« Question No. 6b | Main | Work in progress »
February 21, 2006
Sneak preview
Ken Burns’s latest mega-project is World War II. He and his company have been working on a 15-hour documentary to be aired next year.
Yesterday at St. Paul’s School, where his daughter was once a student, Burns showed excerpts from a rough cut. He told the students they were the first people outside his Walpole studio to see any of the work.
Why World War II? In speaking with the students, Burns cited two pieces of polling data about American perceptions of the war. If the data is correct, half of Americans believe the wars in the European and Pacific theaters were fought in different time frames. Four in ten think the United States fought as Germany's ally against the Russians.
Will Burns do for World War II what he did for the Civil War? Will he put his distinctive stamp on the war? Will his documentary stir the public to talk and read about the seminal American event of the 20th century as he stirred it to talk and read about the seminal American event of the 19th century?
More than 15 years has passed since Burns’s Civil War documentary aired. I’m not sure anything on television this side of the grand finale of American Idol can capture the kind of audience that Burns’s Civil War did. That series truly became a national experience, connecting the public with its history in a way that no other television event has.
The public should have even more personal reasons for watching Burns’s World War II documentary. Even more than 60 years later, most of us have parents, grandparents or great-grandparents who lived through it -- or didn't.
As a subject, World War II also has some technological advantages over the Civil War, the main one being moving pictures. The snippets screened for the students at St. Paul’s yesterday showed the bodies of U.S. Marines bobbing in the surf off the beaches at Tarawa. Such images tell a story as no still picture can.
No doubt Burns knows more about story-telling than he did in the 1980s, when he made his Civil War film. But even then he knew the importance of telling such a big story chronoligically. He is committed to this approach for World War II, which should give viewers a sense of just how global the war was for their forbears.
To narrow that approach to particulars, he has chosen to tell the story from an American perspective through the experiences of four municipalities: Mobile, Sacramento, Waterbury, Conn., and Luverne, Minn.
From the little bit of the film I saw, and from what Burns said, he plans to do much more than follow the fascinating stories of veterans and others from those four places. He will also show the distant social and economic milieu of that time. He will tell the story of race (a favorite theme, whatever his subject), of the internment of Japanese-Americans, of the place of Jews in our society and of how the Holocaust dawned on the American conscience.
Something else might happen as a result of the Burns film. It could be that editors like me all over the country will look for ways to tell their communities’ and states’ World War II histories in conjunction with the documentary’s showing. Burns appears to have chosen his communities well, but this is a big country, and World War II dominated life in every community.
Anyway, it was a privilege to get an early peek at Burns’s project. I hope he succeeds. I hope he reawakens Americans to their history. What happened then matters now, and the better we understand it, the more confidently we can face the future.
Posted by Mike Pride at February 21, 2006 03:42 PM
Comments
My son, a sophomore at CHS, was studying last night for a history test on WWII. His brother is a junior at CHS who took "Land of Promise" (American History) last year. Neither knew who the Axis powers were. My son the junior couldn't identify where D-Day took place, eventhough every night he plays "Medal of Honor" a computer simulation game from WWII. He wasn't sure what decade it occurred.
Hearing about those survey results gives me no comfort about how history -- or equally important, geography, are being taught.
I recall that I knew from early on who fought in that war -- my father fought in that war, and, probably more significantly, so many movies and TV shows in the 1960s when I was growing up focused on WWII.
It is funny what assumptions we make. I confess that only a year or two ago did I realize that they didn't call it WWI until AFTER World War II!
Posted by: Dan Wise at February 23, 2006 10:06 AM
When I was in high school, back before there was electric lighting, my history teacher sort of back-loaded the agenda. He got so carried away with old history that he never got to new history, i.e., the 2d World War. I suspect that this same thing is true today. Of course we were then still close enough to the conflict that we at least knew who the various combatants were.
All right, I'm officially an old fogey (fogie? fogy?). But it's sad how little the average American knows of his country's history or governing traditions,and that lack of knowledge can help to erode those traditions. Look at how complacent we are about the Bush administration's concerted, repeat assaults on essential civil liberties.
Posted by: Katy Burns at February 23, 2006 09:47 PM