still images come alive, as moving pictures had not yet been invented. So while the images themselves were still, he was able to bring them to life by slowly panning and zooming a camera over them to give the illusion of movement. This technique became so ubiquitous that it has its own title “The Ken Burns Effect” and is actually a tool in movie editing software, such as iMovie.

This technique has served Burns well over the years. The fact that it still works all these years later is a testament to the quality of the content that Burns continues to produce. And that is what it is really about, the content. You can hire Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and a cast of similarly respected actors to narrate a documentary, but if the letters and speeches they give voice to are unremarkable, no amount of window dressing will make them substantive. Invariably, the material that Burns and his researchers uncover more than just the feelings of the authors, it shows a richness of life that fills in the complexities of history that has been sanded down by popular culture over time.

In fact, Burns uses the contemporary actors’ voices judiciously. He understands the impact of having Tom Hanks narrate and doesn’t want to overwhelm by having him voice General Washington, realizing that utilizing him in that way would obscure other less prominent, but no less important, voices. “In fact, when Tom Hanks reads, I said to him when he came in, you’re not George Washington. Everybody will just hear everything that Washington had to say. And so we gave him 14 quotes, from 10 different people . . .” It is on these primary sources that the story of history is built. They reflect a reality that we don’t always get the chance to confront, especially in regard to the mythmaking we sometimes indulge ourselves in. And the real story is almost always more interesting than the myth.

While The Civil War and The American Revolution stand apart from Burns’ other documentaries in the scope of their subject matter, depicting the two major conflicts that shaped us as a nation, his other work is definitely not minor. Here are a few titles to explore:

Brooklyn Bridge, 1981 (his academy award nominated debut)
Baseball, 1994
Jazz, 2001
The War (World War II), 2007
The Vietnam War, 2017

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