Entertainment, TV, Television - Marine Corps Times

‘The War’ is a 15-hour film with a narrow view

The TV promotions for Ken Burns’ “The War,” which premiers Sunday on PBS, give the sense that the seven-part series about World War II will be a departure for public television’s flagship filmmaker.

“Not recommended for children,” the notices say. “Disturbing content.” “Violence.”

Not quite what viewers have grown to expect from Burns, whose films usually cycle from talking heads to B-roll sunrises to stentorian voiceovers as the camera zooms back from an old photograph. Burns is accustomed to humanizing monumental subjects — previous epics have included “The Civil War,” and “Jazz” — so the biggest conflict in history is certainly within his range. But as an entry in the Burns oeuvre, how different is “The War?”

Not very, revealed an advance copy of the series provided to Military Times.

The seven episodes follow four American towns — in Connecticut, Alabama, Minnesota and California — and track the sons they sent off and the changes the war brought home. Men from the towns fought all over the world: One parachuted into Normandy before the invasion; another was a beachmaster on D-Day; and others fought in the Philippines and at Peleliu.

Their families at home have other interesting stories to tell. One woman remembers being allowed to play on the Gulf Coast beach in Alabama, but being forbidden to have campfires after dark, for fear of German submarines out at sea.

Burns includes a great deal of combat footage, but with its spare music, slow fades and period photographs, “The War” is instantly recognizable as one of his films. When he has enough historical footage, Burns breaks away from his formula, as in an astonishing color sequence about the Battle of Iwo Jima. Many of the black-and-white movies we expect from the period were originally shot in color, Burns says, but were converted to black-and-white to be included in the newsreels of the day.

Although “The War” assumes its viewers have no prior knowledge about World War II, it’s a highly incomplete account of the conflict — Burns barely mentions the Battles of Britain or Midway or Stalingrad or Kursk, and interviews no Germans or Japanese or French or British, nor does he really discuss context, strategies, tactics, weapons or politics. From the perspective of Burns’ Joe Sixpack protagonists, World War II is a “cataclysm” that blew in out of nowhere, chewed up millions of lives, and then blew away again.

So, despite its “audience is a blank-slate” conceit, “The War” will work best for people already familiar with the history-book details of World War II, who have a sense about the war’s important commanders and battles, and are interested in the details of the war as told by Joe and Jane Punchclock of Anytown, U.S.A., now recalling events in their 80s.

Burns concedes in a message at the beginning of every episode that the “war was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting;” and he told Mother Jones magazine that the 15-hour film “wasn't going to be all things to all people; it was more like a poem, not a textbook.”

But for a documentarian of Burns’ reputation, whose previous movies are considered the definitive treatments on their topics — has anyone else made Civil War or baseball movies since his? — it seems to have been difficult for many people to accept his narrow-purview strategy for World War II. Most Americans first heard of “The War” in the spring of 2007, when Latino groups learned that Burns was filming different groups’ accounts of the World War II and demanded they be included, too. (He eventually agreed and added their stories to the film.)

The lack of completeness may be where “The War” is a departure from Burns’ other films: even with its immense length, the movie doesn’t even attempt to exhaust its subject matter. There may not be a way to make rival movie about baseball or Thomas Jefferson, but even after the mammoth “War” there is still ample opportunity for many more great World War II films.

If you watch:

“The War” is scheduled to air over two weeks: The first episode premiers Sunday at 8 p.m. EDT, then the next editions air at 8 p.m. the following three nights. The fifth episode is scheduled to air on Sept. 30, with the final two episodes on the two following nights.

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