Documentarian Ken Burns stood in the governor’s reception room and addressed a man who was present but could not hear him.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Burns said.
He was talking to the painting behind him. Of all the opulent features and fixtures in the State Room of Rhode Island State House, the room orbits around Gilbert Stuart’s 1802 portrait of George Washington.
So too does Burns’ new project, which prompted his visit to the Ocean State Thursday and was part of a multistate tour to showcase and roll out his latest behemoth of a documentary. “The American Revolution,” co-directed with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, is a six-episode,12-hour docuseries set to premiere nationally on PBS beginning on Sunday, Nov. 16, and airing consecutively through Friday, Nov. 21.
Rhode Island is the 17th state Burns has visited since the tour began in January 2025, in which he and Botstein have often fielded questions from students about the project it took them eight years to make. Higher schoolers and college students in the Rhode Island Civic Leadership Program, plus state leaders and media, were treated to a 15-minute sneak peek from the docuseries. Burns visited the State House ahead of a sold-out preview screening at Rhode Island College Thursday night, hosted by Ocean State Media.
“I always make a joke that we’re gonna lock the doors and show the whole 12 hours,” Burns told the crowd.
Even in the highly truncated version the documentary shown Thursday, one could grasp the Burns style: A mix of reenactments, voiceover, and like all Burns films, a good amount of panning and zooming across still images — a trope so associated with the filmmaker that Apple’s iMovie software refers to the technique as the “Ken Burns effect.”
The clipshow opened with a quoted passage from Thomas Paine, who described America as “a small spark” that soon became a flame inextinguishable — a revolutionary fire which, largely unlike those before it, burned in defense of inalienable rights for all people, Paine argued.
“The centrality of women, the centrality of Native Americans, to enslaved and free Black Americans, are hugely powerful to this story and do not in any way take away from the most important person, George Washington,” Burns said.
‘Would I have been a patriot?’
During the screening and Q&A, students could be seen taking notes. Some were curious about filming techniques, others wanted to know about historical research.
“I’ve been doing this for almost 50 years,” Burns told students. “Only one of the films is not about American history.”
The 72-year-old filmmaker who lives in Walpole, New Hampshire, is known for his thoroughness in miniseries on topics like baseball, country music, and jazz. In each outing, Burns refused to cede any of these topics’ complexity to the tyranny of a shorter runtime.
Also like his past documentaries, Burns has not shied away from the sinister, the cruel, and the dark in America’s revolutionary story. Burns wondered if it’s not “fear” that prevents people from acknowledging how violent the American Revolution was.
Burns said he hopes audiences will ask themselves what they would do in the 18th century. “I hope that the series makes everyone think… ‘Would I have been a patriot? Would I be willing to fight for my beliefs? Would I be willing to die?…And I suppose, would I be able to kill someone else?’”
He gave the example of a Vermonter loyal to the crown, who was bayoneted in the ribs by his childhood friend. “That is the American Revolution, as much as it is big ideas in Philadelphia,” Burns said.
“It’s funny, we accept the violence of the Civil War and our 20th century wars we’ve been involved in,” Burns added. “We found that by showing how bloody this revolution was…we get a better sense and that those big ideas are not, in fact, diminished. They’re actually made that much more inspiring by telling the complicated story.”
Burns added to students, “Americans were a lot more divided then than they are now.”
Botstein, who has worked with Burns for 30 years, stressed to students that the filmmakers employed as many kinds of cameras as they did narrative perspectives.
“We shot for this film in particular with every kind of camera you can imagine — really fancy, expensive, huge feature-like cameras, [but also] Ken’s iPhone.”
The technological changeups over the years have not changed the essential process for Burns and Botstein: “You still have to make art that looks and sounds beautiful,” Botstein said.
Read the entire article by the Rhode Island Current here.
