Ken Burns on the Emotional Potency of Interviewing
The New York Public Library - New York Public Library
Ken Burns' most recent documentary film project, The War, tells the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of more than 40 men and women from four quintessentially American towns - Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; and Luverne, Minnesota - who experienced and helped to win the most extraordinary war in history.Woven largely from their memories, the narrative unfolds as the war unfolded - month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt.The film series explores the most intimate human dimensions of a worldwide catastrophe that touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America demonstrating that in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives.From Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps, the companion book to this fall 2007 PBS series, The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945 by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, includes all the iconic events as well as those of prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and those who struggled simply to keep families together while their men were shipped off - NYPL
