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.
Whoah. Good come back./s
No comeback. I'm not fighting with you. Just suggesting that his good documentaries aren't deserving of the label of 'leftist trash'. That's all. Goood day to you either way.
Saint FDR.
"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."
A few years ago here in AZ, a high school history book taught that the US attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor. The school allowed the teachers to teach that without denial!
Shameful!
That's exactly what it will be about. The way Burns does it, though, if you saw Baseball, is that his pet issues show up over and over again, he doesn't relegate it to one portion of the documentary.
So there won't be a chapter on the Tuskeegee airmen, but they will be featured at almost every point throughout.
Burns will have a long way to go to replace it as the definitive Television history of the War.
LOL!
Great narration by Sir Lawrence, too.
That B&W picture they used so often, of the gaunt woman's face still haunts. I think it may be from the picture of the poor, heroic spy caught by the Nazi's, who worked with "Intrepid."
Isn't it illegal to smoke what you're smoking?
We are so fortunate to have had fathers that were real patriots. Not these bastards in congress today, who are willing to sell our country down the river to appease some low life tyrant.
Thank you. We we are fortunate to have had such men as my father who just did what was expected of them at the time. He never bragged about anything he had done. In fact, the only story I remember him telling me was of being scraffed on a beach by a jap zero and diving into a hole next to another udt team member. He said he sat there for a long while to make sure that the danger had passed and all the while the man next to him was just shaking in terror. He turned to him to tell him to calm down and it was at that time he realized that the man was dead and he was the one doing the shaking. Always very self-depreciating about himself and what he did in the war. I think that most of the men who fought in that war were much the same.
My father returning from a mission over Japan was reading his instruments, while heading back t Guam. He woke up his navigator, who happened to be sitting in the bombardier's seat. The navigator, upon waking up, noticed another B-29 heading right at them. He alerted my father who was able to bank the plane away from the approaching B-29.
He's convinced that had his navigator not alerted him about the approaching B-29, they would have collided over the Pacific.
"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."
Come on, be fair, it will be 75% Tuskeegee Airmen, 12.5% Apache Code Talkers, 6% on the contributions of Gay Marines, and 6.5% on both the Pacific and European theaters.
BE FAIR Dammit it was a very diverse war!/Sarcasm
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