Sneak Preview: Ken Burns' The War

The delegates to the American Library Association (ALA) conference in Washington, D.C. in late June got a very special treat: a talk by Ken Burns and a preview of his upcoming World War Two documentary, The War.

Burns is a prolific documentary filmmaker, best known for his 1990 award-winning series The Civil War. He spoke at ALA about the importance of libraries as the keepers of the "DNA of civilization". No one is better suited than Burns to know the truth of this statement: he and his staff have spent hundreds of hours scouring the Library of Congress, the National Archives and public and private libraries across the country for information to use in his documentaries.

As gratified as the librarians were to hear all these kind words about their profession, they were more eager to hear about his much-anticipated new project. In the years the success of The Civil War, Burns has been asked repeatedly if he would do a film on World War Two, and the answer was 'no.' He had done a war film, so instead he concentrated on films about other areas of Americana, most notably the 1994 film Baseball and the 2001 film Jazz. Burns finally decided to take up the World War Two project when he heard two facts: one, that one thousand World War Two veterans die every day, and, two, that a large percentage of high school seniors believe that the United States was allied with Germany against Russia instead of the other way around.

Based on the previews shown at ALA, The War is similar to The Civil War in tone. Burns and producer/director Lynn Novick chose to tell the story through the eyes of people from four towns: Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota. The film uses a lot of video, both from the war zones themselves and from the home front, along with the maps and still footage that were used to such great effect in The Civil War.

Burns and Novick made a conscious decision to tell the story from "the bottom up" by using only first-hand accounts. You'll see no experts or Monday morning quarterbacks here, only men and women telling us their thoughts and memories and how their lives were changed on the beaches of Normandy or crowded around the family radio in Mobile. In addition, they recreated only a very minor amount of footage - the majority of the footage shown in the film is of the period.

The film consists of seven episodes running over fourteen hours. The War premiers on PBS on Sunday, September 23, 2007 and will show over the course of two weeks.