Mother Jones
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Since it was founded in 1978, the Greenwood School in Putney, Vermont, has required its students to memorize and publicly recite the Gettysburg Address every year. In his new film, The Address, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns follows the students at this small, all-boys school as they grapple with internalizing Abraham Lincoln’s two-minute speech. The twist: All the kids have learning disabilities, including speech and language deficits, that make their struggles and—spoiler alert—triumphs all the more poignant.
Think of it as Ken Burns’ Spellbound. The 90-minute film, culled from three months of footage of classes, dorm life, and kids goofing off, is not a typical Burns project. Though, he explains, “You’ll know it’s a Ken Burns film: It has all the old photographs, it has the ‘Battle Cry of Freedom’ playing, but it’s something different.” Instead of enlisting actors, Burns got students at the school to narrate the film, speech impairments and all. “It’s not full-on cinema verité,” he says. “But for 320 hours of footage reduced to an hour and a half, it’s cinema verité!”
Making the film inspired Burns’ side project, Learn the Address, which is encouraging as many people as possible to learn Lincoln’s words by heart. So far, the project has collected hundreds of videos from everyday and celebrity orators.
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Q&A: Ken Burns on Why Memorizing the Gettysburg Address Matters
