Arts & Entertainment
Ken Burns Sees ‘Rhymes of History’ in New Documentary on the American Revolution
“The American Revolution,” a new documentary from Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, tells the extraordinary story of the birth of the United States.
But if you think it’s a story you’re familiar with, think again.
More than nine years in the making, the six-part,12-hour documentary series tells the tale of the country’s founding struggle from multiple viewpoints.
It begins with a reminder from longtime Burns collaborator and narrator Peter Coyote that long before 13 British colonies made themselves into the United States, the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy had created a union of their own called the Haudenosaunee — a democracy that had flourished for centuries.
Burns and Botstein sat down with WTTW News to discuss their new film.
“What we’re taught in grammar school was that the American Revolution was about taxes and representation, and that’s true, but it’s also about Native American land,” Burns said. “Benjamin Franklin had himself been inspired by the Haudenosaunee — this Iroquois Confederacy and their model that had worked for a long time as a model for the United States. … What the revolution is, is a world war, a civil war, and a war over essentially the prize of North America — and what is the prize? This land.”
Despite some depictions of the revolution that sanitize the war, this documentary reveals a brutal conflict. One historian notes that in the Battle of Bunker Hill, early on in the war in June 1775, the British Army suffered its highest casualty rate until the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
“We forget that the American Revolution is at least two things happening at the same time,” Botstein said. “One is this huge revolution of ideas and how a government might be structured and who might lead that government, … and the other is a terribly brutal, very complicated, 18th century war. Eighteenth century war is really terrible and awful and bloody and scary and violent and dark — and in order to really understand our founding story, I think you really have to braid the two together.”
It was hard to appreciate just how unlikely it was that the revolutionaries — with help from the French — would defeat the British, “that we were able to throw off the biggest, most mighty military power in the world,” Botstein said.
The film features an incredible array of A-list Hollywood talent to give voice to the many participants in the story — including Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti, Morgan Freeman, Kenneth Branagh, Claire Danes and Samuel L. Jackson.
“I think we have a better cast than any film that’s ever been made or television series ever, that helped bring alive, not just the familiar top-down folks — and you get to know Washington a little bit better with more dimension — but dozens, scores of other people that you’ve never heard of,” Burns said. “Sometimes they’re teenagers, sometimes they’re Native Americans, sometimes they’re free or enslaved Black people, or women who are half the population and central to the success of the revolution.”
The film also uses a variety of music, both period and newly composed, and features performances from Yo-Yo Ma, Rhiannon Giddens and Brooklyn Rider among others.
Making a film about a period of deep political division in the past at a time of deep political division in the present, Burns said he could see “the rhymes of history.”
“We began this when Barack Obama had 13 months to go on his presidency, so we’ve been watching the rhymes of history, the echoes of history change as we’ve done it,” Burns said.
Likening the struggles of the nation to the struggles of an individual, Burns said it’s important to understand and celebrate the country’s origins.
“Here’s the central thing,” Burns said. “When a person is in a struggle, having great difficulty, they go to a professional and the professional wants to ask an essential question. Where are you from? …. So if you go back in a time of great division and internal turmoil for an entire country, you go back to your origin story. … So we’re hoping that if anything this story does is help put the us back in the U.S.”
Burns said the American Revolution was the most important event in world history since the birth of Christ.
“It changed the way people were,” Burns said. “Everybody was a subject up until then, and all of a sudden there were people who were citizens. And so I think there’s a fundamental optimism when you study the past. There’s also a fundamental sort of psychological therapy that takes place. If we learn our origin story, we can help us get through this and begin to move on to the next great phase, which is repair.”
“The American Revolution” premieres on WTTW on Sunday, Nov. 16, at 7 p.m.
