Friday,
September 21, 2007
"The War" A MUST See - Starts
this Sunday !!!!!!! PBS-TV
The
ANNOTICO Report
At
14 and a half hours, The
War is a whopper of a film,
and often revelatory. It is also nostalgic, and nationalistic. It is fantastically sentimental stuff -
filmmaker Ken Burns at his most indulgent.and, it's
pretty effective. Burns has a made an art out of wringing tears and sighs from a
nation whose lack of interest in history ranks among its most salient
characteristics
The
War is
neither a complete nor balanced account of World War II.Imagine
that Burns had narrated The Civil
War solely from the Union perspective, and you'll have a sense
of both what's right and what's wrong with this latest epic: It's rousing
and meaningful and not technically inaccurate, but not exactly the whole
truth.
The
series contains no identifiable historical experts. The War
offers no commentary from the German or Japanese side, or even
from the British or Canadians.The film even says little about Hitler,
Stalin, Mussolini, Hirohito, Churchill, FDR, or any of the other national
leaders who presided over the worst catastrophe of the 20th century.
What The War
provides instead is a harrowing portrait of war from the bottom up,!!!
Burns and his
team show a particular knack for finding stories that highlight the
disjuncture between battlefield wretchedness and the relatively normal lives of
Americans at home. Among the most affecting is that of "Babe" Ciarlo, an Italian-American draftee who wrote
cheerful notes home while battling for his life in the
True to form,
Burns milks Ciarlo's story for all it's worth,
juxtaposing letter after letter ("We are having beautiful weather";
"I'm glad that you're going down to the beach with the babies";
"I'm all right- nothing ever happens here") with graphic
footage of rifle fire whizzing through the Italian countryside, mortars
blowing farmhouse-sized holes in the fields, corpses decomposing in
ditches, and medics binding up awful wounds.
=======================================================
Thursday, Sept. 20, 2007,
In the final
moments of The War, the
new miniseries by Ken Burns, the camera gazes out over a country horizon at
sunset. Lilting in the background are the soft chords of a solo piano,
accompanied by the murmur of crickets. Then, the husky voice of pop stylist
Norah Jones eases in. "For those who think they have nothing to
share," she sings as the faces of World War II veterans and their families
begin to flash across the screen, "Who feel there are no heroes
there..." After some two minutes of plaintive photographs, the film closes
with Jones in a last patriotic refrain. "
This is
fantastically sentimental stuff - filmmaker Ken Burns at his most indulgent.
Even worse, it's pretty effective. Since his triumph in 1990 with The Civil War, Burns has a made an art out
of wringing tears and sighs from a nation whose lack of interest in history
ranks among its most salient characteristics. Now, 17 years to the day since
PBS broadcast The Civil War, he
returns this Sunday night with The
War, a sprawling account of the American experience in World War
II.
At 14
and a half hours, The War is a whopper of a film, and often revelatory. It is
also manipulative, nostalgic, and nationalistic.
Imagine that
Burns had narrated The Civil War
solely from the Union perspective, and you'll have a sense of both what's right
and what's wrong with this latest epic: It's rousing and meaningful and not technically
inaccurate, but not exactly the whole truth.
Burns readily
admits that The War is
neither a complete nor balanced account of World War II. "The Second World
War was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting,"
reads the opening screen of each episode. "This is the story of four
American towns and how their citizens experienced that war." He means this
quite literally. The War
showcases a handful of lively, eloquent Americans from four
disparate towns-
The series
contains no identifiable historical experts. (Though cultural historians
What The War
provides instead is a harrowing portrait of war from the bottom
up, as described by worried siblings, imprisoned civilians, and others who
had little control over its direction. Burns focuses on the experiences of
front-line soldiers"our boys," in the anxious words of home front
observerswho found themselves caught up in the "meat grinder" of
national service. The film opens
with the story of Glenn Frazier, an
Burns and his
team show a particular knack for finding stories that highlight the
disjuncture between battlefield wretchedness and the relatively normal lives of
Americans at home. Among the most affecting is that of "Babe" Ciarlo, an Italian-American draftee who wrote cheerful
notes home while battling for his life in the
In its
fascination with the blood and guts of combat, The War is like a
nonfiction Saving Private Ryan: a sickening run of violence
leavened by tales of individual heroism and courage. (Lest we fail to draw the
connection, Tom Hanks himself reads the words of Al McIntosh, a small-town
As to which
social and political systems might lead people to choose one set of actions
over another, The War is decidedly mum. This emphasis on feeling, rather
than analysis, is the key to Burns' style. Though often described as a historian,
or documentarian, Burns prefers to call himself an
"emotional archaeologist"; he wants to know how the past felt, not
how it happened. His approach often makes for great viewing: Who wouldn't be
devastated to learn that Ciarlo's mother, believing
his promises that "I'm doing good, and always happy," spent years
fruitlessly scanning the newspapers for evidence that he had, in fact,
survived? "Emotional archaeology" does not, however, always make for
unimpeachable history.
The
problem with relying so heavily on memory and emotion is that they are often
unreliable guides to the past. When asked to recount what their hometowns were
like before the war, the residents of Waterbury, Mobile, Sacramento, and Luverne describe idylls free from social conflict: "Everybody
knew pretty much everybody," "we had a wonderful neighborhood,"
"all ethnic groups were just perfect," "it was a wonderful way
to grow up." In the world of The
War, there are no Democrats and
Republicans, everyone stood loyally behind FDR, and the Depression barely put a
dent in American optimism.
This tendency to
view the home front through the gauzy lens of nostalgia is one of the film's
weakest points. Burns addresses racial segregation and Japanese internment at
some length, condemning both as great contradictions in a war for democracy.
Even here, though, the sins of the past are filtered and softened for the
present. Everyone interviewed laments such practices as moral errors- an
admirable consensus suited to 2007. More dubiously, they almost all remember
feeling that way in the 1940s. This is where a few more expert voices might
have come in handy. Burns often mocks historians as dry, unimaginative hacks,
people who would prefer to hand you a phone book filled with raw data than to
compose an engaging narrative. Leaving aside the general merits of this
criticism, in the case of The War,
a touch of big-picture expertise might have made the narrative more
interesting, rather than less.
Historian John
Dower, for instance, has written eloquently of the differences between the
Pacific and European theaters, describing how Americans' racialized
ideas of Oriental savagery sanctioned battlefield practices "cutting off
the ears of enemy dead, for instance" mostly lacking in the campaign
against Germany. The War
portrays the brutality of the Pacific War - in one scene, the film quotes late
memoirist Eugene Sledge as he describes a fellow American chopping out the gold
teeth of a wounded, but still living, Japanese soldier. Without more context, though, we're left to understand such actions
merely as evidence of war's generic degradation.
With choices like
this, The War, despite its graphic footage and remarkable personal
testimony, is a relatively safe film, unlikely to offend anyone's political
sensibility. Although Burns successfully undermines the bloodless "good
war" myth - after 14 hours, he amply demonstrates that World War II was,
in his words, "the worst war ever" - he happily affirms the popular
image of a selfless and unsurpassed "Greatest Generation." At times,
Burns seems almost envious of that generation's opportunities for heroism and
sacrifice. After 9/11, he pointed out during a preview screening in
The film ends rather
incongruously, not with an assessment of how those sacrifices shaped the global
balance of power in the 1940s but with the somber declaration, "A thousand
veterans of The War die everyday." The effect is vaguely guilt-inducing:
After all they've done for us, now we're just going to let them die? The intent, however, is
more practical. Among their other goals, Burns and PBS hope to encourage
Americans to interview their grandparents and great-grandparents and to send
the recollections to the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project to be
stored for posterity.
It's here, in the
intimacies of family dynamics and generational memory, that The War is likely to have its
greatest impact. Even the most innocuous relative or neighbor, the film reminds
us, may contain untold depths: Perhaps that retired trucker survived the Bataan
Death March, perhaps that insurance man was shot down
over
The film shows
just how deep the trauma of war penetrated into the lives of these men and
women, and how little most of them have ever said about it. Some 60 years later, Olga
Ciarlo still cries while reading the letter she
composed to her brother Babe for his 21st birthday. Even
Undoubtedly,
there are many more such memories to be recorded: stories of violence and death
and loss subsequently covered over with the thin veneer of civilization. If The War inspires a new generation
to set out in search of these tales, it has done more than most films will ever
do. Then again, those who go looking for stories of battlefield heroism and
sacrifice may be surprised at what they find. During a trip to the beach this
past summer, my 90-year-old father and I slipped into conversation about his
Army years, spent in such exotic places as
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