TY - JOUR
AU - Fresko,, David
AB - Abstract Far from Vietnam (Chris Marker, et al., 1967), though heralded as a major contribution to the history of radical documentary and extolled as a cri de coeur about the inability of French intellectuals to sufficiently contribute to the anti-war struggle, has been inadequately understood for the internationalism underlining its politics and the montage employed to achieve it. Its production linked France, the USA, Cuba and Vietnam; its textual shape consolidated its transnational exchanges through montage, which marshalled multiple counter-cinematic techniques to link the real and imaginary addressees of global anti-war publics across cuts generative of new creative cartographies and political subjectivities. Far from Vietnam’s form signalled the counter-cinema that it was while simultaneously calling into the being the counter-public necessary to confront US militarism. As opposed to uncritical evocations of solidarity, which elide differences between home and abroad, the essay concludes by arguing that Far from Vietnam, much as its title suggests, realizes and questions international political praxis’s stability as a category of thought and action. Timed to coincide with recent milestones commemorating the USA’s long war of aggression in Southeast Asia, in particular the fiftieth anniversary of the Johnson administration’s deployment of ground troops in Vietnam in 1965 and the war’s close ten years later, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War (2017), a 1035-minute blow-by-blow account of the military and geopolitical nightmare that animated the globe during the Long Sixties, begins under the twin signs of silence and trauma. Openings are privileged moments in films. They frame what we see and how we see it, and within the first five minutes of Burns and Novick’s documentary, audiences are introduced to Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam war veteran who presents with epigrammatic clarity the problems that the filmmakers seek to redress regarding this world-historical event. Coming home from Vietnam was close to as traumatic as the war itself. For years, nobody talked about Vietnam. We were friends with a young couple and it was only after twelve years that the two wives were talking. Found out that we both had been marines in Vietnam. Never said a word about it. Never mentioned it. And the whole country was like that. It was so divisive. And it’s like living in a family with an alcoholic father. Changing, for a moment, the cadence of his voice to a whisper, he continues, ‘Shh, we don’t talk about that’, only to conclude, ‘Our country did that with Vietnam. It’s only been very recently that, I think, you, the baby boomers are finally starting to say, “What happened? What happened?”’ What happened, indeed? The similes, metaphors, metonyms and other discursive sleights of hand that Marlantes employs pose as many questions as they do answers. One could, for instance, interpret the gendered silence Marlantes describes as participating in a more general repression experienced by veterans to compensate for the traumas they experienced in Vietnam and at home, a masculinity exposed only by whispering wives. Yet Marlantes transforms this silence into a metonym for the nation (‘the whole country was like that’), which is further likened to ‘a family with an alcoholic father’. Who actually constitutes this family and its alcoholic head? Is this a drama of national identity whereby the American body politic finds itself under the abusive sway of a drunken head of state? Or might the USA and Vietnam be kin, the former a self-flagellating dipsomaniac projecting its sadistic will upon the latter in an act of Cold War hubris? What if, in a perverse twist, the repressed though inescapable alcoholic were Vietnam, hovering over a devastated American public? Marlantes’s words are reinforced by the filmmakers’ own, which equally draw upon medical, indeed pathogenic, metaphors. ‘The process of healing’, stress Burns and Novick, can only begin ‘[if] we unpack this enormously complicated event, immerse ourselves in it and see it with fresh eyes [in order to] inoculate ourselves against the further spread of the virulent disunion that afflicts us’.1 Despite claims to ‘fresh eyes’, Marlantes and the filmmakers’ comments dovetail with the uncertainty of agency that Fred Turner describes as endemic to US attempts at reconciliation: ‘Was Vietnam something Americans did? Or was it something that happened to them?’2 They also function as a vivid illustration of what Sylvia Shin Huey Chong calls the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. ‘Modeled on an analogy of the nation to the individual subject’, she writes, the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ or the ‘specter of Vietnam’ not only imagines the US nation-state as wounded like the soldiers it sent to war, but also calls upon the discourse of forgivingness and redemption to heal the nation of its psychological malaise.3 In contradistinction to Marlantes’s characterization of the silent – that is, disavowing – nature of traumatic (non)therapy, Chong highlights the public dimension of national recovery, which ‘takes place not on the analyst’s couch but within the public sphere, through the images of the national media’, much like those produced by Burns and Novick.4 Hardly the neutral conduit for the recitation of historical memories, the public sphere constituted by images and sounds is characterized by an exercise of power akin to that of the military-industrial complex. As Viet Thanh Nguyen argues, documentaries and other modes of historical remembrance (from memorials and museums to fiction films and video games) constitute ‘mass-produced fantasies’ at once ‘corporate and capitalist’ that mark the commodification and ‘industrialization of memory’.5 Mnemonic commodification, according to Nguyen, ‘proceeds in parallel with how warfare is industrialized as part and parcel of capitalist society, where the actual firepower exercised in a war is matched by the firepower of memory that defines and redefines that war’s identity’.6 In a suggestive twist of fate, the US military apparatus’s superior expenditure of men and materiel in Indochina over the course of a decade corresponds with The Vietnam War’s seventeen-hour running time and ten-year production schedule. Indeed the very archival materials that Burns and Novick employ indicate such an uneven distribution of resources: black-and-white, expired, splice-ridden, silent footage shot by the North Vietnamese and their sympathizers on the ground contrast with the colour-saturated, expertly rendered images amassed by the US war machine to which the filmmakers have added up to 150 tracks of sound.7 And although Burns and Novick have been at pains to include the stories heretofore absent from US public discourse – above all those of North and South Vietnamese soldiers – the economic, military and cinematic inequities that characterized the war as it unfolded intersect in 2017 with a mnemonic inequity that still frames the conflict through US eyes and ears (as proved by a soundtrack replete with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and their ilk). Much like the generic Hollywood combat film, whose life was extended during the cycle of films about the Vietnam War from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, The Vietnam War ‘remains a narrative’, in Fredric Jameson’s words, ‘about us, a narrative whose elements do not involve any radical cultural difference’.8 The three key features of The Vietnam War – repressive overcompensation, the commodification of memory, and the uneven distribution of cinematic and mnemonic resources – coalesce to support the insidious ideological operation that Roland Barthes long ago identified as the myth-making operation par excellence: homeopathic inoculation.9 ‘One immunizes’, Barthes writes, as if presaging Burns and Novick to the letter, ‘the collective imagination by means of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil; one thus protects it against the risk of a generalized subversion’.10 In The Vietnam War, a small dose of autocriticality, masked as a disease or virus (‘the virulent disunion that afflicts us’), and an overwhelming cascade of details distract from the racial barbarism, geopolitical myopia and masculine posturing that resulted in such a devastating war. Claims to a heterogeneous array of perspectives and the balanced point of view that this implies smack of the most vulgar journalistic platitudes, as well as a historical and political relativism summarized by Novick’s historiographical diagnosis that ‘[there] is no agreement among scholars, or American or Vietnamese, about what happened: the facts, let alone whose fault, let alone what we’re supposed to make of it’.11The Vietnam War not only effaces difference, it marks a failure of identification, such that the American citizen-subject, both as interviewee and ideal audience, are, to follow Barthes once more, ‘unable to imagine the Other’ because ‘any otherness is reduced to sameness’.12 What Burns and Novick thus achieve is a homogenized pluralism that acknowledges the war’s multiplicity of perspectives as well as the failures of US foreign policy in order to disavow both. In the process they eradicate the very distances and differences that defined ‘Vietnam’, yesterday and today. The Vietnam War reopens debates about how documentaries produce historical memory and create consensual ideology through corporate-capitalist media production; it also provides a contemporary framework for placing in relief the outpouring of cinematic energy that took place as the war unfolded – a time when no one could stop talking about Vietnam – and thus an arena of critical inquiry both popular and scholarly given the period’s historically distant yet stubbornly enduring pull. It is in this context that I situate the following study of Loin du Vietnam/Far from Vietnam (1967), the collectively produced antiwar ‘film-manifesto’ spearheaded by Chris Marker in collaboration with a host of French and France-based cineastes, including Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein and Joris Ivens. Joined by an international consortium of writers, composers, artists, actors and intellectuals, as well as over 150 technicians, assistants and friends, the collective set out ‘to affirm, through their profession, their solidarity with the Vietnamese people in their struggle against aggression’.13 A major contribution to the history of radical cinema, Far from Vietnam served as a rallying point for the expression of international solidarity with the Vietnamese cause. It also contributed to a nascent political film culture that would flourish in and around the events of May–June 1968, precipitating, in part, the establishment of SLON (La Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles), the Medvedkin Groups and ISKRA (Images, Sons, Kinescope et Réalisations Audiovisuelles), collective enterprises that would dominate Marker’s political cinematic endeavours in the decade to come, as well as the revolutionary film praxis pioneered by Godard under the aegis of the Dziga Vertov Group.14 Often extolled (when mentioned at all in literature dedicated to the individual filmmakers who comprised the collective) as a cri de coeur about French intellectuals’ inability to adequately contribute to the antiwar struggle, Far from Vietnam has seldom been explored for the political internationalism underlining its creation and montage aesthetic that Marker employed to give cinematic shape to such solidarity.15 The heterogeneous nature of the collective as well as the internationalism underlining its work was reflected in countries visited for the production: some members, like Varda, Lelouch, Ivens, his collaborator and wife Marceline Loridan, and the journalist Michèle Ray, travelled to both North and South Vietnam; others, like Klein, an American expatriate living in Europe, returned to the USA to film the disintegrating domestic consensus; still others, such as the Cuban writer Carlos Franqui, arranged to interview Fidel Castro in Cuba; while Godard and Resnais remained in Paris to consider the real distances that precluded them from acting upon the solidarity they so deeply felt. Alongside the international consortium assembled by Marker for Far from Vietnam, one witnesses the New Left filmmaking collective New York Newsreel’s voyage to North Vietnam to produce People’s War (1969), as well as their formation of a parallel distribution and exhibition network for the circulation of third-world documentaries from Vietnam – including Struggle for Life (1968), A Day of Plane Hunting (1968), US Techniques of Genocide in Vietnam (1969), Women of Telecommunication Station #6 (1969) and Young Puppeteers of Vietnam (1969) – and from Cuba – such as Santiago Alvarez’s Hanoi, martes 13 (1967), La Guerra Olvidada (1967) and 79 Primaveras (1969); Emile de Antonio’s creation of a globally sourced film archive and his transformation of the cinematic apparatus into a form of Marxist historiography in In the Year of the Pig (1969); and Ivens and Loridan’s cohabitation with Vietnamese villagers along the demilitarized zone at the seventeenth parallel in order to produce Le 17ème parallèle, la guerre du peuple (1968).16 All partake of an internationalism linking economic, semiotic and ideological struggles in the formation of a regionally, politically and aesthetically diverse countercinematic public. Connecting France, the USA, Cuba and Vietnam, Far from Vietnam documented the war as well as the activism against it, and consolidated those energies of international dissent through a battery of countercinematic techniques, including discontinuous montage, emphasis on filmic materiality and reflexivity, which are manifest, as I discuss at length below, most directly in Godard’s contribution, ‘Camera-Eye’, and Marker’s overall editing of the project. Such techniques solicit spectators’ participation during signification, and work to link real and imaginary addressees of global antiwar publics across cuts that unite as they divide in order to provoke a dynamic relay between self and other. From conception to exhibition, Far from Vietnam’s form signalled the countercinema that it was while simultaneously calling into being the counterpublic necessary to confront US militarism through a framework of international political solidarity. By inscribing the differences and distances that literally and figuratively separated western intellectuals from Vietnam’s revolution, Far from Vietnam, as its title suggests, simultaneously realized and questioned the very stability of international political solidarity as a category of thought and action. Branded ‘zero as art’ by the US film critic Andrew Sarris, subject to bomb threats by reactionary terrorists and pulled from distribution in Paris, banned in France d’outre-mer because of its ‘subversive’ potential, and treated as a key critical text animating debates about political modernism in journals such as Screen, Far from Vietnam has only recently become available to audiences and scholars after forty-five years of obscurity, courtesy of SOFRACIMA’s 2013 restoration. It demands recontextualization as a semiotic, economic and, most significantly, public manifestation of the antiracist, anticapitalist and anti-imperialist imperative of the age.17 In what follows I situate Far from Vietnam at the nexus of three critical-historical inquiries: the political economy of its mode of production, which encompassed collective decision-making, international collaboration and the circulation of films and film-related materials along alternative distribution circuits; debates within the arena of anticolonial and anti-imperialist praxis over the difficulty of actualizing solidarity internationally; and an account of signification and reception rooted in the technique of montage and its participation in the formation of publics and counterpublics. Triangulating Far from Vietnam’s political economy, intellectual milieu and formal/textual operations demonstrates not only how its filmmakers overcame the alienating divisions of labour upon which private-capitalist and civil-governmental media industries were organized, it also shows how alternative filmic practices may open new spaces for sociopolitical activity and intersubjective exchange capable of affecting filmmakers and audiences alike. Fidel Castro consecrated 1967 as the ‘year of heroic Vietnam’. Speaking on the eighth anniversary of the Cuban revolution, he explained, ‘[Vietnam] has won the sympathy of the world, as well as the minds of thinking people. [Imperialism] has incurred the most radical pronouncements from Bertrand Russell and [Jean-Paul] Sartre and hundreds of intellectuals in Europe, Latin America, and the entire world.’18 As metaphor and metonym, ‘Vietnam’ summarized the global struggle against racism, imperialism and capitalism, galvanizing with discursive dexterity social movements across the ‘three worlds’ in a shared sense of urgency and international political solidarity whose intensity escalated commensurate with US military aggression. Yet this spirit of solidarity was hardly achieved without effort. On the one hand, third-worldist political consciousness had to be born, in Kristin Ross’s words, of an ‘unresolvable or impossible identification with the colonial Other’.19 On the other hand, navigating the geopolitical pathways to and from Vietnam demonstrated the contradictions essential to solidarity’s actualization, as proved by North Vietnam’s notorious injunction against Jean-Luc Godard’s visit to Hanoi that same year. In contradistinction to Castro’s ideological rectitude, the North Vietnamese charged Godard with ‘vague ideology’. Given the politically questionable aesthetic anarchism permeating his work to that point, their reaction was hardly surprising. Two years earlier in 1965, after the dramatic escalation of US military force on the Indochina peninsula, Godard vowed to speak of the Vietnamese struggle for liberation in all his films.20 Anticapitalist, antiracist and anti-imperialist references abound in his work from the middle of the decade. Ferdinand’s (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne’s (Anna Karina) performances in Pierrot le fou (1965) of ‘Uncle Sam’s Nephew versus Uncle Ho’s Niece’, for the benefit of American servicemen, savagely reduced US foreign policy to a caricatured exchange between warring families. In Masculin Féminin (1966), Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) sarcastically extolled the death of Vietnamese communists, women and children to a black GI, while Robert (Michel Debord) indexed overt sympathy for the Vietnamese struggle when painting ‘Paix Au Vietnam’ on the unwitting soldier’s automobile. Photographs from mass market magazines depicting the nightmare effects of the US military upon the Vietnamese body – left burned, maimed, dead – collided with the image of Juliette (Marina Vlady) in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1966), the consumer-turned-prostitute who speculated about how ‘strange it is that a person who is in Europe on the seventeenth of August, 1966 can think of another who is in Asia’. And the reduction of compositional depth in La Chinoise (1967), to accommodate both speeches directly addressed to the viewer and writing upon the mise-en-scene, transformed the screen into an approximation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s enormous, colourful calligraphic wall hangings, the dazibao, a sound-slogan and poster-image designed to demonstrate a raising consciousness against both Euro-American imperialism and Soviet-style communism and in favour of their Asian foils.21 Godard’s inclusion of sociopolitical events in line with third-world liberation and failure to travel to North Vietnam reveal the necessary distance built into cinematic proclamations of solidarity with the decolonizing world. In particular, maximizing the very distance that separated the filmmaker – socially, geographically, ideologically and historically – from the Vietnamese through the cinematic sundering of picture and sound would prove the cornerstone of a montage aesthetic and filmic politic underlying ‘Camera-Eye’, his contribution to Far from Vietnam. Yet even those who made the trip to North Vietnam experienced the essential distance Godard emphasized. Susan Sontag, for instance, travelled to Hanoi as part of a delegation of US sympathizers and described the country as ‘unreal’ and ‘incomprehensible’ to demonstrate how her tourist’s experience of the revolution forestalled making ‘the full intellectual and emotional connections that political and moral solidarity with Vietnam implied’.22 The awkward ambiguities of Godard’s and Sontag’s gestures unveil a more general problem that plagued western intellectuals: how to militate against US aggression in Vietnam and actualize a genuine politics of solidarity with the Vietnamese and, by extension, all oppressed peoples of the world from afar – that is, from one’s own social, historical and geographical position? Rather than claim solidarity directly and immediately – an idealistic fallacy that Sontag’s experiences in Vietnam rendered not just problematic but, more accurately, insupportable – Godard’s practice showed how the overtly mediating effects of montage proved the primary vehicle through which a radical, materialist mode of cinematic politicking could be marshalled to generate new creative geographies spanning racial, economic and ideological distances. In fact over the course of the Vietnam War, activist-filmmakers from across the globe followed from this capacious understanding of cinematic geography in order to generate a counterpublic sphere of solidarity. Here filmmaking not only documented the war and the international consortium of activism against it, it also consolidated those very energies of dissent through the distribution, exhibition and projection of films of and for the real and imaginary addressees of a global antiwar public. Within this fractured and uneven space of material and discursive exchange, activist-filmmakers expanded the very scale, scope and possibilities of militant publicity, and thus of radical cinematic politics itself. The widely held perception that US imperialism was inextricable from domestic oppression compelled the antiwar movement to grow increasingly radical as the 1960s unfolded. In this context, the Left sought to construct a transnational counterpublic unified around an ideological platform whose tenets, extrapolated from third-world liberation writ large, contested imperialism, capitalism and racism.23 Animating this transnational configuration was the dialectical exchange between self and other, which manifest as the spatial-geographic division between ‘here and elsewhere’, a theoretical motif first elaborated by Godard in ‘Camera-Eye’, and then developed with Anne-Marie Miéville in Ici et ailleurs/Here and Elsewhere (1974). The cinema entered into this field of political activity as a tool prized for its capacity to reshape ideological perceptions of reality and produce both consensus and dissensus around a given cause. For the US government, military prosecution of the war was inseparable from public relations propaganda campaigns that marshalled the mass media to define ‘Vietnam’ for body politics at home and abroad. In its delineation of the war, the US Armed Forces, much as they had during World War II and the Korean War, engaged a massive filmmaking apparatus that extended to include the Hollywood culture industries.24 Filmmaking, in fact, was only one part of a vast media machine that encompassed print, radio and the newly omnipresent television. Establishment media, especially newspaper and television journalism, not only shared the underlying ideological assumptions about the war, but also drew much of its coverage from official administration pronouncements.25 Media complicity enabled the federal government to wage the war on its own (ideological and representational) terms until events in Vietnam, above all the Tet Offensive in January 1968, opened up an insurmountable ‘credibility gap’ between information and actuality that precipitated the widespread disintegration of consensus among political leaders, journalists and the public. Revelations of federal mendacity exacerbated previously repressed contradictions within the dominant public sphere of mediation and created conditions for critical coverage. Such coverage, however, was not characteristic of the corporate media’s overwhelming output and remained imbricated – indeed incriminated – within the political economy of its social organization and the ideological means of its representation, which attempted, above all, to mitigate distances between the domestic public’s perceptions of the war and its actuality abroad. In attempting to overcome, if not erase, the intrinsic distances that characterized every encounter that marked itself as ‘Vietnam’, establishment media addressed audiences with a fraudulently authoritative, transparent and unmediated representation of historical reality. The political and cinematic Left, by contrast, addressed their energies towards the formation of a counterpublic set against the State and Hollywood. Propagandizing against the war proved inseparable from a critique not only of US Cold War ideology and its attendant definitions of ‘Vietnam’, but also the means of its representation, creation and distribution by establishment media and the federal government (its aesthetic of unmediated transparency).26 The projection of counter-ideological publicity thus proceeded from the formation of countercinemas, which indicated the cinematic apparatus’s transformation into an instrument of and for emancipatory political praxis along two intersecting fronts: semiotic and socioeconomic. The former generated oppositional idioms or idiolects built into the cinematic text, while the latter transformed the social relations of production, exhibition and distribution. As Godard’s example suggests, montage proved the primary cinematic method for negotiating the multiform gaps dividing here from elsewhere. Rather than address audiences with a putatively transparent and unmediated proclamation of political solidarity, Godard’s montage inscribes, in Stephen Heath’s words, ‘the distance of negation’.27 ‘Vietnam is not a crisis of consciousness’, argues Heath in his brief but incisive account of the film, ‘but a crisis of the subject, of the ideology through which we live – a problem of representation’.28 ‘Negation, distance’, he continues, ‘is […] the demonstration of relations, of structures; the overturning movement […] between representation and production, image and material, subject and language, a critical dialectics’.29 Understood as a form of negative praxis, montage struggled to produce (dis)unity out of the very contradictions driving politics, history and filmmaking; it stressed the material conditions of set-up and editing in order to demonstrate how sound and image mediated historical reality – that is, the lived experience and consciousness of that experience. For filmmakers, media contestation was political in so far as it attempted to transform not only our ideological perceptions of reality, but to define those perceptions anew. By amplifying the materiality by which images and sounds were appended to one another, filmmakers attacked the stultifying illusionism of establishment media by making the process of signification strange, in fact by (re)mediating the very realities into which the obtaining public had been habituated. Mediation’s overt reverberations with the ‘mass media’ reveal the latter to have been the Vietnam War’s primary ideological front. Here the cinematic creation, distribution and projection of liberation ideologies of solidarity capable of producing real and imaginary global alliances proved to be the countercinematic public sphere’s principal focus, a form of material and ideological intervention precisely designed to transform what Heath elsewhere framed as ‘the relations of subjectivity in ideology’.30 The theoretical perception that events experienced here with those unfolding elsewhere, and which Godard was to elaborate with Miéville in Ici et ailleurs, was initially born of his contribution to Far from Vietnam, ‘Camera-Eye’. Oriented primarily around his operation of a large, 35mm Mitchell BNC, ‘Camera-Eye’ inverted the Vertovian dictum to which its title implicitly referred by claiming the cinema’s inability to directly represent the war. In so doing, it negated the camera’s capacity for producing an impression of the realities he originally set out to depict. What emerged was the ironically ‘filmed’ remainder of an ‘unfilmable’ film that used the very poverty of its means to transform the cinema into a tool for reshaping sense perceptions in relation to historical actuality and reorienting consciousness along an imaginary axis capable of giving rise to new, political cinematic collectives. The most striking aspect of the image-track remains Godard’s operation of his oversized apparatus (figure 1). At once neurotic and erotic, he gently and obsessively preoccupies himself with turning the camera’s lights off and on, twisting its knobs, and framing and reframing an object permanently unseen because it is absent from his and his machine’s frames of perceptual reference. Editing intersperses documentary footage that has been, variously, shot by Ivens and Loridan in Vietnam, produced by Marker with Bruno Muel at the striking Rhodiaceta factory in Besançon, drawn from newsreels, excerpted from La Chinoise, and taken of the Mitchell’s inner workings in order to compensate visually for the project’s representational insufficiencies. Over a soundtrack punctuated by explosions and gunshots, Godard elaborates on the possible films that he would have made had he been granted access to the North, films on the hideous spectacle of US militarism and its effects upon women’s bodies, defoliated countrysides and poisoned rivers. Yet the relay between sound and image – between the imaginary films Godard describes and the ‘found’ footage that illustrates these apparent lacks – short-circuits. The material differences between Godard directing his camera (in colour, on 35mm, and with fixed camera perspectives) and the imagery he inserts onto the picture-track (which ranges from black-and-white and colour, 16mm and 35mm, high speeds and low, and employs a variety of techniques, be they handheld or fixed, staged or newsreel) open a gap between actuality and possibility that reinforces the apparatus’s insufficiency when placed both proximate to and at a remove from the scene of combat. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Godard’s oversized and fetishized 35mm Mitchell BNC, in ‘Camera-Eye’, from Far from Vietnam (Chris Marker, et al., SLON, 1967). Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Godard’s oversized and fetishized 35mm Mitchell BNC, in ‘Camera-Eye’, from Far from Vietnam (Chris Marker, et al., SLON, 1967). The distances that Godard draws out between picture and sound participate in a wider critique of the epistemological authority of vision and representation.31 Drawing spectators’ attention to the heterogeneous character of this sequence’s images and then placing them in fraught relationships to its sounds demonstrates the inadequacies of empirically extracting knowledge from reality’s recorded surfaces. Moreover, it refuses the epistemological closures enforced by conventional documentary and commercial film practice, which obscure the material heterogeneity of filmic representation in order to create a false sense of continuity, mastery and certainty: ‘what you see is what you get’. Here the dislocating gaps between picture and sound, between documentary reality and its fictional corollary, reveal signification and, by extension, solidarity to be a mediated process of exchange across the literal and representational distances that Godard’s impossible project and Far from Vietnam more generally demand. Godard’s voiceover narration, which treats Vietnam as a pandemic master metaphor for global liberation, expands this critique to account for the constitution of subjectivity in terms of the self’s relation to larger geopolitical events. ‘Rather than try to invade Vietnam with a kind of imposing generosity’, he argues, ‘let Vietnam invade us and realize what place it occupies in our daily lives wherever we are. Then we realize that Vietnam is not alone.’ Acknowledging ‘what place [Vietnam] occupies in our daily lives’ avoids the trappings of uncritical solidarity by drawing neither a direct connecting line nor claiming a false equivalency between distinct spaces of sociopolitical struggle, both of which would constitute the vulgar projection of self-satisfying liberal desires (‘a kind of imposing generosity’). In fact it asks filmmakers and audiences alike to examine their own social and geographic positions as the precondition for grasping what unfolds elsewhere. The problem of political solidarity that Godard develops runs far deeper than the recognition of sympathies across political and geographical boundaries; it penetrates the structures of domination that permeate every facet of daily life and perpetuate disunity among the disenfranchised. For while ‘we can apply Che Guevara’s motto to ourselves – “create two, three, many Vietnams”’ in order to ‘create Vietnam in ourselves’, it remains essential to understand that the major strikes that were held at Rhodiaceta in Besançon or Saint-Nazaire were episodes profoundly tied to Vietnam. A worker at Rhodiaceta must draw lessons from the struggle of North Vietnam when he fights with his union. He must learn ideas of principle because if he finds the pace of work at Rhodiaceta too heavy, and he can no longer live, or sleep, neither think nor read, he is truly a subhuman, a byproduct and he feels exploited. I, for example, being a director who works in France, am completely separated from most of the population and from the working class in particular. And my personal struggle, which is against American cinema, against its economic and aesthetic imperialism, which has now corrupted the world cinema, in the end is a similar struggle. Yet we don't speak, the public worker doesn't see my films. Between me and him is the same cut [coupure] that exists between me and Vietnam, or rather between him and Vietnam […] We don't know each other because I am trapped in a sort of cultural prison and they are in a sort of economic prison.32 To map solidarity’s field of interconnecting disconnections, Godard employs a dizzying array of metaphors, similes and tentative homologies that link different strata of struggle around a common, albeit unstated, theme: estranged labour. In ways that mimic, almost verbatim, the young Marx of 1844, Godard describes workers as ‘subhuman byproducts’ of an industrial apparatus that renders them incapable of even the most rudimentary of actions (living, sleeping, thinking, reading). Filmmakers, in turn, languish under the stultifying ‘aesthetic and economic’ constraints imposed by a Hollywood whose hegemony has corrupted cinema the world over. And a social division of labour in France and beyond estranges workers from their unions, filmmakers from the working class, and the world from Vietnam. Overcoming the pervasive effects of social, political and economic alienation means situating the formation of solidarity and subjectivity within an interlocking nexus of projections and introjections, of identifications and transpositions that highlight the very mechanisms of mediation that seem to stifle unity by penetrating people in both body and mind. If the productive apparatus – above all the cinematic apparatus – has so thoroughly alienated filmmakers from their experience of reality, then the answer Godard suggests is not the paralytic abdication of filmmaking in and of itself, but the sublation of those very conditions of oppression towards emancipation. Here depictions of the Mitchell’s materiality take on deepened meanings that summarize the contradictions that ‘Camera-Eye’ appears unable to fully synthesize (figure 2). As a technology whose successful operations are predicated upon the accurate regulation of intermittent motion, the camera materializes the logic of instrumental reason that powers – materially and conceptually – the US war machine, much as Paul Virilio suggests in his claims that war refuses to exist without representation and that ‘[weapons] are tools not just of destruction but also of perception’.33 What is more, as the means of cinematic production, the camera serves as a reminder for the oppressive cultural hegemony exercised by the culture industries whose output – the industrially produced commercial film – demands the ceaseless control of movement to ensure the exchange-value of individual shots and their place in a film as a whole.34 But Godard’s in-camera images sterilize that regulation by rendering the passage of film to be one of wasteful expenditure – ‘dissipated energy’, as Jean-François Lyotard phrases it – that refers back only to its own dissipation; nothing ensures the images record anything other than their own exposure.35 Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Depictions of the Mitchell’s materiality take on deepened meanings, in ‘Camera-Eye’, from Far from Vietnam. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Depictions of the Mitchell’s materiality take on deepened meanings, in ‘Camera-Eye’, from Far from Vietnam. Reflexivity thus emerges as the structural precondition of a filmmaking practice fundamentally incompatible with the instrumental logic of industrial cinematographic representation. It serves, moreover, as the material basis for opening new horizons of collective experience and intersubjective exchange within the radical imaginary. To escape from his ‘aesthetic and economic’ prison and open these imaginary horizons, Godard draws upon André Breton’s ‘Second Manifesto on Surrealism’. ‘I believe in the absolute virtue of anything that takes place’, quotes Godard over a densely edited maelstrom of images that cover the distance from Vietnam to the inside of his camera, spontaneously or not, in the sense of non-acceptance, and no reasons of general efficacity, from which long, revolutionary patience draws its inspiration – reasons to which I defer – will make me deaf to the cry which can be wrenched from us at every moment by the frightful disproportion between what is gained and what is lost, between what is granted and what is suffered.36 Within this dense quotation, Godard highlights two phrases: ‘long revolutionary patience’ and ‘the cry’. For those not in a revolutionary situation, the only option, according to Godard, is to ‘cry louder’. Here the politically conscientious ‘must listen and retransmit this cry as often as possible’. Montage is central to the apparatus’s sociopolitical use-value. To turn the cinema into a ‘transmitter’ that projects liberation’s ‘cry’ across boundaries that undermine the creation of solidarity – a cut across race, class and geography – is to address an unknown, imaginary collective whose existence it assumes but cannot confirm. Michael Witt cogently suggests that Godard endows the apparatus with a ‘pedagogical function and democratizing effect’ capable of ‘drawing social classes together’. ‘By simply re-presenting the physical and social world to vast numbers of individuals in instantly accessible form’, writes Witt, ‘[the cinema] encouraged – indeed, made almost inevitable – a profound renegotiation of one’s place in the world’.37 By filming, as Godard claimed in 1978, ‘not things, but the relationships between things’, one sees how the camera’s inability to represent solidarity is what enables ‘social’ and ‘existential’ montage to produce it.38 For Witt, the ‘social cohesion’ achieved by such montage ‘is associated closely with questions of national identity’.39 And while this may be true of Godard’s culminating cine-historiography Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), the vision of collective belonging promoted by ‘Camera-Eye’ and the radical montage Godard developed with and beyond the Dziga Vertov Group is precisely international in its scope. Implementation of discontinuity as a representational strategy, the cinematic rendering of the ‘cut’ (coupure) splitting solidarity, materially underscores the montage principle of convergence through divergence, of bringing images and sounds, and, by extension, peoples and places, together in order to signify the global struggle to be a heterogeneous whole. Montage projects, in short, a political people into existence. In so doing it navigates gaps between theory and practice; between the representational presence assured by the cinematographic image and the distanced absence it always carries within (what Jean-Louis Comolli describes as ‘the present index of an absence, of the lack of another image’);40 between a political platform and the ability to render it concrete; between here and elsewhere. By vitiating, indeed invalidating, these very dualisms, the countercinematic projection of an imaginary collective ‘translates subjective sensibility into objective form, into reality’.41 The conversion of new forms of subjectivity and new collective imaginaries into concrete reality is the fundamental hurdle that all radical praxis must overcome. The theoretical perception that is viewed here as inextricable from elsewhere was, in fact, born of such cinematic and political obstacles: Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group’s inability to complete its film on the Palestinian Revolution, provisionally titled Jusqu’à la victoire/Until Victory and whose fragments would form the basis for Ici et ailleurs. Commissioned by the Central Committee of the Palestinian Revolution and financed, in part, by the Arab League, Godard along with Jean-Pierre Gorin and the cameraman Armand Marco travelled six times to Jordan, the West Bank and Lebanon between November 1969 and August 1970. When the fedayeen whom they had been filming perished during the events of Black September, and the Palestinian struggle found itself far from ‘victory’, Godard and Gorin likewise found themselves unable to complete the picture.42 Once again the ability to produce a film of solidarity with a real, existing political movement foundered. But when Godard returned to its remnants with Miéville in 1973, they compensated for deficiencies in the original design by weaving its very problem – not only the deaths of their subjects but also the physical distance separating the comforts of their material existence in France from struggles abroad – into the structure of Ici et ailleurs.43 The resulting film counterposed docudramatic footage of a working-class French family with images of the Palestinian revolution in order to realize cinematically the here/elsewhere divide. Early in the film, over a montage featuring footage of May ’68, Palestinian guerillas, annotated newspaper clippings and an image of the ET (AND) from the film’s title, Godard unfolds a series of oppositions endemic to the struggle for solidarity’s actualization. French Revolution and, and, and Arab Revolution; Arab Revolution and, and, French Revolution; Here and Elsewhere; Victory and Defeat; Foreign and National; Quickly and Slowly; Everywhere and Nowhere; To Be and To Have; Space and Time; Question and Answer; Entrance and Exit; Order and Disorder; Interior and Exterior; Black and White; Yet and Already; Dream and Reality; Here or Elsewhere; Powerful or Miserable; Today or Tomorrow; Normal or Mad; All or Nothing; Always or Never; Man or Woman; More or Less; To Live or To Die; Rich or Poor.44 The conjunction AND develops a series of interanimating and mutually constituting exchanges that span history and geography (as the French Revolution, doubly signifying 1789 and 1968, and the Arab Revolution suggest). They further cross a series of philosophical themes ranging from ontology (‘to be and to have’, ‘interior and exterior’, ‘normal or mad’, ‘to live and to die’), epistemology (‘question and answer’), and the formation of subjectivity along lines of race (‘black and white’), class (‘rich or poor’) and gender (‘man or women’) to space’s (‘here and elsewhere, ‘foreign and national’, ‘everywhere and nowhere’, ‘entrance and exit’,) intersection with time (‘quickly and slowly’, ‘yet and already’, ‘today or tomorrow’, ‘always or never’). For Gilles Deleuze, Godard and Miéville’s emphasis on the ET of the title generates a differential relation between images and sounds, a cinema of interstitial ambivalence in which primary importance is placed on the conjunctive and disjunctive properties of the cut.45 The effect, much like the one elicited by ‘Camera-Eye’, is to ask spectators to participate in the production of meaning and thus engage the projection and introjection of new forms of (cinematic) subjectivity. While Godard and Miéville (and Deleuze) prioritized the ET at the centre of their film’s title, this shift to OU (OR) makes even more concrete the invitation to participate in the film’s semiotic actualization by placing what appear to be outright alternatives in opposition to one another, enervating the ET’s potential for ambivalence, if not similitude. But rather than evince a crude binomialism, Godard’s narration concedes it is ‘too simple and too easy to simply divide the world in two’. Emphasizing these conjunctions’ generative dimensions allowed Godard to expand this ‘linguistic’ analysis not only to the realm of images, but to the constitution of subjectivity through an imagistic exchange between self and other. ‘In fact’, he claims in his narration, ‘we probably make our own image from the other’s. Friend or enemy, you produce your image, you produce and consume your image with mine, distributing mine to your image.’ Evocative of the command to retransmit the cry of liberation concluding ‘Camera-Eye’, Miéville’s final voiceover during Ici et ailleurs enjoins us to ‘learn to see here in order to hear elsewhere. Learn to hear yourself speak to see what others do. Others are the “elsewhere” to our “here”.’ The self’s antagonistic relation to the other is inseparable from the underlying structures of colonialism and imperialism, and animates longstanding debates in the history and theory of anticolonial and anti-imperial struggle focused on the problem of international solidarity. For Ho Chi Minh, imperialism and capitalism conspired to split the forces of liberation into ‘two proletariats’, discrete, distant and dubious of one another. ‘Imperialism and capitalism’, he wrote, ‘do not fail to take advantage of this mutual suspicion and this artificial racial hierarchy to frustrate propaganda and divide forces which ought to unite’.46 Overcoming this divide by articulating its essential links proved fundamental for mutual liberation. As the Godard of 1967 drew together the workers of Besançon and Saint-Nazaire with Vietnam, so too did the Ho of 1923. ‘All the martyrs of the working class’, he exclaimed, those in Lausanne like those in Paris, those in Le Havre like those in Martinique, are victims of the same murderer: international capitalism. And it is always in belief of the liberation of their oppressed brothers, without discrimination as to race or country, that the souls of these martyrs will find supreme consolation’.47 The obstacles precluding solidarity’s ‘supreme consolation’ constituted the crux of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, composed in the midst of the Algerian struggle for independence from French colonial rule. Comprising not only Fanon’s text but also an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, each part was designed to speak to distinct but intersecting groups; each needed to hear the voice of the other in order to transform the self. For Fanon, the Hegelian spirit of Europe’s expansion abroad proved a self-justifying adventure developed in lands far beyond the continent. From this point, he writes, Europe engaged in ‘a permanent dialogue with itself’ such that ‘an increasingly obnoxious narcissism’ was to ‘inevitably [pave] the way for a virtual delirium where intellectual thought turns into agony since the reality of man as a living, working, self-made being is replaced by words, an assemblage of words and the tensions generated by their meanings’.48 Reification of reality and the alienation of man from the material conditions of existence through language generated increasingly abstract and opaque visions of historical development that weakened whatever part of European thought might provide the potential for liberation. Fanon, however, discerned ‘Europeans […] who urged the European workers to smash this narcissism and break with this denial of reality’.49 Clearly Fanon here invokes the Marxist tradition of utopian liberation from the economic exploitation and the mystifications of false consciousness; yet unfortunate echoes of nationalist ideology and racial supremacy stifled ‘the call’: ‘The fact was that the workers believed they too were part of the prodigious adventure of the European Spirit’.50 The ideological grip of nationalism reified the here/elsewhere divide, and imperilled any chance of the two proletariats from uniting. Fanon consequently proposed a necessarily violent explosion of the contradictions perpetuating colonial servitude. The dialectics of national liberation, he claimed, constituted an ‘encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation’.51 In his preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre implicitly stressed the ‘congenital antagonism’ at the heart of Fanon’s historical-ontological metaphysic of liberation. Acknowledging ‘this book had certainly no need for a prefacing [… especially] as it is not addressed to us’, he admitted to writing his introductory remarks precisely to carry the dialectic through to its conclusion: we, too, peoples of Europe, we are being decolonized: meaning the colonist inside every one of us is surgically extracted in a bloody operation. Let’s take a good look at ourselves, if we have the courage, and let’s see what has become of us.52 Here and elsewhere therefore link at the psycho-affective level for the oppressor and oppressed, a congenital and thus inescapable antagonism that projects and introjects the colonial experience in ways that are, in the end, always liminal, always indeterminate and always in between. ‘Congenital antagonisms’ powered structural continuities, constituting antithetical ends of a basic self/other dualism. For filmmakers of the Left, montage was the technique for cinematically activating this very (dis)continuity between people and places in order to generate creative geographies of solidarity and emancipation, the most intense figuration of which was Far from Vietnam. The spirit of collective cinematic praxis promoted by Godard underlined Far from Vietnam’s material and textual execution. A continuation and negation of the European art cinema’s cycle of portmanteau films – such as Les Sept péchés capitaux/The Seven Deadly Sins (1962), Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), Le Grand escroc (1964) and Paris vu par … /Six in Paris (1965) – the production simultaneously exploited the celebrity status of its most prominent contributors while moving away from the Romantic legacies enshrined in French auteurist criticism of the 1950s. As Marker stressed, Our film is the result of a truly collective work, especially when compared to films where the collective aspect developed only later. Here we have a collective with a continuous collaboration although each one of us obviously is responsible for only one part of the work […] All of us contributed to the common task as much as they could.53 Refusing a ‘hierarchy within the team’, Far from Vietnam’s collective endeavoured to create a mode of unalienated labour in which political commitment dovetailed with the Marxian slogan ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. While early production documents describe the central, decision-making presence of a ‘basic group’ (groupe de base) comprising the film’s primary auteurs, the overall project unfolded according to the following principles: ‘full co-operation to attain a joint planning; individual filming and editing; discussion on the various parts; final editing to achieve a synthesis. All the directors agreed that their films might be re-edited, re-cut and used – or not used – according to the final requirements.’54 Assembled by Marker, Far from Vietnam’s montage reflects the production’s central contradiction between the auteur and the collective. Individual voices and styles, above all those of Godard and Resnais, may be recognizable but no one individual contribution is identified, as would be the case in an omnibus film. Moreover, Varda’s appearance in the credits despite her sequence’s excision demonstrates the lengths to which the film deviates from a collection of self-contained episodes in favour of collective speech. To bridge the very distance articulated by the title – that is, to foment solidarity from afar and thus invent a collective politics of solidarity through cinematic means – Marker’s montage sublates the individual into the collective, thereby revealing the necessary loss of the self when constituting the collective political subject. The projection of cinematic solidarity was inseparable from a critique of the ‘aesthetic and economic’ hegemony of the industrial-commercial film, its consonant manifestations in print and broadcast journalism, and its relation to the war machine at large. As such, Far from Vietnam launched its cinematic broadside along interlocking semiotic and economic fronts, and in so doing signalled the necessary coming together of a countercinema with the formation of a counterpublic, the one inextricable from the other. Reorganizing the social relations of production generated solidarity within the filmmaking collective and challenged the commercial status of the commodity film and its alienating and divided mode of production.55 Montage materially inscribed the group’s basic heterogeneity into its resulting textual shape as the idiolect of its collective constitution. And direct address solicited audiences within its unfolding such that they too would participate in its semiotic and political actualization. Far from Vietnam thus functioned as a dynamic model for solidarity’s creation rather than its static representation; from conception through exhibition, the self-same solidarity between filmmakers addressed itself to audiences and, however tentatively, to the Vietnamese, in order not only to signal the countercinema that it was, but to call into being the counterpublic necessary for actualizing its contempt for US military aggression. Across these different stages of Far from Vietnam’s creation, I want to prioritize an expanded understanding of montage that draws inspiration from the Soviet avant garde of the 1920s. The Soviet legacy would be fundamental for Marker and Godard, each of whom, starting after 1968, would participate in cinematic collectives named, respectively, after Alexander Medvedkin and Dziga Vertov. Above all, I want to suggest that this is because the Soviets conceived of the cinema as a framework for the intersubjective expression of collective experience and the recalibration of sense-perceptions necessary for the formation of a public, or in this case a counterpublic set against the war.56 For Soviet filmmakers such as Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, montage functioned as a mode of social-cinematic praxis capable of producing a particular ideological vision of reality and thus new forms of politicized subjectivity. Vertov, in particular, understood montage as ‘the organization of the visible world’, elsewhere framed as its ‘communist decoding’, and treated the technique as a general process defining every stage of a film’s production (before, during, and after shooting).57 As a result, montage becomes isomorphic with critical thought and sociopolitical practice. When analysed at the point of reception, it prompts spectatorial participation in the process of signification and creates the structural preconditions for the emergence of radical spectatorship and new radical imaginaries fundamental to a counterpublic’s collective-cinematic enunciation and consolidation. In Marker’s hands, montage functions as a mode of (re)mediation that questions not only the ideological frames through which establishment media enforce obtaining perceptions of reality, but also the stability of cinematic perception and representation as such. To achieve this instability, Marker wove together competing and contradictory points of view, styles and sources as part of a semiotics of disjunction that disorients audiences and their normative relation to reality through impossible and incompatible juxtapositions of sights and sounds. To draw spectators into the film’s unfolding is thus to ask them to perceive politically, to judge the war, its depiction and their own relationship to it. But it is also to build semiotic indeterminacy – the dissonance and distance implied by disorientation – into film’s textual design, exacerbating the antagonisms at the heart of solidarity’s formation in order to cinematically render this camaraderie as the objective manifestation of a collective expression. Indeterminate textual heterogeneity is by definition unpredictable, and thus integrates the possibility of semiotic failure into the film’s ultimate design. This ‘failure’ is precisely what sends spectators struggling towards new horizons of collective experience and thus new political imaginaries for negotiating the very racial, economic and geographical disparities that form Far from Vietnam’s substance. Far from Vietnam was originally conceived as a pedagogical exercise in the linguistic redefinition of the discourse used to describe Vietnam and the Cold War. Provisionally entitled ‘Vocabulary’, the proposed long-format film was intended to comprise sequences of various lengths and styles, to be edited by Resnais, which would have constituted a new cinematic lexicon for understanding Vietnam’s position in Cold War geopolitics. Early production documents contain a cornucopia of words and phrases to be disentangled in their polysemic and political density: ‘Independence’, ‘Escalation’, ‘Negotiation’, ‘Consciousness’, ‘Viet Cong’, ‘Americans’, ‘Stakes’, ‘Strategy’, ‘Violence’, ‘Peasants’, ‘Living Standards’, Geneva Accords’, ‘Vietnamese Culture’, ‘People’s Army/People’s War’, ‘Civilian Population’, ‘Infiltration’, and ‘War Crimes’, among others.58 In unravelling, for example, the multiform meanings of a key term such as ‘war’, which according to the filmmakers was so full of significance as to be devoid of it, the ‘Vocabulary’ project would send audiences into a cinematic spiral where ‘Cold War’, ‘Civil War’, ‘Revolutionary War’, ‘War of National Liberation’, ‘War Crime’ and ‘Atomic War’ would collide in a frenzy of demystification and (re)signification.59 In addition, tests touching on geography, history and aesthetics would occasionally appear to quiz spectators to ensure the correct ideological lessons were being drawn.60 By framing their film as an exercise in linguistic (re-)education, the makers of Far from Vietnam sought to undo the ideological effects of contemporary language’s reification of reality (what Fanon described as ‘a virtual delirium where intellectual thought turns into agony since the reality of man as a living, working, self-made being is replaced by words’).61 They moreover anticipated something close in spirit to ‘[the] new sensibility and the new consciousness’ that Herbert Marcuse identified as the New Left’s project of political emancipation, but which nonetheless ‘demand a new language to define and communicate the new ‘values’ (language in the wider sense which includes words, images, gestures, tones)’.62 Though Marcuse did not specify the cinema as ‘language in the wider sense’, its collective and discursive assembly of people, places and politics (as well as ‘words, images, gestures, tones’) may be the very means to unleash the ‘values’ sensed beyond the radical imaginary’s horizon. Reconstituting ‘language’ in order to express new ‘values’ means changing the very means by which we apprehend reality, cinematically or otherwise. Though prodding audiences with exams would seem to be the very definition of didactic inculcation (and thus the opposite of critical, reflective thought), the ‘Vocabulary’ project’s pedagogical dimensions were inextricable from an overall strategy of aesthetic engagement that prioritized the active participation of filmmakers and audiences alike. Rather than ‘illustrate a thesis’, the filmmakers proclaimed a desire ‘to communicate a thought [réflexion] with all the means that the cinema has to offer in order to transform a thought into language and render it perceptible [sensible]’.63 In demonstrating the very mechanisms through which thought and language interrelate when producing sense perceptions, spectators would glean lessons enabling them to perceive reality not only cinematically but also politically. In this context film does not simply represent social and historical experience, but intervenes directly into those very experiences, actively transforming our perceptions of the world rather than passively reflecting them. Far from Vietnam’s resulting shape bore almost no relation to the ‘Vocabulary’ project’s initial design. Yet its pedagogical emphasis on (re)defining the means by which reality is perceived continued to inform its semiotics of disjunctive (re)mediation and consequent critique of vision. The former, in part, was born of a hesitation among members of the collective to include fictional footage whose force, they feared, would pale in comparison to the ferocity of the documentary reportage circulating throughout the mediascape (what Marker, at one point, referred to as a ‘dictatorship of the document’ [la dictature du document]).64 To mitigate such fears, the Belgian composer André Delvaux argued the need to emphasize the ‘relay’ that occurred between the creation, collection and circulation of documents (footage or otherwise), and thus on the essentially indirect, second-order nature of mediated perception. ‘Why don’t we express this relation with images as basic information (or misinformation)’, he asked. ‘In other words, why don’t we use documentary material towards a second degree of perception […] not as representations of reality, but as representations of information?’65 With Far from Vietnam’s title in mind, we might reformulate Delvaux’s question to ask how one might build distance into both the cinematographic document and the montage bringing such documents together. This distance manifests in the film’s global structure, which analytically arranges eleven discrete sequences (as well as an introduction and conclusion) according to the geographical East and West divide. Announced by title-cards (‘Bomb Hanoi!’, ‘A Parade Is A Parade’, ‘Johnson Cries’, ‘Claude Ridder’, ‘Flash Back’, ‘Camera-Eye’, ‘Victor Charlie’, ‘Why We Fight’, ‘Fidel Castro’, ‘Ann – Uyen’ and ‘Vertigo’), each passage mixes not only a range of media, genres and tones – documentary and fiction, personal anguish and analytical historiography, archival footage and contemporary journalism, advertising, comic books and animations, in addition to video, television and film – but also reveals through contradictory juxtaposition the structural alignments linking here with elsewhere and the disparities therein. The introduction, for example, stresses the material, financial and technological divide between the US Seventh Fleet as synthetic war machine and a Vietnamese peasant army organically embedded in the land; marches for and against the war in the USA and France (‘A Parade Is A Parade’) contrast with Vietnamese street theatre lampooning President Johnson (‘Johnson Cries’); Claude Ridder’s (Bernard Fresson) paralytic anguish and Godard’s subjective call to aesthetic arms offset the didactic rehearsal of the history (‘Flash Back’); Ray’s voyage to Vietnam and comparison of the different fighting forces is distinguished from Godard’s failure to make such a trip (‘Victor Charlie’); Castro and Westmoreland (‘Why We Fight’) cinematically encapsulate the Cold War’s ideological gulf; and comparative depictions of widowed wives – Ann Morrison, wife of Norman Morrison, the Quaker pacifist who self-immolated below Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office window in protest, and Uyen, a refugee from Vietnam living in Paris with her three children – link here and elsewhere through sacrifice and loss. With contradiction woven into the film’s textual warp and weft, conflicts of potentially dialectical proportions swarm its discursive field. The effect underscores not only the polyphony of voices that speak through the project, but likewise gives cinematic rise to the grievances splitting peoples and places as a result of the war. Competing perspectives and the movement through multiple media are essential to Far from Vietnam’s formation of a collective counterpublic. On a concrete level, the film’s very emergence is testament to the existence of that public – its creation is the product of a polyglot assortment of antiwar activists who have not only used the cinema to generate a community of their own but to extend that community cinematically, that is, through its public projection to a community of strangers (workers and the antiwar movement), whose existence is assumed yet unknown and who, by virtue of their encounter with the film, participate in the social practice that it is.66 That Far from Vietnam’s European premiere on 18 October was held in Besançon was a mark of the filmmakers’ determination to reach a very real public. Explaining his choice to debut the film before Besançon’s workers, Marker described it as ‘made by militants speaking to militants and intended to be shown to them’.67 Despite claims to homogeneity (‘militants speaking to militants’), many in the audience found the film difficult to follow, leading to a heated post-screening discussion about the aesthetics and efficacy of cinematic politicking.68 When one audience member claimed the relationships drawn between striking French workers and Vietnam was ‘a bit too easy’, Resnais responded: The film aims to show the relations between Vietnam and a worldwide revolutionary movement. Only it does it, obviously, with, at times […] clumsiness, naiveté, precaution, posing questions rather than trying to answer them. It’s true that it’s a film that tries to get our thoughts moving [mettre notre réflexion en action]. It’s certain that this film is made of question marks, of questions that we asked ourselves and, maybe, that you ask yourselves.69 For Marker, debate signalled that ‘our film became alive’, an ‘outcome more important than if all the spectators had been simply enthusiastic’. ‘This film’, he summarized of its success, ‘has been made to trigger discussion’.70 If the screening at Besançon constituted the attempt to reach a real, existing public whose political sympathies would render them potentially amenable to Far from Vietnam’s message of solidarity, Marker’s montage textually reinforces publicity through its consolidation of commonality. If Vietnam is an inescapable event for the world, for those directly and indirectly involved (‘upon whom it weighed each day [as a threat, as a challenge, as a question, and as a political sign]’, as Marker described it), regardless of social, political or geographical orientation, then it operates as a common term for reality’s definition (experience and consciousness of that experience).71 ‘Under the conditions of a common world’, writes Hannah Arendt, ‘reality is not guaranteed primarily by the “common nature” of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object’.72 As such, Far from Vietnam’s disjunctive montage ensures a multiplicity of competing, irreducible, divergent perspectives (born of and perpetuated by the film) circulating around a single object (Vietnam) precisely to demonstrate the common condition, the objective reality, of the struggle. Imprecise and unpredictable, this heterogeneity offers audiences not simply a film to watch but the articulation of images and sounds to consider, an expression that operates as the precondition for the spectator’s encounter with the film’s expression of collectivity, publicity and political subjectivity. But it is also an encounter that questions the very stability of that look’s formation through pre-existing frameworks of visibility. Textual inscription of perceptual instability occurs through strategies of (re)mediation and the abstract, semiotic dissonance that follows. Above all, it emphasizes both the cinematic apparatus as a tool for mediating perceptions of reality, and also the collusion of establishment media – not only Hollywood and broadcast journalism, but also advertising, comic books, and so on – in the administration’s deliberate misrepresentations of the war. Godard’s ‘Camera-Eye’, as discussed above, showed the apparatus’s mechanical intricacies in order to jam the instrumental logic of its movements, waste its material resources, and probe its ability to produce even a visible ‘picture’ of ‘Vietnam’. Ray’s camera during ‘Victor Charlie’, moreover, malfunctions (‘it went crazy’, intones Maurice Garrel over the soundtrack) and thereby accidentally provides the key ‘image’ (un) representing conflict. Torn and perforated, emulsion improperly exposed, and replete with camouflage-like imprints, Ray’s ‘unusable’ footage devolves into a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of geometric abstractions whose dissonance occludes verisimilar access to the war’s depiction. In so doing, her footage reveals the instability colouring all representations of Vietnam (figure 3). Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide The kaleidoscopic maelstrom of Michèle Ray’s ‘unusable’ footage, in ‘Victor Charlie’, from Far from Vietnam. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide The kaleidoscopic maelstrom of Michèle Ray’s ‘unusable’ footage, in ‘Victor Charlie’, from Far from Vietnam. While the establishment media – the federal government, Hollywood and corporate journalism – strive to stamp out ambiguity and representational instability through a logic of immediacy and transparency, Marker’s montage intervenes. Newscasts, speeches, commercials and extracts from Hollywood combat films surge across Far from Vietnam’s semiotic landscape, but only as the mutilated distortion of a televisual flow quite literally short-circuited in order to make these ordinarily innocent images appear as the strange, shimmering, and insidious objects they truly are. During ‘Why We Fight’, Marker renders General Westmoreland’s projection of a carefully crafted ideological message as at best a misprision of historical reality, or at worst a self-satisfying, myopic manifestation of US righteousness. He is, in short, not the living embodiment of a man but a mechanical reproduction whose post-facto transformation reveals the fabricated nature of US ideological projection (figure 4). Evocative of the Frank Capra series of the same name, ‘Why We Fight’ also recalls the establishment media’s case for war in films like Why Vietnam? (1965) and the public faces marshalled to make it – Johnson, McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Defacing Westmoreland, he defiles them all; more than a critique of ideology, it is semioclasm with a vengeance.73 Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Chris Marker’s revealing transformation of General Westmoreland, in ‘Why We Fight’, from Far from Vietnam. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Chris Marker’s revealing transformation of General Westmoreland, in ‘Why We Fight’, from Far from Vietnam. Far from Vietnam’s dominant themes – distances between here and elsewhere, necessity of political protest, mediating effects of language and technologies of representation – unite in its penultimate sequence, ‘Vertigo’. Marker edits together footage shot by Klein of an antiwar rally organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which brought nearly half-a-million people to New York City’s streets on 15 April 1967. Demonstrators march below the National Liberation Front’s flag, carry placards printed with images of Mao and Malcolm X, and clash with their antagonistic counterparts who chant ‘Bomb Hanoi!’ Its diversity is, in one sense, a symbol of its uniformity, the polyphony of perspectives that appear to combine into a sign of struggle signifying ‘Vietnam’. Yet Marker’s editing demonstrates the very alienation at this protest’s heart, found especially in the self-righteous advocates who support ‘my country, right or wrong’. A slim-suited veteran aggressively thrusts his finger into the face of a diminutive, elderly immigrant whose perspective he abhors and whose presence in the USA offends him. A myopic mother refuses to engage in any reasoned debate with her interlocutor by repeatedly asking him ‘who’s right and who’s wrong?’ Moreover, she denies the tragedy of children killed overseas; when asked what makes her children so special, she replies, ‘I’m an individual and they’re mine!’ These two, and others like them, represent a hegemonic public whose only grievance is the possibility of an opinion that might contravene their own – that is, the counterpublic projection of a competing discourse, a ‘discourse that’, Michael Warner writes, ‘is not merely a different or alternative idiom but one that […] would be regarded with hostility or a sense of indecorousness’.74 In fact these conservative voices move through public space as the instantiations of the privatized citizen; they speak not to their antiwar adversaries but at them. Of this alienating impasse of mutually assured myopia, Arendt comments, ‘[people] have been deprived of seeing and hearing others, or being seen and being heard’.75 ‘Vietnam’ may be a common term, but it also reveals that commonality’s fractured reality. To break free of this stalemate is to intervene in the means through which its reality is apprehended. Towards the end of this sequence Klein’s camera confronts a man – a poet, in fact, planted there by him – holding the hand of a small child on the street (figure 5). The poet lets out a series of rhythmic grunts, shrieks that slowly reveal themselves to be the elongated syllables of a terrifying term: ‘na-palm’. The intensity of his cries leads a small crowd to mass around him on the pavement; some cannot comprehend what he tries to say while those who can make out the word seem mystified by what it might mean. Sensing their confusion, the poet stops and switches to his normal speaking voice in order to explain: ‘Napalm is jellied gasoline used in Vietnam to burn up people in villages’. Marker punctuates his statement by interpolating newsreel footage of a flaming body flailing in its death throes as the poet asks his audience to imagine what it could do to them (figure 6). The intervention of an unknown, outside element to foment a disturbance; emphasis on the materiality of speech, its stuttering towards the creation of something sensible; and the solicitation of the imagination to grasp terror elsewhere – these break the deadlock of ideological sloganeering by addressing audiences with the brute, denotative reality of something unspeakable. The effect does not so much ‘bring the war home’ (a slogan that would gain increased prominence in the near future), as demonstrate that it was always and already a US export abroad, much like the wealth of materiel loaded and unloaded by the Seventh Fleet in the Tonkin Gulf that opens and closes the film. Figs 5–6. View largeDownload slide The poet’s shrieks and grunts are revealed to be forming the word ‘napalm’, as footage of a burning body is introduced, in ‘Vertigo’, from Far from Vietnam. Figs 5–6. View largeDownload slide The poet’s shrieks and grunts are revealed to be forming the word ‘napalm’, as footage of a burning body is introduced, in ‘Vertigo’, from Far from Vietnam. ‘Vertigo’ culminates with an appropriately dizzying montage depicting US culture as the imbrication of militarism, consumerism and mass mediated vision. Children and teenagers play ‘Vietnam’ by pretend raping, beating, torturing and murdering one another in parks suggestively spray-painted with graffiti that links ‘Mickey Mouse’ with ‘God’ and ‘War’; throngs of passers-by purchase newspapers (‘lies’); distorted footage appropriated from television – not only Westmoreland’s aforementioned grandstanding but also clips from Hollywood combat films, Westerns and commercials – rapidly unspools as an impenetrable miasma of electronic noise; magazine advertisements for Band-Aids and Polaroid cameras are détourned into photo-montages that include images of war in inappropriate contexts. In this social compact linking consumerism, militarism and technologies of vision, the Polaroid advertisement speaks loudest. ‘Ready, Aim, Press the Button … and sixty seconds later, it’s like opening a present’, it proclaims. The ‘present’ is revealed as a bombed-out village, slowly coming to sight on a piece of plastic (figure 7). As Marker draws this sequence to a close, air-raid sirens and radio announcements blare over the soundtrack while Klein captures indices of Americana. His camera records the American flag’s reflection in the window of a Time Square souvenir shop, shifts focus to capture a postcard of the Statue of Liberty behind the glass, and then reframes to discover another featuring President Johnson’s official portrait (figure 8). Laden with irony and contrived, it turns the administration’s iconographic and discursive energy back on itself, for the machine of publicity that seeks to galvanize its citizens to support a war based on lies through the very image of its President finds its negation there as well. Figs 7–8. View largeDownload slide The ‘present’ from Polaroid is revealed as a bombed-out village, and the camera focuses on a postcard of President Johnson, in ‘Vertigo’, from Far from Vietnam. Figs 7–8. View largeDownload slide The ‘present’ from Polaroid is revealed as a bombed-out village, and the camera focuses on a postcard of President Johnson, in ‘Vertigo’, from Far from Vietnam. Far from Vietnam concludes by juxtaposing footage of Vietnamese peasants roaming the remnants of their ruined village with pedestrians on New York City’s crowded streets (figures 9 and 10). In each case the focal length of the lens has been reduced to collapse space and flatten the image, such that the movement of bodies within the frame creates morphological resonances across the two, alike in their compositional features yet utterly distinct in their iconographic specificity. Here the cut that mediates between these two spaces of social and political reality, indeed inequity, signals their essential yet unmistakable (dis)association. ‘In a few minutes, this film is going to end. You are going to leave this room and, for most of you, go out into a world without war’, begins the voiceover narration, which addresses itself directly to the audience with the second-person plural – vous. ‘That is our world too and we know how this world can screen us from certain realities’, he continues by way of shift to the first-person plural – nous – an ambiguously articulated subject position that speaks simultaneously for the filmmakers and for the audience that Far from Vietnam has attempted to will into existence. We are far from Vietnam, and the Vietnam of our emotions and of our indignation is sometimes as far from the real Vietnam as would be indifference to it. We live in a society which has highly developed the art of hiding from itself its own ends, its own vertigo, and above all its own violence. Figs 9–10. View largeDownload slide Images of Vietnamese peasants are juxtaposed with pedestrians on the streets of New York, in Far from Vietnam. Figs 9–10. View largeDownload slide Images of Vietnamese peasants are juxtaposed with pedestrians on the streets of New York, in Far from Vietnam. Fanon bemoaned ‘a virtual delirium where intellectual thought turns into agony’ as the hallmark of Europe’s colonial enterprise and wilful self-deceit. Far from Vietnam’s ultimately ambivalent, indeed paralytic, solidarity can only partially invert the ‘agony’ of reality into the ‘delirium’ of emancipation, can only partially unmask the violence of desire and attendant loss of the real. But the cut that signals the gulf separating here from elsewhere also projects the spectator into the vertiginous space of the radical imaginary. The intersubjective exchanges that characterize collective experience allow us to see that ‘Vietnam’ was, and continues to be, always and already inside of us. Footnotes 1 Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, ‘Vietnam’s unhealed wounds’, The New York Times, 29 May 2017, p. A21 (my emphasis). 2 Fred Turner, Echoes of Combat: Trauma, Memory, and the Vietnam War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 11. 3 Sylvia Shin Huey Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 2. 4 Ibid., p. 3. 5 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 13. 6 Ibid. 7 On the addition of sounds to mostly silent footage, see David Kamp, ‘Why The Vietnam War is Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s most ambitious project yet’, Vanity Fair, 12 July 2017, <https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/the-vietnam-war-ken-burns-lynn-novicks-documentary> accessed 28 November 2018. 8 Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic (London: BFI Publishing, 1992), pp. 39–40. 9 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 41–42. 10 Ibid., p. 150. 11 Kamp, ‘Why The Vietnam War’. 12 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 151. 13 My discussion of Far from Vietnam is drawn, in part, from new primary research I conducted at SOFRACIMA in Paris. All translations of primary documents are mine unless otherwise noted. Additional, invaluable secondary sources on Far from Vietnam’s production, distribution and reception include Laurent Véray, Loin du Vietnam (Paris: Editions Paris expérimental, 2004); Ian Mundell, ‘Far from Vietnam > < Inside Vietnam: the genesis of Loin du Vietnam ’, European Foundation Joris Ivens, no. 9 (2003), pp. 25–28; Thomas Waugh, ‘Loin du Vietnam (1967), Joris Ivens and Left Bank documentary’, Jump Cut, no. 53 (2011). 14 The politicization of French film culture, though not exclusive to the events of May–June 1968, was so animated by those months that they dominate the most salient works on the topic. The foundational English-language history on the subject remains Sylvia Harvey, May ’68 and Film Culture (London: BFI Publishing, 1980). The authoritative account in French is Sébastian Layerle, Caméras en lutte en Mai 68 (Paris: Nouveau monde editions, 2008). For a more recent English-language evaluation of post-May–June political cinematic praxis, see Paul Douglas Grant, Cinéma Militant: Political Filmmaking and May (New York, NY: Wallflower Press, 2016). Though often misidentified as a SLON production, Far from Vietnam precipitated that group’s formation, as Marker’s close collaborator Inger Servolin attests. See Bamchade Pourvali, ‘Quand la collectif prend forme, entretien avec Inger Servolin’, Vertigo, no. 46 (2013/12), p. 75, and Véray, Loin du Vietnam, p. 26. 15 The paucity of critical analysis in English-language literature devoted to Far from Vietnam’s contributing filmmakers is notable. For instance, Godard’s English-language biographers limit their discussion of his involvement to a few short paragraphs. See Colin MacCabe, Godard: Portrait of an Artist at Seventy (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003), pp. 181–82, and Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2008), pp. 311–12. Antoine de Baecque, by contrast, provides readers with insights into the production and reception of Godard’s participation though understandably neglects the film as a whole, in his Godard, biographie (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2010), pp. 360–64. A similar scarcity characterizes work on Chris Marker. See, for instance, Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), pp. 113–14; Nora Alter, Chris Marker (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 73–75; Sarah Cooper, Chris Marker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 74–75. 16 Given Vietnam’s scale on the world stage, widespread and varied reactions by filmmakers were hardly surprising, so this represents a modest fraction of the hundreds of films ultimately produced. The most comprehensive filmography on the subject remains Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud (eds), From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 350–75. See also Eric Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 268–82. 17 See Andrew Sarris, ‘Far from Vietnam’, Film Culture, no. 46 (1967), p. 34; on bomb threats and the cessation of Parisian distribution, see Véray, Loin du Vietnam, p. 34; on censure of its distribution in France d’outre-mer, see Véray, Loin du Vietnam, p. 27; on its significance for Screen’s critical culture as well as political modernist aesthetics, see Stephen Heath, ‘Lessons from Brecht’, Screen, vol. 15, no. 2 (1974), pp. 103–14, and Peter Wollen, ‘Godard and counter- cinema: Vent d’est ’, in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), p. 123. 18 Fidel Castro, ‘Castro marks 8th anniversary of the revolution’, Havana Domestic Radio and Television Services, tx 2 January 1967; included in the Castro Speech Database, Latin American Network Information Center, <http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1967/19670102.html> accessed 28 November 2018. 19 Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 80. 20 Michael Goodwin and Greil Marcus, Double Feature (New York, NY: Outerbridge and Lazard, 1972), p. 12. 21 Less explicit, though no less trenchant, was Made in USA (1966), a wild riff on Hollywood that mixed a garish, ungainly colour palette, overblown wide-screen vistas and the logic of the cartoon short into a carnivalesque cornucopia of depressingly failed gags that ironically upended the pleasures of the American culture industries in order to reveal their violent, sadistic underside. 22 Susan Sontag, Styles of a Radical Will (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), pp. 211–12. 23 The impact of ‘third worldism’ on New Left politicking in the USA and France cannot be overstated. On its influence on US filmmaking, see Bill Nichols, Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1980), pp. 23–25, 257–58; Michael Renov, ‘Early newsreel: the construction of a political imaginary for the Left’, in Grant H. Kester (ed.), Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 199–214; Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism and the Making of a US Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). In France, third worldism primarily manifest as a fascination with Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. See Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, pp. 80–90; Julian Bourg, ‘The Red Guards of Paris: French student Maoism of the 1960s’, History of European Ideas, no. 31 (2005), pp. 472–490; Camille Robcis, ‘“China in our heads”, Althusser, Maoism and Structuralism’, Social Text, vol. 30, no. 1 (2012), pp. 51–69. 24 On the relationship between Hollywood and the production of consensual ideology during World War II, see Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War (New York, NY: Free Press, 1987), and Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 5–6. On the Pentagon’s public relations campaigns during the Vietnam War, see J. W. Fulbright, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (New York, NY: Liverlight, 1970). Several Hollywood stars lent their talents to government-funded documentaries, most notoriously John Wayne, whose pro- Vietnam War fantasy of US imperialist rectitude, The Green Berets (1968), was supported politically and financially by the federal government. See Leo Cawley, ‘The war about the war: Vietnam films and American myth’, in Dittmar and Michaud (eds), From Hanoi to Hollywood, p. 74. 25 On the relationship between print and broadcast journalism during the war, see Daniel C. Hallin, The ‘Uncensored War’: The Media and Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1989); Lawrence W. Lichty, ‘“Vietnam: a television history”’: media research and some comments’, in Alan Rosenthal (ed.), New Challenges to Documentary (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 495–505; Rick Berg, ‘Losing Vietnam: covering the war in the age of technology’, in Dittmar and Michaud (eds), From Hanoi to Hollywood, pp. 43–44. 26 David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 196–97. 27 Heath, ‘Lessons from Brecht’, p. 104. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 105 (italics in original). 30 Stephen Heath, ‘From Brecht to film: theses, problems (on History Lessons and Dear Summer Sister )’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 4 (1975/76), p. 39. 31 Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images-Sounds-Politics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 114–16, and Michael Witt, ‘Montage, my beautiful care, or histories of the cinematograph’, in Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds), The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), p. 45. 32 Jean-Luc Godard’s voiceover narration of ‘Camera-Eye’, his contribution to Loin du Vietnam/Far from Vietnam (1967). 33 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), p. 6. 34 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Acinema’, in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 350. 35 Ibid., pp. 350–51. 36 André Bréton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 125. 37 Witt, ‘Montage, my beautiful care’, p. 45. 38 Ibid., p. 46 (my emphasis). 39 Ibid. (emphasis in original). 40 Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the visible’, in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds), The Cinematic Apparatus (New York, NY: St Martin's Press, 1980), p. 141. 41 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 24. 42 On Jusqu’à la victoire’s production, see de Baecque, Godard, biographie, pp. 466–73. 43 Serge Daney, ‘From projector to parade’, Film Comment, vol. 37, no. 4 (2002), p. 37. 44 Godard’s voiceover narration of Ici et Ailleurs/Here and Elsewhere (1974). 45 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 179–80. 46 Ho Chi Minh, ‘Some considerations of the colonial question’, in Ho Chi Minh: Selected Works Volume I (Hanoi: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1960), pp. 13–14. 47 Ho Chi Minh, ‘Oppression hits all races’, in Ho Chi Minh: Selected Works Volume I, p. 52. 48 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1965), trans. Richard Philcox (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2004), p. 237. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., p. 237. Fanon’s account of European workers’ unwillingness – or inability – to claim solidarity with the dispossessed abroad is, in fact, not unlike Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of French working-class hostility to Algerians during their seven-year insurgency against French rule. See Lyotard, ‘Algerian contradictions exposed’, in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 204–05. 51 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 2 (my emphasis). 52 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Preface’, in Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. lvii. 53 R. Ritterbusch, ‘Entretien avec Chris Marker’, Image et Son, no. 213 (1968); reproduced in Alter, Chris Marker, pp. 136–37. 54 ‘Untitled minutes from pre-production meeting’, 28 January 1967, SOFRACIMA dossier on Far from Vietnam, Paris, France, n.p.; ‘Press release’, 19 September 1967, SOFRACIMA dossier on Far from Vietnam, Paris, France, p. 2. 55 The solidarity between the filmmakers was, in fact, short-lived, as testified by the fallout with Lelouch, always an outré figure on the fringes of the New Wave. Although he considered the film worthy enough to commit distribution resources to it from his production firm Les Films 13, a public disagreement between Ivens and Lelouch at the Paris premiere in December 1967 demonstrated his tenuous relationship to the collective. As Thomas Waugh reports, Ivens, recently returned to France having spent months in Vietnam filming The 17th Parallel, rebuked Lelouch for the pity he bestowed upon the Vietnamese, or what Godard in his monologue referred to as ‘a kind of imposing generosity’. See Waugh, The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens 1926–1989 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), p. 527. Ten years later, in an interview with Peter Lev, Lelouch claimed to ‘detest’ the film, labelling it ‘dishonest’. See Peter Lev, Claude Lelouch, Film Director (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), p. 56. 56 Although writing of a context at great remove from this – that of the constitution of Classical Hollywood Cinema during the first three decades of the twentieth century – I borrow this formulation, in part, from Miriam Hansen, who develops it out of her own extensive engagement with Alexander Kluge’s theory of political film practice and critical elaboration of the cinema’s relationship to publics and counterpublics. See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 7. See also Hansen, ‘Foreword’, in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois Public and Proletarian Sphere, trans. Peter Labayani, Jamie Owen Daniel and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. ix–xli. Devin Fore astutely links Vertov’s theory and practice with Negt and Kluge’s, in ‘The metabiotic state: Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year’, October, no. 145 (2013), p. 4. 57 Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 42, 72, 88–90 (emphasis in original). 58 ‘Projet: “Vocabulaire”’, and SOFRACIMA dossier on Far from Vietnam, Paris, France, n.p.; ‘Untitled “Glossary” for “Projet: ‘Vocabulaire’”’, SOFRACIMA dossier on Far from Vietnam, Paris, France, n.p.; reprinted in Véray, Loin du Vietnam, pp. 60–62. 59 ‘Untitled “Glossary”’. 60 ‘Untitled minutes from pre-production meeting’. 61 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 237. 62 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, pp. 32–33 (emphasis in original). 63 ‘Project: “Vocabulaire”’. 64 ‘Untitled minutes from pre-production meeting’. 65 Ibid. 66 Michael Warner, Publics and CounterPublics (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2002), pp. 11–12, 74–76. 67 Ritterbusch, ‘Entretien avec Chris Marker’; reproduced in Alter, Chris Marker, p. 138. 68 A transcript of this discussion, which included Alain Resnais, William Klein and the film editor Jacqueline Meppiel, was published as ‘Loin du Vietnam’, Cinéma 68, no. 122 (1968), pp. 36–55. 69 Ibid., p. 47. 70 Ritterbusch, ‘Entretien avec Chris Marker’, p. 138. 71 ‘Project: “Vocabulaire”’. 72 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 57–58. 73 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 9. Widely seen across the USA in a host of venues from draft boards to high schools, Why Vietnam? is generally understood to epitomize the US government’s cinematic attempt to encapsulate the reasons for US involvement in Southeast Asia. See Claudia Springer, ‘Military propaganda: Defense Department films from World War II and Vietnam’, Cultural Critique, no. 3 (1986), special issue ‘American Representations of Vietnam’, pp. 156–59, and James, Allegories of Cinema, pp. 202–03. 74 Warner, Publics and CounterPublics, p. 119. 75 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 58. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Montage/mediation/publicity: Far from Vietnam
JO - Screen
DO - 10.1093/screen/hjy059
DA - 2019-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/montage-mediation-publicity-far-from-vietnam-YmMU6Ru8a3
SP - 70
VL - 60
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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