Iconic Imagery, Timeless Tragedy.

Peter Davis’s epic Vietnam War documentary, Hearts and Minds, hit 1970’s America like a swift punch to the gut. This was a film that tried to decipher the events of a deeply polarizing and confusing period in American history. There are several things that Hearts and Minds was able to bring to the surface through its style that make it evocative of the political and historical events of the 1970’s.

This documentary was one of the first to sit down and take a good long look at the events that occurred during the years spent in Vietnam, and it took a stance that these actions were far more sinister and neo-colonization influenced than most supporters of the war would like to admit. The fact it was so direct with its message and so self assured in its footing, gave it an almost crusade like need to get its word out. The fact that Hearts and Minds was able to pick up the 1975 Oscar for best documentary feature also speaks volumes that people were receptive to the message of film even though they may not have been proud of them.

While the film does take its stance on the side of the Vietnam natives and scarred veterans, it does so within Davis’ tightly edited view. He manages to let these images and interviews speak for themselves rather than be a narrative driven work. He never actually tells you how to feel, but from his choices of imagery and use of juxtaposition, the audience is never left in the dark about his views.

One example of his ability to illustrate the way that the American belief in this war was a huge fiasco of people just following orders blindly, was by showing pretty much in succession, a drill sergeant yelling at a squadron and coach yelling at a team during a college football game. There is also a shot of a priest praying with and for the team reinforcing the idea that god was on the side of the Americans and of the war and that it was important to win. All together it placed the situation in a ridiculous, trivialized light.

The movie was also effective in showing the aftermath of the war in both people’s personal lives and the country as a whole. There were the thousands of amputees and shell-shocked veterans, who were the first to return from war, not as the heroes their fathers were, but as men questioning as to why they were there in the first place. Davis captures this through scathing interviews of vets who had seen it all and came home changed people, both physically and mentally. He also shows the ignorance and hypocrisy of the rhetoric that one hero POW recites for children at a school, purely because that’s all he knows how to do.

Davis pieced together so many iconic images of that terrible war into many almost poetic montages. There is the shot of the girl running nude down the road with napalm burns, the man executed in the street, face scrunched in anguish, and the shots of many grass huts being blown to bits from a comfortable height above. The genius of the film was its ability to present all the material to the audience in a way to make them feel something. Some audiences were bound to disagree with what Davis was trying to put out there, however no one who views this movie is left unaffected. That is what the best art does. Finally Hearts and Minds was important historically because it paved the way for other slightly subversive documentaries, such as Fahrenheit 9/11 to be able to exist/inform/spin their side of the story.