by J. Nathan Matias

Band of Brothers

Both Speilberg's Band of Brothers and Ken Burns's Brooklyn Bridge are based on nonfiction books. While both film/book sets are nonfiction, the similarities end there. Where Burns's style uses sources and narration to tell a story, Band Of Brothers depicts an acted film that could as easily have been fiction.

Burns's documentary style is well seated in the long tradition of narrative history. But Spielberg and Ambrose connect much more with the trend in creative nonfiction, which appropriates fictional techniques as much as possible.

The difference is striking. Contrast Ken Burns's documentary, Lewis and Clark: The Corps of Discovery, based loosly on Ambrose's book, Undaunted Courage. This film contains fewer primary sources than Burns normally employs, but he makes up for it with scenery. When Spielberg bases Band of Brothers on Ambrose's book of the same title, one can hardly tell that both films are rooted in the same author.

Spielberg's Band of Brothers looks like a movie. It plays like a movie. If I didn't know it was all nonfiction, I would consider it a serial movie. But if you keep Ambrose's book in your lap while watching the movie, you will be surprised at how exactly-faithful the movie remains to the story. In fact, the extended DVD, which contains interviews with the members of Easy Company, reinforces this. Even the dialog is faithful to the solders' accounts.

A thorough analysis of the devices and methods used in Band of Brothers is beyond the scope of this hypertext, but no doubt it would provide useful to writers and new media authors. This documentary movie stretches the nonfiction genre, accomplishing in film what authors like Tracy Kidder do in print: good, honest storytelling.