Copyright The Boston Globe
That’s when Burns noticed an oil painting on the wall. Beautiful, he thought. It was a landscape, depicting farms and homes on one side and a bright red factory on the other, as if an agrarian society were transforming into an industrial one. “It was,” Burns recalls, “the perfect way to end the film.” For more than 30 seconds, the young filmmaker slowly panned his camera across the painting. It was the prototype of what would become the director’s signature move — today famous as the “Ken Burns effect,” a technique to bring a sense of motion to a still image, which Burns did not invent but is now widely associated with his work. Apple even built a “Ken Burns effect” command into its iMovie app. Burns used the pan and zoom effect on historic photographs to thumping acclaim in his 1990 documentary masterpiece, The Civil War, and deploys it with paintings in his newest film, The American Revolution. The six-part series is scheduled to premiere on PBS on November 16. The documentary about America’s origin, directed and produced by Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, is debuting amid a loud and bitter national argument about what America is, and who it is for. Burns, 72, has worked on The American Revolution for 10 years. Still, it is hard not to see — or at least to infer — a reflection of the current era in American politics. The series highlights a spine-tingling quote from Thomas Paine, about how the American Revolution proved that the “powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it.” It’s a sentiment that would be at home on a handmade poster at a No Kings political rally. “I decided to do this when the ink was still drying on our Vietnam film in December of 2015,” Burns says. “Barack Obama had 13 months to go in his presidency. We’ve gone through a lot of stuff [since then], but our discipline is to not play to whatever’s going on, not to put a neon sign saying, Isn’t this so like today? “Things will resonate, and we don’t care; we just know that human nature doesn’t change,” he says. During the Revolutionary period, “Is there a failed invasion of Canada in which we want to make it the 14th state? Yes. Is there a continent-wide pandemic that kills thousands and thousands of people? Yes. Is there a total eclipse? Yes — and 100 other things that rhyme. “The Bible says there’s nothing new under the sun, which means human nature doesn’t change,” Burns says. “What’s nice about this subject” — the Revolution — “is that we have the one example when there is something new under the sun, and that’s why I believe that this is the most important event since the birth of Christ.” The American Revolution? The most important event in two millennia? “Yeah, absolutely,” he says. “Because everybody up to that point has been a subject, and for the first time, there’s something new called citizens.” Since that first Ken Burns film, Working in Rural New England (1975), which for years was shown to visitors at Old Sturbridge Village, Burns has told deeply-reported American stories in his movies, on topics such as the Brooklyn Bridge (1981), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The National Parks (2009), and The Vietnam War (2017). He is the preeminent television documentarian of American life, culture, and history. For certain history junkies and/or nerds, he’s more than that — he’s like Paul and Ringo put together. “This is like the Dalai Lama coming,” gushed history teacher Peri Crowley, after Burns presented movie clips to a student assembly at the Stillwater Central School District in New York in September. Crowley said she used Burns’s Civil War series in her classes for years. The American Revolution, which the Globe previewed, is as big and ambitious as any Burns series, and includes voices from a cast of mega stars, such as Tom Hanks, Claire Danes, Josh Brolin, Adam Arkin, Liev Schreiber, Paul Giamatti, Edward Norton, Jeff Daniels, Samuel L. Jackson, Meryl Streep, Wendell Pierce, and Morgan Freeman. It is narrated by Peter Coyote, who is familiar from many Burns films, including The National Parks, Country Music, and The Vietnam War. There are some neat symmetries between Burns’s first film at Old Sturbridge Village and his latest project, which are exactly 50 years apart. “It’s funny that The Revolution harks back to that [first film], because we’re doing a lot of reenactments,” Burns says. The haunting photographs that were so compelling in Burns’s Civil War don’t exist for the Revolution. He overcame this technical challenge with the liberal use of Revolutionary War reenactors — people obsessed with historical accuracy who do this sort of thing on the weekends. “We have 500 hours of material shot over years and years, various reenactors, not with the idea, ‘Can you reenact the Battle of Monmouth Court House?’ It’s just filming them in French uniforms, in American uniforms, in Continental, in militia, in Hessian, in British — whatever they do.” These scenes of marching and musket firing are shot in an impressionistic style, without clearly showing faces. The movie deploys the reenactors almost like illustrations. “Just like at Old Sturbridge, we didn’t ask them to do a specific thing, we asked them to come and do the thing that they did, and we filmed them doing it.” (Side note: The oil painting that inspired Burns’s use of the Ken Burns effect is no longer at Old Sturbridge Village, as an exhausting and sweaty Globe search this summer of every public structure in the place discovered. In fact, the painting hasn’t been there for 40 years. Some further digging revealed the painting to be The Waltham Mills of the Boston Manufacturing Company [c. 1825] by Elijah Smith Jr., a not-particularly-famous artist. The painting apparently was exhibited at Old Sturbridge Village from 1971-1985, according to a note in the files of the painting’s current owner, Gore Place, a museum and historic estate in Waltham. Gore Place acquired it around 1991, a spokesman said. The painting is displayed in the Gore mansion between two windows in a ground-floor office, with no indication — not yet — of its special place in the recent history of documentary filmmaking.) If we were to apply the Ken Burns effect to a giant aerial photograph of Southern New Hampshire, we could pan over the bald top of Mount Monadnock in Jaffrey, and then continue sliding northwest, about 30 miles, to the town of Walpole, population 3,600. We’d pass casually elegant old homes, rolling green lawns dotted with hardwood trees, and natural landscaping that doesn’t try too hard, amid the rising steeples of white clapboard churches. We’d hover over the bougie grocery store in downtown Walpole, and then zoom in on a long white house done in Gothic Revival style, with a fieldstone foundation, black shutters, white columns, and pointed arches above the windows. This is Burns’s editing studio, which he bought in 1991. He also owns a home in Walpole a few minutes away by car. In the studio’s driveway is Ken Burns, having just arrived himself, with no staff, and dressed in a loose T-shirt on a warm and sunny day this past summer. With him is his dog, Chester, a fit, 10-year-old goldendoodle who makes friends easily. Burns says he has several daily habits: The New York Times crossword, speaking to each of his four daughters, and a 3-mile walk with Chester over local roads and trails. For 46 years, the filmmaker has lived and worked in Walpole. The inside of the sprawling studio, a former doctor’s office, according to Burns, is an incongruous mix of vintage and cutting edge: old plank floors, creaky staircases, and mounds of modern computer equipment connected to giant curving video screens. The place looks as if a family of 19th-century farmers found a time machine, and used it to rob a Best Buy. The studio was quiet on this day in July. Work on The American Revolution was done and most of Burns’s crew was away. Burns would soon be heading back onto the road for a fall tour. His task was to promote a documentary about America’s origin story to a country that feels like it is splitting at the seams, to people dug deep into partisan trenches, unable to agree even on basic facts. “One of my colleagues pointed out to me about five years ago this statement by Richard Powers, the novelist,” says Burns, who often quotes smart things from other writers. He cites a line from Powers’s The Overstory: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” “So we set out not trying to change anybody’s point of view, but realizing that whatever transformation takes place in people, it comes from this benevolent Trojan horse” — the story. When Burns released his Vietnam documentary in 2017, he prepared for blowback over his team’s exhaustive dive into one of the most politically contentious events in American history. “But it was unbelievable that we didn’t have these controversies that we thought we’d have to answer,” he says, “because a good story neutralizes that dialectical preoccupation, the left or right, red state or blue state, young or old, rich or poor, gay or straight.” Ken Burns’s origin story is inextricable from his mother’s illness — Lyla Burns was a cancer patient throughout Ken’s childhood. He grew up in Delaware, where his father, Robert, taught at the University of Delaware, and then in Ann Arbor, Michigan, when his father took a job at the University of Michigan. “I had no childhood,” Burns says. “I spent it watching somebody die. I mean, I did stuff, I played baseball. I had, you know, crushes on people, but it was all with this sword of Damocles hanging over everything.” His mother died in 1965, when Burns was 11. “Sixty years is way too long to be without a mother,” Burns says, quietly. His widowed father enforced a strict curfew on Burns and his brother, but would sometimes forgive the curfew for movies. “Even on a school night, he and I might stay up till 1 a.m. watching an old movie, or he’d take me out to the cinema guild, or to this first run house, or the Ann Arbor Film Festival.” One night, they were at home watching an old film, Odd Man Out, a moody, 1947 crime drama directed by Carol Reed. It stars James Mason as an Irish nationalist leader who is wounded in Belfast during a botched robbery, and spends much of the film staggering from one troubling encounter to another while hiding from the police. Not to spoil the ending, but it’s a tragedy. “And my dad started crying,” Burns recalls. “I’d never seen him cry. Hadn’t cried when my mom was sick, hadn’t cried when she died, didn’t cry at her impossibly sad funeral. And I just went, ‘I get it.’ Somehow, whatever cards he was dealt in his own too-short life — he died in 2001 — whatever demons he had, that film had provided a safe haven. So I remember at age 12, I just said, ‘I’m going to be a filmmaker,’ and I told him that.” Peter Coyote, narrator for The American Revolution, says he has a gift. Of course, the actor is clearly gifted with a richly textured voice — his familiar, comforting timbre coming out of a telephone during an interview bestows the odd sensation of being inside a Ken Burns movie. But the gift Coyote is talking about is his wide peripheral vision. “I can spot a comma coming up six words away,” he says. “And so I’m very good at carrying the listener through dependent clauses. That’s just the way my mind works. And that’s the way Ken writes, and that’s the way his writers write.” Asked what makes Burns good at what he does, Coyote narrates a long and thoughtful answer. “So if you think about any Ken Burns movie, he’ll find little Ebenezer who left home in Lexington, Massachusetts, to join the revolutionaries, right? And he’ll pick that little guy up all through all 12 hours, this emblematic guy — and he’ll do the same with a British loyalist and the same with a wife on the march with her husband. And so all these stories get told through the personas of people, real people. And it’s a guarantee that audiences are going to identify and understand. “What makes him good is he brings up all these undiscovered facets of the gem that you thought you knew about, and he expands it into a usable and cognizable part of the human experience.” He laughs. “How’s that for a sentence?” The American Revolution is instantly recognizable as a Ken Burns film. Voice actors read the words of historical characters from letters, learned talking heads show up occasionally to provide context, and the Ken Burns effect brings life to old paintings. The impressionistic, almost dreamy footage of reenactors feels like something fresh and new, delivering the violent blasts of muskets and visually stunning drone shots of soldiers on the march. Easy-to-understand maps untangle complicated skirmishes. The film’s brilliance, though, is in the many ways it hooks your attention through the development of its characters, both famous and obscure, throughout a story every American knows at some level. Not to spoil the ending again, but we win the war. Critically, though, the characters don’t know that. “At the end of Episode Five,” Burns says, “when Charleston is defeated and an entire patriot army is captured, you go, ‘[Expletive.] The French might be in but I’m not sure we’re gonna win.’ George Washington is not sure we’re gonna win. This is scary. And so you’re scared too.... Nobody knew then how it was going to turn out. Good history filmmaking or good history writing is treating it as if it might not turn out the way you know it does. “Good history-telling is that you go into Ford’s Theatre thinking the gun might jam. And I have had hundreds of people who, in our Civil War series, have come up and said, ‘I knew how it was going to turn out but I really wish that it wouldn’t do that.’” Coyote says he didn’t appreciate until recording The American Revolution the extent to which the Colonial rebellion was, in fact, also a civil war. “I didn’t realize that mostly it was American loyalists to the king killing patriots, patriots killing loyalists, and moving back and forth and wiping each other out,” he says. Like any other viewer, Coyote can’t help see the parallels between America’s past and its present, he says. But to him, the parallels are comforting. “Things were once so bad it makes today look like a dispute at a picnic, and we came from that period of the Revolutionary War and somehow forged a nation with a Bill of Rights and a Constitution, and pushed this experiment and held the forces of autocracy at bay, basically until the present moment.” Before a public preview event for The American Revolution in New York in September, Burns admits that as the film’s release date creeps closer, he is getting nervous. “Oh, yeah, of course,” he says, sitting in the empty mezzanine of the exquisite Palace Theatre, in downtown Albany, New York. “I was at Telluride a week before last, premiering it,” Burns says. “And I woke up at four in the morning! I do public speaking a lot, and I always get a little bit nervous ahead of time, because if you don’t, are you phoning it in?” The pre-release publicity tour is, for Burns, like a detox program, to step down slowly from working on the film, rather than finishing cold turkey. “People say, ‘Well, how do you stand working on something for 10 years?’” he says. “It’s so painful to leave it! This period of talking about it is the only thing that keeps me sane. Otherwise I’d be grief stricken that the project’s over, right? “I love my job and if you started asking me questions about the Brooklyn Bridge film, which I finished in 1981, I could practically recite the whole script for you. It’s like they’re my children. All of them. All of them.” The Palace house lights went down. The clips from The American Revolution that Burns intended to show to an audience later that night appeared on the theater’s screen, in a test run. Burns sat in the dark, posing for portrait photos for the Globe Magazine, illuminated by the occasional powerful flash. He was distracted by the clips on the screen. To his eye, the colors in the movie looked washed out. He excused himself and urgently hurried off, on a perfectionist’s mission to fix a minute problem that his fans were unlikely to notice. And suddenly it made sense why the series took 10 years. Burns is already deep into what comes next. He is serving as an executive producer on a three-part film on the life of Henry David Thoreau, he says. He’s an executive producer on a film about crime and punishment. And he’s working on a film about Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War. Burns and his co-director and producer on The American Revolution, Sarah Botstein, are working on a film on the history of Lyndon B. Johnson and the Great Society. Burns has also done eight two-hour interviews with Barack Obama. They have one or two more to do. Other ideas are percolating, such as the history of the CIA and something on invention and technology, from Eli Whitney to Steve Jobs. “People say, ‘What do you want to come out of the Revolution film?’ We say, ‘Nothing — whatever you take out of it,’” Burns says. “But I’ve been trying all my life to put the ‘us’ back in the US, and tell stories we share in common. “I think this human project and the American project are hugely important stories to tell. And with the exception of Leonardo da Vinci, who I can go off for hours on, everything I’ve done has been in American history. And if I were given 1,000 years to live, I wouldn’t run out of stories in American history.” The Revolution put the United States among the rare countries with a specific born-on date, from which the timeline of national history flows to this day. “And it is your timeline no matter when you came,” Burns says. Whether you are new to the United States, or your family has been here for too many generations to remember, it is your Revolution.
