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Thread: Anyone watching Ken Burns

  1. #1

    Anyone watching Ken Burns

    It aired on Sunday with part 2 on Monday, three yesterday and four tonight. I finished part one last night (thank God for DVR) and it was really good. I have been thinking about it all day. I can't wait to see the rest of it. It has already been released on DVD and is available to rent on Netflicks and Blockbuster.

    Looks like they are going to reair it starting on Oct 3rd. Click Here to see dates and times for and for the schedule and rebroadcast schedule.



    More info here


    James

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  3. #2
    I just learned about it today, so I'll be looking for the re-run or possibly renting it.
    Stan

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  4. #3
    http://www.sltrib.com//ci_6939881?IA...www.sltrib.com


    [quote]Ken Burns didn't want to go to war again.
    Ever since his landmark PBS documentary series "The Civil War" debuted in 1990, Burns and his collaborators were inundated with requests to document other armed conflicts. For most of a decade, Burns said no.
    "We're emotional archaeologists - we're not interested in excavating the dry dates and facts and events of the past," Burns said on a recent publicity visit to Salt Lake City. "We're interested in some kind of higher emotional resonance, which required that we be overtaken in a way by the emotion, the pain, the loss, the grief of the war. Even at the remove of 150 years, and still photographs solely, it was a gut-wrenching experience for those of us involved. And I said, 'I'm not going to do it.' "
    Burns changed his mind in the late '90s when he learned that about a thousand World War II veterans were dying every day, and that "our kids in high school, too many of them, think we fought with the Germans against the Russians," he said.
    "I realized that, hey, I'm in the memory business, and every time one of these veterans died, it was like a library burning down," Burns said. "It was the loss of so many volumes of stories that I couldn't abide it."
    From that desire to preserve the memories of World War II came "The War," a 14-hour, seven-part miniseries that begins Sunday at 8 p.m. on KUED Channel 7.
    One of Burns' first challenges was to decide how to distinguish his movie from thousands of other World War II films and books.
    "In surveying them, none showed the Second World War with the simultaneous Pacific and European and home front going on," Burns said. "There were some [accounts] that were bottom-up, but they were about an intimate moment and provided no context. Most provided context with no intimacy."
    So Burns and his longtime collaborators, co-director Lynn Novick and writer Geoffrey C. Ward, decided to show World War II not from the viewpoints of generals and world leaders, but through the eyes of regular Americans from four towns - Luverne, Minn.; Sacramento, Calif.; Mobile, Ala.; and Waterbury, Conn.
    The towns yielded many facets of the wartime experience. Mobile is a port city, so thousands flocked there for shipbuilding jobs - and Mobile had a large African-American population, many of whom enlisted and fought discrimination in uniform. Sacramento, like many West Coast cities, had a sizable Japanese-American population, American citizens who were shipped off to internment camps solely because of their skin color.
    The film's interviews, and the letters read by actors (including Tom Hanks, Josh Lucas and Samuel L. Jackson), are all from people from those towns who lived through the war, either in combat or minding the home front.
    "If you weren't in this war or weren't anxiously waiting for someone to come back from that war, you're not in our film," Burns said. "There's no Shelby Footes, no Monday-morning quarterbacks, no armchair historians. . . . We wanted to be entirely bottom-up, and that meant there could be no experts."
    The chronology of the war, as depicted in the film, is frequently shown the way Americans then learned about it - usually through newspaper accounts, newsreel footage and long-delayed letters from loved ones on the front lines. Sometimes events aren't shown when they happened, but when the people of Luverne or Waterbury experienced them.
    For example, the Nazis' systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews is briefly mentioned as foreshadowing in the first two episodes, but not brought up again until episode 7, "when three of our guys from three of our towns stumble on the Holocaust," Burns said. "And that makes it fresh, makes it new. It's no longer 6 million, it's human lives, real individual human lives."
    As Burns was finishing the elaborate sound-effects mixing on "The War," Latino groups began a campaign criticizing the movie, saying the stories of Latino World War II veterans were being ignored.
    Burns, still clearly agitated by the criticism, answers now that no Latinos came forward with their stories in the four towns his team researched. He also said that, because of the movie's format, "we don't have a lot of different stories. We don't have a WAC or a WAVE, we don't have a merchant seaman, we don't have a person in this battle or that battle."
    Burns defends his artistic license. "If you were painting a still life and you leave out an orange," he said, "does the orange lobby then lobby to have C

  5. #4
    I caught some of it on sunday night. It was pretty good. My wife even watched it with me. I didn't know there was more in the documentary. I'll have to quit screwing around on the net and go get some quality time watching TV.

  6. #5
    I caught some last night... I agree very good. My neighbors have watched it all.

    I wonder how PBS is doing ratings week!
    Ouch my freaking ears....

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  7. #6
    http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6481196.html

    War Victory: Burns Documentary Earns Best PBS Ratings in Seven Years

    PBS' latest Ken Burns multipart documentary, The War, averaged a 5 rating/7 share in TV households, according to Nielsen Media Research overnight numbers for Sunday night.

    PBS said The War was its highest-rated program in seven years, since an episode of Antiques Roadshow, and the biggest opener for a PBS miniseries since the last Ken Burns documentary, Lewis & Clark, which averaged a 6.1 overnight rating in November 1997.

    The War's performance was significantly below the 9 rating Burns' landmark Civil War documentary averaged on its first night in 1990, but that was also a time of a far less fragmented audience, when The Miss America Pageant could still pull a 17 rating.

    The War's 5 rating was also slightly below the rating scored by Burns' Baseball documentary (5.1 ) in 1994.

    PBS said it is not measuring the show by initial overnights as much as by the impact of its multiple airings in combination with Web components, community outreach and educational efforts associated with the broadcast. For example, Burns has said that local noncommercial stations have produced more than 40 productions mirroring The War, but with their own local voices.

    The series will air over four nights this week and three nights next week, with multiple airings, including stations that plan to run the first four episodes back to back next weekend.

    James

  8. #7
    Ahhhh, it didn't do as well as 'The Family Guy'. But I must admit Family Guy was freakin' hilarious.


    http://www.mercurynews.com/music/ci_6995760

    [quote]'The War' has strong ratings start

    NEW YORK

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