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| by Cochaman Peef with additional writing by Bridget Petrella | ||
| PBS' ‘Ken Burns: The War’— Thought Provoking. | ||
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What Burns achieves is a
personal intimacy with his subjects so that you feel like you are in a
private conversation with people who are revealing secret and intimate
memories of what life was like for them. It is an exceptional feat of
documentary story-telling that he is able to provide us with the facts
of the war while bringing us into 1940s American lives. It brings a
closeness, an intimacy with his subjects, perfectly matched by
photographs, footage and music, so that we are moved sometimes to tears
by their revelations. |
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Despite a number of short-term
unwarranted arrests for a virtual plethora of misdemeanors,
which, for some odd reason, remain "classified", Cochaman Peef
has continued to let his beloved hemp play a substantial role in
his ever-waning life. Whether he’s smoking from a hand-blown
glass pipe while studying Eastern religion and Woody Harrelson
philosophy, or just smoking Jamaican sticks and watching Kung-Fu
with David Carradine on DVD [he claims to know Carradine
personally, a fact we've yet to dispute]. |
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“The
Second World War brought out the worst as well as the best in a
generation, and I think it may also have reflected the last time the
United States of America was truly united in one single purpose.”
explains Ken Burns. I must confess I had been waiting for the premiere
of Ken Burns The War DVD since I first heard of its filming several
years ago. I love Burns' films. He is the master of the long documentary
film and one of the most gifted filmmakers of our time. Burns, who
produced the award winning film The Civil War, Jazz and Baseball, now
brings us The War. It is a documentary film about World War II and is
nearly fifteen hours long and had been previously broadcast over seven
nights on local PBS stations. In an NPR interview, Burns stated that he
had vowed never to make another war film after finishing his exhaustive
1990 documentary, The Civil War. But for years World War II veterans
would urge Burns to tell their stories. And then he read an alarming
statistic: 1,000 veterans of that war die each day. With the World War
II veterans dying, it was time to "honor what they did when they were
teenagers," Burns says. "We asked them to become professional killers.
They did their job very well. They saw bad things, they did bad things,
they lost good friends. And they came back and they put a lot of that
information in deepest, darkest recesses of their souls and it has been
our privilege in recent years that some of those folks have now begun to
speak."
The
War took six years to complete and was a difficult undertaking. In a
USA Today article, Burns states "This has been the most challenging
project I've ever done, but also the most rewarding. It was born with a
sense of urgency. We realized the clock was ticking and a narrow window
would close very shortly." Indeed, five of the 44 men and women in The
War have died. Burns, who calls himself an emotional archaeologist, says
he was touched by the stories told by veterans and loved ones who cried
over buddies lost and the horrors they experienced. Their impact
lingers. In July, Burns broke down after learning that one of his
interview subjects, Ray Leopold, had died. "It hurts because they were
so generous," he says. He almost didn't make this film at all, thinking
that World War II had been so heavily chronicled already that there
would be nothing left for him to film. However, he thought there was a
tremendous need to capture the stories of World War II survivors before
the generation was gone. Burns also came upon studies showing that most
high school graduates knew little about the world's deadliest war. He
realized that there was a need to educate a younger generation.
That
is only the beginning of this epic journey with the master
documentarian, Ken Burns, and it was a terrific start. I was captivated
by the power of his cinematic lens. I should mention that I am probably
one of the few people who wasn't all that impressed with Saving Private
Ryan. To be perfectly candid, I felt it was overly maudlin and
manipulative, which are characteristics that really turn me off. I don't
like being spoon fed sentimentality, it is probably why you will never
see me reading a Nicholas Sparks book. I just don't like my emotions
being manipulated. But I loved HBO's Band of Brothers for delving into
the same material as SPR without the maudlin manipulation. It is,
without doubt, one of the single best movie experience documenting WWII.
And from the first episode of Burns' The War, you will indeed be
riveted. I will probably re-watch the entire series again as it merits
more than just one viewing. If you have any interest in World War II,
you must not miss this documentary film now that it's available on DVD. UB
