A new VPM documentary that tells old and sometimes forgotten stories about the nation’s history is receiving both criticism and praise.
That’s because the 55-minute film, “Declarations: Black Americans and the Revolutionary War,” uses a variety of tools, including interviews such as the one with the noted political philosopher and scholar Danielle Allen, archival documents, and artificial intelligence (AI), to bring the stories of four lesser-known Black Revolutionary-era figures to life.
Those figures are James Lafayette, who served the Patriots’ cause by working as double agent; Harry Washington, a slave of George Washington, who escaped from Mount Vernon to fight for the British; Elizabeth Freeman or Mum Bet, who sued a well-known Massachusetts Patriot and won; and Abraham Peyton Skipwith, a slave who petitioned for and secured his freedom, going on to become one of the first free Black landowners in Richmond.
Stacey Holman, director and producer for the project, said that VPM approached her about making the film, with the idea of featuring Skipwith, and it was up to her to choose the rest of the subjects. She decided to include Lafayette and Washington because they both fought in the war, and Holman felt that it was “important to find characters who were actually boots on the ground. James was interesting because he was actually a spy.”
One thing that made Harry Washington interesting was his connection to George Washington, Holman said.
“He was enslaved by George Washington, and George Washington was very much interested in retaining his property,” Holman said.
The British promised freedom to slaves who fought for the king, but the Americans did not. In fact, the slave trade was abolished in Britain in 1807, and slaves in the British colonies were freed in 1838. In America, which fought for freedom from the British, it took another bloody war, the Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865 and resulted in a conservative death toll of more than 600,000 people.
The Paris Treaty of 1783, which officially ended the Revolutionary War, even included a clause that stated that “All prisoners on both Sides shall be set at Liberty, and his Britannic Majesty shall with all convenient speed, and without causing any Destruction, or carrying away any Negroes or other Property of the American inhabitants, withdraw all his Armies, Garrisons & Fleets from the said United States.”
But the British had promised Washington his freedom, and they granted it, evacuating about 3,000 Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia after the war.
Holman also knew that she wanted to tell the story of a woman.
“We tend to always lean on the men and the male stories, and we knew we needed to balance it out with a woman, and particularly someone who was ideally up north, because we didn’t want it to be a fully Southern story, even though Virginia is ground zero for a lot of stuff,” Holman said.
Skipwith is another historical figure whose story is likely unfamiliar to many Americans, Holmes said.
“No one has heard of him at all,” Holmes said. “That’s actually the irony of it.” But Virginia activists and historians were able to bring his story to light.
The 55-minute video, “Declarations,” which premiered to Virginia audiences Monday night, is now available to stream on PBS’s website, allowing viewers to decide for themselves.
An early scene in the film shows a teacher talking to her students about what independence means, and one of the students says it means, “we have something that other people can’t take away.”
The teacher responds, “There are some things that you are entitled to — rights.”
Sesha Joi Moon, who co-founded the JXN Project, “a historic preservation nonprofit dedicated to recontextualizing the origin story of Jackson Ward” with her sister, Enjoli, in 2021, and is featured in the film, said she hopes the documentary will help more people learn about important Black historical figures.
Moon notes that given that one in four Black Americans can trace their roots to Richmond, “stories about forgotten foremothers and forefathers like Abraham Peyton Skipwith are deeply important to disrupt the one-dimensional narratives that we’ve been told about the role of Black people during the revolutionary founding of the nation.”
The problem with the stories that most people know about Revolutionary history, Moon said, is that “when stories are told, we, as Black Americans, are often either on the periphery or not included altogether, but ‘Declarations’ is rare in its centering of the Black American experience in the pursuit of a more perfect union.”
Moon says that she hopes that the film and the story of her own nonprofit, which is documented in the film, “helps to inspire others to find the forgotten founding figures in their respective community. The next Abraham Peyton Skipwith and Jackson Ward are waiting to be found — even if 250 years later.”
Holman said she hopes the documentary leads more people to start asking questions about history.
“It’s like, why are these towns named the way they’re named? Why do we call things this instead of that?” She said that she wants people to think about places and names and to approach them with curiosity, a curiosity that can help people uncover more stories.
To tell this particular story, Holman chose to use AI, a controversial decision.
VPM Chief Content Officer Steve Humble said that generative AI was used in the film to supplement archival materials.
“The typical route has been archival materials,” he said. “Archive is often a primary visual tool, but in the case of storytelling centered on historical Black narratives, archive is both limited and limiting. We were so lucky to find Hudson Campbell, a historic researcher and talented artist, to create original works of art that we used to teach the AI engine, and through 100s of prompts and outputs overseen by several historians, we were able to create historically accurate AI imagery.”
The reception to using AI in this way is mixed.
Jeff Pierson, a professor of communication studies at Bridgewater College, says that AI has the potential to be democratizing.
“Really, what we’re seeing, I think,” Pierson said, “is another brand new communication revolution unfolding where AI is becoming an additional storytelling tool.”
He likens what is happening to AI to what happened with the advent of photography, film, and computer animation. Pierson said he can remember when people debated whether green screens should be used or films should be colorized. (That one is still a hotly debated topic among film buffs.)
“So I think technology itself, or the idea of new technology pushing our media, is an ongoing story,” said Pierson, who is in the process of developing a course on AI literacy for undergraduates.
“I think anytime there’s new technologies coming out that kind of push the limits of our abilities to communicate, it creates some controversy and some interest,” said Pierson, who cites the example of the controversy that occurred when photography became widely available.
“You know the history of MOMA,’ he said. “The Museum of Modern Art in New York was founded because a lot of other museums would not exhibit photography and film at that time.”
With AI, Pierson sees potential: “Certainly AI-generated videos will allow, you know, a single person or a couple of people to produce from a technological standpoint, a high-quality looking product,” Pierson said, and, in many cases, to do it more quickly.
Though this development could be frightening for some in the film industry who fear job losses, “it probably will eventually lead to a lot more content coming out because it can be a much faster faster way of putting together a film,” he said, citing the example of “Dreams of Violets,” an entirely AI-generated docudrama by Ash Koosha about the Iran War that was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival becoming the first fully-AI generated full-length film to be featured at a major film festival.
Koosha, Pierson pointed out, is considered “a very skilled filmmaker,” and with AI he was able to produce the film quickly and with a very small technical crew.
Despite ethical concerns, Pierson’s view of AI is generally positive, but some other teachers and researchers take a bleaker view, including Pierson’s colleague at Bridgewater College, Sam Hamilton.
Hamilton, an associate professor of English at Bridgewater, also directs the school’s Digital Media Strategy Master’s Program.
“I’ll say right from the jump that I think the documentary itself is excellent and well needed in terms of what it is focusing on and how it is highlighting some of these folks’ contributions to the Revolutionary War efforts,” Hamilton said.
However, Hamilton does have some concerns about how the film was made.
“I think in many instances, when documentary filmmakers are making films, and they have a strong desire to represent their historical subjects, particularly in visual terms, they can make use of a lot of different tools and techniques that don’t involve generative AI,” he said. “So I know they hired a portrait artist to, for example, create a portrait of Abraham Skipwith, but I think in other instances, it would have been possible, and probably even preferred, if they had hired not just one portrait artist but a team of portrait artists to create and animate portraits.”
While the decision to use AI in “Declarations” is being framed as an artistic one, it is also likely a financial one, Hamilton said.
“To be blunt about it, it just costs less money to pay one artist to create a portrait and then use generative AI to animate that portrait than it does to hire a team of artists or perhaps a team of reanimators to recreate the same scenes that they chose to depict,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton said that he thinks that “it’s actually kind of troubling and kind of ironic given the subject matter of the documentary, which as far as I can tell is meant to highlight key contributions that Black [historical figures] made to the Revolutionary War efforts and how those contributions have been hidden or obscured, or even erased from history,” he said. “It’s kind of disappointing that they wouldn’t have sought out more artists, contemporary artists, to bring those stories to life.”
He said that when looking at AI, it’s also important to consider not just why it’s used but how it’s used. In this film, he said he doesn’t think AI was used to do something a human couldn’t.
“Certainly, I think using a real artist to create portraits and then using a generative AI tool to animate those portraits is more ethical than just having the generative AI do it all,” Hamilton said. “It’s a complicated, important story. I just think it’s a little disappointing that these tools were used in the telling of it.”
For more information about “Declarations” and VPM’s other 250 projects, see its VA250 website at vpm.org/250.
