Ken Burns’ ‘The American Revolution’ explores the beginnings of the nation’s democracy

Amna Nawaz:

Beginning on Sunday on PBS, a six-part 12-hour series on the American Revolution. It's the latest from filmmaker Ken Burns examining the earliest days of our nation's democratic experiment. And it comes at a time of deep divisions in our country.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown has a look for our series Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy and part of our Canvas coverage.

Rick Atkinson, Writer:

A shot rings out. No one knows where the shot came from. That leads to promiscuous shooting.

Jeffrey Brown:

April 19, 1775, the first shots of the Revolutionary War. Afterwards, nothing would be the same from then to our own time.

"The American Revolution," says Ken Burns, is as important as any film he's made, precisely because it is the founding moment, the origin story of a nation still wrestling with itself and the very idea of democracy.

Ken Burns, Documentary Filmmaker:

We have tended to make the revolution kind of sanitized and about men in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, which is really important, but this is a bloody revolution. It's a bloody civil war in which Americans are killing other Americans because they don't agree with this.

And it's also a global war that's superimposed on top of all of it. And I think understanding the origin story and understanding what the intention was of the creation of the United States as it morphed and as it changed as it went along helps us today understand not only where we are, but where we could be going.

Jeffrey Brown:

We joined Burns and co-director Sarah Botstein recently at the Mount Vernon, Virginia, home of George Washington, one of a number of places around the country they have been screening the film for audiences ahead of its TV premiere.

And if you're looking for complexities and contradictions, start right here at the quarters that housed Washington slaves.

I know you have this mantra, it's complicated.

Ken Burns:

Yes. Nothing could be more complicated than the person most responsible for our country, the person without whom this country doesn't exist.

Jeffrey Brown:

Right. And we're walking by the slaves.

Ken Burns:

Owning other human beings.

Jeffrey Brown:

It was a war of ideals.

Narrator:

The American Revolution was the first war ever fought proclaiming the unalienable rights of all people.

Jeffrey Brown:

And land grabs.

Man:

They end up being kicked around and moved from place to place. This is, of course, the story of Native people relative to the United States.

Jeffrey Brown:

Of the highest virtues.

Man:

The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.

Jeffrey Brown:

And lowest venality.

Man:

Robert Morris was a war profiteer and mingled public and private funds with unabashed abandon.

Jeffrey Brown:

And vital, says Botstein, to see this as a civil war.

Man:

They were brothers. One was in the British and the other in the American service, totally ignorant until that hour that they were engaged in hostile combat against each other's life.

Sarah Botstein, Documentary Filmmaker:

We were breaking with ourselves. We were British subjects and British citizens. We do understand I think collectively, the American Revolution as this great war of ideas and a beacon of freedom, democracy, all the wonderful things we can celebrate about what is so important about the American experiment.

But mothers lost their sons, brothers fought against brothers, communities were ripped apart. It was a deadly, terribly scary time. And there was a kind of radicalization and violence and terror.

Jeffrey Brown:

Ken Burns' trademarks are on display, camera pans and music, historians on major battles and lesser known social issues.

Kathleen Duval, Historian:

It was the job of women to go in and take care of those bodies.

Jeffrey Brown:

Actors, including Morgan Freeman, voicing the words of both celebrated and everyday figures from the era.

Morgan Freeman, Actor:

Some consider us as much property as a house or a ship.

Jeffrey Brown:

One strong emphasis, the often less explored role of Native Americans before and during the revolution.

Narrator:

The American Revolution was about to plunge the once united six nations into a civil war of their own.

Ken Burns:

You can get an A in eighth grade or 11th grade if you say taxes and representation, but it's about Native American land first and foremost. You have these 13 colonies that are superimposed over Native American land, and there are Native Americans living with Americans, sort of coexisting or assimilated.

And then you have to the west many separate nations that are distinct as France is from Prussia, and we had to find a way to understand what that meant.

Jeffrey Brown:

Something new for the Burns team, the extensive use of reenactments, not faces, but bodies on the land in battle living through the times.

Tell me about that, the decision to do that and how you came to think about it.

Sarah Botstein:

What we did mostly was spend a lot of time with those reenactors without our cameras and with our cameras filming impressionistic things.

What does it look like when there's a bayonet charge? What is it like when the soldiers are walking through the snow? You can kind of imagine the land that they walked on, see the fields where they died. And also, creatively for us, we sort of turned our editing room upside down in how much live cinematography there is, how we use paintings.

We don't just use paintings and material from the time. We commissioned watercolors. It's really a lot of everything and how we as a country thought and consider the revolution for 250 years.

Jeffrey Brown:

There are, of course, a number of jarring moments for a contemporary audience. One hit me was soldiers in a major city.

Ken Burns:

One unbelievable thing that gets a response is when we show in our first episode when General Gage orders a fleet of ships from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to come to Boston with almost 2,000 troops to not protect it, but to police it.

And then you hear these voices from the period talking about, what, a standing army? This is a big, big deal. And audiences erupt, because, of course, right now, it resonates.

Jeffrey Brown:

Democracy itself, Burns says, was not an object of the revolution. It was a consequence. And the film comes out as Americans are again or still divided over its meaning and many fear for its future.

Burns insists his longstanding approach to looking at history, as he puts it, calling balls and strikes like a baseball umpire, still holds.

Ken Burns:

If you superimpose some philosophy of historiography or some political bias that's attuned to today's moment, you have made something that has a half-life of a couple seconds. But if you're attendant to the narrative story, you have something that has resonance and you're talking to everybody.

Jeffrey Brown:

Doesn't it change either your responsibility now or the way you think about it or what you want us to see?

Ken Burns:

No, because it's all built in a story that's based on facts. And I think it will resonate with Americans of all stripes because it's telling our origin story.

Jeffrey Brown:

You know, President Trump and allies were saying that there's been too much emphasis on the negative, as opposed to the triumphs and the positives of this country. Where does this film fit in or where do you fit in now to this thinking about how we tell history?

Ken Burns:

You can't water it down. It is really complicated and you have to tell that complication. Everyone is drawn to the stories that are real and complicated. And any idea of boiling it down to simplistic slogans is not American.

Sarah Botstein:

We have talked to so many Americans who are really hungry and interested for good history, good stories. And there is a lot to be proud of and a lot to learn from our bruises and scars and things we have not done well.

I have two children. I want them to learn history so that they can make their future brighter and better and learn the lessons from the past, whether those lessons are inspirational, instructive, depressing, dark or light.

Jeffrey Brown:

"The American Revolution" begins airing this Sunday and runs six consecutive nights.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at Mount Vernon, Virginia.