In 1990, Ken Burns debuted his PBS series The Civil Warand changed documentary filmmaking forever. Through the use of music, images and first-person stories—things that affect us on a gut level—Burns’ film took what could have been another narcoleptic history lesson and made it feel real. So many people responded to it that it even showed up in pop culture standbys like TV Guide and People—a huge coup for a documentary, let alone a complex and challenging one that stretched out over several nights. These days, the term that is unanimously applied to the film is “masterpiece.”
Because The Civil War was such a paradigm shift, it sometimes overshadows Burns’ more recent—but no less brilliant—films, Baseball (1994) and Jazz (2001). On September 23, his sixteen-hour series The War premieres on PBS, focusing on how four American towns—Mobile, Ala., Sacramento, Calif., Luverne, Minn. and Waterbury, Conn.—responded to the U.S. involvement in World War II. The tagline for the film, “in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives,” speaks to the intensity of the subject matter; The War is almost like a synthesis of Burns’ previous films, combining the battlefield intensity of The Civil War with interviews with living subjects who can say, “I was there, and this is what I saw,” as he did in Baseball and Jazz.
On July 23, Burns visited St. Louis, lecturing and screening preview clips of The War at the Sheldon Ballroom. He was kind enough to sit down with us at Mosaic earlier that day to give us a long and generous interview about his newest film, the process of filmmaking and the difference between sentiment and sentimentality.
SLM: So, if I understand correctly—basically, the reason this documentary happened now is because that whole generation is disappearing.
KB: And once they’re gone, you have the problem of abstract stories, which, as good as they are, no one will be able to say, ‘And then I picked up my rifle, aimed, and I killed that man.’ Or, ‘I watched my best friend die.’ No one will be able to say that anymore. They will only be quoting someone—that’s why, for us, this project had such an urgency to it.
SLM: So—you guys focused in on the story by focusing pretty tightly on four American cities. Can you talk a little bit about that?
KB: That’s the key to it. Our first thought was just to focus on one town, but there’s no way you’d have a town with the range of experiences, and we’re really a big, big, place, so we wanted to have one from each region. And as much as I’d like to say that they were chosen by darts on a map, we wanted to pick towns that not only the audience would have no preconceptions or baggage about, but we wouldn’t as well. Waterbury [Connecticut] was an industrial town, a brass city that was turned into a war machine. We’d read a memoir from a guy named Eugene Sledge, from Mobile … and he introduced us to his best friend, Sid Phillips, who introduced us to his sister, Catherine, and that expanded into their circle of friends—a bunch of Southerners who love to tell stories, so that was a great town. We knew we wanted to tell the Japanese American story, alone among ethic groups, with the possible exception of African American narratives, which I’ve told in nearly every film. I wanted to tell that horrific, hypocritical story of Japanese Americans, so instead of picking Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, L.A. or San Diego, we picked Sacramento, and I’m so glad we did. And then finally, we wanted a small Midwestern town. Waterbury, Mobile and Sacramento are all about 100,000. We’d met a pilot whose first day of work was June 6, 1944, and in the next ten months he’d see unspeakable things, do unspeakable things, lose good friends and nearly give up to despair. We asked where he was from, and he said, “Luverne, Minnesota,” and so we went back to Laverne, and in the process discovered Al McIntosh, the editor of the Rock County Star Herald, our one-man Greek chorus, who’s read by Tom Hanks. What we were looking for was the arbitrary, the accidental, the happenstance. I think that all those towns delivered, all the time, unexpected people, unexpected experiences, and unexpected archival materials.
SLM: Yeah, usually those little towns have some gung-ho town archivist.
KB: Right, and so you get the warp and the weft even in Sacramento and Mobile and Waterbury—they’re very intimate, but nothing like Luverne, where Al McIntosh can watch the depot agent, Scotty Dewars, deliver a telegram to someone, and he knows, and Scotty knows, and they know the son who’s just died … it’s just so poignant.
SLM: Where there other cities you guys looked at?
KB: I guess at the time, there were handfuls of small towns we looked at, but it wasn’t anything beyond talking out loud for a few minutes.
SLM: I just imagine you guys trawling through vast piles of documents in attempt to winnow it down.
KB: We went through tons of documents, but just in those towns. Then, what we did, was we didn’t hold ourselves to it. There are several people who were not from these towns—really, we just wanted to tell a good story. So when we met Glen Frazier, who in the summer of ’41, before we’re in the war, hears that the girl he thinks he’s in love with says she’s in love with somebody else, he ends up joining the Army and ends up on the Bataan Death March. That’s a great story, the fact that he’s down the road from Mobile shouldn’t stop us from telling a good story.
SLM: This brings up something else—you hear people use that phrase ‘Bataan Death March,’ just off the cuff, which is just another symptom that these stories need to be told, because the history is disappearing out of the collective memory. That was such a horrible thing, and I don’t think people would use it so casually if they had any idea of what had actually happened.
KB: Nobody knows. I thought I knew, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know it was the largest surrender in U.S. history. I didn’t know how horrible it was, the extent of it. But people will know when they see the film.
SLM: Aside from things like that, what do you think will surprise people the most when they’re watching this film?
KB: I think that World War II is like a cottage industry. It’s a big thing, a franchise. You’ve got major films, excellent feature films like Saving Private Ryan; you’ve got great documentaries, and Band of Brothers, a great dramatic series, and then you’ve got the books. So far nobody’s been able to get, I think, all the fronts simultaneously—the home front, Europe—and you’ll see documentaries, and Episodes 1–5 is Europe. You take it out of time. We land on D-Day, we go home, we then land in Saipan, come back home, we go back to Saipan … that’s the way it happened, and it’s anchored by the homefront. So [in The War] not only will you get an overview, but you’ll get a bottom-up sense of the intimacy between the two. In the end, I think what we were interested in is answering that deeper question, what was it like to be in this war? What was it like to anxiously await for someone to come home? I think too much at home is mediated by a fascination with generals, strategy and armaments, and in some cases all these things at once. What I want to know is what so-called ordinary people did. And in that, you find a World War II that’s closer than you can imagine—objects in the mirror are closer than they actually appear. (Laughs).
SLM: There was one woman in particular, I can’t remember her name, but I was shocked that she was talking about spotting U-boats off the coast—
KB: Yeah, Katharine Harris, in Mobile. I grew up in Delaware when I was two until I was about 10, we’d vacation at the beach there. And they had submarine towers every quarter of a mile.
SLM: I had just never realized it had come so close to home. With Iraq being so far away, people don’t connect with this war on such a personal level.
KB: After 9/11 was the single greatest threat to this country since the war of 1812. Pearl Harbor is in the most remote place on earth. So 9/11 … you have to go back to the war of 1812 to get something like that, and there were more casualties during 9/11 than during the entire Revolutionary War. More dead. It was just on a totally different scale … anyway, I just think that was such a wasted opportunity, for us to remember what shared sacrifice is about. Instead, the president goes on TV and says, “Let’s go shopping.” If he’d said, “In five years, I want us to be free of foreign oil,” last year we could have been.
SLM: That’s the other thing about World War II—it was more of a unified front back home.
KB: Oh, yeah. And it didn’t mean that people didn’t disagree with one another. But people weren’t calling each other traitors on Fox News, either.
SLM: Now, part of this project, in addition to the documentary, is all these PBS stations, gathering oral histories.
KB: Yeah! It’s so great. So what happened was, after The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz, in a very ad-hoc fashion—St. Louis did it—films were produced. Like, “What We Did in the Civil War.” Or “What Our Triple A Baseball Team Was,” Or “Jazz Musicians You Should Know About.” But it was only about a half dozen across the system, and we have the largest system on earth. This time I went to them and said, “We have to make sure everyone’s doing this.” We linked up to the Library of Congress Veteran’s History Project, and we’re encouraging these kids who may not know who we fought with to go over there with their grandparents or their great-grandparents and ask them what they did. Arthur Schlessinger said there’s too much Plurbus and not much Unum, and I think he’s right. I think all of our films have been about Unum, and no more so than this one.
SLM: I think, I may be wrong, but it seems in general that whole generation was pretty reticent to talk about what they saw and did.
KB: There’s a lot of that, but I think we now live in a much more therapeutic society, and talking about these things is very much part of it. That comes actually from the second World War. In the movies, they started talking about Freud and psychoanalysis and all these things that are part of a society suffering from an enormous amount of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Which means that their kids, who fought in Vietnam and Iraq, could talk about it. But they didn’t. A lot of it has to do just with the nature of war itself. A lot of people come back and just hold it in. These were just 18 or 19 year old kids, turned into professional killers, and they did do that. They killed other people. Sometimes they missed and hit people who shouldn’t have been killed. Sometimes they deliberately killed people who were in their way. That’s just what happens in all wars. And so they saw bad things, they did bad things, they lost their friends. They were scared out of their mind, they didn’t know if they’d live or die. That re-arranges your molecules. And it’s paradoxical: you live life to its fullest, and see and feel things you don’t in ordinary life, in addition to that horrible terror. But it’s something that’s unique to people who have been in combat.
SLM: One of our editors just talked to a World War II vet who gets together every year with a bunch of guys who were in his platoon, and he seems to have an almost compulsive need to tell and re-tell these war stories. It’s exactly what you’re talking about, he came back from the war, got some kind of 9-to-5 job and it was just so pale compared to being in a war. And he had a hard time finding people he could talk to about what he’d experienced.
KB: It’s interesting when you think about people—it’s more intense than sex, love, family, college, sports—all the things that people … well, when you’re not in the army, you give all your money to your college, right? You remember the sporting games. But it’s not like when someone’s trying to kill you. I’ve touched it twice, once with The Civil War and now with this one. And it is intense, just this experience of knowing you could die at any moment.
SLM: Yeah, and I guess as a result there’s a lot of emotion tied up in this war—I just saw this Peter Jennings special about the bombing of Hiroshima and I was floored by how angry these veteran’s groups were when it was proposed that they include the Japanese point of view in the Smithsonian when the Enola Gay was installed, the argument being that if the bomb saved X number of American lives, how dare we question that bomb?
KB: What’s happened is there’s a political correctness that entered into our lives, and it’s against the truth. It comes from both sides and the middle, and it attempts, in this case, to soft-pedal history. What they did is important to know, and also it’s very important, I don’t why the bomb is so symbolic. I understand, yeah, it’s the first time it’s used, the only time it’s been used. But you can’t take it out of context. We were bombing Germany and killing 10 times that number of people all the time, and so were the Germans. The Japanese were slaughtering people, too. This was unbelievable slaughter going on, and this bomb was part of it.
SLM: So that’s where you guys leave off, just as the bomb is dropped.
KB: Totally. Another 40 minutes, we bring people home, but that’s it. That’s another film. Just like The Civil War, we don’t go into the Reconstruction.
SLM: Sort of tangentially related—you mentioned how you highlighted Sacramento in order to get at the experience of Japanese Americans during the war, which is something a lot of people don’t really know about.
KB: You know, I thought everyone would know about internment, what they wouldn’t know about was the bravery of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team [a Japanese-American combat unit]. The fact is, they don’t even know about internment, which is outrageous. If the only thing people know about George Washington is that he had wooden teeth … which isn’t even true … well, if we can lose George Washington, we can lose the awareness of the internment camps.
SLM: Were there things that you guys discovered for the first time, or were surprised by when you were researching internment?
KB: I think our surprises are not in the realm of statistics or fact. They’re in a kind of emotional thing that overtakes your heart and your feelings. There were lots of things, lots of fact, but I can’t say that these are new or that people are utterly ignorant of it. I can only say how it was, and when you personalize history, when it’s not abstract—not 100,000 or 200,000 Japanese Americans—but suddenly get to know some families, you’re like, oh, my goodness, they did that? What if I were given a week to leave my life? These were citizens, as much as you or me, all of a sudden, it’s like: you have a business? Sorry. You own land? Sorry. Your home? Sorry. Possessions? Sorry. How would you feel if that happened to you? It has emotional resonance, when you break it down, microscopically, to see what it was like, and then having the indignity of being classified as enemy aliens. Then the government had the audacity to say, oh, we reversed policy you’re not eligible for the service unless you go into front-line combat duty. They were used like that, they suffered as much as any regiment, they were decorated as much as any regiment, but they did it magnanimously. At Cannes, the Europeans were blown away, and had no idea, the treatment of African Americans and Japanese Americans. I’m just like a sponge, I knew about it already, but in 1987 or whenever it was that the Reagan administration paid off the survivors, as reparations, I thought, okay, this is just going to be in our bloodstream and everyone will know it. I was stunned that people didn’t know, I’d just assumed we’d be telling them something new with the 442nd, the regiment made up entirely of Japanese-Americans. Ninety percent of the people in this country don’t know about interment. There’s going to be some shock; what’s nice is that the Japanese Americans in our film are so generous. They live it for us, and therefore we relive it. Mostly the film was an attempt to discover a range of combat experiences, and then put them together, to intertwine them into a story that you have a guy who’s a ball turret gunner, you have a guy who’s a fighter pilot, you have a guy who’s landing at Omaha Beach. You have a guy in North Africa, another in Sicily. You have a guy who’s a medic, a woman who’s a nurse. Somebody who’s a marine grunt, someone on a battleship, then you just begin to understand what the experience is in battle, and that’s what we sought out. So instead of focusing on strategy or tactics or this celebrity general, you get to be with this guy who’s fighting for his life. The general usually isn’t. You also personalize it—you know this person. In choosing the four towns, you know peoples’ experiences. We know who’s waiting for them back home. We know what their dog looks like. We know what their front lawn and their mom looks like.
SLM: It wouldn’t seem like it off the top of your head, but I’d think the dog would actually add a lot—
KB: The dog’s a hugely important thing! And we give you their addresses. Because people remember what their address is when they were 18 years old. Oh, yeah, I lived at a place like that, 1101 whatever it was—it does mean something.
SLM: And I guess that becomes all the more intense when you’re looking at a small town like Luverne, where everyone knows what each others’ addresses were at 18, where the stories are all so connected.
KB: Yes, more comes from less. We were able to delve more into that, in a way that you can’t in a larger town, or a big city like St. Louis. You find a neighborhood, that mother experiencing grief when she turns that star from gold to blue when her son dies …
SLM: Have your subjects seen the film, have you gotten reactions from them so far?
KB: Yes. And we don’t need another review. We’ve had it all, not just from them, but other veterans who aren’t in the film. They’ve said to us, “that was the way it was.” Five and a half years ago, for some of these people, we spent a morning with them. It was an exciting disruption, but after that, they come back and find themselves woven into something where their lives are suddenly on the same level as Eisenhower’s, and that’s how it is—and how it should be. The wife of one of our fighter pilots, her story is told in the film, their courtship and marriage—we were showing her an episode. A really dark episode, in which her husband figures prominently. She just wept, and I comforted her, and she said, you know, when he talked about the war, I’d always go into the kitchen and wash dishes. So after watching the film she finally, actually was able to understand what her husband had gone through. And he had nightmares every night—she found a way to connect. We made it real. We’re diving in an airplane, that’s exactly like his plane, and driving in and blowing up a German truck, and she knows that he wakes up in the middle of the night with a palsy in one hand, because of how much killing he pumped out by pressing the button. So she remembers, each morning, to put his coffee in the other hand, the one that doesn’t shake.
SLM: So as far as the homefront goes, you’re touching on these mothers, or wives, or a Rosie the Riveter type gal—
KB: Yeah. But that’s what happens, you say “Rosie the Riveter,” and all of a sudden, you have this cliché, but then you meet Emma Belle Petcher, who comes from Millry, Alabama, this little tiny town. She gets on the bus, and goes to Brookley Field [to assemble bomber parts], and that’s what it’s all about. We tend to make everything abstract, sanitize it. Too often, I think we tend towards the sentimental, the nostalgic.
SLM: So you’ve got all these stories, all these little tiny threads, and if the opposite of the abstract is the detailed, how to not get lost in it all? How do you create a story from all these tiny details?
KB: You’re dealing with tens of thousands of footage, tens of thousands of photographs. Hundreds of hours of interviews. Where do you start, and how do you make sense of it? We think this is the best film we’ve done, we’re not the best people to judge that, but we think it is. But there were times when it didn’t look good. So, at that point, what do you do? You try to make it better each day.
SLM: Yeah, I know that feeling all to well as a writer. But I have the liberty of knowing that paper is cheap. If I screw up and have to start something from scratch, it’s no big deal. But you guys are dealing with a very different situation … I mean, film is not cheap.
KB: No, it is not. There’s an interesting terror in what we do. And that actually is a great galvanizing force, because we still shoot on film. If someone told you that every 15 minutes on your tape recorder was going to cost $150, you’d start asking some really serious questions. And when people are talking, you try to just listen to them, but you might have to nod or raise your hand like you’re going to come in to try and move it to a different place. Sometimes, they’ll make a comment that’s great, but it’s not quite what you’re looking for.
SLM: It must be tough, too, asking people to go back 50 years and dredge up some of these experiences.
KB: But it’s not really going back—memory is now. It’s on our hard drive. The implication is that it’s something that’s way back when, so it’s safe. The last thing these guys want to do is wake up these memories. We had lots of people break down on camera. They’d start a sentence not knowing that they were going to cry at the end of it. We have a historian in the film who happened to be a 19-year-old in the war, and so we were not asking him to be a historian—and I started the second roll of film by saying, “You saw bad things.” And that did it. And for the rest of the interview he was saying, “I don’t know why I’m this way, I don’t get this way.” Or sometimes at the beginning of a sentence, they’ll start by just talking and then they access that emotion, and … well, I cannot stress this enough how much of a privilege it is, when someone is doing that favor to you, there’s no artifice. It’s not like cable news where they cop their attitudes. It’s real lives, real emotions, deeply felt. Some of the ones we did pre-interviews with were just learning how to talk about it, and some of this they had not even shared with their own families. But by revealing these things, they make themselves vulnerable and it’s our responsibility to protect them and to honor that. I think that is why this film is so powerful—because these people were willing to be so vulnerable. There is this sort of base of sentimentality and nostalgia. We all more or less agree that’s bad, though some people are shameless and will manipulate it. And then there’s the rational world, where we live our lives. But there’s a higher emotional register, which is what art can do at times, and it’s what we’re all looking for in our own lives, our relationships. That’s actually so much different than sentimentality and nostalgia, but it is emotional. And it’s what music does, it’s what art does—that’s what we try to get after. I remember something that someone said in Jazz that really struck me: you know, the reason people have a hard time describing music is because they blame it on the music, but it’s a failure of words to accurately describe it—music unbelievably precise in what it does. We lack the vocabulary to describe it. Our language is poor in relationship to music. So we live safely in this rational world, but we’re looking for that higher emotional level. It’s something that’s transcendent, and they’re aren’t any words for it. Since there aren’t any words for it, it must be relegated to the category of sentimental or nostalgic. People will say to me all the time, “Well, in your sentimental histories …” And I go, there’s nothing sentimental about them. You may feel sentiment, you may cry, but it’s not sentimental. Sentimental is the Andrews Sisters—who you do not see in the film. (Laughs.) Bing Crosby will make you cry, and he’s in this film a couple of times.
The War debuts on September 23 on KETC Channel 9; go to ketc.org for showtimes. Also take a look at their interactive oral history project, Your Stories: St. Louis Remembers World War II. Find it online at ketc.org/yourstories and watch video footage of St. Louisians recalling the war firsthand; add Your Stories’ Facebook page to yours; add your own stories to the site or chat with others interested in World War II history. You can also see footage of Burns’ appearance a the Sheldon Concert Hall last July by visiting ketc.org/kenburns.
