Are the parks another subject that stands for something larger in national history?
Burns: Absolutely. What we look for in choosing the subject of a film is some entity whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s able to reflect the inherent contradictions in America’s story and also its potential. I think that’s what we’ve been focused on in the body of our work. We’ve pursued this question of space: how we as citizens are defined by our relationship to the land in the United States. We’ve explored this in the history of the West, this incredible intersection where all these cultures clash together. We’ve explored this theme in Lewis and Clark and in Horatio’s Drive, a film about the first cross-country automobile trip. And for the last six years, we’ve been working on a history of the national parks because we think in the story of Americans preserving this land is the story of America itself. Duncan: Like baseball and jazz, the National Park System is an American invention. When Yellowstone National Park was set aside in 1872, that was the first time in
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