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Hearts & Minds

The more one studies film the more fascinating documentaries become.  There are two valid types.  One is a purely informational program that is competently organized and executed, but the other is an artistic organization of staged and unstaged reality that seeks to deliver emotional truths as well as factual truths. 

With all that has been going on recently, it seems like a good time to visit a
superb example of this latter type of documentary, the 1974 Oscar-winning film about the war in Vietnam, Hearts & Minds.  If you want a thorough examination of the causes and events of the war, there is an excellent six-part documentary called Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, and if you want an emotional, artistic evocation of what the war was like, there are fiction films ranging from the fantastic, such as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, to the realistic, such as Platoon and Hamburger Hill.  What Hearts & Minds does in its 112-minute running time is to use archival footage and fresh interviews to form a blended multiple viewpoint of what the war was like and what its impact was on humanity.  During the first half, the movie seems aimless, jumping around in time and place to gather what appears to be unrelated footage about the war.  There’s a bit on the former South Vietnamese politicians, a bit about an American town honoring a returning POW, interviews with a couple American officials, Daniel Ellsburg, a look at some American military personnel visiting Saigon hot spots, and so on.  But gradually and inexorably, the film’s emotional depth and coherency draw into focus.  The pieces become more severe in tone and less distanced in theme as they seem to swirl closer and closer around a kind of profound vortex where the consecration of life and the dedication of patriotism can and cannot coexist.  Regardless of your previous experience or knowledge, you enter Hearts & Minds as a novice and are pulled through its emotional journey so that by the end you do have an understanding of the stakes in the conflict and the physical and spiritual scars it left on those involved, encouraging you to visit other sources of documentation and interpretation to explore further its unstated lessons. 

Hearts & Minds has been released by The Criterion Collection (HEA060, $40) in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback.  In comparison to the cropped LD, there is more picture information on all four sides of the image.  The color transfer looks like it is pretty much as good as it is going to get.  Hues are fresh and grain is modest.  The monophonic sound is free of distortion and there are optional English subtitles.  A large booklet-style jacket insert accompanies the platter, featuring several essays that provide a detailed analysis of the film and its historical context.

Ironically, the director, Peter Davis, provides a commentary track, explaining early on that he deliberately avoided giving the film a narration so that a viewer would not be consciously guided to form opinions about the material—but of course, his commentary does just that.  Although he recorded the talk in 2001 and was referring to Vietnam, some of his statements carry a lasting validity:  “As far back as World War I, we were seeing ourselves as the world’s saviors, and I felt that that was a note that needed to be struck here, in Hearts & Minds.  So in a way, the film is an attempt to discover the past in a different light, the present in a new light, and not so much the future, but the ‘what if’—what if we do this again?”  He doesn’t really say enough about what has happened to the individuals he interviewed since the film was shot, but he does touch on it in a few instances.  He tells a lot more about how he chose and arranged the interviews to begin with, as well as many other details about how the film was conceived, how individual sequences were arranged and why the film is structured the way it is structured.  He also talks about his own career, about the war and about other related matters, and he answers critics who have, over the years, taken issue with some or all of the choices he made. 

In one of the film’s jaw-dropping final segments, William Westmoreland, once the general in charge of the war, speaks to the camera and states, “Well, the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner.  Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient, and as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is, uh, is not important.”  Davis explains that regardless of where he put the piece in the film, “It detonates all the footage around it.”   He explains that he shot that portion of the interview three times, and on each take, Westmoreland gave the same answer.  “I wasn’t trying to make General Westmoreland look bad.  I was trying to display American feelings that he had been honest enough to express, American feelings that were very wide and very deep.”  

- by Douglas Pratt

 

Douglas Pratt's DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
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