Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Ken Burns: An Accurate Reproduction of an Image or Leaving Out A Group?

The Ken Burns documentary "The War" (http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/ny-fftv5382202sep23,0,2620347.story) is an interesting example of "Everybody matters." When stories came out about World War II, they mainly focused on the white male who left home at a young age and how he either returned home or didn't. But, in this documentary, Burns has been criticized for leaving out the Latinos who fought in the war. He did add a couple of shots that showed pictures of the Latino soldies in the war, but what I find puzzling is that Burns is the one taking the heat for something that previous films and documentaries didn't have to face nearly as much for making a film about something from 60 years ago. If Burns was making a film about the Iraq war and leaving out diversity, I could understand the criticism, but on this topic we are making somewhat uninformed conclusions as to how predominant each ethnic group was in WWII.
Now, that having been said, we have to realize that "Everybody matters." I think that instead of attacking this documentary for not featuring enough Latinos, it would be much more powerful to have a documentary that only featured Latinos from the war. From an outsider's perspective, I just don't see how one full scene in a documentary would make the Latino community any happier about Burns documentary. There would be a sentiment of "Why were we only in one scene?" However, if the Latinos from the war were featured in, say, half the documentary, it would be an inaccurate portrayal of the war. So why not have a program that featured just the Latinos from the war? For one, we would learn much more about their story than we would from one scene in Burns documentary, and we wouldn't be hearing the same old story that every WWII documentary has.

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