By Hans Schoots - Many Western Europeans who were active in the Vietnam movement knew veteran
Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens's films on Vietnam and Laos, albeit
sometimes without knowing that Ivens was their director. His films were an
almost ritual part of numerous Vietnam meetings and seminars in France, Italy,
West Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. I am referring to THE THREATENING
SKY (1966), 17TH PARALLEL (1968) and the Laos film THE PEOPLE AND THEIR GUNS
(1970). For these last two documentaries, Ivens collaborated with his wife
Marceline Loridan. The couple lived in Paris and were also involved in the
collective French Vietnam film project FAR FROM VIETNAM (1967), with directors
Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Alain Resnais
and Agnes Varda among the other participants.
Ivens himself traveled Europe to accompany his films, visiting Oslo in the
north, the occupied Coca Cola factory in Rome in the south, and many places
in between. In France he belonged to the hard core of so called 'petitioneurs',
well known people like Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Jean-Paul Sartre and
Costa-Gavras, who signed political declarations on a daily basis. Signoret was present at the intimate first preview of one of Ivens's
Vietnam-films. 17TH PARALLEL belonged to the main program of the big meeting
of Intellectuals for Vietnam in Paris in March 1968 and traveled widely throughout
France. In its first week in Paris, showings in two cinema's were broken off
prematurely after bomb-warnings, presumably from the extreme right. In Italy
Ivens was an almost yearly guest of honor at the Festival dei Populi in Florence,
one of the many cultural manifestations connected with the Italian Communist
Party, where his films were shown to large audiences.
Ivens's films on Indochina were mainly shown in the film circuit that catered
to radical youth, students, activists and the labor movement. They were hardly
meant for distribution in regular movie theaters. In the meantime Ivens and
Loridan had considerable success in their efforts to find a large audience
via television. In several Western European countries one or more of their
Indochinese films were shown on TV. The same went for Eastern Europe. In Moscow
in 1968 Ivens received the Lenin Prize for his work in Vietnam. THE PEOPLE
AND THEIR GUNS, however, did not make it to the East, on account of its radicalism.
Ironically, this extremely dogmatic film, with screenwide Maoist texts between
the images, was produced with a financial contribution of three thousand dollars
by filmstar Elisabeth Taylor.
It is impossible to measure the exact influence of Ivens's documentaries.
The number of people that attended the filmshows is unknown and one can only
estimate that millions of people in several European countries must have seen
one of the films on television. It is fair to assume that the Ivens-films
made their mark on the views of a considerable number of Europeans. Especially
if one considers that Ivens and his work were very well known among leftist
opinion makers in at least France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands and
thus had an indirect influence on public opinion too.
The question I will try to answer here is what the intended message of these
films was and - taking the films themselves as the main source - how audiences
actually must have interpreted them. In an attempt to answer these questions
I will concentrate on the best-known and most important of Ivens's Indochinese
films, 17TH PARALLEL. Another possible question would concern the significance
of the films in the (esthetic) history of cinema. I will not address this
issue here, as it is not relevant to the theme of this congress.
I.
The origins of and the preparations for 17TH PARALLEL are a story in themselves.
In the spring of 1967 Joris Ivens went to Hanoi on the invitation of the North
Vietnamese government to teach at the film school there. Once in Hanoi, the
authorities asked him to make a new film on the Vietnam War. He had already
made the 30 minute short THE THREATENING SKY, and they now suggested he make
a bigger film, something like THE SPANISH EARTH, the legendary film that Ivens
had made in the thirties during the Spanish Civil War, assisted by American
writer Ernest Hemingway. To make their new film, Ivens and Loridan proposed
to go to the seventeenth parallel, the demarcation line where North and South
Vietnam were separated by a demilitarized zone (DMZ).
The story is that the North Vietnamese found this plan too dangerous at first,
but that the European guests managed to convince President Ho Chi Minh personally
over dinner. Now they needed material and a crew. The Vietnamese bought a
camera and a sound recorder from an American journalist for them, and placed
a Vietnamese crew at their disposal. The subsequent journey to the 17th parallel
was a dangerous and adventurous enterprise, with truck drives by night down
one of the heavily-bombed main supply routes to the south. The crew members
had orders to protect Ivens's life at all cost and hurled themselves on top
of him when they decided things were getting too dangerous. Ivens, 69 years
of age at the time, would throw his protectors off in anger.
To see the film 17TH PARALLEL in the right perspective, it is necessary to
look into the situation on the battlefield at that time - May and June 1967
- at the location where it was shot: the district of Vinh Linh, directly to
the north of the DMZ.
About two months earlier, at the end of February of that year, the North Vietnamese
army and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) had started
an offensive in the area to the south of the DMZ. This offensive was still
underway when Ivens and Loridan arrived on the scene, and would, with some
ups and downs, continue until late that year. American and South Vietnamese
towns and military bases like Con Thien, Camp Carroll, Khe Sanh and Dong Ha
were under almost constant attack. In these attacks both guerilla units and
well equipped ground troops were used, supported by heavy 155 and 175 mm artillery
located on the northern border of the DMZ.
The American Marine base Con Thien, opposite the Vinh Linh district where
Ivens and Loridan worked, was shelled and cut off from the outside world for
several months and could only be supplied by air. Between 5 and 14 July a
new climax was reached. Con Thien and the nearby strongpoint Gio Linh 'were
subjected to the largest communist rocket and artillery bombardment of the
war to that date'. The circumstances in Con Thien, with its soldiers living
in underground shelters, were the subject of an incisive reportage in Times
Magazine, that in a way mirrored the film that Ivens was shooting on the
other side. The guns shelling Con Thien from Vinh Linh included the latest
models that had just arrived from the Soviet Union. No wonder that, after
his return to Paris, Ivens was visited by some American representatives of
CBS, accompanied by 'a somewhat suspect' third gentleman, who offered to pay
him a lot of money for his shots of just these guns. In vain, of course.
The North Vietnamese/NLF-offensive was followed by a large-scale American/South
Vietnamese response. In the southern part of the DMZ pamphlets were dropped
from American planes summoning the population to leave. Afterwards the area
was turned into a black desert by bombing, and pacified by new American troops
that landed on the coast.
In other words: the district of Vinh Linh, where Ivens en Loridan shot 17TH
PARALLEL, was located in a combat zone, where a well-prepared North Vietnamese/NLF-offensive
had been underway for months in a way that was no longer limited to guerilla
tactics and had much in common with a regular ground war.
From this perspective, it is - to put it mildly - remarkable that the North
Vietnamese government had failed to evacuate the civilian population and was
exposing it to the large-scale American/South Vietnamese reprisals it cannot
have failed to expect. This of course fitted into the theory of people's war,
in which every civilian was forced by its own government to participate in
the fighting. In fact the theory really did not recognize 'civilian population'
as a category at all. In this particular case the population of Vinh Linh
was placed in a position in which it could not escape active participation
in the war. At the same time, propaganda aimed at Western public opinion would
stress that civilians fell victim to brutal American violence.
These were the circumstances under which the film 17TH PARALLEL was made.
It is hard to say if Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan were fully aware of
what was going on. What we can say, is that they don't seem to have asked
themselves any questions. In their book 17e Parallele. La guerre du peuple
they give a more or less accurate description of the military situation at
that moment, but without the history of the previous months and thus without
the essential fact that the district they were filming in had been turned
into a battlefield by a decision of the North Vietnamese army itself. In 17TH
PARALLEL one gets the impression of a more or less coincidental series of
battle scenes, albeit with one regularly recurring phrase: 'The Americans
destroy everything'. The bombing that the inhabitants of Vinh Linh are subject
to seems to come out of thin air.
I will now summarize the contents of 17TH PARALLEL, a film with a length
of about two hours.
In the introduction we see smoking ruins and burned earth in the DMZ. Several
Vietnamese explain why they refuse to let the Americans drive them away from
their homes in the Zone. The rice needs to be harvested, one of them says,
emphasizing the unexpectedness of what is happening.
Now follows footage of a meeting of the Party Central Committee of Vinh Linh,
held in an underground shelter. The tendency of the deliberations is that
the struggle is progressing and the rice harvest is good. All this thanks
to the farmers' cooperatives and the party, that plays a decisive role in
everything.
Images of village life then alternate with a speech by the chairwoman of the
Executive Committee of the village and the female second-in-command of the
local peoples' militia writing a letter to her next of kin about the struggle
against the Americans.
The next part shows several aspects of daily life in a largely underground
village suffering under American bombs. Life goes on in the underground shelters
and houses; between raids the villagers work the land.
Now a woman journalist from Hanoi (actually it is Xuan Phuong, Ivens's translator
and doctor) interviews the village chairman shown earlier about the situation
in the village, which counts some 4000 inhabitants. Most of the men are away
for service in the army, the village is mainly led by women.
Roughly the second half of the film gives an overview of all kinds of military
activities in defense of the Vinh Linh district: exercises by the militia,
the army firing heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns, the shooting down
of an American plane, the capture of an American pilot, cultural activities
in support of the war effort, children acting out the capture of an American
pilot… Duc, a boy of about eight or nine years old, tells the foreign
filmmakers how he gathers information south of the DMZ for the uncles
of the North Vietnamese army. After a quotation from President Ho Chi Minh
on the invincibility of the people and the reunification of Vietnam, the film
ends in a classroom where children learn how to say 'Hands up!' in case an
American bandit pilot should fall into their hands.
Throughout the film we see bombardments, or rather, we hear them on the soundtrack,
and we see the ruins, for instance in the town of Ho Xa. All this juxtaposed
with details of daily life in Vinh Linh. A remarkable fact is that most of
the people who have their say in 17TH PARALLEL are officials of the party,
the army or local government.
Summarizing the whole film, I think we may call it a strongly ideological
piece of work. The information it gives is used to paint an image of Vinh
Linh as a model society, that fits fully into the theoretical model of people's
war, as thought out in China by Mao Zedong and developed further in Vietnam
by General Vo Nguyen Giap and others. As Joris Ivens declared at the time:
someone who wants to make a film on the Vietnam war not only has to be a filmmaker,
but also has to study Vo Nguyen Giap's book People's War, People's Army.
Joris Ivens was guided by a deep belief in the revolution, and when he showed people's war in his films, it was the people's war as it should be according to his convictions, not necessarily as it was in reality. He wanted to make films 'that clearly show the invincibility of the people's war,' he said. 17TH PARALLEL is thus an illustration of the following set of beliefs:
1. The imperialists terrorize and bomb a peaceful civilian population.
2. The people resist as one man by means of people's war.
3. Society is fully politicized, the whole population is united in political
organizations.
4. The party leads everything.
5. In this way the people are invincible.
6. The struggle has a strategic political aim, which is the reunification
of Vietnam under party leadership.
In press statements and articles at the time, Ivens was quite clear about the cause he and Loridan were fighting for: 'We had to defeat our common enemy, and here [in Vietnam] they were busy defeating him'. For them, Vietnam was just one focus in a worldwide struggle for socialism and communism and against the common enemy, imperialism - primarily American imperialism.
As activist filmmakers their duty was of course to convey this message to the Western public. The seriousness with which they approached this task is clear from the detailed reports about their activities they wrote for the North Vietnamese government. For instance a piece entitled 'Report on the Work in the Area of Political Propaganda by Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan from August 1967 to March 1968 in Europe' , in which they gave an account of the articles they had published on Vietnam, the interviews and press conferences they had held, the book they had published in Paris on their work in Vietnam, and Loridan's testimony before the Russell Tribunal in Copenhagen.
II.
How did the audience interprete 17TH PARALLEL? I think the film could be
seen on two levels, both of which contained their own propaganda message.
For an attentive and susceptible audience, the message was the communist one
summarized above. I call this the 'maximum message', comprising of, so to
say, point 1 to 6. It asked for concentration during the screening of the
film and a readiness to listen seriously to the not always exciting texts
that accompanied the images. It was the message that the radical wing of the
European Vietnam movement liked to hear, as Ivens himself had noted in France.
Ivens had been living in Paris since the middle of the fifties and although
he continued to more or less support the French Communist Party (PCF) until
about 1970, he rejected the PCF slogan 'Peace in Vietnam' as early as the
mid-sixties and took sides with the radical student movement, organized in
the Union Nationale des Etudiants de France (UNEF), who propagated 'Victory
in people's war'. As French activist and Ivens-collaborator Robert Destanque
once said of the director's relationship to French radical students: 'Joris
Ivens sings the song of communism the way the youngsters like to hear it'.
However, the bigger audience was the television audience. Here, most of the
viewers must have seen the film on the other level I referred to. I call this
the 'minimum message'. Apart from the film itself I have looked into a large
number of reviews of 17TH PARALLEL that appeared in newspapers and magazines
in several European countries. Even in moderate publications, the reactions
were generally favorable. This seems surprising, considering the fact that
most of the reviewers certainly did not share the ideological views that were
expressed in the film. Most of the reviewers evaded the ideological side of
the matter. I think the reviewer of the Dutch daily De Tijd summoned
the feeling of most of his colleagues very well: 'Even if the opinions and
intentions of Ivens are not ours, we can accept his film as a warning that
things [in Vietnam] cannot go on like this.'
Of course in the famous year 1968, when the film came out, uneasiness over
the Vietnam war was already widespread, and the images suggesting an attack
on a civilian population out of thin air, certainly had more impact on a general
television audience than the rather ponderous texts on how society should
be organised. An effect that I believe was reinforced by the length of almost
two hours, the slow pace and sections that several reviewers understandably
considered dull. Unintended, it all stimulated the television audience to looking with
only half an eye. And obviously, the image of a hard-working peaceful population,
suffering under American bombs, would stay in their minds that way. In other
words, the 'minimum message', consisting of point 1 only.
Thus, while Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan made a film in support of the
party and people's war, I think the majority of its audience took 17TH PARALLEL
for a call for 'Peace in Vietnam!'
© Hans Schoots. Talk at the Congress 'Europe and
the Vietnam War' at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, december 2000. Notes
available at request.
