Over four decades of documentary filmmaking, Ken Burns has become almost as much of an American icon as his subjects. His sui generis style of bringing the country’s seminal history to life—the Civil War (his series on the subject catapulted him into the lexicon in the 1990s), the Roosevelts, the national parks, and Vietnam, among other topics—has become such a cultural fixture that Apple named one of its iMovie editing tools “the Ken Burns effect.” Now he’s tackling the country’s origin story. In his farmhouse office in Walpole, New Hampshire, surrounded by his collection of quilts, Burns gives a behind-the-scenes peek at The American Revolution, his new six-part series debuting November 16 on PBS, and why the South plays a starring role.
One thing the series does is reconceptualize what we think of as the “revolution” as actually a “civil war.”
That’s not something that’s superimposed on it by us. People are referring to it at the time as a civil war, and you’re beginning to say, “Oh, right, it is.” We’ve let the material talk for itself.
What is a loyalist but a conservative, right? Somebody who thinks that the greatest form of government in 1775 is the British constitutional monarchy. They are right: Their prosperity, their good health, their literacy—colonists are much more literate than the British—come from the fact that they have enjoyed this salutary neglect, as a British observer put it, of a hundred and fifty years and three thousand miles.
This story is a head-on collision of two opposing things. One is “There’s nothing new under the sun,” which is Ecclesiastes—meaning human nature doesn’t change—and the other is that the American Revolution is the signal of the beginning of human nature changing. Everybody before this moment is a subject. The people in these thirteen former colonies are now citizens, with all of the terrifying responsibilities and failures connected with not living up to the founders’ idea of virtue and the pursuit of happiness. I’ve said this a million times: I think the American Revolution is the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ.
The Revolution is often told as a New England story. You make a real point in this series that it’s equally a Southern story.
This symphony, if you can call it that, has its first movement in New England. It’s where the hottest rebels are. It’s the spark. It moves quickly to the mid-Atlantic states, and then the British employ a Southern strategy, where they’re realizing they’re having a hard time holding together the colonies. They think there’s more loyalist sentiment down South—they easily take Georgia and rip a star and a stripe, someone said, from the rebel flag. Then they take Charleston. We surrender an entire army there. Then they set about trying to pacify South Carolina. It doesn’t work. General Cornwallis decides he’s had enough. He moves into North Carolina and then into Virginia, thinking that if he captures the biggest prize, the war is over. Virginia is the most important state, the most populous, the birthplace of both the general that’s fighting the army and the author of the Declaration of Independence, and it has a large population of enslaved people that can possibly be persuaded to come to their side. It’s an error, and they end up in the place where Washington himself warned militia captains never to try to fight—Yorktown.
You started this series in the final months of the Obama administration. We’re in a very different national moment now, as we approach the country’s 250th anniversary next year. Did that change your viewpoint?
Not at all. I don’t have any responsibility, except to the art and the facts of telling the story. In my editing room, there’s a little neon sign in cursive that says, “It’s complicated,” and the reason the sign is in the editing room is that, much as you want the art to win, the facts have to win.
Photo: Chris Buck
Ken Burns arranges toy soldiers, similar to ones he had as a child, at his New Hampshire home.
You also famously carry a few objects with you all the time.
I have in my pocket, normally, this heart-shaped stainless-steel thing that a woman made after The Civil War, called the healing heart. I loved it so much. It has a concave feel to it. I put it in my pocket, and it’s never left. I have a minié ball from the Gettysburg battlefield. I have things that have accumulated that have meaning to me, just personally. I actually asked the woman who sent this healing heart to me to make four more, which I gave to all my daughters.
We’re surrounded by some of your quilt collection. What appeals to you about them?
I love that these objects have meaning. My job is to be able to parse and digest and get to the heart of a story, to learn as much as there is. All of these quilts were made by women, and women were not normally permitted to be part of that thing that’s history. You don’t know who made these. It might even be signed “Hannah Winthrop,” but you don’t know if she’s eighteen or eighty, happy or sad, whether she made it together with people. I like the unknowingness of quilts. They’re friends. The International Quilt Museum in Nebraska took sixty or seventy of my friends away and went on a touring exhibition. They had another city they wanted to send them to, and I said, “No, send them home,” and I piled them up here, and they were here for six months just so I could be around them again.
For your busman’s holiday, what TV do you watch?
It’s all over the place. I’m a Luddite, so I don’t do much bingeing. Over the weekend, I watched a rebroadcast of Yellowstone, including the last season, which I had missed. I watched the new Shōgun twice, because I’d remembered watching it as a TV show back in 1980. I watch a lot of sports, and I watch a lot of news. I wanted to be a feature filmmaker from the earliest time. I go to the Telluride Film Festival every single year. The first thing I do is I go to Turner Classic Movies and see what’s on. I’ve been known, even though I needed to catch up on sleep, to stay up all Saturday night to watch the movies there.
The way viewers watch your series has changed drastically since The Civil War. I remember watching it night after night, as much of America did. Now your projects also stream.
I really was wedded to the idea of our watching together, and I knew that it had long passed, but I still like that. Watching when everyone else is—that, to me, is a shared experience, like when you’re at the ballpark and everybody sings the song at the same time. Nobody’s asked you what your political affiliation is. You all sing.
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