Exclusive Portrait Series: Ken Burns' The War

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Imagine, for a moment, the world through the eyes of Ken Burns. Time moves in slow motion; perspective zooms in and out and pans across portraits of the past; light segues from subject to subject in one seamless, steady transition.
    You would be experiencing the “Ken Burns Effect,” a trademark technique — now used on Apple film-editing systems, Nokia phones, screensavers, etc. — made famous by the documentary filmmaker.
    Burns also blurs the line between his passion and profession. His acclaimed works take years to make — and days to watch — and yet he never feels as if he’s on the job. (“There’s no division between work and play.”) In the past 20 years, Burns has used his effect to get up close and personal to capture major moments in American culture. The Civil War. Baseball. The West. Jazz.
    “I’m exploring the way my country works,” says Burns, 54, who lives in Walpole, N.H., with his wife, Julie, and three daughters. “There was more drama in things that were real than in anything we could come up with in our imaginations.”
    In “The War,” his latest epic, which will air on PBS this month, Burns points his lens at the lives affected and afflicted by World War II. Such a grand subject could use his special effect. The global conflict split the world in two and led to the deaths of more than 60 million people, mostly civilians.
    Burns focuses his camera on individuals, finding war stories from four vintage corners of the country: Mobile, Ala.; Waterbury, Conn.; Luverne, Minn.; and Sacramento.
    “It’s amazingly fertile ground to explore the history of the war,” he says of the River City. “We wanted to pick someplace that would be unexpected, not only for our audience but for us, to begin with a blank slate.”
    The film, which runs more than 14 hours, examines the courage of ordinary citizens, such as black veterans who were denied basic civil rights at home and Japanese-Americans put in internment camps by the government. But “The War” came under fire when Hispanic groups objected that the film excluded the contributions of Latino soldiers. Burns denies any intentional omission, claiming that no Hispanic veterans came forward to share their stories. But after much debate and national pressure, Burns and PBS finally agreed to focus more on Hispanic veterans.
    “We weren’t excluding anybody,” he says. “When we designed the film, it wasn’t a textbook. It was a poem.”
Continued...

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