3/8/23, 7:50 AM A Crucial Vietnam Film Returns | The New Yorker

Richard Brody

A Crucial Vietnam Film Returns

August 29, 2013

The unhealed wounds of Vietnam still show in diverse ways, as in “The Butler,”
an aesthetically minor but politically canny film that, with editing, jams President
Johnson’s aggressive pursuit of civil-rights legislation up against his aggressive
escalation of the Vietnam War—the violence of which turns out to hit home. The
horror of the war’s direct effect, the fury of the resistance that it provoked, the
self-inflicted damage to American ideals, and its over-all impact as a lever for
huge social, political, and psychological fractures are packed in the aptly diverse
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and ravaged form of the collective film, “Far from Vietnam,” from 1967, a new
restoration of which opened yesterday at Film Society of Lincoln Center for a
weeklong run.

The project was organized by Chris Marker, who didn’t shoot footage for the film
but edited it, composed the voice-over commentary, and organized the filmmakers
who shot sequences: Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, William
Klein, Joris Ivens, and Claude Lelouch (and, as Thomas Waugh reports, also
Jacques Demy and Ruy Guerra, whose plans were rejected). While the film
provokes a jangling mental dislocation, the sense of a world out of joint, the
motive for its production is political, and Marker emphasizes the grotesque
injustice of an overwhelming American force deployed against its actual victims,
the Vietnamese people. Markers also takes footage that William Klein shot on the
streets of New York and shapes it into a hectic collage of passers-by, set to a
soundtrack of bombardments and sirens. It’s a chilling riff that evokes the
widespread American incomprehension of life under attack.

Klein’s footage of demonstrations in New York in 1967 is one of the crucial

documentary distillations of the moment. He presents a pro-Vietnam War War
Veterans Parade from April 29th of that year, which New York’s mayor, John
Lindsay, attended with obvious embarrassment (commenting, “A parade is a
parade is a parade”). An anti-war demonstration at Wall Street two days later
features employees (almost all young men), some with frat-house grins, pressing
against the barricades and taunting the protestors with shouts of “Bomb Hanoi!”
On the margins of a protest from April 15th, an elderly opponent of the war,
speaking with a foreign accent, is insulted by a young, pomaded, jingoistic
proponent (“Go back where you came from!”). At that same event, one woman
reminds the crowd, “You don’t know what a bomb is, none of you know what a
bomb is,” and an incantatory singer—a bearded man holding a small child by the
hand—intones, with a prayerlike lament, the word “Napalm,” breaking it up into
syllables. Questioning reveals that few of the passers-by knew the meaning of the

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word. The military draft made the war a truly existential matter of policy. I recall
—and I wonder whether others share this recollection—that protests fell off
drastically as soon as the draft ended, in January, 1973, more than two years before
the end of the war.

The two sequences of the most manifestly personal import and aesthetic design
are those by Godard and Resnais. Neither is “signed,” but Godard’s sequence is
identifiable. He’s in it, at the eyepiece of a large and cumbersome 35-mm. camera
placed on the roof-deck of a Paris apartment, speaking a monologue that provides
the movie with its title and, in effect, its subject: being in France while opposing
the war in Vietnam. Godard discusses his failed attempt to go to North Vietnam
(his visa application was rejected) in the context of his own cinematic
uncertainties at the time. In a sort of aesthetic crisis, he had thought of making
films outside France, a crisis that he had been discussing in interviews in late
1966. The aesthetic crisis had a political basis as well as a personal one:

I’m isolated from a whole part of the population, and, in particular, from the working class. My
personal struggle, which is a struggle against the American cinema, which is against the
economic and aesthetic imperialism of the American cinema, which has undermined the whole
world’s film industry…

He lamented, “The working class doesn’t go see my movies.” His withdrawal from
the French film industry, later that year, was connected with this feeling, with the
burden of celebrity, with the frustration with inherited film forms and their
political implications, and with his increasingly doctrinaire ideological
inclinations. Yet what remains most original about the sequence is its mirrorlike
reflection of a filmmaker considering the state of his art, his political commitment,
and his life—and its place in the film is the revelation of an artist whose very
identity has been pushed to the breaking point by the war. Godard’s specific
recommendation—“to let Vietnam invade us, and to realize the place that
Vietnam has in our everyday life, everywhere”—suggests a practical step toward

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exactly the sort of constrained self-abnegation that marked much of his work of
the following few years.

Alain Resnais’s sequence is the one that, this time around, surprised me the most.
It features the actor Bernard Fresson playing a writer named Claude Ridder, who
is asked by a film producer to write a treatment on Herman Kahn’s book “On
Escalation.” Most of the sequence is a fifteen-minute monologue by the writer
delivered to the woman he lives with, in which he takes stock of the political and
social implications of the war in terms of his own life and experience. It’s a
heartfelt, passionate, deeply insightful, daringly reasoned view of world politics. It
also delves into the media politics of the reporting of the war, the atrocities taking
place in many countries around the world, the anti-totalitarian consensus, in the
wake of the Soviet invasion of Budapest, which the Vietnam War shattered. It
continues with references to the facile and dogmatic anti-Americanism that the
war stoked, as well as of his recollection, from the Second World War, that the
arrival of the American Army signified the defeat of the Germans, now meeting
the awful realization that “the Americans are the Germans of the Vietnamese.”
Resnais films the sequence with a theatrical directness. It’s like a miniature play in
monologue form, and the character comes off as a stand-in for the director. The
historical insight from the perspective of memory is utterly in keeping with
Resnais’s early and great feature films, such as “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” “Last
Year at Marienbad,” and “Muriel,” but the modestly straightforward aesthetic
betrays none of the disturbances of the time (or, for that matter, of the character).

Yet nothing ages like political rhetoric, and it’s apt to recall, this week especially,
the truly literary, visionary, and even prophetic gifts of political orators whose
words, on enduringly historic occasions, themselves make history. Some of the
rhetoric on the soundtrack of “Far from Vietnam” now rings hollow, such as a
sardonic reference to “a South Korean type of anti-communist bastion.” That
doesn’t sound so bad in the light of subsequent developments in South—and
North—Korea, whereas Resnais’s text would read, even now, like a wise and

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cautionary view of world politics. In particular, the politics of sympathy and of

intervention from a European standpoint. In its way, it’s as documentary as Klein’s
revelatory view from the New York streets, as Godard’s self-revelatory aesthetic of
revolution and critique.

More: Alain Resnais Jean-Luc Godard Movies Vietnam

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