Vietnam in Turmoil

Vietnam in Turmoil, shown Wednesday at the Harvard Square Theatre, represents a new breed of films: the travelogue-war movie. Here is the familiar inane narration describing stray bits of native culture for Western eyes. Here is the widespread dullness of staged photography: the religious dance performed in an empty temple, or the peasant family seemingly ordered to cook a meal for the camera's benefit. Even when the camera turns to something indisputably real--such as the wreckage of the American Embassy or the ashes of a farmer's hut--it always seems to be missing not only the crucial event, but also the crucial parts of the aftermath.

The American Friends Service Committee, which co-sponsored the film with the Harvard Square Theatre, advertised it as "the first feature-length film to show the tragic situation in Vietnam." Because it was made by a Japanese documentary film company, the Friends hoped it would be a non-partisan but critical look at the war. But when the AFSC representatives first saw the film, at the public premiere on Wednesday at 2 p.m., it turned out to have, among other things, a narration in English which might have been written by Hollywood under contract to the U.S. State Department.

The source of the spoken commentary is apparently a mystery to the AFSC. The narrator is at times ridiculous ("All the Vietcong weapons were discovered to be foreign-made") and at times plain wrong ("The Geneva Convention divided Vietnam into two countries--North and South.") Sometimes the sound-track has no connection with the pictures: we hear the sounds of a furious battle, while watching a column of grinning soldiers march casually across a bridge. Worst of all, the film makes no attempt to give the audience the historical or immediate background of what he sees. The war is treated as a natural or ethnic phenomenon, like plagues and Buddhist parades. "Atrocity begets atrocity," drones the narrator, "and every day the war increases in size."

The photography manages to be even more misleading than the sound track. Unless this film was heavily re-cut in this country, the Japanese must be blamed for doing far worse than most American companies would dare. The camera ambles along the Mekong River, through rice paddies, Saigon boulevards, and typhus hospitals, until finally, we see a line of soldiers marching through a field. There are long digressions on Saigon sanitation primitive Mco tribesmen ("they will probably never enjoy the benefits of advanced civilization"), and a Japanese-built dam. We are told that there are thousands of refugees streaming into Saigon, but we neveer see the details of a city slum. Although the film was made in 1965, when there were about 150,000 American soldiers in the country, we see a total of two dozen Americans, usually "advisers" on patrol. We are told that the war is everywhere, yet we only sees shots fired in combat twice in the whole film, both aimed at distant targets.

When the war is shown, it takes place in deserted surroundings, as if everyone cleared out when this camera crew came around. The strategic hamlet is empty except for a lone cow; the soldiers marching through a plantation seem to be going nowhere; the American presence in Vietnam comprises a dozen Marines and a machine-gun. (The Japanese are probably not entirely at fault for the inadequate coverage, because of American and South Vietnamese security measures.) Even the atrocity scenes, some of which seem staged, do not add up to a statement about the horror of war. The editing is either crudely ironic or very artless: after a long sequence of the torturing of a Vietcong prisoner, we cut to a group of white-clad schoolgirls singing songs.

The men who made Vietnam in Turmoil undoubtedly intended it to be "humanitarian," and although the narration favors the American and Saigon governments, the photography does not consciously try to justify the war. But because the film does not treat the war as one made by men, for real and imagined reasons, with real and terrifying effects, it misses the most important and neglected events which are happening in Vietnam. The film allows the audience to react to the torture and the blood with abstract shock, as it might to a primitive ritual, and thereby encourages the illusion that we are not really in Vietnam, and that the suffering is very far away.