History Lessons

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns wants to make sure everyone understands the brutality of World War II before those who fought it are no longer around to tell it.

By: Ilene Dube

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A scene from France, 1945.


   Ken Burns is like the Joyce Carol Oates of the TV documentary world. He churns out footage for 16-hour epics faster than the average fan can keep up.
   His latest effort, The War, co-directed and produced with Lynn Novick, will premiere on PBS Sept. 23. The seven-parter took six years to make. Just the trailer for this 14-hour exploration of "ordinary" men and women who were involved in combat during World War II is 66 minutes. Mr. Burns recently paid a visit to WHYY-TV’s Philadelphia studios to promote the film at a preview screening, where tissues were placed at the ends of aisles.
   "Filmmakers hate to show clips — you work for six years to produce 14 hours — so we’ve asked the ushers to lock the doors. We’ll be out tomorrow morning if we don’t take bathroom breaks," he joked.
   After making The Civil War, which debuted on PBS in 1990, Mr. Burns and his team swore they would never make another film about war — it was just too emotionally draining. "It brings out the best and the worst in people," he said. But then Mr. Burns learned two things that made him change his mind. First, he found out that a high percentage of high school graduates believe the U.S. fought with the Germans in World War II.
   "We’re not teaching history, we’re not getting up to this point," he railed. "Our education system is withering, and there are distractions from video games. Narrative is no longer considered as important as social issues, but narrative is the way to talk to people."
   Then he learned that 1,000 World War II veterans are dying every day. Mr. Burns knew he had to capture the stories of a generation who fought and lived through the war before they are gone. "To ignore that would be irresponsible; we’re in the memory business," said the filmmaker, about whom the late historian Stephen Ambrose commented, "More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source."
   World War II had been "done to death," Mr. Burns told NPR’s Fresh Air Host David Bianculli in March. He didn’t want to do another "top-down history," interviewing historians and experts from their armchairs, but show the war through the towns and streets where those who fought it lived.
   The 14-hour film centers around the inhabitants of Mobile, Ala., Sacramento, Calif., Waterbury, Conn., and Luverne, Minn. The characters are not only those who served in combat, but those back home, waiting for the return of their loved ones. These four towns were selected because viewers would bring few preconceptions, as they might to a place like New York City. The jazz backdrop during the film’s opening in a farming town harks back to the final film in Mr. Burn’s epic trilogy: The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994) and Jazz (2001).
   There is no such thing as a good war, but this was a necessary war, a just war, something that had to be done, Luverne native and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus Samuel Hynes says in the documentary.
   "World War II brought out the best and the worst of a generation and blurred the line so it was almost indistinguishable," Mr. Burns said in a private interview earlier in the day. "The real number of casualties will never be known. (An episode guide describes the "epoch of killing that engulfed the world from 1939 to 1945…cost at least 50 million lives.")
   "More than 80 million served, but the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians," said Mr. Burns. The U.S. was relatively fortunate — American cities were not destroyed, and civilians were never really at risk. But without the sacrifice of American lives, the outcome would have been different." The American economy grew stronger and at the end the U.S. became a major world power, he pointed out. "It touched every family on every street in towns across America."
   Mr. Burns and his crew spent five years in the National Archives researching the footage used in The War. It was all silent, and it took the team years to recreate the sound effects. "How you use the footage is what makes it ‘new,’" said Mr. Burns. "We went in not looking for dry facts but emotional archaeology. We found ourselves having our own version of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)."
   We often think of the Vietnam War era as the first time footage showing the violent brutalities of war was aired on TV, but World War II footage was every bit as brutal and gory. It was screened in newsreel houses and, in fact, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered it shown so American people would know what the troops were facing.
   If there seem to be comparisons to the war in Iraq, Mr. Burns insists "the film doesn’t have a political bone in its body, but it’s accurate to war and a lot of people get killed. Teenagers get trained to become serial killers and they lock it away."
   There are also truly horrifying scenes of the camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau and others. Behind the barbed wire are bodies where rigor mortus has set in; some lay dying, and those already dead are stacked like firewood. Ray Leopold, a medic and a Jew, says "It was too bad I was forbidden by the Geneva Convention to kill. This was the most horrible human experience ever visited on the face of the Earth. It happened. I know. I saw it."
   Two out of every three Jews in Europe were killed. Poles, Russians, homosexuals, the handicapped, gypsies and slave laborers were treated with the same abuse, their skulls and skeletons stacked like firewood. In one chilling scene, the bones of a hand are coming out of an oven. "No apology can ever atone for what I saw," Mr. Leopold said.
   Mr. Burns was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Newark, Del., and Ann Arbor, Mich., where his father was a professor of cultural anthropology. His mother, a biologist, died when he was 11, and he has said he "wakes the dead for a living… when you don’t have a childhood history, making the past come alive becomes important." His father imposed a strict curfew, but Ken could stay up late watching films. The Alfred Hitchcock fan saw his father cry during a movie and knew the power films had. Mr. Burns recalls taking only one history class while studying at Hampshire College, but was always interested in filmmaking.
   His Brooklyn origins called to him when making his first film, the Academy Award-nominated The Brooklyn Bridge, inspired by David McCullough’s book The Great Bridge (Simon & Schuster, 1972). Since then he has made 22 history films.
   Just as "Ashokan Farewell" (a fiddling tune by Jay Ungar) was popularized after its use in The Civil War — it was played during the reading of a letter by Sullivan Ballou to his wife a week before he fought in the First Battle of Bull Run; it plays again 25 times during the 11-hour series — Mr. Burns has used Norah Jones’ recording of "American Anthem" in The War.
   He first heard it on his car radio, sung by mezzo soprano Denyce Graves, while driving his father’s ashes from Ann Arbor in 2001. The lyrics made him pull off the road to cry, and he knew he needed to use it. "With the greatest singing voice God has ever given anyone, 26-year-old Norah Jones nails it," he says.
   But Jay Ungar — the "Jewish boy from the Bronx who wrote the Scottish-Irish lament about fiddling camp breaking up" — is still in Mr. Burns’ heart. Mr. Ungar has written a song for Mr. Burns and his wife, and it will be used in his next film. In the meantime, the Norah Jones/Wynton Marsalis recording of "American Anthem" will be released in September (Sony BMG Legacy Recordings).
   Next time you use the Ken Burns effect on iPhoto, giving your slide show that documentary feel as it automatically pans across and zooms in and out of your family vacation shots, keep in mind that, when Steve Jobs invited Mr. Burns in to see the product while in development, the filmmaker told the Apple co-founder he does not do product endorsements. Instead, Apple gives Mr. Burns computers he donates to Room to Grow, a foundation started by his wife that helps children born into poverty.
The War will air in seven, four-hour installments on PBS beginning Sept. 23, 8-10 p.m. Marathon viewings will be aired on weekends, and the film will launch as a weekly series after its first two-week run. Accompanying the series will be a companion book written by Geoffrey C. Ward with an introduction by Ken Burns (Alfred A. Knopf), as well as a complete DVD box set with "making of" footage; www.pbs.org/thewar. WHYY is working to preserve veterans’ memories of World War II; information about participating can be found at www.whyy.org/thewar