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A renowned documentary filmmaker on the American Revolution
by Rodney Ho / © 2025, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Ken Burns revolutionized the way historical documentaries were made before the internet was even a common term, so it’s hardly a shock he’d eventually tackle America’s fight for independence in his latest opus The American Revolution.
“What is so spectacularly inspirational is the men, the women, the Native Americans, the European ancestors and the Blacks who were kidnapped who are all central to the creation of this story,” Burns said [at The Carter Center, Atlanta, Georgia]. “The heart of the story is how for the first time in human history, people are citizens and not subjects. We are asking human beings to take on this incredibly difficult responsibility. It still is today, more than ever.”
A thorough exploration
As an independent filmmaker, Burns has been exploring everything from baseball and the [American] Civil War to the national parks and jazz. He remains determined to give viewers thoughtful, nuanced, in-depth documentaries. His World War II doc The War took six years to complete. The Vietnam War took 10 1/2 years. American Revolution ate up another decade. (Burns works on multiple projects at once.)
Christopher Brown, a Columbia University history professor who spent several years helping Burns on The American Revolution, said a truncated timetable would not allow for “new thought or [to] discover a new voice. … I’ve been teaching the American Revolution my entire career, yet I learned so much from this documentary I did not know. That is scholarship.”
Filming a ‘good story’
Burns used paintings, close-ups of diary entries, documents, letters and “more maps than all previous documentaries combined,” he noted. And he spent hundreds of hours filming reenactments on battlefields from New Hampshire to Georgia.
The most intriguing figure in the doc, Burns said, was America’s first president.
“He is deeply flawed,” Burns said. “He’s rash. He risked his life on the battlefield. He was spectacularly heroic in sometimes foolish ways. He makes two glaring errors in two big significant battles, yet he remains the most important person in the story.”
Burns noted that “Good stories allow for complexity.”
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