Documenting Vietnam

February 28–April 29, 2018

Powerful and innovative documentaries reveal the impact of the Vietnam War on the way Americans perceived themselves.

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Winter Soldier
Hearts and Minds

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Films
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Events

Past Events

Saturday, March 3, 4 PM
Panel Discussion: Kronos Quartet, My Lai

Kronos Quartet’s collaboration with composer Jonathan Berger and novelist Harriet Scott Chessman, My Lai revisits the horrors of the massacre and its aftermath. The work’s creators and performers visit BAMPFA for this conversation.

BAMPFA

Past Films

In the Year of the Pig
Emile de Antonio
United States, 1969
Restored 35mm Print
Wednesday, February 28 7 PM
This Academy Award–nominated doc makes the case against US intervention in Vietnam using an incendiary montage style. “An explosive analysis of the American war machine” (Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research).
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Interviews with My Lai Veterans
Joseph Strick
United States, 1970
Restored 35mm Print
Friday, March 2 7 PM
Introduction by Harriet Scott Chessman
Strick’s documentary spotlights five veterans who took part in the US military’s infamous My Lai massacre, the incident that opened the public’s eyes to the atrocities of the Vietnam War. With Frederick Wiseman’s Basic Training and Appalshop’s Whitesburg Epic.
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Winter Soldier
Winterfilm Collective
United States, 1972
Saturday, March 3 5:30 PM
Introduction by David Harrington; Peter Gessner in Person
This record of testimony about American war crimes “may be the most important account we have of America’s tragic encounter with Vietnam. . . . Remains essential viewing” (Chicago Reader). With Peter Gessner’s short Time of the Locust.
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Hearts and Minds
Peter Davis
United States, 1974
Sunday, March 11 2 PM
This Academy Award–winning documentary “holds a mirror up to our national conscience” (Judith Crist), revealing the effects of the Vietnam War on both North and South Vietnamese as well as Americans at home. With Carolee Schneemann’s short Viet-Flakes.
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No Vietnamese Ever Called Me N****r
David Loeb Weiss
United States, 1968
4K Digital Restoration
Thursday, March 15 7 PM
Interviews with three black Vietnam veterans capture their experiences of institutional and everyday racism. With Keith Garrett’s look at African Americans in the military, The Black GI.
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Little Dieter Needs to Fly
Werner Herzog
Germany, United Kingdom, France, 1997
Imported 35mm Print
Thursday, March 29 7 PM
Herzog accompanies a Vietnam War POW back to the jungles of Laos to relive his imprisonment and torture in this award-winning documentary. With Jack Chambers’s short Hybrid.
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The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
Errol Morris
United States, 2003
Sunday, April 29 8:45 PM
Errol Morris in Person
Built around interviews with former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, Morris’s Academy Award–winning film is a haunted reflection on US military power from World War II through the war in Vietnam.
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Documenting Vietnam

Self-Portraits of America at War

February 28–April 29, 2018

At the time the most documented conflict in history, the Vietnam War generated a torrent of brutal images, stories, and statistics disseminated daily in mass media, bringing Americans face to face with the carnage committed in the name of freedom and prosperity. Meanwhile, journalists, filmmakers, and artists sought ways to chronicle, represent, and reflect on the war, searching for truth amid a conflict replete with fictions and lies. Fifty years after the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers at My Lai—an atrocity whose extent was exposed only gradually, as veterans returned with stories of war crimes—we present this series of innovative documentaries that reveal the impact of the conflict on the way Americans perceived themselves. Eschewing the drama, pathos, and pyrotechnics of conventional war movies, these films employ a straightforward, economical approach that nonetheless has a powerful and enduring impact. Many of the works, such as In the Year of the Pig, Hearts and Minds, Time of the Locust, and Viet-Flakes, recontextualize news footage and photographs to lend the documents deeper poetic and political resonance. Other films made as the war raged on, including No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger, The Black GI, and Winter Soldier, share a chorus of voices searching for justification of the human cost of national ambitions, while two films made decades later—Little Dieter Needs to Fly and The Fog of War—feature subjects forever haunted by their participation.

This series is presented in association with Cal Performances, which presents Kronos Quartet’s performance of My Lai on March 4 at Zellerbach Hall.

Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

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Thanks to Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, Milestone Films; Todd Weiner and Steven Hill, UCLA Film and Television Archive; Cassie Blake, Academy Film Archive; Walter Forsberg, National Museum of African American History and Culture; Diana Kluge, Deutsche Kinamathek; Jennifer Bertani, WNET; Brian Hung, Cinema Guild; Laura Abrams, Cal Performances; Peter Gessner; Betsy Strick; Sarah Donahue and Janet Cowperthwaite, Kronos Quartet; and Tom Luddy and Cherilyn Parsons, Bay Area Book Festival.