Hut-Sut Rawlson on the rillerah and a brawla, brawla sooit

[austin_dern]

If there's one thing to count on this time of year it's documentaries about the Attack on Pearl Harbor. I watch even if I've already seen a great number of them. Often there's some interesting point that I hadn't noticed before, and certainly any minute-by-minute reconstruction is great suspense. (Oddly, I've only seen part of Tora Tora Tora, since the only time I saw it on TV was the night before I was flying cross-world and I had to get to bed.) Plus it's fun to see if the documentary bothers mentioning that there were attacks on any other part of the world at the same time. Even more to see if they fall into the trap of saying the Japanese attack on Hong Kong and Malaya was ``the day after'' that of Pearl Harbor. That's International Date Line confusion which can trap up even normally industrious writers. And there's picking out understated biases like claiming the attack ``turned pacifists into patriots'', as if the only true patriotism is that which is eager to kill.

One of the shows was billed as a ``dramatic re-creation''. That's a phrase loaded with danger, although Pearl Harbor is one of those cases where a pretty complete dramatic re-creation can be done. There's enough documentary evidence both contemporary and from those who went through it writing down what they remembered that a dramatization can be done with reasonable confidence it represents honestly.

They get to the flag-raising ceremony at the Pearl Harbor naval base, which corresponded to the first Japanese airplane attacks with a synchronization that would be dismissed as corny in a movie. It shows the re-creation of the flag-raising in a split-screen with contemporary footage of Japanese fighters. The flag itself is the fifty-star flag.

I'm confident they meant well, and probably they just got to the day of filming without realizing no one had ordered a 48-star flag. They'd probably have got away with it too if the 48-star flag weren't so straightforward a grid; I doubt I could tell the 45-star or 49-star, or a 46-star if it were held vertically and allowed to fold over itself, from the 50-star flag at a glance.

Trivia: New York City had its first air raid siren of the Second World War on 9 December 1941, at about 1:25 pm, for enemy bombers supposedly arriving around 2:00. Don't You Know There's A War On?, Richard Lingeman.

Currently Reading: Starchild, Frederik Pohl, Jack Williamson. Don't see many novels these days where a steady-state theory of the universe comes into play. (It was written around 1964.)

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Is this "Days that Changed the World" on the Hitler Channel? They use the 50 star flag for everything, even though they've obviously gone to a lot of trouble in other aspects of prop-gathering. It's pervasive to the point where I've wondered before if it's the director's idea of humour, or what. They also show American carriers when they're talking about Nagumo's fleet, although most shows do that. There's apparently not a lot of footage of massed Japanese carriers.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure, honestly. I mean, it's all History Channel-class shows, but do the names really matter? There's the Reasonably Responsible one where the off-screen narrator goes over the timeline with stock footage and cuts of interviews of the aged survivors, including some film from interviews done in the late 70s. Then there's the Responsible But Impersonal one, where someone, typically British, appears on-screen explains things minute-by-minute while showing animated reconstructions of troop positions and movements, and we never hear from the people who actually fought in the thing, but some of them are sometimes re-enacted.

Later in the day is the Personal but Dubious re-enactment with just a sprinkling of off-screen narration providing exposition, and then a lot more re-enactors doing all the scenes, getting close to what you'd have if this were a movie.

And then there's the Loopy Theory show, where they re-create key scenes and provide exposition, but also highlight some maverick professor's theory that John Nance Garner was in the pay of Nobuyuki Abe. Some of these include non-insane professors pointing out the theory fails on every possible measure, including the idea that anyone would care about anything John Nance Garner did after 1932; some of them just say there are doubts among the established community.

Titles, directors, narrators, actors, interviewees ... they're all just part of the continuum of World War II documentaries, and any attempt to name them gives as much sense of identity as mileage markers on the highway do.