Ken Burns 'WAR' Begins 23Sep 8pm PBS

[Parche]

Ken Burns, whose latest documentary series, "The War," begins Sunday on PBS (WNET/13 at 8 p.m., WLIW/21 at 10 p.m.), has always been drawn to statements that sum things up in the broadest way. Posted on the wall of his office here, behind his own farmhouse in Walpole, N.H., is a pearl from Tyrone Guthrie, the Minneapolis theater impresario: "We are looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of again."

Burns is forever quoting historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also, about how our fractured society suffers from "too much pluribus and not enough unum." So it is in "The War" that the opening minutes have former Marine pilot Sam Hynes saying, "I don't think there is such a thing as a good war. There are sometimes necessary wars," thus providing a theme that runs through Burns' seven-parter, all 15 hours of it.

Burns has a sum-it-up for himself as well. He says right out that he's about "Waking the dead" and that this stems from his mother's death when he was 11. He volunteers in interviews and speeches that there wasn't a day of his childhood when he wasn't aware of her cancer and that it influenced "all that I would become."




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He did not see this link until well after he had earned renown for "The Civil War," which captured the nation's imagination in 1990 and gave people a new way of looking at still photographs, which freeze a moment in time but which he animated by zooming in, or scanning over them, the technique now called the "Ken Burns effect." Burns now takes his turn examining the war that killed 60 million.

"Here lie three Americans," says the Shakespearean voice of the narrator as the screen shows one of the photos of World War II, a Life magazine shot of uniformed bodies on a New Guinea beach. Published in 1943, it marked the first time Americans back home had been allowed to see their dead, though nearly two years had passed since Pearl Harbor.

A matter of Life and death

Burns and a half-dozen others are in a sound studio in Times Square making final tweaks to Episode 3, "A Deadly Calling." The Life photo is used in its introductory moments, following a shot of a bucolic homeland cemetery and newsreel-style footage of an island battle.

Burns, in jeans and a T-shirt, sits with a legal pad on his lap, taking notes next to his co-producer and co-director, Lynn Novick. Second by second, they are scrutinizing the soundtrack to decide when our contemplation of the cemetery should be interrupted by the sounds of lapping waves and rat-a-tat machine gunfire. "We anticipated out of the cemetery a little too much," Burns says, "and it's not about the waves, it's about the guns," so the soundman tones down the surf. But the decibel level rises through the battle footage, culminating in an explosion. Then, silence - it's time for Life's depiction of death.

The beach photo was unsettling enough in a magazine. Here Burns makes you go from one body to another as limbs sink into the wet sand. Are those maggots on that back? The only sound now is the narrator reading Life's explanation that it was time to show "the reality that lies behind the names ... on monuments in the leafy squares of busy American towns." Then, music - the soft piano of Dave Brubeck playing "Where or When," and a baby back home plays with a framed photo of his uniformed daddy.

Where the truth lies

Burns' calls his work "manipulated truth," and it's as orchestrated as any feature film. Still photos and war footage come without sound, meaning the cacophony of combat is all imposed, as are the hiss of a welding torch at the Mobile, Ala., shipyard and the nickering that punctuates the story of a Waterbury, Conn., man who got to horseback ride while others were dying overseas.

Burns is not producing a textbook but "an epic poem," and he's tried to distinguish "The War" from other World War II films by focusing on the interplay of home front and war front, using Sacramento; Luverne, Minn.; Mobile and Waterbury.