Inside North Vietnam

The United States bombing of North Vietnam seems to have become a mere matter of missions flown, tons of explosives dropped, raids carried out, supply lines interdicted, all couched in the most mind-easing military and journalistic jargon. Felix Greene's new film, Inside North Vietnam, is a welcome reminder that there are human beings behind the statistics of the war in the North.

Sitting in a hot hotel room in Cuba last summer, Greene explained his hopes for the movie: "I think it should shake the public--to see the kind of people we're dropping this stuff on."

For the most part, that is what the movie is about: the North Vietnamese people, and how they have mobilized, gearing their lives to fighting the American bombing raids. Greene makes no pretense of being "objective" about his reporting. He opposes the war; he opposes the bombing policy. The audience sees the results of American bombing in North Vietnam. You can call it "propaganda," but you cannot dismiss the clear evidence of wholesale destruction which the film portrays.

The movie makes two major points. First, that this otherwise gentle people is grimly determined to resist and fight on and on until they have won "victory," meaning the reunification of Vietnam under Communist rule. Second, that the North Vietnamese war economy is organized in such a way that American bombing will not be able to crush it. "The Vietnamese have never known modern technology," comments Greene, "and so have never become dependent on it."

Over and over, this theme is pressed home. What we Americans rely on our machines to do, the Vietnamese do with their hands. You don't have to take Greene's word for it. He shows you. A flood control dam, for instance. One bomb would destroy it. But then we see pleasants carrying buckets of water from a river to irrigation ditches, the way they have always done it. How many bombs will it take to destroy this method, the commentator asks. A railroad bridge is destroyed, and we see women fire-brigade-line-style lifting rocks to prop it up before nightfall, when the trains will roll again.

And if the bridge is not repaired on time there are the bicycles and the boats to transport military equipment. Greene insists that one bike can carry 400 pounds of material. Five bikes, one ton, and then you think about what Secretary McNamara has said: less than 100 tons of materiel flow from North to South Vietnam each month. Before the bombing began, it was about six tons a month. You wonder whether American bombing can stop all of the 500,000 bycicles in North Vietnam.

This is the kind of question Greene wants the audience to consider. If what he has produced here is "propaganda," then it is shrewd and subtle propaganda, for he does not club the audience over the head with 85 minutes of American "war crimes against the heroic struggling Vietnamese people." Though there are the inevitable bedside clips of women and children maimed by the bombing, the film is not calculated to elicit the audience's sympathy for the North Vietnamese under siege and attack so much as it means to show that American efforts to subdue this nation are futile.

One sobering digression of the film should especially interest American audiences. Greene interviewed a U.S. fighter-bomber pilot, a major, who had been shot down 11 days previously. The major, with his right leg and left arm severely fractured, lay in a hospital bed, and talked about the war. Nervous, with his face showing the strain, he said he hoped the war could be "terminated"--he spoke almost throughout in military jargon. He said he agreed with the "Kennedy, Fulbright, Mansfield position," that we "need to take another look in regards to our Vietnamese policy." What about draft-card burners? He was against them. What was needed was "to put the pressure on the politicians through the vote."

Though the interview with the American flyer was interesting, there are other digressions which drag. Greene's interviews with North Vietnamese officials add little. Greene's would have done better to stick to his theme of the effects of the war on daily life, rather than wasting time shooting interviews with Hanoi official-dom. Other baldly ideological sequences pall, such as scenes of marching North Vietnamese soldiers (there is "no conscription" in North Vietnam, maintains Greene) striding forward to the tunes of the Liberation Hymn of South Vietnam.

Though Greene is a self-admitted "amateur" at film-making, he has produced a technically superb film in view of the adverse working conditions. He had no crew and did the lighting and sound himself, while operating the camera (from electricity off his jeep battery). The color of his film is good, though some of it was not processed for three and a half months. Kodak recommends processing movie film within 24 hours after exposure.

This film represents a unique opportunity for Americans to see what goes on in North Vietnam. Greene is a British subject (a cousin of the novelist Graham Greene) who has lived in the United States for the past two decades. Since he made his first trip to China in 1956, he has had a rare entre into the world of Asian Communism. He and Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett seem to have cornered the market for providing the "other side" of the story to the West. It makes for interesting education.