Revisiting Vietnam on film
By MATT ASHARE | May 31, 2006
COMING HOME: Unfinished Symphony: Democracy & Dissent documents a May 1971 Vietnam veteran protest march from Concord to Lexington.
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Every chapter in Stanley Karnow’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam: A History begins not with an epigraph, but with a series of photographs. It’s an odd conceit, but one that’s uniquely fitting for the first American conflict so thoroughly documented on film, from the images that sustained magazines like Life to the reels of footage shot by news cameramen. Not coincidentally, Karnow wrote his book in conjunction with a TV series underwritten by WGBH. It was the power of imagery that eventually convinced Americans that our Vietnam venture, no matter how well intentioned, was a tragic failure. In the half century since our troops arrived in country, images of Vietnam, real and fictional, have only proliferated, as Americans have wrestled with the difficult issues surrounding the war.Friendlier relations with Vietnam, along with an increasing willingness to talk on the part of those who were there, making policy in Washington or making war down in the trenches, has only created new opportunities to explore a wound that never seems to heal. The best known documentaries on the subject have attained something close to blockbuster status by not just investigating aspects of the conflict, but by uncovering the socio-political structures that led us so far astray and left the better part of a generation wounded physically and psychically. (Remember how jubilant Reaganites were when a little military operation in Grenada came off without a hitch? Or when Stormin’ Norman came, saw, conquered, and got the hell out in the first Gulf war? Both marked a break with the defeatist thinking that followed Vietnam.)
At the same time, smaller films by directors with more modest budgets have continued to surface. Most eschew the big questions in order to explore corners of the conflict in Southeast Asia and on the homefront, and to make inroads into the North, where footage and stories are still being uncovered. It doesn’t end there: once home, thousands of dramas played out across the country as Vietnam vets struggled to fit into a society that hadn’t come to terms with the war.
The ostensible context for bringing together the more than 40 Vietnam films in the Harvard Film Archive’s nearly month-long series “At Home and Abroad: The Vietnam War on Film” is the May 30 reissue on DVD of the Winterfilm Collective’s painful yet cathartic 1972 exploration of the My Lai massacre, WINTER SOLDIER (1972; June 2 and 6, 7 pm). That film is a discussion of the dehumanizing mindset that had led to the massacre by 12 anonymous soldiers whose identities are revealed in the new short film it’s screening with, WINTER SOLDIER: THE CONVERSATION (2005). But it’s hard to ignore that giant elephant in the corner of the room — namely, the increasingly discouraging situation in Iraq, which, on so many levels, seems to resemble what this country went through in Southeast Asia. Ten years from now will there be an Abu Ghraib equivalent of Winter Soldier? Or a film that follows up the current investigation into the alleged Marine massacre of Iraqi civilians?
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