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.