![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/85a51ec41cfd76f8cfa142994161d44e88-250617-WSJ-KenBurns-roll5-strip2-1.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Ken Burns and I have just met at Bowling Green, the tiny park at the bottom tip of Manhattan, when he brings up \u201call the lives that have been through here.\u201d He doesn\u2019t mean the tourists lined up to take selfies with the bronze bull, or anyone in the last century or even the one before that. Although he lives in New Hampshire, he\u2019s an on-and-off New Yorker with a place in Soho and a daughter in Brooklyn, and he\u2019s walked downtown this morning to discuss his docuseries The American Revolution, co-directed with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, 12 hours of lofty ideals and bloody bayoneting and the contradictions underlying \u201call men are created equal.\u201d (It will premiere on PBS on November 16.) Here, in the middle of British New York, and before that Dutch New Amsterdam, is where muskets were fired and the empire had its very last outpost in 1783, after the war ended. I had been hesitant to ask Burns if he felt the presence of all those ghosts as we walked the streets. It might sound a little woo-woo, I thought. Turns out I did not need to be concerned. Before I get my first question out, he zings right into a short travelogue about what (or should we say who) he sees when he walks around his own neighborhood.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs you go west across the streets, you get Lafayette, a general in the Revolutionary War, and then Crosby is the 19th-century philanthropist, and then Broadway \u2014 that doesn\u2019t count \u2014 and then Mercer, a general who is wounded and dies in the Battle of Princeton,\u201d says Burns. He\u2019s animated by his enthusiasm, talking very fast. \u201cAnd then Nathaniel Greene, probably the most important general after Washington, and then David Wooster, a major officer. Then West Broadway \u2014 doesn\u2019t count, again, though it used to be Laurens Street \u2014 and then Thompson, a general, and Sullivan, from New Hampshire, where I live, a very important general in the Battle of Long Island, the biggest of the war, but is also part of the extermination of the Indian villages in the Haudenosaunee and upstate. And then there\u2019s Varick, also a general, and then Hudson and Washington.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the high-energy spoken equivalent of a 30-second pan across a 19th-century map, and he\u2019s gone barely halfway across town. I half expect a solo minor-key violin to kick in.<\/p>\n
That manner of activation of a still image, now widely known as the Ken Burns Effect (thanks partly to Apple iMovie, where it\u2019s a menu option), is a powerful way of retaining a viewer\u2019s gaze for much longer than a static shot otherwise might. It\u2019s fundamental to the experience of Burns\u2019s films: sustained scholarly commentary, the gradual accretion of fine detail, and the intimately mic\u2019d narration incorporating primary sources (especially diaries and letters, read by the likes of Meryl Streep), all in the service of the bigger story, of ideals crafted and crushed, republics born and torn apart, leaders who are perceived as marble statues but in real life are flawed and complex.<\/p>\n
He says that he looked up one day as his team was finishing the Vietnam documentary that came out in 2017 and said, \u201cOkay, we\u2019re doing the Revolution next.\u201d Donald Trump was coming to power, so thoughts of imperial rule were perhaps on Burns\u2019s mind. Even though he\u2019s already covered the Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam, the Revolution felt like a particularly huge undertaking, and \u201cI knew I needed to be farther along in my professional life to have the chops.\u201d (He\u2019s 72 now.) It has been cooking for a decade, all while he\u2019s been completing at least eight other projects, including Benjamin Franklin and The U.S. and the Holocaust. It was, he says, dumb luck that The American Revolution came together just in time to mark (a) the 250th birthday of the nation and (b) the swerve to autocracy cloaked in red, white, and blue that we\u2019re living through.<\/p>\n
Unlike most of his other films, this one required some inventive solutions to the historical documentarian\u2019s core problem, which is that the further you go back in time, the scantier the available material becomes. For The Roosevelts and World War II, Burns had newsreels; for The Civil War, he could employ the photographs of Mathew Brady along with illustrations from the likes of Harper\u2019s Weekly. This time around, there are only so many paintings and printed broadsides to send the camera gliding across. That was also true during Burns\u2019s Benjamin Franklin project, but \u201cthat was with a central figure who had his portrait painted many times,\u201d he says. \u201cThis story introduces us to literally scores and scores of people who didn\u2019t, who then have to be brought alive.\u201d Among other things, he uses finely rendered watercolors of the battle scenes, some of which existed before the film and others that his team commissioned.<\/p>\n
There are also reenactors in costume, which is a little unexpected. Many documentarians are disdainful of such performances, and Burns avoided working with them on The Civil War. \u201cThey kind of had, for me, a cartoony thing,\u201d he recalls. This time was different, partly because \u201cyou realize how deadly serious they take it.\u201d (It helps that, although there is plenty of racism baked into the story of the American Revolution, there isn\u2019t a lost-cause mythos. Very few Americans pine for the days under the Crown.) \u201cSo I said, we\u2019re going to follow reenactors and shoot them impressionistically. And in many points, some of our visual solutions are because they didn\u2019t want our cameras anywhere near them. We would say, \u2018We can fly a drone.\u2019 And they go, \u2018Yeah, but not low. No, not that low.\u2019\u201d Many of those scenes, as a result, are near-abstractions that still tell a pivotal part of the story. A brief shot of a Black-skinned hand on a gun reminds viewers that thousands of fighting men, both Tory and rebel, had been or were enslaved. An arresting and beautiful overhead shot of a line of soldiers advancing unevenly across the emerald grass and brown dust of a field in New Jersey frames the first episode\u2019s title.<\/p>\n
![\"High](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/9eaf5930b346ad43c30fb9d0e1c5e94644-AMREV-E01-tc-01093117.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n High above a New Jersey battle site, via drone.
\n Photo: Courtesy of American Revolution Film Project\/Florentine Films\n <\/p>\n
So much of what happened here in New York City is seen mostly in maps and\u00a0watercolors. George Washington\u2019s retreat from Brooklyn after the Battle of Long Island, which almost throttled the Revolution in its cradle \u2014 \u201cafter a gigantic tactical error,\u201d Burns explains \u2014 crossed the spot where we are standing in lower Manhattan. But not everything has been paved over. He gestures to the ironwork around Bowling Green, where, he points out, there once stood a statue of King George III. \u201cEarly in the resistance,\u201d he says, \u201cthe colonists were getting so upset that the British put a fence around the statue. It didn\u2019t stop some patriots from shooting him through the cheek.\u201d And then, in 1776, came the revolt: After the newly signed Declaration of Independence was read out to Washington\u2019s troops, the rebels \u201cpulled the statue down.\u201d It broke into shards, most of which soon went up to a foundry in Connecticut to be recast into bullets to be fired back at the British. One magazine of the day suggested that the ammunition would \u201cassimilate with the brains of our infatuated adversaries.\u201d Burns, off the top of his head, tells me that the statue was turned into \u201c42,088 bullets.\u201d That scene (and that number), along with thousands of other such details, makes its way into The American Revolution.<\/p>\n
A related point comes up a couple of times in our conversation: the desire to avoid Revolutionary War kitsch. The last thing you want in a film like this, as Burns puts it, is \u201cthe kind of romantic, encrusted-with-the-barnacles-of-sentimentality story\u201d a lot of us recall from the schoolroom, of Betsy Ross\u2019s stitchery and the British generals\u2019 haplessness and Washington\u2019s I cannot tell a lie. \u201cBut you can get rid of the cherry tree and the wooden teeth and a lot of other mythologies and replace it with Washington\u2019s own words \u2014 that gives him a gravitas, and we have an appreciation for his ability to move ordinary people to fight in the dead of night, to be able to pick subordinate talent without fear of being overwhelmed by their intellect,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Our talk of the first president eventually pivots to the actions of the current one. Burns, after all, is one of the success stories of public broadcasting, in the pantheon with Bill Moyers, Julia Child, and Big Bird. After 30 years\u2019 worth of attempts to defund PBS, the Trump administration and its congressional allies have finally managed to carry it off, effectively dismantling the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The National Endowment for the Humanities, which has backed many of Burns\u2019s films, is likewise under threat. Without their grants in his early years, \u201cwe wouldn\u2019t have been able to make it.\u201d (As it happens, 30 years ago, when PBS funding was under a previous existential threat after the Gingrich Congress swept in, I interviewed Child about this very subject, and she offered a prescient and similar reading. \u201cThis new group of people seems to want to dismantle everything that\u2019s taken so long to build up,\u201d she told me in that singular voice. \u201cWhat\u2019s so deadly liberal and horrible about teaching people drama and singing? The thing is, if you\u2019re far off in North Dakota \u2014 saying it\u2019s elitist is a very elitist thing itself, saying that only the rich can enjoy theater. It should be available to everybody!\u201d)<\/p>\n
Burns will be able to continue working, of course, owing to his long-standing reputation \u2014 \u201cWe\u2019ll survive; PBS will survive\u201d \u2014 but even he will feel these cuts. The American Revolution was only partially backed by corporate and independent donors. Apart from one single-sponsor project 40 years ago, \u201cI\u2019m having a hard time thinking of any film that doesn\u2019t have CPB money in it. I had $4 million in authorized and appropriated funding for a project, LBJ and the Great Society \u2014 gone,\u201d he says. Like Child, he\u2019s most concerned about the loss to communities where PBS is one of the only good media sources around. \u201cThey\u2019ll become news deserts, essentially. It\u2019s so sad because of the damage it will do in Alaska, the Dakotas, eastern Tennessee \u2014 communities in which PBS isn\u2019t just children\u2019s and prime time, but it\u2019s continuing education, warning systems, homeland-security stuff,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/dda2479d69e7ec53114c421b474a552d3e-BTS0180-230509-Colonial-Williamsburg--VA.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/afcffb446f18c3d111aed13a7a6f15bac8-BTS0342-240616-Monmouth-Battlefield-Stat.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Shooting at Colonial Williamsburg and on a long-ago battlefield. Photo: David Schmidt; Edgardo Gonzalez.\n <\/p>\n
\n Shooting at Colonial Williamsburg and on a long-ago battlefield. Photo: David Schmidt; Edgardo Gonzalez.\n <\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/764e9e038aff79fc86eeab0823b6e0d070-BTS0360-credit-Mike-Doyle.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/d07cf44673df62d9b7ef12655957cf8914-BTS0165-230305-Western-PA-Graham-Deneen.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n The use of reenactors was an unusual choice for Burns: \u201cYou realize how deadly serious they take it.\u201d Photo: Mike Doyle; Graham Deneen.\n <\/p>\n
\n The use of reenactors was an unusual choice for Burns: \u201cYou realize how deadly serious they take it.\u201d Photo: Mike Doyle; Graham Deneen.\n <\/p>\n
The right-wing argument has been that there are far more outlets available to a young filmmaker today than there were when Burns shot Brooklyn Bridge, his first feature, in 1981. Perhaps so, but he has seen the business from the inside, and he knows what streaming and cable outlets do and do not offer. The American Revolution \u201ctook ten and a half years to make and cost 30 million bucks. I spent ten of those ten and a half years raising the 30 million bucks. At that point in my professional life, I could have gone to a streaming service or to premium cable and gotten the $30 million probably in one afternoon, in a pitch. But they would not have given me ten and a half years, and there would\u2019ve been suits at every level, writing notes and whatever. And that\u2019s the difference. These are all director\u2019s cuts, and they all have the ability to breathe,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
![\"Burns](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/9a6bd2a2f84964a43286b12d3e634677fc-BTS0662-240618-Walpole--NH-Loren-Howard.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Burns (lower right) and his team at work on The American Revolution.
\n Photo: Loren Howard\n <\/p>\n
We\u2019ve been walking up Broadway from Bowling Green as we talk, and now we\u2019re in Trinity Church\u2019s yard, where we pause in front of the tomb of Alexander Hamilton. You don\u2019t talk about him too much in the new series, I remark. \u201cNo, we didn\u2019t \u2014 he shows up seven or eight times, at really particular moments. But he is indelibly marked by one of the greatest cultural phenomena of this century,\u201d Burns says. He smiles at the thought of Hamilton \u2014 as Burnsian a piece of musical theater as one could ever imagine \u2014 and we look down at Eliza\u2019s grave marker, next to her husband\u2019s: \u201cMy youngest is at school in Connecticut, and, you know, she can recite the entire thing.\u201d He pulls out his phone. \u201cI have to take a picture for her. Or, actually, a movie.\u201d Whereupon he turns his phone to \u201clandscape orientation,\u201d and with a steady hand frames Alexander Hamilton\u2019s name and epitaph, hangs on it for a moment, and then \u2014 I am not making this up \u2014 does a slow Burnsian pan down to Eliza\u2019s. He presses \u201csend.\u201d A moment later, a heart emoji pops up, and his daughter FaceTimes for a moment to thank him.<\/p>\n
We turn south along Wall Street as we near the end of our conversation \u2014 passing Federal Hall, the site where Washington was inaugurated and Congress met for the first time, and walking down toward Fraunces Tavern, where Washington bid a teary good-bye to his officers \u2014 and Burns returns to the challenge of getting into the heads of those ancient figures. \u201cHow could they possibly feel? Plus, what\u2019s with the buckles on the shoes and the hose and the waistcoats and the powdered wigs? So clearly they\u2019re not like us. Well, of course, they\u2019re exactly like us,\u201d he says. And then he starts ticking off turning points in the film, all of which sound curiously contemporary: \u201cThere\u2019s a failed invasion of Canada.\u201d His enthusiasm kicks in and he starts talking even faster. \u201cThere\u2019s a continent-wide pandemic that kills more people than the Revolution did. Come on! There\u2019s arguments about inoculation. Come on! You can\u2019t make this stuff up.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter<\/p>\n
A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines.<\/p>\n
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n