Some of us here at the Insider have been watching the Ken Burns World War II documentary "The War" on KCET this past week. Burns' latest work is filled with first-hand accounts of the war through the eyes of veterans and their loved ones on the home front.
One of the veterans interviewed is Pomona College alum Paul Fussell, who is a Pasadena native. Fussell went on to a long career as a literary critic, but has also drawn on his experiences as a second lieutenant on the battlefields of France in 1944 to write about war, our glorification of it, the reality of the thing, and the jarring disconnect between the two. His book about the First World War, The Great War and Modern Memory, won a National Book Award in 1975.
One of the veterans interviewed is Pomona College alum Paul Fussell, who is a Pasadena native. Fussell went on to a long career as a literary critic, but has also drawn on his experiences as a second lieutenant on the battlefields of France in 1944 to write about war, our glorification of it, the reality of the thing, and the jarring disconnect between the two. His book about the First World War, The Great War and Modern Memory, won a National Book Award in 1975.
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It's odd to watch "The War" and to see a nation fully mobilized with people at home very much a part of the war effort through rationing, recycling rubber and metal, war industry jobs, war bond drives, and the sacrifice of loved ones who came home scarred or maimed or who just never came home.
Odd because to look at the nation at war now for longer than its three years, eight months in World War II, one sees no such effort, no such willingness to sacrifice on the home front while the bill for our current war continues to pile up - over $450 billion to date committed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, life goes on here as if nothing has changed, and the burden of the fighting is borne by mainly military families now and by our children tomorrow when the bills for our current wars, for Social Security, for Medicare, come due.
We're still waiting for leadership from either major party and their partisans. We won't hold our breaths.
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We've been fans of some of Burns' past works - "The Civil War", "The Brooklyn Bridge", to name a couple - but we've noticed that Burns' films have become longer and in some cases less focused than his earlier works.
Some of the reviews of "The War" have not been kind. New Yorker television critic Nancy Franklin wrote in the magazine's September 24th edition:
You have to work very hard, and take yourself very seriously as the keeper of the keys to America, to make a tedious documentary about the Second World War. But that is what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have done.... They've taken a subject that is inexhaustible and made it merely exhausting.
The so-called "Ken Burns effect," the use of pans and scans over a still photo with the camera lingering over a face and pulling in tightly with contemplative musical bridges has certainly made Burns an easy target for parody.
"The Old Negro Space Program," a short film by Andy Bobrow, is one such Burnsian mockumentary (this is about ten minutes a contains a bit of profanity, if you're offended by that sort of thing):
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