Making Sense of the 60s and 70s
While the filmmakers of the direct cinema and cinema verite persuasions were
busy focusing on the small, revealing, but unmediated moments, on cultural
events such as rock concerts; and on what Thomas Waugh calls "easy targets"
of scorn or ridicule, American and global society were undergoing massive
social, political and cultural changes, tremors, and revolutions. Waugh suggests
that the conventions of verite--the fly on the wall strategies and pretensions of the
style--were simply not equal to these revolutions…or at least the key verite and
direct cinema filmmakers were not willing to employ them to these ends.
By 1965, the US was knee-deep in a war in viet nam. By the formal end of the
engagement in 1973 over 3.5 million troops had served in Southeast Asia.
"Draftees" accounted for 38% of all American troops in Vietnam. Over 12% of the
draftees were college graduates. Over 58K American troops would be killed in
action and over 153K wounded over the course of the war. Over 47K
vietnamese troops were killed. During the course of the war the US would drop
more
At home and abroad, increasingly large numbers of students and other activists
took to the streets in protest, resulting in frequently intense clashes with police
and domestic military forces. On May 4th 1970, four students at Kent State
University were killed and nine others are wounded when a contingent of
Guardsmen suddenly opens fire during a noontime demonstration.
Youth Culture in general came into its own in the 60s, fuelled by ample amounts
of Sex Drugs and Rock Roll, and political idealism and as a result of notable
changes in the structure and function of the middle class family. In the Summer
of 1967, a massive confab of young longhairs, old beatniks, sundry freaks and
curious on- lookers gathered in Golden Gate Park for the first Human Be-in…a
festival that kicked off the notorious Summer of Love in San Francisco and
brought "hippies" to world attention. In May 1968, a large coalition of students,
blue collar workers, and left-wing intellectuals virtually shut down Paris and
brought the French government to the point of crisis in clashes over wages and
living conditions, academic and social freedom, discontent with the war in
vietnam and a host of other causes. In August 1969, over 1/2 million concertgoers converged on a dairy farm in Bethel New York to celebrate the Woodstock
Music and Art Fair
In the US, the struggle for African American Civil Rights begun in the 1950s
continued with increasing intensity and urgency throughout the 60's. On August
28, 1963, about 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington D.C. at the end of a march to urge support for pending civil rights
legislation. It was at this event that. Martin Luther King Jr.’s gave his famous “I
Have A Dream” speech. This was a decade also marked by increasingly violent
racial confrontations in major urban centers, including riots in the ghettos of cities
from Watts to Detroit. After King's assassination in 1968, there were marked
moves toward increased militancy in the African American Community--this was
a period that saw the rise of black nationalist and black power movements such
as the black panthers.
The struggles for African American civil rights provided a catalyst for other civil
rights and liberation movements in the 60's and 70's, including those of other
racial and ethnic minority groups, gay liberation to the women's movement.
Here's a 15 minute tour of those times…
Many young documentary filmmakers in the 60s and 70s were very naturally
drawn to or influenced by these movements and events, as well as to the new
possibilities of documentary film as a political tool, a way of fostering a new social
and political consciousness and change.
(It's interesting that even Hollywood wasn't exempt from the cultural shifts
happening during these times. A new generation of young filmmakers and film
producers such as Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Arthur Penn, Dennis
Hopper, Robert Evans, Bob Rafaelson, began making and producing highly
personal films that pushed the boundaries of traditional screen subjects…films
with a definite undertone of political and social, and generational awareness…)
Films such as Easy Rider and Bonny and Clyde revelled in the antiestablishment
outsider… (if you want to learn more about these bad boys, check out Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls: how the sex-drugs-and-rock'n'roll generation saved
Hollywood -- both the book by Peter Biskind and the doc made from the book)
The documentary traditions and conventions of the 1970's were also undergoing
changes. Where the Griersonian tradition viewed social problems and the
dispossessed from a rather privileged position -- the powerful attempting to use
film to lift the weak from the mire-- these filmmakers tended to represent what
Nichols characterizes as "history from below." -- from the point of view of
historically marginalized community. Where the Griersonian tradition and the
tradition of the American Depression Filmmakers such as Pare Lorentz looked
toward centralized power of governments to develop solutions to social ills, many
60's filmmakers consciously questioned or openly opposed the policies and
practices of the State. If anything there was some affinity between some of these
filmmakers and the Leftist filmmakers of the past--vertov, the Film and Photo
League and league, Joris Ivens…
In 1967 a group of American independent filmmakers and photographers formed
a collective in NY to document and chronicle politically significant events of the
time--particularly demonstrations, acts of political resistance, and what they
considered to be abuses of governmental power both in the US and globally.
The group called itself Newsreel -- it's radical, agit-prop films, which, bore no
individual credits, were shown on college campuses, at political organizing
meetings, at in community halls. These were not meant to be calm and
analytical works--they were consciously meant to be confrontational and inciting.
The organizational idea eventually spread to other cities including Boston and
San Francisco, and Los Angeles. California Newsreel is still in existence.
I'm going to show you a clip from New York Newsreel's Columbia in Revolt -chronicles the demonstrations of students and the occupation of the campus
administration building in 1969. Like a lot of student protest activities in the 60s,
the demands and grievances were wide-ranging and various: students were
pissed about campus relations with the defense department and its involvement
in war research; they protested the building of a new gym which was planned to
occupy a site in the mostly African American Morningside Heights neighborhood;
and they demanded greater student voice in campus administration.
SHOW clip from Columbia
--Which Nicholas Mode? Filmmaker as directly engaged as partisan participant
--Do you think the low-tech nature of this film was intentional or expedient? Why
would it have been intentional?
--What evidence do the filmmakers bring to bear in support of students and in
condemnation of campus administration
--What relations to and differences from verite?
--What Is not being shown?
The war naturally provided fodder for these and other activist filmmakers both
during the war and after.
The roots of American involvement in viet nam go back to the end of t he
second world war. Since 1946 nationalists insurgents under the leadership of
Communist-backed Ho Chi Minh had been fighting a bloody guerrilla war to
defeat French colonialism.
The US had embarked on a Cold War policy of
attmpting to contain communist world expansion. There were fears that French
defeat in Vietnam would dangerously strengthen communist postion in
Asia…There was much talk of the “Domino theory” : if vietnam fell, the rest of
Asia would soon follow. The initial small US commitment to military and
economic aid continued to grow until, the US would pump increasing amounts of
money into the French war in veit unti by 1950 it was supporting almost 80
percent of the war.
Over the next ten years US commitments in Vietnam continued to expand in an
attempt to shore up the South Vietnamese government against further
communist incursion. During the Kennedy administation, followers of Ho who
had remained in the south after the partition of the country began insurrengy
actions against the US-back South Vietnamese Govt (This group came to be
known as the National Liberation front – the guerrilla soldiers that fought for the
front were known as the Viet Cong)
Under kennedy increasing amounts of
military aid and military advisers were sent into the country and authorized to
take part in combat. THE NLF expanded its incursions into the south—sending
supplies and troops from the north along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
By 1961 the Viet Cong had won control of over half of South vietnam with little
local opposition and by 1964 regular communist north vietnames army began
infiltrating across the 17 parallel that demarcated North from South Vietnamese.
The war began to escalate…After Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson
stepped up this involvement…Johnson pledged to protect South Vietnam from
the Communists—he also promised that no “american boys would die there.
There was increasing concern about what was then called “The Domino Effect”—
the possibility that if South Vietnam fell to Communism, the rest of Southeast
Asia would fall like a row of dominos. In the South, Communist National
Liberation Front (also known as the Viet Cong) had been waging guerrilla warfare
with broad support of the peasantry against US-backed government since the
mid sixties.
http://www.askasia.org/frclasrm/readings/r000189.htm#u
In August 1974, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
giving the president broad war-making powers. In February 1965, the US began
strategic bombing of the North—believing that this would coerce North
Vietnamese communist regime in Hanoi to pressure Vietcong to stop fighting in
the South. Despite Johnson’s promises, by 1965, over 184K American troops
were in Vietnam…
Background Information
After the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu and the signing of the Geneva Accords of 1954, the U.S.
shifted its support to Ngo Dinh Diem, a conservative nationalist whose prominent American friends
included Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Nixon. As a Catholic in a Buddhist country, Diem
needed a base of support in the south and found it in the large population of refugees (some 900,000) -most of whom were Catholic -- who had left their homes in the north, aided and encouraged by the U.S.
With the certainty of firm American backing, and this new domestic base, Diem refused to hold the
elections agreed to at Geneva. Instead he organized a referendum that gave the people of the south a choice
between himself as president or Bao Dai as an elective monarch. Diem won handily, getting more than
605,000 votes from Saigon's 405,000 registered voters.
In opposition to Diem's increasingly harsh and authoritarian rule, the National Liberation Front (NLF, later
branded "Viet Cong") was formed in 1960. To reinforce Diem, the new American president, John F.
Kennedy, dispatched Green Beret "advisers" in 1961 and provided increased military aid, including
American-piloted armed helicopters, as the guerrilla war expanded. By spring of 1963, South Vietnamese
opposition had reached the point that Buddhist monks were demonstrating dramatically against Diem's rule
and the war by self-immolation. Diem lost the confidence of the Americans as well as his own people; and,
with the Kennedy administration's encouragement, an army coup deposed Diem. On November 1, 1963,
Diem was killed by the Vietnamese military who took over from him.
Following the ouster of Diem, there was no Saigon regime that survived without American support; and of
the several that were ousted, American involvement was critical in every case. Only with the coup that put
Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky in power (June 1965) did the U.S. feel that it had a satisfactory
political instrument to work through. Subsequently, the U.S. was unwilling to countenance any coup; and
when there were challenges to the power of Thieu and Ky, the U.S. threw its full weight behind the two of
them.
President Lyndon Johnson (following the assassination of President Kennedy -- eleven days after the
shooting of President Diem) sought to sustain his domestic social programs (the "Great Society"), amidst
ongoing worries about the international consequences of the "loss" of South Vietnam (the "domino
theory"). Congress overwhelmingly passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, 1964, giving the
president broad war-making powers; and, in February, 1965, the U.S. began strategic bombing of the north,
believing that this could bring Hanoi to pressure the NLF to stop fighting in the south -- something Hanoi
neither would nor could do. The first U.S. Marines went ashore in a direct combat role at Danang on March
8, 1965. Soon thereafter, American civilian and military personnel came under frequent NLF/Viet Cong
attacks. In January 1968 even the symbol of American power and presence, the U.S. Embassy, was
besieged. Presi- dent Johnson proposed a Mekong River development project as a nonmilitary continuation
of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. At the same time he vowed not to be "the first [American] president to
lose a war."
When he took office, President Johnson made two promises with respect to Vietnam: he would not "lose" it
and he would not send "American boys" to die there. Johnson failed to keep either pledge.
By 1965, 184,000 American young men were fighting in Vietnam, and many were dying. They fought
forces organized by the National Liberation Front (NLF) into guerrilla units and stable village militia. The
NLF was a coalition native to the south, made up largely of peasants. Many South Vietnamese
noncombatants aided the NLF by supplying military information, food, medical services, homemade
weapons, and recruits. In return, the NLF organized village self-defense, established schools, encouraged
local irrigation projects, and, in general, functioned as a government throughout large areas of the south.
North Vietnamese army combat units didn't arrive until March-April 1965. As late as 1967 there were only
55,000 regular North Vietnamese troops in the south. The bulk of the fighting, until mid-1968 or 1969, was
in the hands of 240,000 NLF soldiers, who engaged 525,000 Americans and 685,000 Saigon army soldiers.
Native to the villages of the south, the NLF guerrillas, lightly armed and thoroughly familiar with the
territory, proved to be a formidable adversary. Because these troops were often difficult to distinguish from
the population itself, U.S. military commanders resorted to such "pacification" tactics as "free fire zones"
and "search and destroy" missions. "Free fire zones" were areas in which anything that moved was assumed
to be an enemy and attacked; "search and destroy" missions frequently responded to a single sniper attack
from a village by destroying the entire vil- lage and relocating its surviving population. In this way, every
Vietnamese, of whatever political affiliation, became a potential enemy to American soldiers. Some of
these soldiers referred to the Vietnamese countryside as "Indian country," and, echoing 19th-century
cavalry soldiers, many claimed that "the only good gook is a dead gook." By 1966 "free fire zones" were
enlarged to areas of several square miles within which saturation bombing by B-52s or shelling by massed
artillery cleared the land and made it uninhabitable by either NLF troops or the local peasantry. It was this
decimation of the land, more than anything else, that filled the refugee camps in the safe areas near Saigon
and other cities.
In 1967 the so-called "Phoenix Program" was initiated. This "pacification" program was intended to
eliminate the NLF leadership (or anyone identified as such without corroboration) through assassination.
Something of the nature of the war in these years can be captured by statistics. Although South Vietnam
was presumably a friendly country we had come to aid, U.S. forces had dropped 1,388,000 tons of bombs
on it by 1969. Ground ammunition expended amounted to 1,374,000 tons during the same period; and in
the first nine months of 1967, alone, varieties of highly toxic crop defoliants (most of it Agent Orange)
were sprayed on 965,006 acres of land. Overall, American troops expended 500 times the quantity of
ammunition used by the NLF; and if the bombing of the north is added to the tonnage dropped on the south,
the total is a stunning 4.5 million tons (1965-1969) or 500 lbs. of explosives for every Vietnamese man,
woman, and child.
And still General Westmoreland called for more American troops, requesting an additional 200,000 in
1968. As the costs of the war rose, in both moral and material terms, Johnson's top advisers became
increasingly skeptical of U.S. military estimates of the situation. Moreover, such influential men as George
Ball and Clark Clifford privately turned against continued American escalation of the war. After the
January 1968 Tet offensive, in which guerrillas attacked no fewer than 34 provincial centers, 64 district
towns, and every major city in the south -- to the apparent surprise of the American command -- Johnson
was strongly urged by his advisers to reject West- moreland's request. On March 31, he called a bombing
halt on much of the north (bombing of the south continued) and declared he would devote the remainder of
his presidential term to seeking peace rather than re-election.
On November 3, 1969, President Richard Nixon officially unveiled his "Vietnamization" program. The
purpose of this program was to gradually transfer combat operations in Vietnam entirely to the South
Vietnamese army. Peak American troop levels of 543,400 fell to 334,600 by 1970, and had diminished to
156,800 at the end of 1971. The "Vietnamization" program was meant to implement Nixon's 1968
campaign promise to bring the fighting to an "honorable" end. With this policy, the South Vietnamese
assumed a greater combat role and consequently suffered an increase in their casualty rate. However,
serious questions arose concerning the South Vietnamese military capacity and willingness to take the
offensive. At the same time, American military capacity was itself affected by morale problems that
included high levels of drug abuse and racial tension.
Despite the decrease in troop strength and lowered morale, military actions actually expanded during these
years. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia (1970) and the South Vietnamese, supported
by the U.S., invaded Laos (1971). These overt incursions stirred controversy in the United States,
particularly in Congress and among college students (although covert military operations, including secret
bombings, had been conducted for nearly a decade -- mainly in Laos).
With American troop strength declining, the North Vietnamese initiated a broad offensive in March 1972
("Easter offensive"), to which Nixon responded with an unprecedented bombing campaign throughout
Vietnam that included the mining of Haiphong Harbor.
If the nature of the war had changed on the U.S.-Saigon side, it was also transformed for the NLF and the
North Vietnamese. NLF casualties as a result of the military failure of the Tet offensive, the various
"pacification" programs conducted by the C.I.A. and the U.S. Army, and the ongoing bombing and
defoliation efforts were enormous. Slowly the weight of fighting shifted from southern-born and organized
guerrilla units to main-force North Vietnamese regular army troops. In the 1972 spring offensive and, more
tellingly, in a final offensive in 1975, the war finally became that which the United States had always
claimed it was: a war for the unification of Vietnam by force, under Hanoi's direction.
By the fall of 1972 both sides had reached a state of military stalemate. The situation facing the Nixon
administration was almost brutal in its simplicity: how to extricate American troops without betraying what
the President took to be a commitment to the Thieu government.
A breakthrough occurred in the peace talks that had been going on between Washington and Hanoi in Paris
since 1968. Concessions on both sides yielded an agreement that National Security Adviser Kissinger
(negotiating for the U.S.) was confident would fulfill Nixon's pledge to end the war with honor. The Thieu
regime's firm resistance to this agreement surprised the American government. To persuade Thieu that the
U.S. would not desert him and to demonstrate to Hanoi a U.S. commitment to a separate, independent
South Vietnamese nation with an anti-communist leadership, Nixon ordered the heaviest bombing of the
north in the history of the war ("Christmas bombing" of 1972). Shortly after this twelve-day offensive, the
Paris peace agreement was signed.
The Paris Accords allowed North Vietnamese troops to remain in place in the south, and, for the first time,
officially recognized the existence of the NLF and promised a future political role for its constituency.
However, the agreement also permitted continuing American military supply of the Thieu government.
Violations of the accords began before the ink was dry. It seems likely, in retrospect, that the United States
would have re-entered the war -- certainly the air war -- had Congress not intervened. On July 31, 1973,
Congress voted to end all bombing in Indochina and to ban any future military moves in the area without
prior Congressional approval. Nixon's requests for aid were consistently cut down (although it should be
noted that the U.S. did send $7 billion to the Thieu regime from 1973 to 1975; for the same period, China
and the Soviet Union supplied Hanoi with $1.5 billion in aid). It became increasingly clear that the Saigon
government was on its own.
Although the American people and Congress had essentially disengaged from the war, the fighting
continued between 1973 and 1975. The inherent weaknesses of the South Vietnamese government, no
longer bolstered by American military participation, resulted in its ultimate defeat.
Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. The war had come to an end.
Perhaps the most well-known and effective films made during the thick of the
War was Emile de Antonio's 1969 film, In the Year of the Pig. It's an openly
partisan--Marxist--history of the war--of colonialism in Vietnam--told in the form of
a non-narrated collage or compilation similar to Esther Schubb's Fall of the
Romanov Dynasty. It's composed of news and archival footage, political
propaganda, speeches, and other sorts of evidence edited into a sharp
indictment of US involvement in the war.
De Antonio has said that he
developed this and other "collage" films by working from transcripts--pasting
them up on an emormous wall-sized board, rearranging them and rubbing them
against each other to construct his "narrative"
This is obviously partisan filmmaking at its most extreme:
(Cinema verite is first of all a lie, secondly a childish assumption
about the nature of film. Cinema verite is a joke. Only people
without feelings or convictions could even think about making
cinema verite. I happen to have strong feelings and some dreams
and my prejudice is under and in everything I do)
While the war was on the news every night, and while the images grew
increasingly grim--nightly talk of "body count"--the picture presented to the public
was generally edited and stripped of historical and political context. At least until
the decisive Tet offensive in 1967, network news was supportive of the war .
Over the past twenty years, a sort of journalistic and political science
conventional wisdom has sprung up about media coverage of the war…The
notion that the incessant appearance of war horrors on the nightly news, the
scenes of domestic protest and political disarray were in large part responsible
for turning the tide of public opinion against the war. David Grosser’s article on
Hearts and Minds—the film we’re about to see—has some really interesting
contradictory takes on that notion. Grosser cites the analysis of the broadcast
news coverage of viet nam between 1965 and 1973 done by Daniel Hallin in his
book The Uncensored War…Hallin contends that, although the tone of the news
and the coverage of the news became increasingly critical as the war rolled on,
the majority of coverage tended to be supportive and uncritical throughout the
engagement. Grosser also makes the point that coverage of government
officials from the pres down to the generals tended to simply air statements
without comment or interpretation… The one exception: Morley Safers reporting
on the torching of a village…put on with great reluctance…
Like a lot of the current reporting of the war in Iraq, news from vietnam tended to
be from the perspective of the military…the bombings shown from the air…the
results on civilians left unshown… M.Moore 911…bombing of baghdad…
Unlike de antonio’s film which was made in the thick of the war,
davis film was shot after the formal end of hostilities…1972
released in 1974. Underwritten by Hollywood…wins academy
award. Controversy. Academy award cermonies
---use de antonio critical quote about Hearts and minds
Abstract: The 1975 Academy Award for documentary feature went to producer Bert Schneider and
director Peter Davis for Hearts and Minds, a searing documentary about the American war in Vietnam.
The 2002 release of the DVD brought renewed attention to this classic work. The argument of Hearts and
Minds accrues through the assemblage of an intricate succession of contradictory words and images. These
ironic juxtapositions combined with a latticework of interview fragments prompts the viewer's construction
of an imaginary narrator who becomes the shadow storyteller. Kenneth Burke's idea of victimage resonates
in the wounded warriors who recur throughout the film like musical refrains. The graphic content of Hearts
and Minds marks the beginning of a decline in representational explicitness leading to the current faded
state of war photography.
Hearts and Minds Redux
Carol Wilder
. . .So we must be ready to fight in
Vietnam, but ultimate victory will depend
upon the hearts and minds of the people that
actually live out there.
-- Lyndon Johnson
The 1975 Academy Award for documentary feature went to producer Bert Schneider and director Peter
Davis for their account of what Americans did “out there” in Vietnam, and what the doing did back. Hearts
and Minds created something of a sensation upon its release in a U.S. bitterly divided about a bloody
conflict in a distant land. The release of the DVD in 2002, a year of escalating warfare and uncertainty,
brought renewed attention to this classic work and made its powerful argument available to generations not
yet born during the Vietnam War years.
In making Hearts and Minds, Davis wanted to know: “Why did we go to Vietnam? What did we do there?
What did the doing do to us?” The film provides its own answers to these questions and more, but what is
the relevance of Hearts and Minds today? Can the film help answer the question “What are we getting
into?” when it comes to military intervention. Davis wrote in 2000 “if the first casualty of war is truth, the
last is memory.” Today the first casualty of post 9/11 warfare is context. Shards of data collected from
eight hundred "embeds" and no through-line; Baudrillard’s (1983) world of more information and less
meaning; “parlor walls” from Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury, 1953) spewing nonstop sound and picture from
the gaping maw of 24/7 cable – logos, crawls, split screens, urgent magisterial music enveloping the viewer
in a carnival of infotainment. Messages play out “within the context of no context” (Trow, 1997); attention
deficit disorder is a national condition, and distraction the new focus. Can a new look at an old movie shed
light upon this dark time?
“First an Undeclared War, then an Unseen Film”
It was a fluke that Hearts and Minds was made at all. Hollywood was no more eager in the 1970s than it is
today to bankroll political controversy, witness Mirimax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein’s shelving in 2002
of The Quiet American as “unpatriotic” because post-9/11 “we were worried that no one had the stomach
for bad Americans any more” (Fuchs, 2003). Michael Caine lobbied successfully for the film’s release in
time to be eligible for the 2003 Academy Awards. Hearts and Minds took an eerily similar path in 1974.
The movie was made in the first place because Bert Schneider earned so much money for Columbia with
Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces that the studio gave him a big budget with no strings attached. Schneider
turned around and gave a million dollars, no strings, to CBS documentary producer Peter Davis, best
known to that time for Hunger in America and the controversial Emmy-winning 1971 Selling of the
Pentagon. Work on Hearts and Minds began in 1972, cultivating further ground broken by Emile
Antonioni’s In the Year of the Pig (1970), the first full-length commercial Vietnam documentary by an
American filmmaker. (Davis’ cinematographer Richard Pearce and editor Lynzee Klingman worked on the
deAntonioni film.)
Pearce and Davis shot more than 200 hours of film across the U.S. and in Vietnam, acquiring an additional
20 hours of stock footage. Davis accumulated 1200 pages of notes on the dailies alone, eventually wrestling
the film to just under two hours. In April of 1974 an incomplete version was screened for Columbia
lawyers and other front office personnel Two hours after the screening, Columbia Executive Vice-President
David Begelman called Schneider to say that Columbia was in “precarious financial condition” and was
“fearful of reprisals from bankers.” Columbia general counsel Burton Marcus confirmed this account,
adding that “what disturbed Columbia executives and lawyers was not the content of the film but the fact
that, in their view, BBS [Schneider’s production company] had not obtained all the necessary releases from
persons who had appeared in the film” (Harrington, 1975, p. 17). They took this position despite the fact
that Schneider had 5 million dollars of liability insurance on Hearts and Minds alone, in addition to
Columbia’s 20 million of general coverage. An additional 25 million coverage acquired by BBS did not
change things, prompting Stephanie Harrington's lament “first an undeclared war, then an unseen film”
(1975, p. 1).
In May 1974, Schneider screened Hearts and Minds to a wildly receptive Cannes audience over Columbia’s
objections. BBS received a detailed legal opinion of its own: “it is hard to imagine a case in which First
Amendment rights are more important. Based on our review of the facts and relevant law, we do not
believe that the film gives rise to viable claims of substance for defamation, invasion of privacy, or related
matters” (Harrington, 1975, p.1). Columbia was not impressed and continued to stall, in what Stephanie
Harrington called “a Rashomon of a tale of -- depending upon one’s viewpoint – exaggerated corporate
cautiousness, financial cowardice bordering on informal political censorship, or, as Columbia prefers it,
simple business prudence” (Harrington, 1975, p. 1).
Hearts and Minds met with rave receptions and reviews at festivals and screenings during the Summer and
Fall of 1974, but Columbia continued to balk at distributing the picture and refused to sell it to someone
who would. Finally, Schneider and Davis managed to buy the film from Columbia and make a distribution
deal with Warner Brothers. Hearts and Minds was thus able to have a brief commercial run in December
1974 in order to be eligible for the Academy Awards. Then the other shoe dropped. Just as the film was set
to go into general distribution, Vietnam War architect Walt Rostow (“a hawk’s hawk”) rushed in with a
temporary restraining order to block it as an unauthorized exploitation of his likeness. Rostow’s bid for a
permanent injunction was denied, and on January 22, 1975 Hearts and Minds opened its first run in
Washington D.C. at an evening sponsored by George McGovern and other anti-war celebrities.
Reviews were mixed. Hearts and Minds was “the truth of the matter” (Francis Fitzgerald, 1975, p. 35);
“propaganda” (Walter Goodman, 1975, section 2, page 1); “a cinematic lie” (M.J. Sobran, 1975, p. 621).
Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that it “may well be the true film for America’s bicentennial”
(1975, p. 38). Andrew Kopkind called it “brave and brilliant” (1975, p. 38). John Simon declared Hearts
and Minds “certainly the most significant and probably the best of all recent films” (1975, p. 64). Writing
in Film Quarterly , Bernard Weiner judged it “a supremely important political film” (1975, p. 60).
Other reviewers were less enthusiastic. The film was morbid, one-sided, manipulative. There were no
“bad” Vietnamese, no pro-war Americans who don’t sound like idiots or worse, and there was too much
emotional pandering. Stefan Kanfer charged in Time that “beginning with the noblest of motives –
examination of the roots and consequences of the Vietnam War – this vigorous, chaotic documentary
manipulates time for its own ends.” Hearts and Minds “cannot leave hell enough alone” (1975 ).
Controversy notwithstanding, in March 1975 Hearts and Minds landed its Oscar. Bert Schneider’s
acceptance remarks included reading a cable from the Provisional Revolutionary Government’s
Ambassador to the Paris peace talks. This so upset host Bob Hope that he had Frank Sinatra read a
statement disclaiming responsibility for any political references. Even in 1975, the year the Vietnam War
officially ended, America was confused, angry, and divided about its meaning.
The DVD release has now officially introduced Hearts and Minds to an audience with little memory and
less knowledge of the Vietnam War, and the film has garnered another round of reviews as varied as the
first. David Ng (2002) in Images Journal: the film “still resonates as a cautionary tale against unquestioned
military might abroad and virulent patriotism at home.” Marty Mapes (2002) in Movie Habit: Hearts and
Minds makes me feel like the kid who gets to eavesdrop in on the grownups conversation.” Today, as in
1975, critics line up in opposite corners. Charles Aliaga (2002) in DV Angle called the film “the ultimate
historical document,” while Colin Jacobson (2002) in DVD Movie Guide concluded “if you seek true
documentation of the war start to finish, you’ll need to look elsewhere.” There is a surprising level of
interest in the Vietnam War among college-age students today, who think of it as a mysterious foggy patch
of American history that carries with it the fascination of a pornographic taboo.
Hearts and Minds breaks the spell of detachment with an emotional punch; almost anyone who has seen it
can remember where and when. What accounts for this enduring power? As Davis hopes, can the film be
reread today in new contexts? Penelope Gilliatt (1975) argued that you can throw all the pieces of the film
randomly up in the air and they will come down with the same story. On the contrary, Hearts and Minds is
a meticulously rendered archetype of cinematic representation built through a choreographed progression
of antithetical messages.
“First they bomb. . . then they film”
The logic of Hearts and Minds accrues through the assemblage of an intricate succession of contradictory
words and images. The cumulative effect of juxtaposed words vs words, words vs images, and images vs
images is the construction of a rhetorical foundation of argument from antithesis. It is a disciplined
montage (Eisenstein, 1949), wherein two messages juxtaposed in contradiction create a dialectical tension
that the viewer is left to synthesize. But all messages are not equal. More often than not, one bit will be
positioned as the metamessage that defines the synthesis. When this device is used repeatedly, as it is in
Hearts and Minds, it prompts the viewer to project an imaginary narrator whose function is to make
meaning through resolving the mixed messages. In Hearts and Minds, this narration is punctuated by
recurring bits of interviews that build a latticework of context. If the viewer has not known what to make of
the mixed messages, the unambiguity of the interviews completes the invisible narration.
Several features of Hearts and Minds contribute specially to its impact, foremost the extensive images of
the Vietnamese Other going about daily life. They are human, they are real, they have feelings, they look
small and vulnerable, not menacing. This other -- all but ignored by mainstream media -- is a sympathetic
victim. The film reverses the figure/ground context of American popular culture by foregrounding the
Other and bestowing it with value. Davis adopts the point of view of a knowing everyman, able to see the
tragic story with a wide angle lens, where the “enemy” is as human as the viewer. David Halberstam is one
of many who have pointed out that Vietnam War television reporting did not “calibrate the killing in human
terms” (Harrington, 1975, section 2 page 1). Hearts and Minds catches the unconscious racism of war, and
the naïve belief that the U.S. could wage a technological war “against people who didn’t have faces.” Peter
Davis gives them faces. Despite the fact that the film was released nearly ten years into the American War
in Vietnam and shortly before the war’s end, representations of civilian Vietnamese people and life were
uncommon in American media, much like Iraqi or Afghani life is absent today. Davis found one place in
particular “Hung Dinh Village, North of Saigon” to anchor his story and in his words “personalize” the
Vietnamese.
In one sequence shot in Hung Dinh, the camera pans from airborne B-52 bombers to villager Nugyen Van
Tai on the ground. “The planes again,” he says, “I don’t know whose they are. Just airplanes.” He stands in
the rubble that was his home. “That is a bomb crater. The bomb struck there and destroyed everything I
had.” Interviews with elderly sisters Vo Thi Hue and Vo Thi Tu follow. “I am so unhappy,” one says. “I am
old and weak. I have nothing to sell, nothing to do, no home left.” The other: “Where am I to find a place to
sit and work for something to eat? Even a bird needs a nest to go back to.” The camera lingers. Shots of
broken china, sandals in the mud, more rubble, and then two village men overheard walking in the rain in
the ruins referring to the cameraman: “Look, they’re focusing on us now. First they bomb as much as they
please, then they film.” Davis is the first to acknowledge that the Vietnamese were doubly exploited by
American technology, first by bombs and then by cameras.
The Vietnamese Other is most powerfully rendered in a sequence of mourning and keening at the National
Cemetery of South Vietnam. The funeral is for a South Vietnamese soldier, and is presented in all its
dignity, ritual, and grief. It includes the unbearable suffering of a young boy who throws himself on the
casket, leading the viewer to share a painful and intimate experience. While some evidence of cruelty by
the South Vietnamese army is seen in shots of prisoners in “tiger cages,” images of cruelty by the “enemy”
– the “other-other” NLF or North Vietnamese – are notably absent. In nearly all cases Vietnamese are
portrayed as sympathetic victims, even in a notorious and graphic brothel scene of prostitutes and
American soldiers. The lone exception is a sequence of Saigon fat-cats, suggesting that South Vietnamese
businessmen and government officials were complicit with the Americans in a war against the Vietnamese
people.
The effect of humanizing the other works both ways. Vietnamese-American scholar Ngo Vinh Long (2002)
reports that Vietnamese audiences he has witnessed watching Hearts and Minds are moved by the
interviews of tearful American veterans, just as American audiences are moved by depictions of the
Vietnamese. Vietnamese viewers are especially affected by the veteran who says “Americans don’t
understand that these people are fighting for their freedom.” For both Vietnamese or American audiences,
Hearts and Minds breathes life into war’s sad players. If demonizing the enemy is a first principle of
propaganda, humanizing the enemy may be a first principle of peace.
Hearts and Minds maximizes the impact of iconic war photography, using stock footage of some of the
war’s most gruesome images. These images are almost as recognizable today as they were then: GIs using
Zippo lighters to torch huts at Cam Ne,; a naked napalmed girl running in terror; a point blank execution on
a Saigon street. Each one of these images was widely distributed by mainstream media and each
encapsulated the essential horror of the war. In Hearts and Minds, not only are these arresting pictures
included, but the moving image unpacks the more familiar still image, playing out the action to greater
effect in what seems like slow motion. The still image of the execution on the Saigon street during the Tet
offensive shows the moment of the bullet’s impact, but the full shot shows the victim fall on his side,
spewing a fountain of blood from his ear. It is much grislier than the still image, and much more graphic
than any photograph coming out of Iraq or Afghanistan today. The last widely seen American war
photograph of equivalent explicitness was of dead American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993.
When Al Jazeera and other non-U.S. networks broadcast footage of captured and unharmed Americans in
2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (separated at birth from the Walter Rostow of Hearts and
Minds) declared them to be in violation of the Geneva Convention.
As essential as stock footage was to telling the story of Hearts and Minds, nearly all of the photography
was the work of Richard Pearce, whose unflinching eye framed the film. Davis (2002) comments on the
quality of “intimacy without intrusion” in Pearce’s work, where subjects became “companions to the
camera.” After one especially heartbreaking interview of the parents of a soldier killed in action, Pearce
briefly wanted to leave documentary work because of the emotional toll it was taking. Pearce uses distance
to calibrate intimacy throughout the film, and whether close on a shoe in the mud or from a master shot
framing a scene, he directs the viewer’s eye with a precision that is essential to the film’s effect.
The Imaginary Narrator
Peter Davis was influenced by the verite documentary style developed in the 50s and 60s by Frederick
Wiseman, D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers, and others. Hearts and Minds is shot largely in
television documentary style, but in a departure from television format Davis rejected the use of a narrator.
The more eloquent the narrator, the less the viewer feels the suffering. After all, this intelligent
commentator is protected from the painful reality of the images and so is the audience. Davis wanted to
remove the curtain provided by the narrator, and at the same time avoid “pounding a conclusion.” While
Hearts and Minds may not have the standard baritone narrator, the director’s use of interviews as well as
the bone structure of the editing itself create an invisible narration that shapes the story as decisively as any
disembodied voiceover.
If Hearts and Minds has a grammar, the interviews are its conjunctions, a device used to connect diverse
and sometimes divergent pieces of sound and picture. The extensive use of interviews provides coherence
and continuity to the Davis montage. The film includes seventeen talking heads from stock footage and
thirty-five original interviews. Nine of the subjects appear three or more times. Seven are American combat
veterans; six are women; fourteen are Vietnamese. In effect, these sound bites and interviews simulate a
voiceover narration whereby the viewer assumes the role of an imaginary narrator. Instead of using a single
voice, Davis cuts his subjects so that they collectively tell the story, “wounded voices running like insistent
snatches of songs,” in the words of Andrew Kopkind (1975, p. 38). It is tempting to mix metaphors when
describing the function of the interviews as they are dispersed purposefully throughout the film, but the
result is to create a lens through which the viewer can bring hundreds of contradictory, complex, and often
disturbing images into focus.
Hearts and Minds presents a depressing array of official sources whose positions should carry credibility,
but whose words and deeds typically communicate the opposite. A notable exception is Clark Clifford,
former Truman aide and LBJ Defense Secretary. Clifford was one of the highest ranking advisors who
openly changed his position on the war, decades before Robert McNamara did the same in his confessional
In Retrospect (1995). Clifford presents an elegant eminence grise; a picture of accomplishment, reason, and
integrity against whom subsequent speakers will be measured. A parade of presidential naivete and
deception follows, sequencing clips from Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and others.
Richard Nixon’s statement is especially arresting: “Throughout the war in Vietnam, the United States has
exercised a degree of restraint unprecedented in the annals of war.” The sheer audacity of this claim in
reference to a war where more bombs were dropped than in all previous wars combined sets the tone of
U.S. government denial and duplicity that mobilizes the viewer for the story that follows. ( One can
speculate that if Davis shot Hearts and Minds II he would pull George W. Bush’s famous disparaged
sixteen words about African uranium for Iraq.)
If Hearts and Minds has a sacrificial lamb it is the first American veteran to appear, Lt. George Coker, a
former B-52 pilot (78 missions) and a just-released seven year prisoner of war. Coker is in sparkling Navy
dress blues and at his Welcome Home rally, but his eyes are haunted. Why did you go, he is asked. Because
“at the time communism was once again trying to muscle its way into a free country.” Davis cuts, as if to
underscore Coker’s cliched response. Coker appears seven more times, more than any other person in the
film, functioning like a funhouse mirror that enlarges and distorts all of the hypocritical things about
American culture. Davis has said that Coker “encapsulates the entire film in his personality.” If so, then he
is the perfect scapegoat, the veteran-victim who repeats platitudes passed down from his leaders, paying for
their sins with his imprisonment and pain. Unlike other veteran-victims in the film, Coker has not yet
grasped the deception which imprisons him still, personifying the tangled innocence and guilt that pervades
the Davis vision. Coker’s remarks are always cut against the grain: Coker finds bombing civilians “deeply
satisfying,” he tells a group of school kids that “Vietnam would be a pretty country if it wasn’t for the
people,” and declares to a roomful of mothers “what you don’t want is a hundred women climbing down
your back, so you figure maybe the gooks aren’t so bad.”
Victimage and Redemption
Kenneth Burke’s (1936 ) idea of victimage resonates in all of the veteran portrayals in Hearts and Minds.
From this view, people by nature seek perfection, and face a constant struggle to create order out of chaos.
The inevitable imperfection becomes a source of guilt, mitigated through two strategies of victimage:
scapegoating and mortification. Scapegoats are not necessarily “evildoers” – in fact, they are often
“profoundly consubstantial” with those who create them. They can be “just like us.” Coker fulfills his
ritualistic role as a scapegoat by appealing to the viewer’s identification with him, expiating our own guilt.
On the other hand, mortification requires some ritual of self-abnegation. The guilt of imperfection has been
internalized, to be expurgated only through suffering and self-punishment. This could not be more
poignantly depicted than in Davis’ interviews with the film’s wounded warriors: Robert Muller, William
Marshall, Randy Floyd, and Stan Holder, all of whom are visibly in physical and emotional pain.
Pilot Randy Floyd breaks down. Bobby Muller appears in the film several times, and it not until mid-movie
that the camera pulls back from a medium shot to reveal that Muller is in a wheelchair. Marshall, a double
amputee, is shot in a similar way. Kauffman calls this technique “a touch of cinematic hokum” (1975, p.
22), but there is no question that it startles. These combat veterans represent by their injuries and enact by
their words the long process of redemption of all wounded warriors, who if they do not feel guilty for
killing, feel guilty for not dying. Their suffering has had the unfortunate consquence of deflecting blame
from the architects of war to its victims, just as today’s emphasis on “support our troops” diverts attention
away from discussing policy and challenging the policymakers.
Walt Rostow was one of those policymakers who steadfastly denied culpability. He is an unrepentant and
deserving scapegoat whose portrayal led him to seek unsuccessfully to block distribution of the film. Here
is the exchange between Rostow and an off-camera Peter Davis:
Rostow: " I know of no communist or noncommunist analysis that would assert that the majority of the
people of that country want to be communist."
Davis: "Why do they need us then?"
Rostow: "Because they were subjected to military attack from the outside. Are you really asking me this
goddamn silly question? You really want me to go into this Mr. Davis? I mean we really have to go back to
the origins of this thing. All right, I’ll do it. But this is pretty pedestrian stuff at this late stage of the game.
Honestly it is. I’ll do it. All right."
Davis: "There is a lot of disagreement about this."
Rostow: "No there’s not. No there’s not. There’s no doubt. I’ll answer your question and you can throw
away that tape but I didn’t really expect to have to be back to this sophomoric stuff, but I’ll do it. . ."
Davis interrupts Rostow mid-explanation and cuts to Lyndon Johnson announcing the Gulf of Tonkin
resolution, making it clear that what he intended to reveal was Rostow’s arrogance, not his rationale. Some
critics cried foul. Walter Goodman faults the sequence because “we do not see Rostow’s interrogator; we
can’t be certain whether some provocation, a gesture, a facial expression, a turn in phrase, may have
prompted Rostow’s outburst.” Rostow’s views are never clearly explicated in the film beyond his central
conviction that “I do believe that what we have done is right, though I would have preferred to see a more
decisive military strategy.” Only five subjects of the thirty-five original interviews have more on-camera
appearances than Rostow. As a documentary edit, it makes little sense to include Rostow’s outburst and
exclude his actual answer to the question unless we attribute the cut to the film’s invisible narration.
Rostow is scapegoated by inclusion of shots he thought were out of bounds for the interview: victimage by
edit. It is the only place in the film where Davis takes a chance with his own credibility in order to keep the
imaginary narrator on track and to some it comes off as a cheap shot that the film did not need. The Rostow
sequence is an example of the sort of “pounding a conclusion” Davis intended to avoid.
The most contested scene in Hearts and Minds is pulled from Davis’ interview of General William
Westmoreland, who says with a sense of comfortable entitlement: “Well, the Oriental does not put the same
high price on life as the Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of
the Orient expresses it, life is not important.” Davis had some difficulty getting Westmoreland to consent to
an interview in the first place because Westmoreland’s “people” – not him – had seen the Selling of the
Pentagon and reported back that it was awful, unfair, dishonest, etc. Davis successfully assured him that it
was none of those things, and the interview proceeded. Davis reports that Westmoreland made the nowinfamous statement not once, but three times. In response to criticism of Davis for juxtaposing that scene
next to the Vietnamese funeral, he insists that no matter where the footage was placed, it “detonated” all the
footage around it. Given the contribution of this moment to the film’s impact, Davis could not have
constructed written narration that speaks more forcefully. The highest ranking American military man in
the film saying the most ignorant thing in the most matter-of-fact way captures the soul of Hearts and
Minds more any other single moment.
While the one hundred on-camera statements by interviewees come equally from pro and anti-war sources,
the sum of all statements is clearly an anti-war message. How does this happen? The quantitative
evenhandedness is illusory. Taking a closer look, it quickly becomes evident that the pro-war argument
does not naturally speak very well for itself and, where it might, Davis does not let it. Westmoreland’s illadvised view on the “Orientals” value of life provides a rare candid glimpse behind the curtain of
imperialistic logic that has set the stage for many Western adventures. Davis does not have to connive here
to make the quote more damaging than it is. On the other hand, the inclusion of Rostow’s bit of bad onscreen behavior can only be seen as an incidence of opportunistic editing. Alternative clips from the
interview could have surely been selected, but Davis pulled the most damning of Rostow’s words to turn
against him.
All of the film’s interview subjects are victims: victims of brutality, victims of naivete, victims of
ignorance, victims of circumstance, victims of bombs, victims of filmmaking. Regardless of the role each
plays in the larger story, as objects of scapegoating or subjects of mortification, they all seek redemption.
The use of interviews to weave multiple strands of narration throughout Hearts and Minds binds the images
and creates a rhythm that carries the viewer through a story that seems more and more inevitable an is, in
fact, more and more carefully crafted. Tracing the arc of interviews, connecting the dots, the voice of the
imaginary narrator begins to emerge.
Argument by Antithesis
Film editor Walter Murch told Michael Ondaatje that “when it works, film editing – which could just as
easily be called film construction – identifies and exploits underlying patterns of sound and image that are
not obvious on the surface. Putting a film together is, in an ideal sense, the orchestrating of all those
patterns, just like different musical themes are orchestrated in a symphony. It is all pretty mysterious. It’s
right at the heart of the whole exercise” (Ondaatje, 2002, p.10). Davis orchestrates his own symphony in
Hearts and Minds by building a composition of argument by antithesis that involves the viewer in an active
process of making meaning. Time and again, one message is placed near its opposite, with the viewer left
to impose the synthesis. In the collage style pioneered by Antonioni, Davis carefully positions all the bits
and pieces. Judith Crist (2002) calls this the filmmaker’s “point counter-point technique,” but there is more
to it than simply displaying mixed messages. It is the multiple ways in which Davis creates a pattern of
contradictions and conjunctions that gives the film its depth and dimensionality. This complex design is
essential to delivering the message, and challenges Gilliatt’s notion that the pieces are interchangeable.
With 220 hours of footage to consider, Davis and editors Lynzee Klingman and Susan Martin faced an
enormous task. Because of the vast quantity of material, Davis, Klingman, and Martin would each work on
separate sequences, regrouping to view each other’s rough cuts. Davis comments on the DVD that the
editing process was “stressful.” For Davis to make a point of it suggests that there were some very difficult
days and weeks grappling with the charged and vivid material, yet they eventually managed to bring the
film in at one hundred twelve minutes.
The opening sequence of Hearts and Minds is paradigmatic of the contrapuntal structures Davis builds
throughout. In rich hues, a horse-drawn cart crosses the screen, bells tinkling softly. The camera pulls
slowly back to a wider shot of village life. “Hung Dinh Village, North of Saigon” reads the subtitle.
Children run laughing with their schoolbooks. Women gather straw, first in close up and then from afar.
Against a backdrop of six women minding their work, an American soldier enters from the right of the
frame and saunters slowly across without notice. He doesn’t belong there. Another shot of two G.I.s
walking away from the camera, weapons at ease. Barely one minute into the film the entire has been told.
We know that these incongruous images are going to collide. We know the unhappy ending, and the
tension created by this initial contradiction propels the viewer ahead with a morbid fascination.
Mixed messages can keep an audience confused and off-balance, striving for a resolution of the dissonance
that is created. Decades of clinical experience and experimentation with double binds, hypnotherapy,
brainwashing, and even Zen practice suggest that whether mixed messages harm or heal, they actively
engage the viewer/hearer/reader in the construction of meaning in a way that unambiguous messages do
not. When mixed messages become a pattern in a context from which there is no escape they can have the
crazy-making consequences of double binds (Bateson et al., 1956). For filmmaker Davis, in Hearts and
Minds, mixed messages offer a rich array of editing strategies. As in the Hung Dinh sequence, picture can
contradict picture over a time-base of several shots (just as sound can contradict sound), or picture and
sound can point/counterpoint in either synchronous or asynchronous patterns. Typically one message is
intended to be meta to the other and thus governs the construction of meaning. Over time and repetition of
these forms, a matrix of contradictions accrues from which the viewer cannot easily escape. Some
juxtapositions are straightforward, as when Rostow says “Ho Chi Minh in ’56, I don’t think could have
gotten elected dog catcher in Vietnam,” followed by Daniel Ellsberg; “Ho Chi Minh dead could beat any
candidate we’ve ever put up in Vietnam.” At several dramatic times Davis uses silence to punctuate a
scene, accentuating the image while validating silence as a message in its own right.
One sequence that embraces all of these forms is an adrenaline pumping series of about twenty-five shots
that starts with a huge roaring and rising B-52 shimmering with heat and ends in the shattered village of
Hung Dinh. The sequence is an essay in itself; a microcosmic film within the film. From the B-52 more
fighter planes follow. Two American fliers provide voiceover. Randy Floyd: making a bombing run “can
be described as a singer doing an aria. . .it was very much a technical expertise thing. . .” Quick cutting
between Floyd, war planes, and George Coker: “You’re up there doing something that mankind has only
dreamed of. . .It’s definitely the ultimate in aviation.” Cut to the village. The incongruity builds. Floyd
talking about “the thrill you get when you see something explode” is voiced over a group of laughing
Vietnamese children. Coker: “to say it’s thrilling – yes – it’s deeply satisfying.” Cut to many bombs
exploding, then pan from planes in the air to the villager on the ground who said “The planes again. . .”
This is a sequence is so abundant with ironic juxtapositions – picture next to picture, sound next to sound,
sound over picture from same or previous shot, etc -- that it could be scored as surely as a musical
composition. By this point, Davis is unrelenting, A “death” sequence with a dead soldier’s parents follows;
next what can be called a bloodlust sequence starring George Patton III, some of the film’s several football
analogies, then the brothel scene, some examples of racism, and we are at the 1968 Tet offensive. The tone
shifts then, just as American public opinion shifted, and Robert Kennedy , Daniel Ellsberg and others make
anti-war statements. LBJ announces he won’t run. We see for the first time that William Marshall is an
amputee and Bobby Muller is in a wheelchair.
Too much is not enough. The upbeat World War II song “Over There” plays over scenes of a burning
village and tortured prisoners. Bob Hope makes jokes at a White House dinner for American POWs,
juxtaposed with shots of more bombs, a hospital in rubble, dead children. In the end, Davis’ most powerful
and controversial juxtaposition is between the long wrenching funeral scene followed by Westmoreland’s
infamous statement. Davis continues to defend the sequence, but it is overtly manipulative. It may be that
Westmoreland’s quote “detonated” the scenes around it no matter where it was placed, but it is hard to
imagine a moment in the film when it could have been more explosive.
Hearts and Minds Redux
In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 science fiction dystopia Fahrenheit 451, books are banned and interactive flat
screen “parlor walls” anesthetize the population. A ragtag collection of hobo intellectuals take to the woods
to become talking books, each preserving a treasured text. In Bradbury’s dark vision, people stopped
reading because the combined forces of censorship and political correctness reduced content to “vanilla
tapioca,” while at the same time a cacophony of electronic media deluged the senses. Hearts and Minds is
such a text to its core of dedicated aficionados, notably Peter Davis, and whether it can cut through the din
to reach a wider audience today remains to be seen.
Some things have changed little since 1975, when Harrington pointed out that the problem with getting
Hearts and Minds released and distributed was that “in the communications industry and particular in the
case of a film dealing with a controversial political issue, financial and political concerns impinge on each
other.” The concentration of media ownership and emphasis on corporate profit has increased dramatically
since the 1970s, making mainstream funding and distribution of political media ever more elusive, as the
case of The Quiet American exemplifies. Yet, compared to the explicitness of Hearts and Minds, The Quiet
American is a fairy tale. Apart from one very bloody scene after a bomb detonates in a busy street, The
Quiet American makes its anti-colonialist point in a subdued and measured way. Post 9/11 sensitivities
have created both a level of censorship and self-censorship that ensures that any film taking a critical view
of U.S. policies and practices, foreign or domestic, will have more difficulty than ever seeing the
mainstream light of day. Today when even combat still photography displayed by the American press is a
shadow of what it was during the Vietnam War, the prospect of another Hearts and Minds is dim. It may be
little comfort that the original has stood the test of time as an anti-war elegy.
Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, recipient of the 2003 Academy Award for documentary feature,
inverts the anti-violence message of Hearts and Minds for today’s audience. Moore includes an ambush
interview of Charlton Heston that is reminiscent in more ways than one of Westmoreland. Heston’s
variation on the “Orientals don’t value life” theme is to attribute gun violence to the “problem” of
America’s “mixed ethnicity.” Moore’s topic of gun violence is similar yet safer ground than the
institutional violence of war and his guerrilla documentary approach is more Tom Green than Frederick
Wiseman. Moore’s outspoken acceptance speech at the 2003 Academy Awards provoked applause and
outrage not unlike Schneider’s 1975 speech., but as an anti-violence text Bowling for Columbine is a
distant echo of Hearts and Minds, a home front allegory that mutes the message through humor and
Moore’s shambling style. The fact that Bowling for Columbine was so successful in theatrical distribution
suggests that today’s viewers respond to politics heavily filtered through entertainment values.
Hearts and Minds was released at the end of “America’s longest war,” not at the beginning or even
midway. The U.S. Marines landed at Da Nang on March 8, 1965; Hearts and Minds got its Academy
Award on April 8, 1975, almost exactly ten years later, and barely two weeks before the fall (or
“liberation”) of Saigon by North Vietnamese and NLF forces on April 25. There was nothing the film could
do to change the course of a war that was virtually over, but if it could not have an impact on the conduct of
the Vietnam War, could it influence the course of other military interventions?
Davis (2002) maintains while acknowledging that Hearts and Minds is not “apolitical,” he hoped to allow
“space for the viewer to reach their own conclusions.” Just as in the initial reviews, the film is more of a
Rorschach test than an SAT. The argument is so tightly structured that there is little room for viewer
indifference. Reaction is either “That was incredible.” or “Well, that was Vietnam. This is now.” or “That
filmmaker ought to be arrested for treason under the Patriot Act.” Hearts and Mind is unlikely to convert
those disinclined to listen, but to the curious viewer it has much to offer as a political text and as a movie.
Hearts and Minds teaches that uncensored war imagery, a human look at the “enemy,” and a reminder of
presidential deceit are necessary if not sufficient elements in creating a persuasive case against war.
If the “Vietnam Syndrome” is a posture of reluctance to war, Hearts and Minds is its primer. To see the
face of the other as in Hung Dinh village, to be confronted with images of violence avoided by mainstream
media, to hear veteran after veteran bear witness to the awful consequences of war even for the living, to
follow a parade of U.S. presidents dissembling or delusional, to get up close and personal with the hubris
and betrayal of war’s architects. These are the places Hearts and Minds takes the viewer, for a moment
making the gauzy hypermediated view of the world transparent. Like the young reviewer who compared
seeing the film to overhearing a conversation with his parents, any viewer glimpses things forbidden,
exotic, mysterious, and raw. Part of the attraction of war is the adrenaline factor, the thrill of being outside
of normal experience whatever the danger. Hearts and Minds mediates this exceptional experience, taking
the viewer as close to being there as most ever want to go. The driving mixed messages in Hearts and
Minds provoke the creation and projection of an imagined narration onto the images of the film, making the
viewer a full partner in the making of meaning. Any combination of two images may bring about a third
imaginary impression which can build exponentially. When that relationship is built from tension between
contradictories, between thesis and antithesis, the filmmaker conjugates rhetoric and art.
This forbidden content is arranged by Peter Davis and his collaborators in such an artful, intricate, and
deliberate way that sometimes the editing trumps the content. Murch again: “At the moment of the cut you
are juxtaposing one image with another, and that’s the equivalent of rhyme. It’s how rhyme and alliteration
work in poetry, or how we juxtapose two words or two images, and what that juxtaposition means. Either
by emphasizing the theme or countering it, modulating it, like an invisible Greek chorus” (Ondaadje, 2002,
p. 268). Davis creates his Greek chorus in the form of the imaginary narrator of Hearts and Minds. The
narrator’s inaudible voice arises from the geometry of multiple varied ironic juxtapositions of picture and
sound framed by bits of interviews in different tones and shadings. William Blake said “Wise men draw
outlines because they see them.” Peter Davis constructs outlines that cannot be seen and narrators who
cannot be heard, all the better to see and hear more clearly the tale he has to tell. The anti-war message of
Hearts and Minds remains intact three decades later, biding its time in the queue for distribution by way of
the ever more bewitching parlor walls.
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References
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