http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/arts/20100625TDY12T03.htm
Atsuko Matsumoto
(Jun. 25, 2010)
Hearts and Minds
3.5 stars out of five
Dir: Peter Davis
Featuring: William Westmoreland, J.W. Fullbright
Winter Soldier
3 stars out of five
Dir: Winterfilm Collective
Featuring: Rusty Saches, Scott Camil, John Kerry
If by seeing Hearts and Minds or Winter Soldier you are hoping to be
entertained, then you should save your money. These two Vietnam war
documentaries can be extremely disturbing.
The two excellent award-winning films are getting their first showing
in Japan despite having debuted more than 35 years ago in the United States.
Hearts looks for reasons why the United States got involved in the
war, meticulously interweaving a variety of footage, including
interviews and images taken on the battlefield. Interviewees range
from locals to Gen. William Westmoreland.
Winter, meanwhile, focuses on the Winter Soldier Investigation,
testimony for which members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War
told of the inhuman acts they committed or witnessed while in that
faraway land.
Facts revealed in the two films--even ones that have since become
familiar--are ugly and only get uglier as the films progress. In
Winter, veterans transform into long-haired hippies telling horror
stories about how they burned villages and saw other soldiers shoot
kids dead or gang-rape young girls and mutilate innocent civilians.
One of the speakers holds up a picture of himself, smiling as he
poses with a dead Vietnamese man, an image that has surely been
echoed in the more recent Iraq war.
Their rather calm testimonies--they speak with a sense of detachment
and only a few break down in tears--may leave some viewers baffled.
It may leave some attributing the cold reaction to post-traumatic
stress disorder; some still may simply wonder, "If you are so sorry,
why did you do it in the first place?"
The aftertaste left by these documentaries was every bit as
disturbing as that of The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now
(1979), which probably had their fictional drama heightened for effect.
The feeling they left with this reviewer was the same sense of
weariness one gets after becoming deeply angered. After all, among
the many fragmented issues surrounding the war in the Southeast Asian
nation, the main motivation for the soldiers on the ground to
continue to fight developed into little more than racism against the
Vietnamese--one of many messages shared by both films.
In Winter, the veterans claimed repeatedly that they were trained and
brainwashed to think of the Vietnamese as slanted-eyed "gooks."
Back in the '90s, a number of European media outlets had a hard time
demonizing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic; they found it much
easier to do so with the likes of Saddam Hussein. These films posit
that if the Vietnamese were of European ancestry, the training
"method" would not have worked at all.
"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a
Westerner," a confident Westmoreland said in Hearts. "Life is
plentiful; life is cheap in the Orient."
Hearts and Minds and Winter Soldier are documentaries well worth
watching, as is Heart of Darkness: A Flimmaker's Apocalypse (1991).
Some may ask, what's the point of seeing these films in 2010 when the
conflict ended in 1975? They are not merely about Vietnam, but
instead a glimpse at the same old us-versus-them mind-set that has
ultimately become part of war time and time again.
The movies are now playing.
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