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.
From a link on it's wiki link:
The Old Negro Space Program, a 10-minute film, humorously chronicles fictional African-American astronauts who overcame NASA's color barrier, telling their story in the earnest style of Ken Burns' PBS documentaries like Baseball. Primarily distributed online, the film has garnered all the tokens of internet success, including its own entry in the Wikipedia and an online shop to sell its souvenir t-shirts and mugs. Its detractors accuse the film of making racism appear equally fictitious, perhaps unintentionally, and of perpetuating black stereotypes.
It usually is! :)
It was based upon the Guadacanal and Solomon Island campaign.
The Donald Trump of PBS strikes again. I gave up around the 100th factual error in his swollen, lumbering 'Baseball.'
This guy isn't any good.
Ken Burns is a left-wing piece of trash.
Wow! That's something special. My dad was in the IV, they hit a good many of the big battles all the way through.
Excellent post. Expresses my thoughts exactly.
Ya mean like Elenor? You know her thighness channels her. Ugh! I disgusted myself even.
Flew many night time missions over Japan. I learned more about the Pacific Theater from my father than any book I've ever read.
I prefer "Her Crusty Pantsuitness"...:)
Or, the direct, and to the point "Cankles".
"Go shopping. That's what we were told," Burns said. "Go shopping. It's ridiculous."
I agree with Burns on this. We were told that the WOT was a mortal peril, which I thought it was and still think it is. And then we were told to do nothing. The public wasn't enlisted into the war in any way. Which made it a lot easier for the Left to say, this is all a farce, there's no threat. And made it a lot harder for the Administration to enlist support for the steps it had to take.
Thanks...I think of all the years I watched things on PBS, not even considering for a moment that the people who run that place were being paid by taxpayers. As a young person, I was completely unfazed by that. Sure, they said as much in their splash-screens, and they had their fundraising, which I just turned off, so I didn't pay any attention.
I tuned in fairly frequently for Nova, but in the Nineties, when I started really paying attention to what they were actually saying and implying...I was really irritated to realize MY money was being taken from ME to give them a soapbox to spit out their Liberal pap.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
My dad was a B26 gunner who completed a tour flying out of North Africa and volunteered to go to the PTO and flew missions out of Okinawa.
He dropped some of the last warning leaflets (warning that something big was coming) over Japan before the drop on Hiroshima.
I can imagine. I'd have been scared to death if I was him, though.
Yes, I dread the re-writing of history coming in this documentary. I'm sure it will be touted as the definitive WWII epic by the media.
Watch the History Channel. Just got done watching a documentaty on Saipan and last week a show on Bataan.
So did I.
But I specified the European theater. I'm so tired of hearing about the same three operations and the same one division.
What percentage of the documentary will be devoted to The Tuskegee Airmen.
(Not to diminish their service mind you, but knowing Burns history, he'll probably devote several hours to them alone)
You can't do justice to a cataclysm like the Second World War with a documentary. Not possible. The best effort I've seen is the British, "The World at War".
Don't count on it. The main focus will be on:
(1) Racial strife in the US military.
(2) Class conflict between officers and enlisted men.
And I base my predictions only on his baseball documentary.
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