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Charlotte y Peter Fiell son dos autoridades en historia, teoría y crítica del diseño y han escrito más de sesenta libros sobre la materia, muchos de los cuales se han convertido en éxitos de ventas. También han impartido conferencias y cursos como profesores invitados, han comisariado exposiciones y asesorado a fabricantes, museos, salas de subastas y grandes coleccionistas privados de todo el mundo. Los Fiell han escrito numerosos libros para TASCHEN, entre los que se incluyen 1000 Chairs, Diseño del siglo XX, El diseño industrial de la A a la Z, Scandinavian Design y Diseño del siglo XXI.

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Projecting History

German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967-2000By Nora M. Alter

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2002 Nora M. Alter
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0472098128
CHAPTER 1 - Excessive Requisites: Vietnam through the East German Lens
Until the day I emigrated to North Vietnam I didnt let the film camera out of my hand. It was my weapon, just as once the rifle had been.
To Cuong, Baut die Strassen zum vorwarts schreiten
The body is a battle site of contending values and their representation. Images of the stable, fixed, and secure serve as a kind of talisman, warding off the mutable, vulnerable and malleable qualities of the body. A vast repertoire of popular myths and heroes complements the stereotypes and biases . . . to form a cultural diorama in the social imaginary.
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality
A reciprocal play of different points of view and ones own, creative intent and communicative result.
Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, Dokument und Kunst
I. Historical Background
The Vietnam War provoked an international response among leftist cultural workers throughout the world, including Europe. A dominant target of national and international student protests, the war was the direct focus of playwrights writing in West Germany, such as Peter Weiss, Rolf Hochhuth, and Gunther Grass. Like their colleagues in Great Britain, France, and Italy (and to a remarkably greater extent than those in the United States), these German writers used their stage not only as a political call to arms in solidarity with the North Vietnamese but also as a more or less disguised forum to speak of their own nations problems, past and present, including the Third Reich and its legacy. This aspect of Vietnam protest literature took many forms. Austrian Marxist poet Erich Fried, living in exile in England and broadcasting for the BBC to East Germany, devoted a collection of verse, und Vietnam und (1966), to the antiwar movement, arguing that there are in fact many Vietnams in history and around the world. There were direct and indirect allusions to Vietnam in numerous films and novels of the period. And of course, as chapter 2 will demonstrate, protest against the war initially served to coalesce student activists who later became members of the Red Army Faction. What is far less well known, however, is the impact of the Vietnam War on the former East bloc, including film production in the German Democratic Republic.
Fidel Castro proclaimed 1967 as the global Year of Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a main theme of that years Leipzig Documentary Film Festival and remained a topic of interest into the 1970s. In 1967 two groups of European filmmakers petitioned to travel to North Vietnam. Hanoi denied the first request, by Swiss French avant-garde director Jean-Luc Godard; this refusal resulted in his contribution to Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967), a celebrated collaborative film conceived and organized by Chris Marker. Its title alludes to the fact that the Western filmmakers (with the exception of Dutch documentarist Joris Ivens) were unable to visit the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), so they filmed various forms of reaction to the war from afar. They used documentary footage of U.S. warships off the coast of Vietnam as well as demonstrations and interviews in the United States and France. Godard also employed self-consciously fictive recreations to bring the war home or, as he put it, to create Vietnam in ourselves.
Hanoi did grant visas, however, to a second European film team (Ivens had filmed alone), the first foreign one to be allowed into the DRV: the leading East German production collective, Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, commonly known as H&S. A year earlier, they had made 400 cm3 (1966), a short film about GDR blood donations for the North Vietnamese. The acclaim it received from the DRV delegation at Leipzig emboldened H&S to make their petition. The result was a series of documentaries about Vietnam that were shot, edited, and shown from 1967 to 1978that is, until after the war, when H&S returned for a second visit. In total, H&S produced fourteen films related to the Vietnam War and its legacy. Filmed to a large extent on location, this series of documentaries employed a variety of techniques more or less conventional to the genre: interviews, found archival footage interspliced with fictional recreations, and so on. These 35mm films varied in length from four to ninety minutes: many were in black and white, some were in both black and white and color, and a few were in color only. Some are available in several language versions, including English. At the time of their release on East German television, in movie houses (preceding feature films), and at international film festivals around the world where they were uncensored, these films received considerable national and international recognition, especially in the socialist bloc but also in countries not directly involved in the conflict in Southeast Asia or with officially neutral positions (particularly Scandinavia).
The H&S films can be divided into three (not quite chronological) categories. The first is films made during the war but not on location in Vietnam. These works are openly agitative, calling on the viewers to commit themselves to the cause of the war in whatever way possible. These films include 400 cm3 (1966), 100 (100 Pushups, 1971), and Remington Cal. 12 (1972). The second group consists of interview or single-person films, including Der Zeuge (The Witness, 1967), a studio conversation in Leipzig with Vu Nam, filmmaker of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front; and the four-part, on-location series Piloten im Pyjama (Pilots in Pyjamas, 1968); Yes, Sir; Hilton Hanoi; The Job; and Die Donnergotter (The Thunder Gods), a psychological portrait and investigation of the lives, backgrounds, and psychological and ideological makeup of downed U.S. pilots in prison in Hanoi. The third category includes on-location films made in the immediate aftermath of the war, alluding to the rebuilding process of postwar Vietnam on all levelscultural, intellectual, political, and economic. The films in this group are Die Teufelsinsel (Devils Island, 1976); Eintritt kostenlos (Free Admission, 1976); Der erste Reis danach (The First Rice Thereafter, 1977); Ich bereue aufrichtig (Im Truly Sorry, 1977); Die eiserne Festung (The Iron Fortress, 1977); and Am Wassergraben (At the Water Trench/Grave, 1978).
To appreciate fairly H&Ss work, it is helpful to juxtapose three quotations that together produce a matrix of problems, each condensing one focal point of the films. To Cuong articulates in the 1970s what architect and cultural theoretician Paul Virilio codified as theory in the 1980s: the ancient notion of the eyes function being the function of a weapon has developed into a situation in which a war of pictures and sounds is replacing the war of objects (projectiles and missiles). In 1976 an East German journal of media studies, Film und Fernsehen (Film and Television), cited To Cuong as recalling, Until the day I emigrated to North Vietnam I didnt let the film camera out of my hand. It was my weapon, just as once the rifle had been. More generally, anti-imperialist filmmakers were asked to practice solidarity with their weapon: camera. Both To Cuong and Virilio thus make an equation at least as old as the American Civil War between the shooting of weapons and the shooting of pictures. What remains is a reciprocal relationship between war and the peculiar part fiction, part fact type of filmmaking known as documentary. The boundaries between the two types of shooting is further blurred when war becomes documentary and documentary becomes war.
The second epigraph problematizes the physical appearance of the human body in the documentary film. In Representing Reality (1993), Nichols argues, The body is a battle site of contending values and their representation. Images of the stable, fixed, and secure serve as a kind of talisman, warding off the mutable, vulnerable and malleable qualities of the body. A vast repertoire of popular myths and heroes complements the stereotypes and biases . . . to form a cultural diorama in the social imaginary. This thesis is part of a widespread concern in cultural studies with the body that has developed out the work of historical materialists as well as of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Judith Butler, among others. At stake for Nichols is what he calls raising political consciousness through a historical dialectic. He goes on to propose that in the documentary film, the body of the subject represents a surplus of meanings (supplemental magnitude) in excess of those immediately intended by the referential film frame. In other words, the phenomenological effect of the human body on the viewer will generate a series of unpredictable and uncontrollable chains of references never anticipated during the making of a film. Nichols argues that the confrontation with the re/presented human body on film raises political consciousness by addressing the contradiction between individual consciousness and a historical dialectic. It attends to those magnitudes that implant themselves in the person, the body, and its consciousness, and yet exceed it. Some of these magnitudes arise due to the race, class, gender, and cultural or national composition of the filmed subject. But just as this physical excess is not necessarily intentional on the part of the filmmaker, so also I would suggest that the viewer is not necessarily able to convert it into meaning or raise it to consciousnesspolitical or otherat least not in the immediate act of direct viewing. But this excess or magnitude of meaning exists nonetheless and will be fundamental to my analysis of H&Ss Vietnam films.
I will focus on the excessive and specifically politicized bodies in H&Ss films, particularly as these bodies bear on the question of precisely whose consciousness is raised when it cannot, by the definition of excess, be that of the filmmakers themselves. Moreover, the bodies here in dispute are not only humanthat is, U.S. air pirates, Vietnamese on both sides of the war, and H&S themselvesbut also material objects. In other words, I want to extend Nicholss historical dialectical thesis about the excessive and disruptive presence of bodies in documentary to include what might be called H&Ss dialectical materialist way of filming humans alongside inanimate objectswhat they call Requisiten. This emphasis on the material object recalls the German theatrical tradition best exemplified by Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, where Requisiten means requisites or indispensable objects but also stage devices or properties. In contrast to this strategy of consigning to objects an active role in the production of meaning, I suggest that Nicholss almost exclusive focus on human bodies to illustrate his theory of magnitude may unintentionally reinforce certain tendencies of what used to be called bourgeois humanismor, in cinematic terms, the tendency to reduce complex historical events to specific human bodies whereby film becomes a machine for the production of the couple and abandons efforts to represent larger collectives and structures (in the manner, say, of Eisenstein in October or Battleship Potemkin).
The third quotation is H&Ss definition of their documentary work: A reciprocal play of different points of view and ones own, creative intent and communicative result. It leads to the problematic of self-identity that emergesnot necessarily as intendedin the representation of bodies and cultures by another: in this case, North Americans and Vietnamese viewed through the East German lens. It remains to be seen how this reciprocity works itself out in terms of filming and revisioning Vietnam as a complex allegorynot necessarily conscious and necessarily incompletefor the history and problems of postwar East German society in particular and capitalist society in general. Thus, at this level of complexity, documentary film brings foreign wars and other foreign events uncannily close to home.
II. Vietnam in/as Film
A renewed look at foreign representations of the Vietnam Warincluding those of H&S20is warranted because, in its multiple representations and subsequent critical appraisals, the Vietnam War is still too often viewed as an exclusively American affair. Most treatments of the war in Southeast Asia begin and end with American occupationfrom the presence of advisers in the 1950s to the final troop withdrawal and notorious airlift out of Saigon in April 1975. With the exception of the tenacious POW/MIA lobby, life in Nam ceased for the American public on that day. Reunified Vietnam sank back into obscurity, leaving a legacy of more or less repressed and suppressed materials to be played and replayed, worked through and acted out, over the next decades. It is as if Vietnam had no history from a Western perspective before the American occupation and none thereafter. In the words of Vietnamese-born, French-educated, American-based filmmaker and theoretician Trinh T. Minh-ha, For general Western spectatorship, Vietnam does not exist outside the war. And she no longer exists since the war has ended, except as a name, an exemplary model of revolution, or a nostalgic cult object for those who, while admiring unconditionally the revolution, do not seem to take any genuine, sustained interest in the troubled reality of Vietnam in her social and cultural autonomy. Nonethelessas demonstrated by the heated reaction to Robert S. McNamaras apologia for the warwhile Vietnam, like any other event, is coopted by the postmodern society of the spectacle, it still retains some power to exceed absolute commodification for some Americans, retaining at least some of its unresolved mystique.
Though far removed geographically and culturally from the Western world, Vietnam was at the time of the war thrust into the center of global attention, becoming a triggering sign with multiple meanings in virtually all political and cultural discourses. Yet the overall concern of North American and Hollywood cultural production concerning Vietnam has been the impact of the war on American society in general and the body of Vietnam veterans in particular. Cultural works or scholarly studies from the United States rarely focus on more broadly defined non-American representations of the war, let alone Vietnamese representations, even when Vietnam held the keen interest of nations throughout the world and was in the forefront of political debates. The American avoidance of non-U.S. material manifests itself not only on the level of cultural production but also on the level of intellectual analysis. Most English-language articles on documentary films about the Vietnam War focus exclusively on American documentaries. If such foreign films as Pierre Schoendorffers The Anderson Platoon (1966) are mentioned, it is only in passing and without regard to their unique perspective: in the case of Schoendorffer, the viewpoint is that of a French infantryman who was stationed in Vietnam during Dien Bien Phu. I went back to discover the Vietnam I had left thirteen years ago with the French Army, Schoendorffers voice-over intones, but except for a few poignant scenes, I discovered above all America. Foreign documentaries about the war are commonly delegated to endnotes or are dismissed as propaganda, even while it is recognized that all documentary images are to some extent propagandistic or can be read that way.
In Eyewitness: Documentary Styles in the American Representations of Vietnam, John Carlos Rowe remarks that Emilio de Antonios In the Year of the Pig (1969) is exceptional when compared to more mythic American documentaries, such as Eugene Joness early A Face of War (1968) or Peter Daviss later Hearts and Minds (197475), in managing to overcome the tendency of viewers to transform the documentarys politics into such mythic propaganda. But, as Michael Renov has noted in Imaging the Other, even In the Year of the Pig remains more about the United States than about Vietnam, with the latter depicted only to be rendered domesticated, made familiar. Renov continues,

The nativist character of In the Year of the Pig results in part from its attention to American diplomats, journalists, and military men whose testimony slowly, meticulously builds a mosaic and in so doing charts one nations collision course with a fateful intervention. The film is conspicuously American in another way as well: it is one part the rationalist discourse of a philosopher trained in the American, analytical tradition (de Antonio did indeed teach philosophy), one part the creative tapestry of a New Yorkbased artist influenced by his contemporaries, the Abstract Expressionists. In this instance, the Other is a topos defined less by Vietnamese geography or custom (though these concerns are addressed in numerous interviews) than by the outer limits of the American imperial mind projected abroad with fateful consequence.

It is important, therefore, to turn to documentary filmmakers trained in a radically different philosophical tradition (historical and dialectical materialism), with a more explicit political commitment (East German communism), and an aesthetics derived not from modernism but from (socialist) realism, to yield an alternativeanti-imperialist but no less fatefulway of defining the Vietnamese Other. In his discussion of In the Year of the Pig, Rowe mentions in passing that de Antonio relies on U.S. censorship of news footage taken by the North Vietnamese (or in some cases the East Germans), and this footage edited into his documentary thus appears as utterly new to his American audience. According to Rowe,

It is a documentary that tries to make the American audience see with the eyes of the North Vietnamese, and it is thus far more effective in terms of questioning not only our myths about ourselves but also many of our Orientalist myths about the Vietnamese. The risk of such documentary filmmaking is obvious. Before In the Year of the Pig was screened in one Texas theater during the war, the screen was splashed with red paint, and demonstrators at many other theaters protested such communist propaganda.

It is imperative to rescue Rowes nameless East German producers and their potentially disruptive images from parenthetical obscurity. To do so properly requires problematizing, if not rejecting outright, the explanatory power of the overused term propagandawhich is part of the prison house of language (Fredric Jameson via Nietzsche) and almost always conceals more than it reveals. At the same time, documentary should not be valorized as necessarily more true than feature films or any other genre, precisely because, in Nicholss terms, documentary is a fiction (un)like any other.
III. A Call to Arms
H&Ss first Vietnam film400 cm3 (1966)is barely five minutes long, yet it is one of their most effective. It was shown as a short before feature films throughout the GDR, and was intended as a direct appeal to East Germans to donate blood to the North Vietnamese. The title of this tersely edited film alludes to the cubic measurement of blood piped from the human vein to container for shipment to its destination. 400 cm3 crosscuts between found footage from Vietnam of starving, wounded, and napalmed people in hospitals to East Germans giving blood. The synchronized music and image track crescendo builds to the penultimate shot of a clenched East German fist pumping blood from its veins to the raised triumphant fist of a North Vietnamese soldier. The bridge between the two distant lands is forged musically and visually, as real and symbolic blood flows between two races and cultures in a gesture of international comradeship. The rhythmic beat of Paul Dessaus musical score echoes the blood life pulsing against the war. 400 cm3 opens with a quotation from Friedrich Holderlins hymn Der Tod furs Vaterland (Death for the Fatherland): Oh nehmt mich, nehmt mich in die Reihen auf! (Oh, enlist me, enlist me in the ranks!). In an interview, H&S say that this allusion makes evident at the outset that their film is not the reporting of an event, but an interpretation and an evaluation. H&S call their work a film-hymn. 400 cm3 ends with the image of Vietcong shooting down an American bomber. Just as Holderlin had enlisted his verse in the opposition against the French foreign aggressor under Napoleon, so do H&S appeal to the East Germans to aid the North Vietnamese materially, bodily, against imperialists in Indochinathe United States, inheritors of the French legacy there. In short, the documentary goes to war across time and space; its referents are music and blood, both linked in a mesmerizing somatic rhythm.
Two later films in this category address the body in both possible senses: human and material. The first100 (1971)is six minutes long and consists of a medium close-up of a male body doing pushups while a superimposed mechanical counter, at the bottom right of the screen, counts down from one hundred to zero with the sound of a metronome relentlessly ticking off camera. Also superimposed in double exposure are Vietnamese faces of various types. A diegetic voice in English screams repeatedly three words: Dog, Pig, Monkey! At the count of forty-three, the male body shows signs of exhaustion, breaking down completely at eight, at which point the counter is instantly reset to one hundred. Then, as penultimate image, the following text appears on frame: Mark Lane in his book Conversations with Americans (New York, 1970): Soldiers in U.S. Marine units are ordered to do 100 pushups if they refer to a Vietnamese as Vietnamese and not as a dog, pig, or monkey. The final image is found footage: a U.S. training film of marine infantrymen screaming during bayonet practice.
In Remington Cal. 12 (1972), H&S trace the historical evolution of the Remington 12-gauge shotgun and demonstrate its current uses. The technique in this fifteen-minute expository film is one of dialectical montage (H&S are particularly influenced by Eisenstein and Vertov), in which contradictory images and sounds are juxtaposed to draw the spectator to certain conclusions. The appeal is less to gut emotion (as in 400 cm3 or 100) than to common sense and reason. The primary focus of Remington Cal. 12 is on the requisite eponymous shotgun. Here the Remington shotgun is systematically taken apart to demystify the audience about the way it works, so that the lethal shell becomes a dead object, as H&S put it. And they film this object close-up with almost loving irony, as if it were a classical still life. Using American and West German Remington advertisements, H&S show the discrepancy between one particular 12-gauge shotgun, marketed for the hunter, and the owners manual, which recommends not using it on animals because it completely destroys the flesh, making it worthless for hunting. The next sequence of images derives from John Waynes fictional feature film Green Berets (1968), with its good-natured and benevolent GIs, immediately followed by documentary footage of their less fictional compatriots in mortal combat in Vietnam, using Remington shotguns. By means of this montage, the audience is made to compare images presented to an American public by Hollywood and the advertising industry with another, equally mediatized reality: instructions and attitudes of U.S. combat troops who have modified their Remington shells (in conscious violation of the Geneva and earlier conventions and in contradiction to official U.S. government press releases) to shoot tiny, flesh-tearing aluminum missiles that cannot be detected by X rays. Wounding is a more productive way of waging war than is killing because it uses more people and resources. As laconically put by one interviewed grunt, the Remington is a very fine weapon. The final sequence in Remington Cal. 12 shows pumpkins, filled with a liquid that looks like blood, being shotby weapon and cameraover and over again. Ostensibly horrifying us by showing what happens to the human body when it is shot, the end of the film assaults the viewer much like the Remington assaults its victims. But this violent use of blood, in contrast to its role in 400 cm3, raised questions about the films effectiveness, even at the time. One East German who saw the film when it was first released recalled in conversation with me that most of us [East Germans] were convinced that the war was wrong and we didnt need such exaggerated theatrical techniques to persuade us. The film does indeed leave the spectator with little room to draw any conclusions other than the obvious, thus running the risk of backfiring, so to speak, in terms of raising political consciousness. Interesting in this regard, however, is that H&S intended the style and structure of Remington Cal. 12 to be a satirical mimicry of advertising, calling it a Werbefilm.
Throughout their films, interviews, and studio conversations (Werkstattgesprache), H&S attempt to deconstruct the status of Vietnam as a television war: that is, the hegemonic control of television over the production and consumption of images representing both the war and the protests against it and the general inflation of images in the society of the spectacle. As H&S note, the primary source of images of Vietnam came (and still are coming) from American TV. For them, the advertisements for their films that ran on East German television were part of the definition of cinema tout court. In this expansive definition, H&Ss cinema includes their team of film critics and theoriststhe entire cinematic apparatus. The corollary of H&Ss recognition of the role of television is to use their films to train viewers to be critical of that more powerful and popular mass medium. Documentary is not only a matter of filmmaking but of instructing the viewers, a la Brecht, in the art of viewing. The same strategy is at play in the Children of Golzow series filmed by former East German filmmakers Winfried and Barbara Junge (see chapter 6).
No doubt by design, the spectator in Remington Cal. 12 is rather heavy-handedly positioned as passive in constructing meaning. The documentary style in these prelocation films is confrontational, overtly political, and in that sense subjective and manipulativeall in direct contrast to the dominant trend in American and European documentary at the time. Both direct cinema and cinema verite outwardly strove toward as much objectivity and neutrality as possible, thus concealing their own irreducibly subjective, tacit, ideological perspective. In contrast, H&S reject that kind of objectivity, tending toward a comparably more subjective style that was part of a general type of documentary filmmaking in East bloc countries. When speaking about the 1973 Leipzig documentary film festival and exploiting the double meaning of German Objectiv, Karl Eduard von Schnitzler comments, The lens [Objectiv] of our camera is not objective [objectiv] but rather highly partisan. That is to say, the camera and film represent more than ever a weapon in the global conflict of systems in an ever more polarized and direct ideological class war. In response to the direct question of whether their films were documentary or propaganda, H&S responded on Swedish television that even the totally unpolitical film is in the last analysis enormously political, for it attempts to depoliticize social (hence: political) life. This responseprecise or evasiveleaves the question of the distinction open, if not moot.
IV. The Body Politic
H&Ss second group of Vietnam films, Pilots in Pyjamas (there is an English and a dubbed German version) is shot entirely on location in Vietnam. It comprises four segments ranging between sixty and ninety minutes in length: Yes, Sir; Hilton Hanoi; The Job; and The Thunder Gods. In the GDR, the release of the film series in 1968 (it was first shown in its entirety in North Vietnam in 1976 and in the South a year later) was immediately preceded by publication of the film book Pilots in Pyjamas (1968), which contains translated transcripts of the interviews with the pilots arranged sequentially (the interviews in the book are somewhat less extensive and do not crosscut among the pilots, as the interviews in the film do) as well as documents relating to the making of the films and some of the controversy surrounding them. H&S also reprinted and discussed the U.S. military code of conduct, pilots affidavits that they were being interviewed without coercion, reproductions of their letters home, statistics relating to the pilots military lives, and an interview with H&S from the West German magazine Stern. The front cover of the book depicts all the high-tech equipment taken from a downed U.S. pilot; the graphically matched back cover shows the simple prison uniform, the pyjamas worn by much of the Vietnamese population and now the American air pirates as well. The book sold 80,000 copies in the GDR immediately after publication. This success may be attributable not merely to a fascination with (U.S.) pilots but also, at a deeper level of consciousness, with all mechanisms of just following orders.
The four films in Pilots in Pyjamas consist mainly of interviews that H&S carried out with ten U.S. jet pilots in a prisoner-of-war camp in North Vietnam dubbed the Hanoi Hilton by the Americans. H&S make clear both in the films and in written remarks that two pilots refused to be interviewed. The others were permitted and/or coerced to speak for themselves to expose their more or less unconscious and ideological contradictions, motivations, and legitimations. The film owed its relatively high profile less to its aesthetic, cinematographic, or even ideological aspects than to its raw evidential status as testimony to the existence of pilots otherwise presumed missing or dead, including Colonel Robinson Risner, a former Time magazine cover subject.




Continues...

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