Review Reviewed Work(S): Hearts and Minds by Bert Schneider and Peter Davis Review By: Peter Biskind Source: Cinéaste, Vol
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Review Reviewed Work(s): hearts and minds by Bert Schneider and Peter Davis Review by: Peter Biskind Source: Cinéaste, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1975), pp. 31-32 Published by: Cineaste Publishers, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41685779 Accessed: 11-09-2019 15:10 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Cineaste Publishers, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinéaste This content downloaded from 138.37.228.89 on Wed, 11 Sep 2019 15:10:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the virtue of HEARTS AND MINDS that in a presumably descended from Ralph Waldo crazy-quilt of interviews, stock footage, vérité, Emerson, embody the very essence of New and film clips, it manages to breathe new life England rectitude, yet utter some of the film's Brn reviews into the worn out images of the war that passed sfllliest remarks. ("The strength of our system is from film to film until they became no longer that you can rely on President Nixon for shocking but comforting, like old friends orleadership.") Jhe mixture of foolishness, familiar faces. HEARTS AND MINDS contains intelligence, and pain in this sequence makes it the original footage of many of these scenes difficult to watch. which we only knew as tenth generation American rulers, monstrous as they appear shadows of themselves; they are invested here in the film, become less authors of a genocidal with a clarity and power that seemed to have culture than its agent, no better nor worse than been lost forever. One brief sequence shows an the people they rule. Nixon, speaking to a ARVN officer casually shooting a PRG suspect group of prosperous party regulars, congratu- in the head. Blood spurts out of the wound like lates the Christmas bombers, calling for a a geyser, and he falls over dead. Another shows "round of applause for the brave men who took Vietnamese children charred by napalm, burnt those B-52's in and did such a wonderful job." skin hanging from their bodies like rags. The Bereaved Vietnamese, mourning their dead, are film contains many such hallucinatory images followed by Westmoreland, tastefully attired in which bring it up short, crystallizing in some a seersucker sports jacket, opining that "the unspeakable moment of casual violence the Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life entire history of the war, shattering the as does the Westerner"; Eisenhower gives a composure of the medium in an instant of presidential welcome to dictator Diem and almost visceral pain. HEARTS AND MINDS explains, to the delight of future students of M ani rinds truly brings the war home. imperialism, that "if Indo-China goes ... the In the process, it reveals the furnishings of Produced by Bert Schneider and Peter Davis; tin and tungsten that we so value there, would this home to be shabby and mean, for its target directed by Peter Davis; research by Brennon cease coming"; Walt Rostow, unrepentent and is not only American policy in Vietnam, but Jones; cinematography by Richard Pearce; unmoved to this day, in an extraordinarily the American experience itself. It looks for the revealing moment of irritation with the edited by Lynzee Klingman and Susan Martin. sources of the war in the arrogant, violent, Color, 198 minutes. A Warner Bros, release. interviewer, discloses a depth of arrogance and hypocritical side of American culture. A stupidity not to be believed: "Are you really football coach in Niles, Ohio, revs up his team asking me that goddamn silly question?" Daniel HEARTS AND MINDS has come and gone. by invoking God and country; Hollywood films Ellsberg sums it all up when he says that Peter Davis, its director, and Bert Schneider, its like MY SON JOHN and OBJECTIVE BURMA "Truman lied . Eisenhower lied . Kennedy producer, have moved on to other films. provide strong doses of anti-communism lied and . Johnson lied . Nixon lied." Columbia Pictures, which financed the pro- racism ("You hideous yellow monsters"); an Answering their American counterparts, as duction and then dropped it like a hot potato, astonishing clip from a military musical it were, are the voices of the Vietnamese, raised has weathered the brief storm of bad publicity apparently called THIS IS THE ARMY reveals in sorrow and in anger. Vu Duc Vinh says: "My and returned to churning out Hollywood an American TRIUMPH OF THE WILL as eight year old daughter was killed and my three potboilers. Walt Rostow, who tried and failed choreographed by Busby Berkeley; a year former old son. Nixon murderer of civilians. What to prevent its distribution, has not been forced POW, Lt George Coker tells a group of have I done to Nixon so that he comes here and to join Martin Bormann in Argentina, despite parochial school kids that Vietnam would be abombs my country. I'll give you my daughter's the sorry figure he cuts in the film. He still lives pretty country if it weren't for the people. beautiful shirt. Throw the shirt in Nixon's face. comfortably in Austin, Texas, doubtless waiting 4 The people over there," he says, "are very Tell him she was only a little school girl." A to offer his services to some future admini- backward and very primitive, and they just woman, asked what her sister died of, replies stration anxious to prosecute a new war in Asia.make a mess out of everything"; George S. simply: "Bombs." Above all, they express a The shouting is over. What was it all about? Patton III pays tribute to his men after a determination to continue the struggle. A HEARTS AND MINDS is the Vietnam film religious service for dead G.I.'s: "My feelings Vietnamese carpenter who makes upwards of to end Vietnam films, a million dollar Vietnam for America just soared. They looked reverent 900 undersized coffins a week for Vietnamese spectacular. By deploying the vast resources and of determined at the same time- they 're a children poisoned by defoliants says: "No a major Hollywood production company, bloody good bunch of killers." Nor are matter how many decades America will fight, it wildly beyond anything imaginable by the sentiments like this confined to loonies like will never conquer Vietnam." anti-war film-makers who labored doggedly on Coker and Patton who can be written off as With its attention to the quality of their grainy black and white documentaries representing the worst of America. They American are culture, HEARTS AND MINDS during the 60's, it reveals the aspiration to have characteristic of the best, as well. Davis shows that the Vietnamese war was indeed a the last word, to get, finally, to the root of the interviews David and Mary Emerson of people's war, a war of the American people problem. Concord, Mass., whose Harvard-educated son against the Vietnamese people, a war which In this ambition, it partially succeeds. It is was killed in action. This handsome couple, until they became tired and frustrated, was 31 This content downloaded from 138.37.228.89 on Wed, 11 Sep 2019 15:10:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms fully, if not enthusiastically, embraced by the ments of the peace movement is not only SORROW AND THE PITY, a compassionate great majority of Americans. This is an ungenerous and false to the facts, but plays into look at the commonplaces of everyday life that important lesson, if it shows us how deeply the hands of pop-historians and their more inspired the people of a large industrial nation embedded in our culture are the roots of serious academic allies who are energetically to follow their leaders in a war against a remote racism, sexism, and anti-communism, butrewriting it is the history of the 60's to prove that peasant society far from its shores. In this unproductive if it merely leads to the nothing really happened. Many radicals are attempt, it fails* and perhaps rightly so, for conclusion that Americans are just plain bad. strangely ready to write off their own political compassion without commitment leads to the This is a major flaw in the film. Lacking past, and refuse to recognize in the sneers and confused, paralyzed humanism of Ophuls' sufficient analysis of the imperialist policies jeers on of media gurus the self-serving message SENSE OF LOSS. Instead, Davis has given us which the war was based, HEARTS AND that people are powerless to change their lives, an American NIGHT AND FOG, angrier and MINDS fails to provide us with tools to dealthat militancy and determination are useless. less elegiac, but conveying, like Resnais' film on with the facts it so effectively drives home. In the course of threading its way through the German camps, an unrelenting nightmare of Although it attempts to suggest that we are the all labyrinth of the war, HEARTS AND civilized barbarism. victims of American culture, and tries to showMINDS finds some strange friends. Prominent us ourselves in the bizarre spectacle of aging among them is Clark Clifford, America's Albert Peter Biskind celebrants of American Independence frisking Speer. It is true that the demands of credibility about on the 4th of July in Ill-fitting and the importance of showing that disaffec- Revolutionary War uniforms, this Arbus-like tion from Washington's war policies extended vision of freaks and grotesques finally tran- to the higher reaches of the administration scends the particulars of the American ex- require the use of some figure like Clifford, but perience and implies that there is no remedy for the spectacle of this man, wrapped in a cloak of American savagery because there is no cause.