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Burns comes to Starz
Acclaimed filmmaker explores human side of historic conflict
By Adam Goldstein
goldstea@mscd.edu

Photo by Jason Small • jsmall04@mscd.edu Filmmaker Ken Burns stands outside of the Starz FilmCenter Aug. 26. Burns premiered clips from his new film, The War, which examines WWII from an American perspective. The series, which is over 14 hours long, will premiere on PBS in September 2007.

When director Ken Burns finished The Civil War, his 11-hour examination of the war between the states, he swore off any further documentaries about epic conflict.

“I didn’t want to be typecast,” he said at the Starz FilmCenter Aug. 26.

But in the mid-’90s, a disturbing set of statistics made his resolve waver.

“The National Council for History Education came out with a study that said that 40 percent of graduating high school seniors think that we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War,” he said. “That’s 40 percent of graduating seniors – not failing, not flunking.”

These widespread historical misconceptions were only a part of his inspiration to address such a sprawling topic. The second was the rapidly diminishing store of first-hand testimony.

"We were losing 1,000 veterans of the Second World War a day in the U.S.,” he said. “It represented in some ways memory being lost from our hard drive.”

Both of these factors were unsettling for a filmmaker who has devoted his career to the cinematic upkeep of historical memory.

The director’s documentaries have targeted such sprawling and multi-tiered topics as the West, jazz, baseball and the Civil War. He’s turned an unflinching and probing lens on cultural and literary figures like Mark Twain and Jack Johnson.

His newest documentary, The War, examines World War II from a uniquely American perspective. The film seeks to tell the story of the conflict from the vantage of four small American towns: LaVerne, Minn., Mobile, Ala., Sacramento, Calif. and Waterbury, Conn. The War aims for an intimate and immediate perspective, a structural departure from The Civil War, which highlighted the conflict’s high-profile political and military figures.

“In The Civil War, we were trying to do simultaneously a top-down and bottom-up look at that war,” Burns said. “In this film, we decided to focus on so-called ‘ordinary’ people … We were looking for an experience of the Second World War in the most visceral and experiential way, (and) at the same time trying to tie together a common American experience.”

The result is a highly personal, instinctive view of war. Burns follows the paths of American soldiers as they wade through the horror, the loss and the devastation of the 20th century’s most destructive and brutal conflict. Through interviews and historical footage, The War follows the major developments of the war through the eyes of American servicemen and their families back home.

Burns screened approximately an hour of the seven-part, 14-hour series for a capacity crowd at Starz. The full film will premiere on PBS September 2007.

Burns premiered footage from the upcoming series at Starz, fielding questions and encouraging dialogue from the audience.

“This is very much going to be your night,” Burns said to the crowd.

Though the intermittent clips from the series’ prologue and episodes painted a frenetic picture of the series as a whole, Burns’ overarching approach tied the disparate segments together. From the Battle of Saipan in the Pacific to the American liberation of Poland’s concentration camps, the film attempts to infuse the war’s major events with an individualized and immediate perspective.
The film is Burns’ attempt to clarify World War II’s legacy, to challenge the status quo of history and to illustrate in words and images the true toll of the war.

“We’re going back to an experience that has been so calcified with the wrong kind of signals,” Burns said. “We called it ‘the good war’ – there’s no such thing as a good war. I think that we’ve tended to see the Second World War in a kind of casual, distanced, celebratory way. I tried to circumvent a lot of the clichés and move beyond them, to restate them in a new way without being didactic.”