| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

War Letters. Prod. by Robert Kenner. A Robert Kenner Films Production, 2001. 58 mins. (PBS Video, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314-1698; 1-800-344-3337; <shop@pbs.org>; <http://shop.pbs.org/education> [Sept. 23, 2002])

No better vehicle exists to capture the impact of historical events than the personal letters of participants, whether they speak of life during colonial settlement, on the American frontier, and through the Great Depression or of the most traumatic episodes in a nation's history—war. The written documents are compelling enough, but when they are employed in a video with dramatic expressive readings overlaid with action scenes and underlaid by a carefully selected musical score, the impact is intense. Ken Burns employed this technique in his monumental Civil War series, whose haunting background music, graphic pictures, and magnificent letters affected millions of viewers. War Letters incorporates some of the more memorable vignettes from The Civil War (1989) into this new video in the generally first-rate PBS American Experience series. However, War Letters most resembles Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (1988), which is the finest video that I have employed in my classroom. . . .

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