The War (Burns/Novick, 2007)

[bunuelian]

I'd laugh if any American director tried to make a compelling 15 hour documentary about the Japanese experience, German experience, Chinese experience, etc. of the war. It would be far and away more absurd to do that than to tell the story of the American experience of the war as Burns does. All this heeing and hawing about needing to tell the universal story simply ignores the vast gulfs of experience and culture that would have to be bridged to make such a documentary possible, not to mention the sheer mountain of practical challenges.

I liked the first episode. Not as tight as The Civil War, and certainly not revolutionary, but good.

[ltfontaine]

What a great opportunity for this popular artist to make one small effort to educate Americans about the world existing outside. What an important time in history to attempt such an effort.

I couldn't agree with you more on this point, gubbelsj. Even if Burns' title for the first episode does make a politically provocative point of distingushing WW II as "a necessary war," implicitly referencing a current one that isn't, he does appear ready to fall into the traditional mode of casting WW II as one more chapter in American, rather than world history. But as Richard W says above, no single treatment can achieve comprehensive coverage of this immense story, so it remains to be seen how well Burns will retell the tale of "what it all meant to us."

And perhaps attacking Burns for telling only surface stories, or merely focusing on specific mainstream interpretations of events, ignores the fact that Burns, like Time magazine, functions more as a reflector of contemporary American tastes than as a trendsetter.

But isn't it from his vantage point as a proven trendsetter that Burns' historiography is loaded and potentially counterproductive? His franchise is so influential, especially allied with that of PBS. Burns' documentaries are the first to end up in classrooms and on library shelves--his work is widely regarded as the gold standard. I would wager that more people have taken their cue from Burns than from any other single source on how to think about jazz or the Civil War. I don't know if creative music will ever recover from Ken Burns' Jazz (According to Wynton), which wrote an entire generation of adventurous musicians out of the story, as if they didn't have it hard enough already.

[exte]

I'm waiting to catch it on DVD. I don't generally disparage Burns though, Unforgivable Blackness was tops.

I had a roommate in college who said I must absolutely see Civil War, and that Baseball got him hooked on Burns, it was that good... My film professor, though, prefers him dead for what he has done to documentaries...

When "The Civil War" first aired in 1990, it was universally praised by both critics and audiences. If "The War" had been the first major effort by Burns, I believe it would also be receiving universal praise. Now, we lament the lack of high quality television, but insist on taking shots when presented with something truly worth seeing.

Do we have some kind of subconscious need to show how jaded we are by taking an arguably minor flaw such as the lack of Latino perspective, and dismissing the entire series on that basis?

Too many critics and reviewers spend too much time scratching their head at the latest Burns triumph and saying to themselves, "gotta bring this guy down a peg, gotta write something with plenty of attitude and a new angle to show everyone how cool I AM."

This was not the attitude of the Greatest Generation which won World War II, and saved the world for several generations of sophisticated brats who couldn't find Guadalcanal on a map if their life depended on it. There was a time when many lives did depend on it.

The major problem facing the country is the complete polarization of "red state - blue state" political opinion which allows for no middle ground and no opportunity for consensus building. God help us if this polarization is now affecting history and the arts.

You had me until the last paragraph. I think you're taking a huge leap there, honestly.

[bearcuborg]

After watching the first two episodes the whole things feels too long. I do appreciate that there is more emphasis put on personal experience rather than a military narrative, but the long pauses and slow fades in and out of black feel insincere.

[Roger_Thornhill]

Do we have some kind of subconscious need to show how jaded we are by taking an arguably minor flaw such as the lack of Latino perspective, and dismissing the entire series on that basis?

Why is that a flaw? "The War" is not supposed to be the definitive account of the American experience in World War II. It even has a title that says as much in the beginning. There was an op-ed in the Washington Post recently with a Latino independent television producer complaining about the omission of Latinos in the film, even after Burns had agreed to make a half-hour segment about Latinos in WWII. Now mind you, this producer was livid that it was only 28 minutes long and that it was tacked on, which made watching the first night of it rather odd as it ends and then abruptly goes into a pretty interesting segment about a couple of Latino Marines, but to think that Burns had to represent every minute ethnicity in America is unrealistic. Hispanics, which can be of any race of course, were not segregated like blacks were nor were they rounded up and shipped to concentration camps like Japanese-Americans, so I can understand why Burns would put more focus on those two groups over Latinos.

I'd love to see a film about the Latino experience in WWII and I wondered why this "independent television producer" hadn't taken it upon himself to make a feature length documentary on the subject - or those Latinos organizations that caused such an uproar over it.

[domino harvey]

Coming to Blu-ray May 15