The Emile de Antonio film series continues at the Harvard Film Archive. I missed Underground, which I desperately wanted to see after seeing it excerpted in the recent Weather Underground. But I did make it In the Year of the Pig and am quite glad I did. Simply put, it’s an incredible documentary, and the sort of work that gives leftist propaganda a good name.
Like Point of Order, Year of the Pig is a compilation film, comprising mostly news and documentary footage of the war, whether shot in the battlefield, the streets of Siagon or at American press conferences and political rallies. It is edited together without voiceover and with minimal titles identifying public officials and speakers. But unlike Point of Order, it also intersperses interviews with various “experts” throughout; David Halberstam, a professor of Buddhism, a French journalist, a historian, and an ex-CIA officer all provide counterpoint to the more official explanations of the war from Lyndon Johnson or Robert McNamara. In this juxtaposition, a thesis emerges: the war is seen by the Vietnamese people as one of national liberation, but the United States sees it only as a pawn in the international Cold War, and its misreading leads it into misstep after misstep of faux-democracy promotion and military costs. By now, this view has become, if not consensus, than at least widespread enough to seem a mainstream interpretation. But even in 1968, this involved challenging an entrenched postwar liberal consensus on American foreign policy.
Furthermore, there were surreal parallels between the war and the current debacle in Iraq: the Chalabi-like charlatan figure of Diem, the elections clung to for legimitacy but which couldn’t take place in 2/3 of the country for security reasons, the perverse optimism of administration spokesmen.
If Iraq keeps inviting Vietnam analogies, a comparison of this film with Michael Moore, particularly the Moore of Fahrenheit 9/11, is hard not to make. Both rely on irony and juxtaposition, undercutting the bloated rhetoric of official statements and letting public figures hang themselves with their own rope. Both filmmakers are sometimes most powerful in their minor observations. I’m still moved by the inclusion of footage of colonists in white suits, sitting at a cafĂ(c) and shooing off begging Vietnamese rickshaw operators; it’s a familiar and desensatized scenario made real by the context in the film. Others since may have done a similar thing, but de Antonio discovered how to re-signify actuality footage from newsreel and television B-roll. More than anyone else, de Antonio shifted documentary away from observation of reality to collage of mass-mediated imagery. It’s possible to imagine Michael Moore treating de Antonio as a filmmaking model. Or maybe not: one feels that even if de Antonio hadn’t created the compilation documentary, it would be necessary to invent it, so tied into our historical moment it is. As Thomas Waugh remarks of Point of Order in his dated but still brilliant essay on de Antonio,
If cinema has long had a clearly articulated tradition of auto-critique, of metacinema, ranging from MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA to LE GAI SAVOIR, POINT OF ORDER signified the coming of age of television with the now richly demonstrated possibility of the mode of meta-video. At the same time, POINT OF ORDER was also an early revelation of video’s crucial potential as a tool of primary historical investigation. Period video footage now becomes an audiovisual historical record with the unassailable authority formerly held only by vintage newsreels…
This is why I feel that Slate’s David Greenberg is unfair in claiming that de Antonio is straitjacketed by his politics, whereas the cinema verite crowd made transcendent films. De Antonio has missed the canon only to the extent that his films just haven’t been distributed. If anything, they’re limited by the flatness of the postmodern media archive within which they work. His films aren’t providing a humanistic portrait of some small segment of American life, they’re sifting through the hours of media we’re bombarded with and trying to make sense, even art, from it. In this sense de Antonio seems a forebearer of postmodern documentarists like Errol Morris and Michael Moore.
But one crucial difference separates de Antonio and Moore: the former eschews voiceover narration. The difference is crucial to the tone and politics of the film. Whereas Moore spells out many of his jokes, de Antonio tries to set up irony that may click or not. Whereas Moore tries to weave conspiracy out of flimsy evidence, de Antonio forces the viewer to engage with the filmed and televisual document. As de Antonio wrote of In the Year of the Pig
…I have been a teacher. My work is didactic… I only want to think that this film on Vietnam is more complicated, has more levels of meaning than there are in a slogan or in a purely didactic message. I don’t believe that such a message has any more sense than to shout in the street, ‘Down with war!’ If you do so, that doesn’t mean anything. The goal of a truly didactic work is to go beyond that and to suggest the ‘why.’ I like to describe my own feelings as democratic with a small ‘d,’ which means that if you don’t want to teach things to people but to reveal things to them, you will permit them then to arrive at the same conclusion as yourself. That’s a democratic didacticism…
Which is not to say that Year of the Pig doesn’t structure spectatorial experience of the argument. I think a closer examination would reveal that a hierarchy of truth does structure the film, particularly in its use of interviews to present the film’s thesis. For not only do the interviewees present a view of Vietnam as nationalist revolution, their words become disembodied from their image and serve as the soundtrack to give meaning to the actuality footage that follows. Waugh writes that ” the voice over, banished by cinema veritĂ(c) as a vestige of a tyrannical past is reclaimed and liberated. No longer the voice over of TWENTIETH CENTURY and THE MARCH OF TIME, it is the voice of a witness participating in a discourse extracting the meaning hidden by the image…”
But what de Antonio does, and what other do after him, is to smuggle in the voiceover by other means. If anything is tyrannical in documentary, it’s the reliance on a disembodied soundtrack to give meaning to actuality footage (which supposedly carries the claim to historical truth, but at closer look really tells us next to nothing). Year of the Pig is more nuanced than a film like Union Maids which gets around the voiceover narration prohibition by finding testimony which conveniently fits the filmmakers own narrational goals. (Noel King’s essay along these lines [Screen 22.2] is one of the most criminally overlooked in documentary studies, in my view). But neither is it as subversive as Trinh Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam in attacking this sound-image hierarchy head-on.
Maybe, though, we can only expect a film to be so prescient and no more.
Harvard Film Archive will be screening a few more de Antonio films this weekend, including Millhouse and Painters Painting.
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