
Ken Burns is not a man. Look past his small round head and his now-graying beard and you will see that he is a juggernaut. No one has ever made a documentary which can compare with one Ken Burns has done. No one ever will. If Michael Moore was one quarter of the filmmaker Ken Burns was, this entire nation would never elect a Republican again.
Look at Jazz. Look at Baseball. Look at The Civil War. These are films which have defined broad and pervasive topics for these generations and their influence will never be shed. If Burns were to remake the greatest large documentary which he didn’t make, Vietnam: A Television History, the original would be little more than a footnote in history.
But enough about Ken Burns and the overwhelming accolades he so obviously deserves. Let’s take a look at his newest film – The War.
Produced for PBS, The War is a seven part, 15 hour masterpiece. Burns is quick to admit that there is no way to tell the entire story of World War II, what those who lived through it still refer to simply as “The War.â€Â To solve that dilemma, he focuses on the wartime experiences of four soldiers from four different locations: Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota. The result is a human look at a landscape usually dominated by dates, generals, hundred mile long fronts and tactics.
In the featurette, “Making The Warâ€, Ken Burns speaks about how people can been telling him for years that he should make a documentary about the Second World War, but he never felt that he would be able to capture that story. Yet when he learned that World War II veterans in America were passing away at the rate of 1,000 a day, he rethought that. We will always have the facts of the war around, but we will not always have the experiences. That is what Burns sets out to, and does, capture in this moving documentary.
The War contains all of the Ken Burns specials. There is James Earl Jones doing the narration, Wynton Marsalis writing and performing songs for the soundtrack, long shots of haunting scenery, Tom Hanks reading letters as the handwritten script floats across the screen, famous and long-lost archival footage mixed together, a great focus on scenes of usually populated environments without people in them, and the camera panning across black and white photos to create the image of movement and to capture the eye.
The beautifully packaged boxed set contains six DVDs, each loaded with at least one episode. The special features from the series are spread throughout the boxed set. Episodes One and Four contain commentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Disc One contains the featurette mentioned above, interviews, and biographies of those in the film. Disc Six has deleted scenes and more interviews. Every episode boasts a soundtrack built from the ground up. Not just as far as the songs are concerned either. All the archival footage Burns procured came without sound, so the recording engineers had to find, record, and mix every sound for every piece of footage. The film was wrapped and ready to be broadcast but was placed on whole for over a year while the soundtrack was finished being compiled. As always, the documentaries of Ken Burns are flawless in their attention to detail.
Through The War, Ken Burns sets the screen ablaze.
This DVD boxed set, soundtrack, and companion hardcover book is available at Amazon.com.
2 users commented in " Movie Review: The War by Ken Burns "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback“No one has ever made a documentary which can compare with one Ken Burns has done. No one ever will.”
As much an admirer of Ken Burn’s work as I am, for me (and many others) Jeremy Isaac’s 1970s World At War series is still the finest documentary made about WW2.
The Civil War is still stands as Mr Burns’s finest piece of documantary film-making.
To Ken Burns: Yes I am a Disabled Vietnam Veteran, and I have had problems ever since that War and I vist the Veterans Hospital almost on a weekly basis, for my own needs and others. I have talked with many a Vietnam Veteran, and all have told me the same thing that nobody ever cared about us. We were just boys and girls when we went over there. We didn;t know what we were getting ourselves into, and because of that we lost over 58,000 of those boys and girls over there, but does anyone care? No one about us even today, maybe people still see us as losers. But it still hurts to tears for us Vietnam Veterans.I know you do Documentaries, I wish you could do a Documentary of how us Vietnam Veterans feel today. I would truly love to give everyone out there a piece of my mind.I have been suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for years because of that War, and its only because of the Grace of God that I’m still here. Ken we are still hurting. I hear it everytime I go to the Veterans Hospital here in San Antonio Texas.Could you help us Forgotten Vietnam Veterans? To finally have our Country recognize us and Love us. For an Examole I wore a T-Shirt that I had made up which said on the front “VIETNAM VET” under that said 1969-1970, and on the back was the bases i was at. Phu Cat, Cam Rahn Bay, and Phan Rang. I wore this T-Shirt everday for six weeks straight. I washed it out everynight. I wore it to all kinds of functions where alot of people were gathered. I did my own survey. Well in six weeks I still got the same look i got forty years ago. A look of disgust. people ignored me like I had somekind of disease or something. Not one person ever came up to me and said at least thank you. I cried many of nights in my pillow because of that. So I stopped wearing it for my own health. How can so many treat us that way trying to defend this country? We have never recovered from that Ken. Can You Do Something. Not just for me, but for at least those 58,000 who lost their young lives over there, and for us who are still in pain today both emotionally and physcially. I was 19 years old when I went over there, and now I am 61, and I still the pain of it after all these years. I hope my emotionally plea sparks a response from you. Thank You and God Bless You, From A tired Vietnam Veteran, Skye!
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