"The War" by Ken Burns

This morning before work I was listening to the NPR show Fresh Air on podcast. This morning they were talking to the documentarian Ken Burns. He is famous for his such works as JAZZ, Baseball and most notably, The Civil War. (You probably watched at least parts of The Civil War in your American history course in high school.) He is also famous for his visual effects. If you have a Mac you're familiar with his zooming and panning of a still photo. He has recently completed a new documentary on World War II entitled The War. The PBS series will not premier until September, but they had him on Fresh Air this morning because of the somewhat controversial nature of the series.

I'll touch on the controversy, but first I think this will definitely be a "must see" for any history buff. Burns focuses on four American towns and how the towns dealt with the war. The towns include Mobile, Ala.; Sacramento, Calif.; Waterbury, Conn.; and Luverne, Minn. He said they tried to get an eastern town, a Southern town and a western town. Then they needed a small town in middle America. This is the most interesting thing about the documentary. Instead of focusing on a generalist view of World War II, which Burns admits, has been overdone, he decided to look into how the war affected individual people in individual towns across America. It will be a seven part, 14 hour series on PBS. Look for it. You can listen to the interview here.

On to the controversy. The controversy, as I understood it, was twofold.
1) There are no scholarly historians involved in the film. The film focuses on real people who had experiences during the war, either on the front lines or here at home. This seems very paltry to me. Burns said that he wanted to know how it felt to be involved in the war. He didn't care about the leaders or the strategies.

2) The film contains 3 obscene words. (Yes, that one.) All three of these expletives comes in context. They played the clips on the show today. In one, a soldier gives a first person account of a battle and in his emotion, lets out an F-word. The other two are references by the narrator to ways that GI's described messed up bureaucracies. FUBAR was one of these references.

Both of these seem like paltry items. Burns idea was not to make a scholarly work. It was to make a feel piece. Second, war is hell. You don't have to watch the news from Iraq long to have that cemented. If the F-word is used in its description, then it seems well placed. I can't wait to see at least a little of this documentary.