THE Vietnam War Discard a shadow in one of the most fertile periods of American cinema, and has led filmmakers for the half century since he had been with his complicated heritage.
These 10 films, assembled to mark the 50th anniversary of The fall of Saigongo from the indelible anti-war classics to the Vietnamese portraits of the Resistance, capturing the immensity of the trauma still reverberal of the war.
“The Big Shave” (1967)
The war was more than a decade and about eight years of his conclusion when a 25 -year -old Martin Scorsese do This six -minute short film. In this document, a man simply cunters in front of a sink and a mirror. After a few knicks and costs, he does not stop, continuing until his face is a bloody mess – a neat but horrible metaphor of Vietnam.
Martin Scorsese poses for the media during a photo call from the international “Berlinale” film festival, in Berlin, February 20, 2024. (Photo AP / Markus Schreiber, file)
“The little girl of Hanoi” (1974)
A young girl (Lan Hương) is looking for her family in the bombed ruins of Hanoi in the monument of Hải Ninh Vietnamese cinema. It is a work of propaganda in wartime (it starts with the intro: “Honoring the heroes of Hanoi who defeated the American imperialist bombing raid B-52”) but also of painful humanity. Against the bombings of December 1972 on Hanoi, “The Little Girl of Hanoi” is the cinema produced in the middle of the war.
“Hearts and Minds” (1974)
The controversy welcomed the historic documentary of Peter Davis around his release, but time has only proven how so it was sober. Newsreel clips and home interviews are contrasted with horrors on the ground in Vietnam in this penetrating examination of the Gulf between American politics and Vietnamese reality. Its title comes from the line of President Lyndon B. Johnson, said during the climbing of war, that “the ultimate victory will depend on the heart and the spirit of the people who really live there”.
“The Deer Hunter” (1979)
In this file photo of October 28, 2008, the director Michael Cimino arrives at the third edition of the Rome Film Festival, in Rome. (AP photo / Andrew Medichini, file)
It is undoubtedly the pre -eminent American film on the Vietnam War. No other film no longer classifies the American evolution of innocence to disillusionment that the devastating epic of Michael Cimino about the friends of the working class (Robert de Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage) of a city of Pennsylvania steel written in the war. The last singing scene of “God wound America”, after their life has changed irrevocably, remains a powerfully poignant punch.
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
Director Francis Ford Coppola poses for photographers during the photo call for the film “Megalopolis” at 77th International Film Festival, Cannes, Southern France, May 17, 2024. (Photo of Scott a Garfitt / Invise / AP, file)
Francis Ford Coppola has bet everything he had on his masterpiece – and almost lost it. “Apocalypse now” What transposes the “heart of darkness” of Joseph Conrad to the Vietnam War, is an epic of madness which valves on the edge of hallucination. Shot in the Philippines and more faithful to Conrad than in Vietnam, “Apocalypse Now” does not so much light up the chaos and the moral confusion of the war which raises it to the grandiose nightmare.
“Plato” (1986)
Oliver Stone Pose for portrait photographs for the film `JFK revisited: through the look glass ”, at 74th International Film Festival, Cannes, Southern France, July 11, 2021. (Photo by Vianney Le Caer / Invision / AP, File)
The 1980s saw a wave of Hollywood films on Vietnam, including “First Blood”, “Hamburger Hill”, “Good Morning Vietnam”, “Casualties of War” and “Born on July 4”. The most important among them is the best “peloton” of the best image of the Oscars, which Stone Written on the basis of his own experiences as a center in Vietnam. Widely acclaimed for its realism, Stone’s film remains among the most lively and visceral dramatizations of war.
“Full Metal Jacket” (1987)
Stanley Kubrick should be considered more often as the supreme anti-war filmmaker. His devastating film of the First World War “Paths of Glory” and the subversive satire “Dr Strangelove or: how I learned to stop worrying and like the bomb” are full classics. “Full Metal Jacket” carries these films of dehumanization of these films in an even brutal place. Splay between the tyranny of Boot-Camp tearing the drill instructor from R. Lee Ermey and the urban violence of The 1968 TET offensive“Full Metal Jacket” merges the two ends of the war machine.
“Little Dieter needs to fly” (1997)
Werner Herzog arrives at Governors Awards on November 12, 2016 in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP, File)
How the former soldiers lived with their experience in Vietnam was the subject of many beautiful films, from “Coming Home” by Hal Ashby (1978) to Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” (2020). In Werner Herzog’s non-fiction jewel, he profiles the amazing history of the German-American pilot Dieter Dengler. In the film, which Herzog later redid as “Rescue Dawn” of 2007 with Christian Bale, says Dengler – and sometimes reconstitutes – his experience being killed on Laos, being captured and tortured and then escaped in the jungle.
“The fog of war” (2003)
The filmmaker Errol Morris poses for a portrait to promote his film, “The Pigeon Tunnel” a documentary on John Le Carré, during the Toronto International Film Festival, on September 12, 2023, in Toronto. (Photo by Joel C Ryan / Invision / AP, File)
Shortly after the start of the century, the former American defense secretary and architect of the Vietnam War, Robert S. McNamara, sat for interviews with a documentary maker Errol Morris. The result is a frightening reflection on the thought that has led to one of the greatest American follies. It is not a mea culpa but a more thorny and more disturbing rumination on the way in which rationalized ideology can lead to the death of millions – and still does not give excuses. McNamara lessons, n ° 1 is “sympathize with the enemy”.
“The Post” (2017)
Director Steven Spielberg poses for photographers when he arrived during the premiere of the film “The Post” in London, January 10, 2018. (Photo by Joel C Ryan / Invision / AP, File)
Moving film by Steven Spielberg Dramatized the 1971 publication of the Washington Post of Pentagon papersA collection of classified documents which made the chronicle of the participation of 20 years in America in Southeast Asia. While the government analyst Daniel Ellsberg (A moving participant in “Hearts and Minds”) could be considered the hero of this story, “The Post” focuses on the publisher of Washington Post Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) and the role of war of the fourth domain.
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For more coverage of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, visit https://apnews.com/hub/vietnam-war.
