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Sunday 23 SEP 07 ON PBS EPIC WWII FILM/SERIES "THE WAR"
THE WAR, a seven-part series directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of a handful of men and women from four quintessentially American towns. The series explores the most intimate human dimensions of the greatest cataclysm in history — a worldwide catastrophe that touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America — and demonstrates that in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives.
Throughout the series, the indelible experience of combat is brought vividly to life as veterans describe what it was like to fight
and kill and see men die at places like Monte Cassino and Anzio and Omaha Beach; the Hürtgen Forest and the Vosges Mountains and the Ardennes; and on the other side of the world at Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Saipan; Peleliu and the Philippine Sea and Okinawa. In all of the battle scenes, dramatic historical footage and photographs are combined with extraordinarily realistic sound effects to give the film a terrifying, visceral immediacy.
Coming Soon! On September 23 an in-depth, interactive Web site will be available right here. The site will feature information about the witnesses who share their experiences throughout the film; a close-up look at the four communities featured in the film; extensive information about the series and the filmmakers; and a searchable database containing hundreds items used in the making of THE WAR.
Ken Burns' 'The War' hits home Sunday on PBS
BY PAUL LIEBERMAN Los Angeles Times
September 23, 2007
Ken Burns, whose latest documentary series, "The War," begins Sunday on PBS (WNET/13 at 8 p.m., WLIW/21 at 10 p.m.), has always been drawn to statements that sum things up in the broadest way. Posted on the wall of his office here, behind his own farmhouse in Walpole, N.H., is a pearl from Tyrone Guthrie, the Minneapolis theater impresario: "We are looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of again."
Burns is forever quoting historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also, about how our fractured society suffers from "too much pluribus and not enough unum." So it is in "The War" that the opening minutes have former Marine pilot Sam Hynes saying, "I don't think there is such a thing as a good war. There are sometimes necessary wars," thus providing a theme that runs through Burns' seven-parter, all 15 hours of it.
Burns has a sum-it-up for himself as well. He says right out that he's about "Waking the dead" and that this stems from his mother's death when he was 11. He volunteers in interviews and speeches that there wasn't a day of his childhood when he wasn't aware of her cancer and that it influenced "all that I would become."
He did not see this link until well after he had earned renown for "The Civil War," which captured the nation's imagination in 1990 and gave people a new way of looking at still photographs, which freeze a moment in time but which he animated by zooming in, or scanning over them, the technique now called the "Ken Burns effect." Burns now takes his turn examining the war that killed 60 million.
"Here lie three Americans," says the Shakespearean voice of the narrator as the screen shows one of the photos of World War II, a Life magazine shot of uniformed bodies on a New Guinea beach. Published in 1943, it marked the first time Americans back home had been allowed to see their dead, though nearly two years had passed since Pearl Harbor.
A matter of Life and death
Burns and a half-dozen others are in a sound studio in Times Square making final tweaks to Episode 3, "A Deadly Calling." The Life photo is used in its introductory moments, following a shot of a bucolic homeland cemetery and newsreel-style footage of an island battle.
Burns, in jeans and a T-shirt, sits with a legal pad on his lap, taking notes next to his co-producer and co-director, Lynn Novick. Second by second, they are scrutinizing the soundtrack to decide when our contemplation of the cemetery should be interrupted by the sounds of lapping waves and rat-a-tat machine gunfire. "We anticipated out of the cemetery a little too much," Burns says, "and it's not about the waves, it's about the guns," so the soundman tones down the surf. But the decibel level rises through the battle footage, culminating in an explosion. Then, silence - it's time for Life's depiction of death.
The beach photo was unsettling enough in a magazine. Here Burns makes you go from one body to another as limbs sink into the wet sand. Are those maggots on that back? The only sound now is the narrator reading Life's explanation that it was time to show "the reality that lies behind the names ... on monuments in the leafy squares of busy American towns." Then, music - the soft piano of Dave Brubeck playing "Where or When," and a baby back home plays with a framed photo of his uniformed daddy.
Where the truth lies
Burns' calls his work "manipulated truth," and it's as orchestrated as any feature film. Still photos and war footage come without sound, meaning the cacophony of combat is all imposed, as are the hiss of a welding torch at the Mobile, Ala., shipyard and the nickering that punctuates the story of a Waterbury, Conn., man who got to horseback ride while others were dying overseas.
Burns is not producing a textbook but "an epic poem," and he's tried to distinguish "The War" from other World War II films by focusing on the interplay of home front and war front, using Sacramento; Luverne, Minn.; Mobile and Waterbury.
As always, Burns has fallen in love with some of his talking heads. In "The War," he has done away with the professorial types who have provided insight, but also distance, in his other films. Here, only those who lived the events get airtime, such as Katharine Phillips of Mobile, who volunteered at a Red Cross canteen after her brother joined the Marines. She recalls how the boy next door rode with Patton across Europe and how everyone was consumed with zeal to "kill the Japs" - that said with a nervous laugh.
Despising snarkiness, Burns edits out anything to make his talking heads look foolish, though he lets a vet describe taking potshots - and seeming to enjoy it - at Japanese soldiers who jumped off cliffs on Saipan, opting for suicide over capture.
Letter perfect
As for letters, Burns will never top the one he still keeps a copy of in his wallet - Sullivan Ballou's to his wife before the Civil War battle of Bull Run, "Sarah, my love for you is deathless." "The War" features very different letters written from Italy by Waterbury's Babe Ciarlo, who was under fire in the Anzio campaign but kept telling his family everything was swell, "We're having beautiful weather ... this afternoon I might be swimming in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
"Nothing ever happens here. ... I guess it's like Waterbury ... dead," the 20-year-old writes, and the viewer inevitably wonders: Is he, too?
Burns was unprepared when he was accused of discrimination - for leaving one group out of his World War II saga. "Where are the Latino stories?" asked Gus Chavez, who launched a "Defend the Honor Campaign" to force Burns to amend the series.
Burns at first said "no" - his film was in the can and, "Don't you know what I've done all my life?" But when the hardball politics didn't abate, he realized it was "a debate I was never going to win" and added two Latino veterans and a Native American at the end of three segments. He doesn't know if that will mollify the critics, but he's put a positive spin on the brouhaha, on how they hadn't pressured Latino filmmakers to tell this story. "No, no, no - it has to be Ken Burns," he says. "In a way, all of this was an extraordinary compliment."
Drumming up support
"The War" will air exactly 17 years after "The Civil War," and Burns knows there are no guarantees it, too, will prove to be, to borrow Arthur Miller's phrase, "something that would last." There were 40 channels then, 400 now. There's really nothing new you can tell people about World War II, other than to shape its story your own way, how you "listen to the ghosts."
He has been around the country for promotional screenings, appearing before West Point cadets one week, a San Francisco audience the next. He walked the red carpet at Cannes. His corporate partners - General Motors, Bank of America, Anheuser-Busch - will promote "The War" on beer cans, ATMs and at NASCAR races. Eager to see PBS attract more than "the choir," Burns seems only to be half-joking when he notes that while you never can be sure what will draw, "You know that violence does. And ... I got a film with the highest body count ever."
He says, too, "It's also, like war, about that ultimate event, one's death, which we avoid mightily in our normal lives ... and love to see in our movies to be distracted by, as if by witnessing a great deal of death, we are somehow cheating it."
"The War" ends with a reminder that 1,000 World War II veterans are dying every day, then plays its haunting theme song, "American Anthem," sung by Norah Jones. "America, America, I gave my best to you," she sings to snapshots of the characters back home, and as husbands and wives, a white couple, black couple and Japanese Americans, all young again.
Oh, yes, the last image of "The War": It's an incredibly young serviceman, smiling, really beaming. The camera pans up the photo of him in dress uniform until it reaches his hat, tilted to the side. He's not identified, he's just another GI Joe. But not to Burns. That's Dad.
THE WAR, a seven-part series directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of a handful of men and women from four quintessentially American towns. The series explores the most intimate human dimensions of the greatest cataclysm in history — a worldwide catastrophe that touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America — and demonstrates that in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives.
Throughout the series, the indelible experience of combat is brought vividly to life as veterans describe what it was like to fight
and kill and see men die at places like Monte Cassino and Anzio and Omaha Beach; the Hürtgen Forest and the Vosges Mountains and the Ardennes; and on the other side of the world at Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Saipan; Peleliu and the Philippine Sea and Okinawa. In all of the battle scenes, dramatic historical footage and photographs are combined with extraordinarily realistic sound effects to give the film a terrifying, visceral immediacy.
Coming Soon! On September 23 an in-depth, interactive Web site will be available right here. The site will feature information about the witnesses who share their experiences throughout the film; a close-up look at the four communities featured in the film; extensive information about the series and the filmmakers; and a searchable database containing hundreds items used in the making of THE WAR.
Ken Burns' 'The War' hits home Sunday on PBS
BY PAUL LIEBERMAN Los Angeles Times
September 23, 2007
Ken Burns, whose latest documentary series, "The War," begins Sunday on PBS (WNET/13 at 8 p.m., WLIW/21 at 10 p.m.), has always been drawn to statements that sum things up in the broadest way. Posted on the wall of his office here, behind his own farmhouse in Walpole, N.H., is a pearl from Tyrone Guthrie, the Minneapolis theater impresario: "We are looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of again."
Burns is forever quoting historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also, about how our fractured society suffers from "too much pluribus and not enough unum." So it is in "The War" that the opening minutes have former Marine pilot Sam Hynes saying, "I don't think there is such a thing as a good war. There are sometimes necessary wars," thus providing a theme that runs through Burns' seven-parter, all 15 hours of it.
Burns has a sum-it-up for himself as well. He says right out that he's about "Waking the dead" and that this stems from his mother's death when he was 11. He volunteers in interviews and speeches that there wasn't a day of his childhood when he wasn't aware of her cancer and that it influenced "all that I would become."
He did not see this link until well after he had earned renown for "The Civil War," which captured the nation's imagination in 1990 and gave people a new way of looking at still photographs, which freeze a moment in time but which he animated by zooming in, or scanning over them, the technique now called the "Ken Burns effect." Burns now takes his turn examining the war that killed 60 million.
"Here lie three Americans," says the Shakespearean voice of the narrator as the screen shows one of the photos of World War II, a Life magazine shot of uniformed bodies on a New Guinea beach. Published in 1943, it marked the first time Americans back home had been allowed to see their dead, though nearly two years had passed since Pearl Harbor.
A matter of Life and death
Burns and a half-dozen others are in a sound studio in Times Square making final tweaks to Episode 3, "A Deadly Calling." The Life photo is used in its introductory moments, following a shot of a bucolic homeland cemetery and newsreel-style footage of an island battle.
Burns, in jeans and a T-shirt, sits with a legal pad on his lap, taking notes next to his co-producer and co-director, Lynn Novick. Second by second, they are scrutinizing the soundtrack to decide when our contemplation of the cemetery should be interrupted by the sounds of lapping waves and rat-a-tat machine gunfire. "We anticipated out of the cemetery a little too much," Burns says, "and it's not about the waves, it's about the guns," so the soundman tones down the surf. But the decibel level rises through the battle footage, culminating in an explosion. Then, silence - it's time for Life's depiction of death.
The beach photo was unsettling enough in a magazine. Here Burns makes you go from one body to another as limbs sink into the wet sand. Are those maggots on that back? The only sound now is the narrator reading Life's explanation that it was time to show "the reality that lies behind the names ... on monuments in the leafy squares of busy American towns." Then, music - the soft piano of Dave Brubeck playing "Where or When," and a baby back home plays with a framed photo of his uniformed daddy.
Where the truth lies
Burns' calls his work "manipulated truth," and it's as orchestrated as any feature film. Still photos and war footage come without sound, meaning the cacophony of combat is all imposed, as are the hiss of a welding torch at the Mobile, Ala., shipyard and the nickering that punctuates the story of a Waterbury, Conn., man who got to horseback ride while others were dying overseas.
Burns is not producing a textbook but "an epic poem," and he's tried to distinguish "The War" from other World War II films by focusing on the interplay of home front and war front, using Sacramento; Luverne, Minn.; Mobile and Waterbury.
As always, Burns has fallen in love with some of his talking heads. In "The War," he has done away with the professorial types who have provided insight, but also distance, in his other films. Here, only those who lived the events get airtime, such as Katharine Phillips of Mobile, who volunteered at a Red Cross canteen after her brother joined the Marines. She recalls how the boy next door rode with Patton across Europe and how everyone was consumed with zeal to "kill the Japs" - that said with a nervous laugh.
Despising snarkiness, Burns edits out anything to make his talking heads look foolish, though he lets a vet describe taking potshots - and seeming to enjoy it - at Japanese soldiers who jumped off cliffs on Saipan, opting for suicide over capture.
Letter perfect
As for letters, Burns will never top the one he still keeps a copy of in his wallet - Sullivan Ballou's to his wife before the Civil War battle of Bull Run, "Sarah, my love for you is deathless." "The War" features very different letters written from Italy by Waterbury's Babe Ciarlo, who was under fire in the Anzio campaign but kept telling his family everything was swell, "We're having beautiful weather ... this afternoon I might be swimming in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
"Nothing ever happens here. ... I guess it's like Waterbury ... dead," the 20-year-old writes, and the viewer inevitably wonders: Is he, too?
Burns was unprepared when he was accused of discrimination - for leaving one group out of his World War II saga. "Where are the Latino stories?" asked Gus Chavez, who launched a "Defend the Honor Campaign" to force Burns to amend the series.
Burns at first said "no" - his film was in the can and, "Don't you know what I've done all my life?" But when the hardball politics didn't abate, he realized it was "a debate I was never going to win" and added two Latino veterans and a Native American at the end of three segments. He doesn't know if that will mollify the critics, but he's put a positive spin on the brouhaha, on how they hadn't pressured Latino filmmakers to tell this story. "No, no, no - it has to be Ken Burns," he says. "In a way, all of this was an extraordinary compliment."
Drumming up support
"The War" will air exactly 17 years after "The Civil War," and Burns knows there are no guarantees it, too, will prove to be, to borrow Arthur Miller's phrase, "something that would last." There were 40 channels then, 400 now. There's really nothing new you can tell people about World War II, other than to shape its story your own way, how you "listen to the ghosts."
He has been around the country for promotional screenings, appearing before West Point cadets one week, a San Francisco audience the next. He walked the red carpet at Cannes. His corporate partners - General Motors, Bank of America, Anheuser-Busch - will promote "The War" on beer cans, ATMs and at NASCAR races. Eager to see PBS attract more than "the choir," Burns seems only to be half-joking when he notes that while you never can be sure what will draw, "You know that violence does. And ... I got a film with the highest body count ever."
He says, too, "It's also, like war, about that ultimate event, one's death, which we avoid mightily in our normal lives ... and love to see in our movies to be distracted by, as if by witnessing a great deal of death, we are somehow cheating it."
"The War" ends with a reminder that 1,000 World War II veterans are dying every day, then plays its haunting theme song, "American Anthem," sung by Norah Jones. "America, America, I gave my best to you," she sings to snapshots of the characters back home, and as husbands and wives, a white couple, black couple and Japanese Americans, all young again.
Oh, yes, the last image of "The War": It's an incredibly young serviceman, smiling, really beaming. The camera pans up the photo of him in dress uniform until it reaches his hat, tilted to the side. He's not identified, he's just another GI Joe. But not to Burns. That's Dad.