The realities of 'War'

It is long enough to seem like the thing itself, and the renown of the filmmaker is such that it will be taken by many as definitive, the last pictorial word on the Second World War. But "The War" -- "A Ken Burns Film" produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick that begins its 14-plus-hour run Sunday night on PBS -- is a movie, after all, and the fact that it is full of real people telling their own stories, and of photographs and newsreels taken of events that would have occurred whether or not there were cameras to record them, does not make it any less of a constructed work, a version, a take, an impression, an aesthetic experience.

It is, for all the care it takes to tell the truth, on some level a work of imagination -- "Ken Burns' The War," precisely.

However mediated -- the war did not unroll as a series of still photographs or bits of film footage cut together under narration and accompanied by a musical score, and certainly Norah Jones wasn't around to sing about it, as she occasionally is here -- "The War" is undeniably some sort of treasure trove. Burns' reputation and connections and resources, the fact that he in some way stands in the public mind for the PBS blockbuster documentary, means that he has been able to assemble a wealth of pictures that you will never under any circumstances see in any other place, ever. (And there is a lot of color footage, which feels like a revelation just by being in color.)

If you are at all interested in that time, or even suspect that it might be good to know something about a big thing that happened quite possibly before you were born -- true, after all, of everyone under the age of 62 -- you will want at least to take a look. (It's made to be of a piece -- a very long piece -- but you can dip in and out easily.) For all its many flaws, it's an honest, fitfully successful attempt to make history breathe and to tell an oft-told story in a new way. (Though not new to Burns, who tells all his stories in more or less the same way, adjusting, of course, for available material.)

That the two would meet -- Burns and World War II -- seems inevitable. He is a big-topic kind of guy, and World War II was the defining and almost chronologically central moment of the 20th century; in myriad ways (cultural, political, technological), we're still living out its legacy. That there are still people alive to talk about it, and that they are rapidly going, would also wet his whistle and hasten his work.