Behind the scenes, The American Revolution( Shyala Jayasinghe). Inset, The Surrender of Lord
Cornwallis, 1820, by John Trumbull.( Architect of the Capitol)
the last nine years and six months has been revelation after revelation after revelation. Sometimes, it ' s the twists and turns of a battle. Sometimes, it ' s the genius of a general to know not only the courage and the strength of one part of its troops, but the weakness and the cowardice of another, and to take advantage of that. Another time, there ' s a victory that Washington has that would have just been glorious, and it ' s just through some unbelievably impossible twist of fate, that the tide of battle turns and it shouldn’ t have. This is Germantown in Pennsylvania. Instead, it ' s yet another defeat. And yet, he gets away, he doesn ' t surrender. He realizes that he doesn ' t have to actually win; he just can ' t lose. The British have to win, and it ' s getting more and more impossible for them to do that because they ' re 3,000 miles away from the home islands. The time it takes for information to get back and forth is impossibly long. Weather, which we know is coming for weeks in advance, sneaks up on people overnight, and the distances are gobsmacking. On their maps, they just look like it as though
it ' s the difference between Surrey and Essex, and it’ s not. The distance between Boston and Charleston is the distance between London and Venice. That ' s just a big deal.
Stanmeyer: Is your approach to this film different than other pieces that you ' ve worked on?
Burns: I think only that we ' re missing the still photographs and the newsreel. But after years of collecting all of this newsreel footage— I mean, all of the reenactments and the live cinematography— it was like we stumbled on an archive of newsreel. The same with the paintings and the drawings and the maps. We just treated them like they were photographs, and we treated the reenactments as if they were impressionistic newsreels. We never went to a group of reenactors and said,“ Okay, we need you to be this part of the battle of such-andsuch.” When we started editing, we ' d say,“ Okay, do we have any guys shooting a volley, a musket, in the middle of fog?” And someone would say,“ Yeah, I think we have it from the shoot we did four years ago.” And we go look, and there it is. And then all of a sudden, those muskets go off, and we happen to have a painting from the battle we ' re trying to bring alive in which you see a volley of muskets going off. We have hundreds of sound effect tracks. We treat it like a feature film. There ' ll be times, I guarantee, when you ' re watching, you’ ll jump. That cannon will go off and you will say,“ Whoa, that ' s a little bit too close for comfort.” And, of course, these first person voices make it real.
I ' ve been very loath to use, in the past 50 years, any reenactments. A little bit in our Lewis and Clark films so that you knew that it wasn ' t just two guys, a dog, and an Indian girl, but it was a military operation, at some points up to four dozen people and very complicated, using keelboats initially and then portaging canoes. You had to have, maybe out of the four hours, two or three minutes of the reenactment so you know what they looked like, so that you could show what they saw. But here, we have lots of it. It’ s all impressionistic. You ' re not reading faces. You ' re not wondering what that guy ' s real job is. You’ re there. You’ re handing it off to a map,
98 // BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE Holiday July 2025 2023