By Bryan Newbury
September 27, 2007

“Gentlemen, this is it.” This was Quentin Aaneson’s introduction to combat. Over Omaha Beach, D-Day, Phase Two. 

Episode Four begins with the climactic scenes from the Normandy Invasion. It has been nearly seven hours to this point, and The War is intent on the payoff. After the first three offerings in the series, the accounts of the three phase European entry almost take the viewer by surprise. It has been noted, and Burns has admitted as much, that The War did not seek to go in a conventional direction; rather, it was conceived as a multi-faceted project that seeks to document the war in ways we haven’t seen time and again. The ways of retelling it that made it a knowing joke that the big “H” on the bottom of your screen stood for The Hitler Channel.

This technique is risky. When an artist of any sort attempts to take on a subject of this nature, he is caught in a sort of… forgive me… Catch 22. He can’t tread the well-worn soils that countless others have walked. He must make it new. However, when endeavoring to make it new, he runs the risk of marginalizing major events and shining a spotlight on the marginal ones. To evade this Daedalus design, he is forced to give great sway to the biggest of the big events, while portraying the surrounding events in a novel manner. So far, Ken Burns has managed to avoid the Minotaur. It is early yet to imagine The War as his Ariadne.

Episode Four is great filmmaking. It is also quite a chink in the armor of this series. 

The inherent difficulty in focusing on the personal stories of America and four of her cities at war is that war, by definition, is a rather dramatic enterprise. Pride of a Nation is filled with the drama, the strategy, the blood and toil of battle. As such, it feels a bit out of place. 

Assume, for a moment, that a person started watching The War with little knowledge of World War II. It isn’t exactly a fair assumption, considering the fact that, more than any event in recent history, World War II is omnipresent. Twenty years from now, who knows? When an artist conceives something on this scale, it is fair to apply the twenty-year test. By that time, the attention span of the American public could make that hypothetical citizen a very believable quantity. What might this John Doe take away from the series? 

Again, it isn’t quite fair. Though mammoth in scope, no one imagines that Ken Burns would wish to create the authoritative film history of World War II. If that is the case, why not focus firmly on one event, one campaign, one theater, one city, one soldier, one soldier’s wife? By setting it so broadly, he becomes vulnerable to criticism that would otherwise be absurdly rash.

D-Day does loom large, especially when viewing the war from a very American perspective. (Will there be the stories of German citizens cowering under aerial attack? If one wanted to bring the American viewing public a different angle from which to view the war, this would certainly be a golden subject.) The rub is that, by focusing in on D-Day, it only diminishes the three years of battle that led up to it. Besides, how much is left to see from the Normandy Invasion? 

Saipan is another watershed, and again, Episode Four delivers on its historical representation of just what we imagine those battles must’ve been like. The counterpoint of the 442nd is well-placed. While witnessing the attitude of the Japanese, from admiral to civilian child, choosing suicide over surrender, we get a kind reminder that this outlook served us nicely in the European theater, courtesy of our own Japanese-American soldiers once they were allowed to prove their patriotism. This does the job in maintaining an intellectual balance. This does not solve the imbalance of the first four episodes as a whole.

With three installments to go, our filmmaker is staring down the white bull’s horns. His personal history is getting hijacked by the larger-than-life events that surround the people in question. Unfortunately, the Japanese penchant for shunning surrender feels like a setup for the events of August 1945. It is too early to assume that this will be the case, and possibly we are being fooled with a bit, but if the cynical bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or even the firebombing of Tokyo) are glossed with the “We had to do it” routine, all could be lost. 

From what we’ve seen thus far, this reviewer is inclined to doubt a ten-thumbed conclusion, with the bunker, Truman’s good faith, and the spawning of suburbia playing out to rosy credits. It is also hard to imagine that the final three episodes will serve to form a coherent project. Should they accomplish this, we might want to find out just who gave Ken Burns the yarn. 

O, I do love cliffhangers.

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Click here to read all of Newbury’s writing on The War.

A film by Ken Burns

Color and Black & White, 2007

Purchase The War at Amazon.com

By Bryan Newbury
September 26, 2007

Good popular music can follow any of a number of paths to achieving momentary success. Great popular music must navigate choppier waters. One of the essential disciplines for a great pop album is song placement. The artist and producer weave a complex, but in many ways predictable, emotional pattern. Song placement is key in this endeavor. Almost always, the great album peaks at song four. There is no way of explaining it. Whether it is ten songs or thirteen, whether pensive or exuberant, the key song is always positioned at number four. For the skeptical, the following apply: 1. Everybody Hurts; 2. Thirteen; 3. Veronica; 4. This Is Hell. Elvis Costello occupies two spots.

Rubber Soul and Pet Sounds notwithstanding, it holds true more often than not. Apparently, the same applies to sprawling documentary work.

The War’s Episode Three is that perfect tune. It isn’t necessarily the hit, but it is certainly the piece of work that will stand out thirty years from now, justifying the importance of the project. Like so many of those pieces of music, there isn’t a definitive explanation for why it is exceptional, especially in comparison to the other pieces comprising the whole, but almost everyone eventually accepts the supposition.

It isn’t hard to accomplish tension and emotional upheaval when your subject is World War II. Manipulating those elements into rising and falling action, therefore, is a thankless task. It is expected, despite the difficulty it entails.

Episode Three throws in the kitchen sink.

We begin with racial tension. There is a need for delicacy here. We all know, whether we choose to admit it or not, that the United States in the 1940’s was far from an egalitarian example. The War points out not only the segregation of the Jim Crow South, and the discrimination faced by African-Americans in both the military and civilian world, but also the continuing saga of Japanese-Americans (as a matter of proportion, notice we can say “Japanese” rather than “Asian” American) in the tumult of our battle against the Axis Powers. The delicacy required pertains to the apparent dichotomy of a country that played a major role in defeating fascism while simultaneously denying basic rights to its minority communities.

Much is made of American exceptionalism. It is hard to controvert, considering men like Daniel Inouye of Hawai’i. As the American military displays the gall to recruit in internment camps for the new 442nd Regimental Combat Team (a segregated, Japanese unit allowed to join—or exhibit treason, should they refuse—the fight in 1943) Inouye’s father tells him that “This country has been good to us… we owe a lot to this country… do not dishonor this country.” Where else can a country expect loyalty from those who find themselves incessantly under the boot of their betters? As The War depicts over and over again, this loyalty is obviously in earnest. Without the efforts of the segregated regiments, it would have been difficult at best to prevail. Somehow, America earned their trust more than its majority population.

If the viewer expected to be spared the importance of collective sacrifice, think again. As we segue from those brave men of Senegambian and Japanese, along with Anglo, German and Italian, etc., extraction, another bit of oblique history is accented. In Episode Two it is made quite clear that, rather than strategy or expertise, sheer overproduction was key to victory. Episode Three illustrates another key to victory: recycling. The question is obvious. When was the last time we were asked to save our kitchen fats? Take one less spoon of sugar? Hell, nowadays it would cause a rebellion if we spared a few thousand Congolese lives to do without the same amount of Play Stations. Point taken.

Issues of mutual effort and ethnic inequality eventually give way to those personal stories Burns hinges the entire series upon. While we’re throwing in the kitchen sink… well, let us say that Babe Ciarlo’s correspondence reaches climax.

More and more, The War reminds us of The Old Testament. While absorbing it, we observe that much of it is scattered, irritating and absurd. And, in some inexplicable way, absolutely necessary for all projects of its kind to follow.

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Click here to read all of Newbury’s writing on The War.

A film by Ken Burns

Color and Black & White, 2007

Purchase The War at Amazon.com

By Bryan Newbury
September 25, 2007

If Herodotus is history’s father, we might nominate Celine his counterpart in terms of twentieth century war analysis. As he recounts his experiences with the World Wars, as a soldier, citizen and sometime refugee, the primary component… aside from war’s mindlessness, brutality and exacerbating class divide… of his evaluation comes down to a sense of randomness.

As Ken Burns’ The War continues, the viewer is assailed with what seems to be a designed randomness.

The concept, for starters, seems to employ the dart-to-map strategy. The War is told as a series of chapters in municipal biographies. The four towns (Waterbury, Connecticut; Sacramento, California; Luverne, Minnesota; Mobile, Alabama) are representative of our distinct geographic and cultural areas. That said, the selection of four communities in the United States to represent our nation at war tends to improvise on that theme of arbitrariness.

Earlier, this reviewer referred to the “Bix Beiderbecke moment” one can expect in a Ken Burns documentary. In The War, Episode Two, that seems to come in the shape of an intense focus on the Weinzheimer family in Sacramento and The Philippines while the Battle of Midway receives a mention almost in passing.

The War’s focus is not on historians or tacticians, though. Through the stories of “common” individuals, Burns endeavors to get at the gestalt. He is to be commended for a unique approach, eschewing “all things Nazi” or the time-tested technique of men with scrambled egg hats poring over charts and troop movements. This method, while novel, does come with problems.

The Beiderbecke phenomenon is the result of those problems. It is evident that, while looking at these average Americans, the sense of perspective is skewed. After all, Eisenhower is more important than most.

But this is nitpicking. Episode Two is a striking two hours of film. From the North African front to the European air engagements to Mobile shipyards, the totality of World War II is portrayed with clarity. Just as this tightrope act appears in peril of falling off into a haphazard telling, the film manages to hit just the right transition. It is quite remarkable. When it seems that an entire year of trench and air warfare, rations, and, for the most unlucky, internment, is progressing along just a bit too fast, a wonderful monologue on what the infantryman faced on a constant basis rights the ship. When one questions the precision of a narrative that pits the under trained but increasingly well-equipped Americans against the sophisticated and professional Axis forces, he soon finds himself blushing at the incisive descriptions of military strategy and collective sacrifice on the home front. If the Japanese look barbaric in their treatment of prisoners, Executive Order 9066 looks us right in the eye. In case you think the portrayal of our loyal public is coming too close to a back patting for your comfort, we learn about the prevalence of black market purchases during the time of rationing. Et cetera. Et cetera.

It would be unwise to continue without mentioning these individuals that represent our wartime society. There is a need to entertain, and in this regard the pacing is spot-on. In the first episode, Katharine Phillips steals the show. Who can resist a southern belle in full flower? In the following episode, the letters of Babe Ciarlo are compelling. Future episodes will develop other interview subjects to a crescendo.

The approach is imprecise but engaging. Again, we find ourselves in an amusing predicament. At this point, what is left to tell about WWII? Still, The War concludes its second night with a cliffhanger. Can Burns and Co. hang on without spiraling into soap opera? So far, the answer has to be in the affirmative.

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Click here to read all of Newbury’s writing on The War.

A film by Ken Burns

Color and Black & White, 2007

Purchase The War at Amazon.com

By Bryan Newbury
September 24, 2007

Ah, The Good War.

Despite pronouncements by soldiers far and wide, one of who plays an integral part in the latest epic documentary project of Ken Burns, that there is no such thing as a good war, all Americans seem to know instinctively that there is indeed. To finish the statement above, though there are no good wars, there are necessary wars. If we are honest with ourselves, the opposite is probably true from the Peloponnesian campaign to Guadalcanal. To refer to a war as necessary by definition extends a value judgment… and in the case of The Big One, at least for the United States, the verdict is overwhelming.

A good war, it seems, is what we are so desperately lacking these days. When considering the Axis Powers, we can conjure images of evil despite the cartoonish posture of Mussolini or the comical moustache Hitler sported. The “gathering threats” of Messrs Hussein and Ahmadinejad seem laughable when considering the challenges of the Anglo Saxon world in the 1940’s. 

Burns does well to assert this difference, albeit in a rather subtle way. The filmmaker has given a number of interviews, which allude to the substantial differences between WWII and our current endeavors in the Middle East. When the subject of collective sacrifice comes up in Episode One, only the most tin-eared observer can miss the comparison.

Anyone familiar with the Burns oeuvre doesn’t need to be told that The War will not be a firebrand’s polemic against American empire. Every detail, ranging from the street addresses of the interviewees to the ubiquitous narration of Keith David, points to a continuation in the Burns body of work. 

Early on, the question seems to be whether or not he can sustain the subject.  The subject, like so much in the Ken catalogue, isn’t all that surprising. Burns has never demurred from America’s larger themes. The Civil War. Our greatest novelist. Our national pastime. One of our two contributions to world culture. Why not tackle the sacred cow of twentieth century America? Of course, one could reasonably accuse him of painting with the broadest of brushes. What is there to profit from an examination of arguably the most examined period in contemporary history? 

This question will be borne out by the seventh episode. Considering the first 150 minutes, it is fair to say that the goal just might be achieved.

Through each turn, The War accomplishes an element of surprise. 

The discerning viewer finds himself questioning Burns’s motives, only to castigate himself when the film acquits itself of any accusation of jingoism. Good war or no, the atmosphere of xenophobia must’ve been palpable during the Second World War. In one moment, we begin to doubt the objectiveness of the film, as footage and stories from Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March seem to cultivate a propagandistic approach. The next, we’re faced with actual propaganda from newsreels and Executive Order 9066. The latter placed the Japanese in America, regardless of citizenship, into internment camps along with German and Italian aliens. It is only natural to assume the side of the victors in this conflict, but The War goes the extra mile thusfar in broadening the scope of ideas.

The question remains: how broad? Should The War sustain its catholic perspective from the invasion of Poland to the mass murder of Hiroshima, it could be an epochal piece of filmmaking. If it diverges in the woods right around the Bix Beiderbecke mile marker, we might have to wait for a nine part series on The Great Depression.

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A film by Ken Burns

Color and Black & White, 2007

Purchase The War at Amazon.com