Posted on 12/07/2006 5:50:44 PM PST by SquirrelKing
Two troubling statistics fueled the creation of "The War," the 14-hour documentary about World War II from acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns.
Burns thought he was done with war movies after his series, "The Civil War." But he changed his mind after realizing that America was losing its grip on the facts of World War II.
"It was really a couple of statistics that got me," Burns said. "One was that we're losing a thousand (World War II) veterans a day, and the other is that our children just don't know what's going on."
Burns said he was astonished at the number of high school graduates who were not certain who the United States fought in World War II.
"That to me was terrifying, just stupefying," said Burns, who will show the first two-hour installment of The War to Dartmouth College on Dec. 1.
The series follows four American communities -- Waterbury, Conn., Mobile, Ala., Sacramento, Calif., and Luverne, Minn. -- through the war years, focusing both on the soldiers from the towns sent to war and the families and friends left behind. Burns and his team interviewed 40 people who fought in the war or lived through it, and actors ranging from Tom Hanks to a 13-year-old Walpole girl read journals or newspaper articles about another half-dozen others. Home movies are interspersed with official archives of war footage.
"What it allows the film to be is experiential," Burns said. "It's not that our narrator doesn't talk about strategy or tactics, but you're not distracted by celebrities. It's not about Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin and Hitler. It's not about Eisenhower and Rommel. These people are names that pass before us in this film, they're not insignificant. But the point of view is from ordinary people, who do the fighting and who do the dying in all wars."
The film also moves away from Burns' signature style -- panning a camera across or focusing on a detail in an old photograph to give the viewer a sense of movement, while an actor reads from a speech or a journal over period music. But viewers still can expect the sort of painstaking attention to detail that has become a hallmark of Burns' work. It took a year to edit the sound to make the battle scenes as lifelike as possible, Burns said.
Work on "The War" started six years ago, before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Asked about the contrast between today's home front and World War II, Burns called the latter, "the greatest collective effort in the history of our country."
Common sacrifice is lacking today, he said.
"We now have a military class in this country that suffers apart and alone, whereas there wasn't a family on any street in America that wasn't in some way touched by the war," he said.
"When 9/11 happened what were you asked to do? Nothing. Go shopping. That's what we were told," Burns said. "Go shopping. It's ridiculous. Nobody said, 'This is a war born of oil, turn your thermostats down five degrees.'"
The War will be broadcast next September on PBS.
"...we're losing a thousand (World War II) veterans a day..."
An era is swiftly passing into memory.
Right about this too:
Burns said he was astonished at the number of high school graduates who were not certain who the United States fought in World War II.
I am convinced, however, that the deconstruction of the WWII generation has begun in earnest, and in a short time WWII itself may be reinvisioned. I enjoyed Flags of Our Fathers, but in many ways felt that it had many of these elements. A new movie is also in the works about the USS Indianapolis tragedy. One wonders if its heroes will be portrayed honestly or with through a deconstructive lens that distills everything into a "People's History"?
In general, I like Burns' work. I alonng with millions enjoyed The Civil War immensely and want to be optimistic about this effort. Time will tell.
A new WW2 documentary?
Maybe they'll finally talk about divisions besides the 101st Airborne, and battles and events not named D-Day, MARKET-GARDEN, or the Bulge...
I look forward to this. I just hope he doesn't spend 3/4 of the series on the Tuskeegee airmen and 5 minutes on the Pacific Theater. lol.
In the back of my mind though, I wonder if he'll find some homosexual who wasn't allowed to serve....
You mean the way he obsessed about New York and Boston in the Baseball doc's and relegated the rest of the world (the Cardinals/Cubs rivalry) to a footnote?
Dad was a WWII vet - fought all the way accross Europe. I'll look forward to this and hope for the best.
...I wonder if he'll find some homosexual who wasn't allowed to serve....
i saw clips of the unedited footage of this series. what i saw was magnificent. i was in tears in moments.
Isn't Ken Burns the knucklehead who thought rascism was a more significant factor in baseball than in the Civil War?
Yeah, but does it cover the other 75% of the European theater?
Great Burns parody: The Old Negro Space Program
ping
"Dad was a WWII vet - fought all the way accross Europe. I'll look forward to this and hope for the best."
As was mine and as will I!
Well, gee, Ken. Whose fault do you think that is?
There is a segment of society, and not an insignificant portion, who feel that all things military are bad, and that there is no good reason to fight for anything. A hint here, Ken...and I am sure you have been to many cocktail parties attended by the devotees to PBS. For the most part, they are the same people who hold the reins of power in the public schools and colleges, write the curriculums and populate the Teacher's Unions. How could you fail to miss the conversations at those parties, chatter between the same people who dumped the military into the crapper back in the Sixties and Seventies, and were proud of it. Thank goodness for Ronald Reagan.
Yeah, Ken is talented, even has a video editing feature named after him. The Civil War documentary was great. But you sleep with dogs and you are going to wake up with fleas. Those SAME people who fete you with their dinners and ooh and ahh over you Ken, are the same people who want to rewrite history to suit their needs, beginning with what children are taught in school.
By the way, SquirrelKing, this is not a commentary on you. And you hit the deconstruction aspect on the head. Liberals like to paint conservatives as the perpetrators of what they view as the already (in their minds) existing 1984, but the truth is, liberals are the true Orwellians in that respect. They already think they can say whatever they want to, and will rarely get called out on it because the media holds their water for them and operates the "Memory Hole", and the only reason they profess to hold WWII vets in any kind of esteem is because they aren't all dead yet.
Yeah. PBS is a sore spot with me, and I am all for yanking the funding on them. Sure, I like Nova and a few other things, but it isn't worth my tax dollars.
The more I think about Flags of Our Fathers, the angrier I get. Eastwood added things that never happened, JUST TO MAKE OUR COUNTRY LOOK BAD...that's the truth.
Japanese american detainees will finally get their voices heard!
My dad was in CBI-China-Burma-India . He ended up on Gen.MacArthur's staff and he can be seen on USS Missouri in some of the surrender photo's. God bless them all.
The book was a thousand times better.
"When 9/11 happened what were you asked to do? Nothing. Go shopping. That's what we were told," Burns said. "Go shopping. It's ridiculous. Nobody said, 'This is a war born of oil, turn your thermostats down five degrees.'"
Burns obviously hasn't learned anything about what this war is about with a comment like that. It is about whether or not western Judeo-Christian civilization will defend itself against a group of radical Moslems who believe that the world should return to its 7th Century existence and all should either be Islamic or be 1) dead or 2) enslaved/subservient to the Islamic theocracy.
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