Preview - The War (A+)

If you know much about me, you know I take documentary film fairly seriously. I plan to take this one very seriously.

Director and producer Ken Burns is the gold standard for documentary filmmaking for innumerable reasons. But the greatest, I believe, is his ability to blend the overtly empathetic and endlessly analytical halves of his nature and his approach to history into a balanced whole. It's the reason I admire him (and "admire" is a word I rarely use).

Burns has taken a departure in making this 14-hour film, one that has created much anticipation. The War uses only firsthand participants as interview subjects. There are no professional talking heads, no historians providing Monday morning quarterbacking, and no celebrity generals on-screen. Burns says, "You either had to be fighting in the war or waiting for someone you loved to come home from the war to make it into this film."

Much as he followed the lives of several "regular" people in his The Civil War and sprinkled the film with quotes from their memoirs, Burns here picked four cities from four corners of the U.S. in which to find common folk and highlights the telling of the war with their perspectives. It should be fascinating to see how a handful of American GIs and their loved ones - from Mobile, AL; Luverne, MN; Westbury, CT; and Sacramento, CA - touched every aspect and theater of the war, both at home and afar.

The team behind this film distilled thousands of hours of footage into this product. Most of it has never been seen before. Some of it was kept hidden because it was considered too frightening and graphic in those times and because it didn't portray flawless American prosecution of the fighting. But it conveys a reality that does more to honor the memories of the combatants than any sanitized movie from the 1940s ever did. Virtually all the veterans in this project say that, finally, someone's "got it right."

Here is a half-hour preview/behind-the-scenes featurette from PBS.



Just the concept of the project strikes a chord in me and I've gotten a bit emotional at the thought of it.

Please make every effort to watch The War beginning Sunday, September 23 and ending Tuesday, October 2 on all PBS stations. If you can't make it that week, most markets will be running it again beginning October 3.

Here is the Alabama Public Television schedule for The War.