PDA

View Full Version : Burns depicts the 'worst war ever'



thedrifter
06-30-07, 05:36 AM
Burns depicts the 'worst war ever'
WWII film preview shown at Cap Center

By MIKE PRIDE
Monitor staff

Jun 29, 2007

Filmmaker Ken Burns's main aim in his new film is to dispel the myth that World War II was the "good war" and to supplant that myth with what he sees as reality. As he put it before a preview of the film last night at the Capitol Center for the Arts, "It was the worst war ever."

The crowd of 800-plus people who watched the 67 minutes of clips from The War were left with little doubt that Burns will achieve his aim. The segments Burns showed included the slaughter of U.S. Marines on the beaches of Tarawa, the mass suicide of Japanese civilians on Saipan and the liberation of Hitler's death camps.

The War is a 14½-hour, seven-part series that will begin Sept. 23 on PBS stations.
Burns told the audience that after the success of his Civil War series in 1990, he resisted making another film about war. Two facts changed his mind. He read that 1,000 World War II veterans were dying each day, many having never told their stories. And he saw polling data indicating that most American high school graduates thought that during World War II the United States fought alongside the Germans against the Russians.
"I couldn't take it," Burns said.

More than six years in the making, The War tells the story of World War II through the experiences of people in four American municipalities - Luverne, Minn.; Sacramento, Calif.; Mobile, Ala.; and Waterbury, Conn.

Burns said he chose the four because they would be unfamiliar to most Americans, meaning viewers would not bring preconceptions to the film. He and his crew made fresh discoveries in researching and interviewing in these places, and he hoped the film would convey that freshness to viewers.
Choosing the four municipalities also allowed Burns and co-director Lynn Nevick to bring focus to a cataclysm that killed 50 million to 60 million people and changed the latter half of the 20th century.

The decision allowed the directors to tell the story in human terms and to explore race and ethnicity in America, themes that have always interested Burns. Alabama was part of the segregated South. Sacramento was home to many Japanese-Americans who wound up in internment camps.

While these social issues are important to the story, its main subject is the war itself - "slaughter beyond comprehension," as Burns put it. The filmmakers use archival footage, some of it in color, to show what happened. They follow the fighting in both theaters of war chronologically.

The film tells the war from an American perspective while recognizing that the United States did not bear the brunt of it. The narrator points out that U.S. cities were not destroyed, and citizens on the home front were never really in danger. The war killed 405,000 American soldiers, but this country suffered proportionately fewer deaths than any other major participant.

On the other hand, the film argues, without the sacrifice of American lives, the war's outcome would have been different. And the war changed the country in important ways. The U.S. economy became stronger each year of the war, and an isolated people moved to the center of world affairs.

The film's narrator says that the war "brought out the best and the worst of a generation and blended the two so that at times they became indistinguishable."

Even with so many moving pictures and so much action, viewers will be struck by the deliberate Burns style. Just as he did in his Civil War documentary 17 years ago, Burns pans slowly over still photographs, sometimes piquing the viewer's curiosity about the true subject until the camera finds and lingers on that last quadrant of the image.

In many cases, those interviewed were telling their stories for the first time. In a press conference before the showing, Burns said "Pop, you never told me that" was a common reaction among children of veterans who listened in on the interviews.

"We were witnessing the birth of expressed memory," Burns said.

Many of those memories were excruciating. Sixty years after the fact, a Jewish soldier from Waterbury who saw evidence of the Holocaust speaks of his experience with pain and passion. A soldier from Mobile in the Pacific watched wounded soldiers being carried past him and decided on the spot to attend medical school after the war.

The preview included so many scenes that were difficult to watch that Burns felt the need to reassure the audience afterward. In the full film, he said, "I promise you people fall in love and tell jokes."

The nearly 50 interviews in the film distinguish it from Burns's Civil War, which featured many historians. By contrast, The War is bottom-up history - "no Monday-morning quarterbacks or armchair generals," Burns said. His speaking parts go to people who fought in the war or waited on the home front for loved ones to come home. "This is our fathers," Burns said. "This is my father."

He said he had "paid lip service to bottom-up history for years. This time it's not lip service."

At an earlier screening, Burns said that during a break a woman asked him to tell her whether a particular subject had survived the war. In fact, it was clear he had, as he was the 82-year-old veteran narrating his own story. This confirmed Burns's sense that "good history is sitting there watching and thinking it didn't turn out the way you know it did."

An aggressive marketing campaign for the film will include advertisements on Anheuser-Busch beer coasters and ATM slips from the Bank of America, Burns said. The two are among the film's corporate sponsors.

The campaign will also include many repetitions of the film's segments on PBS and an early release on DVD.

"If you make a good film and nobody knows it's on, is it good?" Burns said. "My answer is no."

Last night's audience included several World War II veterans from the New Hampshire Veterans Home in Tilton.

"Young people don't know enough about the war," said Charlie Safford, who flew 50 missions over Italy.

And, said Forrest Foley, a veteran of the 10th Mountain Division who described the snap of a bullet that just missed him in a foxhole in Italy, "They need to know so they'll avoid it in the future."

Another veteran, Vernon Vermouth, manned a 50-caliber machine gun guarding airstrips in the China-Burma-India theater.

"Every war is nasty," he said, "and sometimes the worst part is getting there and back." He recounted an attack by German planes using torpedoes that sank the ship behind his in the Mediterranean Sea.

Vermouth called the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima "the best thing that happened in the Second World War."

"They dropped the bomb, and we knew we were out of there," he said.

Thomas Pillsbury, a soldier from Concord, landed with his anti-aircraft unit at Normandy on June 12, six days after D-Day. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was present at the liberation of Dachau.

Pillsbury said the most difficult thing about the war was being away from home.

"I lost my father during the Battle of the Bulge, and I couldn't get a furlough, naturally," he said.

He plans to be watching when the full film airs in the fall.

Asked if he saw World War II as a good war, he said, "No war is good."

Ellie