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Hanoi Jane Touts the Rebirth of Vietnam Era Antiwar Movie "Hearts and Minds"
Plug your nose, RBers, Jane waxes down memory holeThree searing films about US atrocities in Vietnam are suddenly back in demand. Jane Fonda relives the role she played in the making of one When Michael Moore used his Oscar acceptance speech to attack George Bush just days before the outbreak of war in Iraq, it was not the first time the Academy Awards had witnessed a controversial anti-war protest from one of its winners. Close to three decades prior, producer Bert Schneider's outspoken response to receiving an Oscar for the searing Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds (1974) so infuriated co-hosts Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra that they immediately cobbled together a disclaimer denying any responsibility for the evening's "political references". The Bush administration's failure to pull themselves out of their current military quagmire has apparently sparked renewed interest in the films that documented the conflict in Vietnam. Hearts and Minds - arguably one of the greatest documentaries ever made, composed largely of interviews with US soldiers and Vietnamese citizens - has been re-released in the UK after revisiting screens in the States. Likewise, Winter Soldier (1972) has hit US cinemas again after more than 30 years. Based on the three-day gathering of war veterans in 1971 that I helped fund, it was a film intended to document American war crimes in the conflict. A third film, Sir! No Sir!, details how GIs were converted to leading members of the peace movement and has recently won plaudits at several film festivals. Watching Hearts and Minds again after so many years, the parallels between the two conflicts seem quite remarkable. The dubious initial premise for war, the polarised society back home of hawks versus doves, and of course Lyndon B Johnson's promise that "the ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there" - from which the film takes its name - all still stick in the throat. It may not have been the first feature film to attack American policy in the conflict (Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig arrived in 1968), but it shook the country like no other. While the film received mixed reviews from critics of the time (ranging from "a cinematic lie" to "brave and brilliant"), Hearts and Minds succeeded in cementing in the US psyche the horrific image of a naked girl running from a US napalm attack, as well as the point-blank execution of a prisoner by a South Vietnamese official. Director Peter Davis's film gave a voice to Vietnamese citizens who up until that point had been painted by the national media only in primary colours. He turned the two-dimensional stereotypes into complex human beings - interviewing a coffin-maker about his child-size boxes, an entrepreneur hoping to make a fortune from building a prosthetic limb factory, and showing a grieving family at a funeral - swiftly juxtaposed with a clip of General Westmoreland's infamous comment that "the oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the westerner". As well as traumatised veterans, he finds draft-card burners, hundreds on peace marches and a returned navy veteran who, when asked by a child what Vietnam looks like, replies: "If it wasn't for the people, it [would be] very pretty." However, it was the focus on the Vietnamese families and the suffering of ordinary individuals that had the biggest effect on Americans in 1974. This was the year after troops had been officially withdrawn from the country, but still a year before the south fell to the National Liberation Front. Inflation, unemployment and the Watergate scandal caused Americans to retreat inward in an attempt to forget about the conflict. Paul Zimmerman in Newsweek described the film at the time as "a thoroughly committed, brilliantly executed and profoundly moving document . . . Unlike our leaders who encourage us to put Vietnam behind us, Davis wants us to confront our feelings about it first and to understand the experience before we bury it. We turn away from this portrait of ourselves at our peril." Posted by: Captain America 2005-11-18 |
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