• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

Ken Burns has produced a documentary about the Revolutionary War that sets a new standard for historical documentaries.

This has been said of Burns before, at least since “The Civil War” premiered in 1990 on PBS. He was 37 years old then and ever since, his name has become a brand that rarely -- if ever -- feels the sting of criticism.

He is 72 now and at the top of his game with “The American Revolution,” a 12-hour film that tells the story of the War of Independence.

With “The Civil War,” Burns amazed us all with the way he used period photographs and the spoken word issuing from diaries and speeches to tell the story of the War Between the States. 

In the process, he managed to cover the whole mess -- the run-up, the politics, the battles, the personalities, the carnage, the economics, the international implications and the conflict’s central issue -- slavery.

But besides all that, with words and images, Burns captured the emotional state of a nation in a specific place and time -- which might be the biggest challenge of all for a documentarian after sifting through all the dates, facts and figures.

He also accomplishes all of the above in “The American Revolution,” produced by his New Hampshire-based production company, Florentine Films.

The film is scheduled to air over six consecutive nights -- Sunday, November 16, through Friday, November 21, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern on PBS. 

“The American Revolution” is produced and directed by Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, and written by long-time collaborator Geoffrey Ward. The narrator is Peter Coyote.

Producing a story as comprehensive as this one must have been unusually challenging for Burns and his team for the simple reason that the visual elements his documentaries have long depended on -- mainly photographs and moving pictures -- did not exist.

The solution? Apply the best elements of cinema to tell your story pictorially even without period photos and films. And that is what the directors did.

“The American Revolution” marries music, ambient sound and stunning cinematography (by cinematographer Buddy Squires) to bring the era alive in a way that is just as vivid and moving as “The Civil War” and Burns’ World War II film “The War,” which premiered in 2007.

Part of the quality of “The American Revolution” lies in the locations his team filmed for the documentary.

Much of the story is told alongside film of rivers and forests at dusk, outside of farmhouses on distant hills, and in and among the colonial buildings that still stand in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia.

When the film tells its stories of battles, Burns’ cameras go to villages and streets where the battles were fought since so many of the locations and their buildings still exist in one way or another.

But even without photographs, Burns found images to spare from the Revolutionary War era, including maps, engravings, period newspapers and pamphlets, and paintings.

And once again, we are made to marvel at the lengths the producers must have gone to unearth so much material in a hundred libraries and archives -- not least of which are the many diaries of people both famous and unknown whose passages are read aloud.

The voices in “The American Revolution” are provided by an all-star cast. In a nice touch, Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney provide the voices of John and Abigail Adams, the roles they played in HBO’s 2008 miniseries “John Adams.”

The story told in “The American Revolution” is expansive. The film points out that the revolution against the British crown by the American colonies had implications for much of the world and, in fact, a great deal of the world was somehow enmeshed or involved in it.

It is a sprawling story more fascinating than many might have previously thought. It is an epic tale that more than justifies its 12-hour length.

“The American Revolution” schedule on PBS, all times 8-10 p.m. Eastern:

Episode One: “In Order To Be Free” (May 1754-May 1775), Sunday, November 16.

Episode Two: “An Asylum for Mankind” (May 1775-July 1776), Monday, November 17.

Episode Three: “The Times That Try Men’s Souls” (July 1776-January 1777), Tuesday, November 18.

Episode Four: “Conquer by a Drawn Game” (January 1777-February 1778), Wednesday, November 19.

Episode Five: “The Soul of all America” (December 1777-May 1780, Thursday, November 20.

Episode Six: “The Most Sacred Thing” (May 1780-Onward), Friday, November 21.