The film Far from Vietnam (1967) commences with its title in stark white sans-serif text on a black background. Cut to the first scene and we are away from the fighting at the front. The title becomes a caption. Deadly cargo is being loaded onto aircraft carriers of the United States Seventh Fleet sailing in the Gulf of Tonkin. Countless munitions fill the vista; the explosive mounds provide an image of America at war, making the overwhelming facts of the matter more tangible. A voiceover informs us that the weapons on-screen will soon join the “over a million tons of bombs” America has dropped on North Vietnam since escalating the air war with Operation Rolling Thunder in 1965 (fig. 1). The footage reveals a fraction of the arsenal of a nation that, according to the narration, spends more money on packaging alone than all of India does on food. The stacks of bombs—olive-green, yellow, and white, seemingly unlimited in number—evoke other plentiful, mass-produced consumer goods and the chain of the military-industrial complex. “The war by the rich,” as the voiceover calls it, America’s Vietnam is variously distanced: it is mediated through the television screen for citizens at home. From the cockpit of a bomber, the countryside was an opaque patchwork of brown and green to be shot through with orange flashes and billowing towers of black-gray smoke; US soldiers on the ground experienced something else.

Cut. An apparently clear view of an empty field, accompanied by the same voice: “The war of the poor . . . but not the weakest.”[1]  [1]
The voice in this section is that of Chris Marker. See “Far from Vietnam, John Akomfrah Presents. . .” Barbican Gallery, October 24, 2017, https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on. Suddenly, some of the green, leafy clusters seem to come alive; attached to fighters’ bodies, they are the camouflage of the Viet Cong. A picture of determination, the fighters march forward, rifles at the ready, only to dip down again and become nearly invisible to the camera eye. Cut again—this time to other revolutionaries in a verdant landscape on the other side of the world. Fidel Castro strolls with troops and advisors. The narrator states: “It is in Vietnam that the main question of our time arises: the right of the poor to establish societies based on something else other than the interests of the rich.”

One of the most divisive events of the second half of the twentieth century, the Vietnam War provoked a rift that continues to haunt American society. The war was fought from 1955 until 1975 between the communist North Vietnamese (supported by the Soviet Union and China) and the democratic, capitalist South Vietnamese with the United States. The US deployed ground troops for the first time in March of 1965, which coincided with accelerating expenditures of resources on the war that lasted through 1969. Spending and loss of life continued steadily until a January 1973 ceasefire agreement, negotiated in Paris, marked the end of the war for the US. The last American combatants left Vietnam in March of 1973.[2]  [2]
At the time, more than 1,200 US soldiers were missing in action or were being held as prisoners of war. While the conflict can be couched in the terms outlined by the directors, it was also war fought disproportionately by poor Americans and racial and ethnic minorities. About 25 percent of troops were in Vietnam as a result of the draft; 1,857,304 men were inducted into the military via the Selective Service System.[3]  [3]
See Selective Service System, “Induction Statistics,” 2018, https://www.sss.gov/About/History-And-Records/Induction-Statistics (accessed March 30, 2018). Some US citizens were shocked and galvanized to protest what they viewed as an unjust conflict that yielded unnecessary loss of life. The idea that people would be conscripted and forced to fight provoked significant backlash. Nonetheless, many other Americans were more convinced about the validity of the war. Outside the US, especially in Europe, there were also mixed feelings about US military involvement in Indochina; antiwar protests flared up in European cities. Opposition to the war increasingly became central to the burgeoning counter-culture, as the caption on Allen Ginsberg’s photo of Ken Kesey indicates (fig. 2). Antiwar sentiments were synonymous with left-wing politics. People on both sides of the debate about the Vietnam War’s validity would likely have agreed that it was a “hot” manifestation of the Cold War, an attempt—perhaps in retrospect, misguided or too costly—to staunch the spread of international communism and limit the influence of the Soviet Union. Vietnam was one of the first conflicts that was broadcast regularly via television. By the late 1960s, the TV was a fixture in numerous American homes; moving images of the conflict in Vietnam were projected nightly into living rooms by the evening news.[4]  [4]
By the 1960s, approximately 95 percent of American homes had a television. Primetime television was broadcast in color starting in 1966–1967. By 1970, 39 percent of households had a color set. See Vincent LoButto, TV in the USA: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas(Santa Barbara, 2018), xiv; xi.  Broadcast via the mass media, the war was both amplified and abstracted as it streamed back as images. Aspects of the horrors of war and the casualty toll bombarded viewers miles away from the front.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, numerous artists and filmmakers in America and Europe felt compelled to demonstrate their stance against the war in artworks or films that registered and critiqued the conflict in Southeast Asia. One of the first instances of art about the war came in On Kawara’s Title (1965) (fig. 3). The conceptual artwork transmits the ubiquity of the war as well as the way it weighed on the minds of many. Curator Kynaston McShine summed up current sentiments in his introduction to the catalog for Information (1970, Museum of Modern Art): “If you are living in the United States, you may fear that you will be shot at, either in the universities, in your bed or more formally in Indochina. It may seem too inappropriate, if not absurd, to get up . . . and apply dabs of paint from a little tube to a square of canvas.”[5]  [5]
Kynaston McShine, “Introduction to Information” (1970), in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, 2000), 212.  The contemporary situation required new tactics. Traditional media and techniques were no longer adequate. The most potent commentaries came from works realized in new or renewed artistic forms: rejections of clear authorship, aesthetic standards, and traditional artistic competence were combined with embraces of readymade images and objects and “the eruption of language into the aesthetic field.”[6]  [6]
Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” October 10 (Autumn 1979): 126. For an extended discussion of Owens’s insights about language and broader cultural changes (the advent of postmodernism) vis-à-vis the end of painting, see Michael Maizels and Juliet Kennedy, “The System That Destroys Itself, or Greenberg’s Modernism and the Liar’s Paradox,” Crisis & Critique 5, no. 1 (March 2018): 211–234. Artists and directors critiquing sociopolitical issues also mounted critiques of representation, recognizing and interrogating cinema and art’s own conventions.[7]  [7]
For an example of an articulation of such views, see The Editors, “About October,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 4–5.   

Far from Vietnam is a documentary film that pushes the limits of the genre while addressing, ostensibly, the topic of the Vietnam War. Concerned with more than the physical fighting in Southeast Asia, it represents the manner in which the war’s impact variously rippled outward through societies in the East and West, North and South. Mirroring the logic of the complex conflict, the image that emerges in the motion picture is kaleidoscopic (fig. 4). Far from Vietnam approaches the idea of Vietnam from various angles, with contributions by the directors Joris Ivens, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda. It was edited by Chris Marker, a celebrated director in his own right, and marked the first effort of SLON (Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles [Society for the Launch of New Works]), the political film making collective he headed.[8]  [8]
While the film largely eschews singular authorship, there are attributable sections: Claude Lelouch shot the American warships seen at the beginning of the film, Joris Ivens filmed the color scenes of Vietnam, William Klien captured American protesters and parade participants in “A Parade is a Parade” and ‘Vertigo”; he also filmed the interview with the widow of William Morrison, an antiwar activist who immolated himself in protest; and Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais both created recognizable segments, respectively “Camera Eye” and “Claude Ridder.” Varda’s audio narration of history and her footage of the reparation of a dyke in France also enter the film. Marker selected much of the already extant materials that interweave the sections. Film historian Jennifer Stob writes that Marker “worked from the theory that cinema could focus on the movements between the misleading categories of subjective and objective portrayal.”[9]  [9]
Jennifer Stob, “Cut and Spark: Chris Marker, André Bazin and the Metaphors of Horizontal montage,” Studies in French Cinema 12, no. 1 (2012), 42.  The film combines found footage, individual vignettes shot by the directors (some on location in Vietnam [fig. 5] and the United Sates) and collaborative sections. Its diverse contents include recordings of military action and protests, interviews, a straight discussion of French and American involvement in the war, a music video with folk singer Tom Paxton, Varda’s voice narrating newsreel footage interspersed with comic book cells selected by Marker,  a “cameo” appearance by Fidel Castro expounding on guerilla warfare, a peppering of snippets of the directors’ other films, an animated sequence, a filmic self-portrait by Godard, and a segment directed by Resnais with a philosophical monologue by a fictional character.

Following the opening shots, an intertitle statement from the directors discloses their politics: they made the film “to affirm, by their craft, their solidarity with the Vietnamese people and to fight against the [war of] aggression.”[10]  [10]
Far from Vietnam (Icarus Films, 1967), my translation.
Nonetheless, Far from Vietnam presents a wide and international range of perspectives on the war—including linguistically, as the polyglot production navigates the different languages of various nations. There are many scenes of people in North Vietnam, often shown working collectively to make defenses; particularly striking among these are shots by Joris Ivens of deactivation of anti-personnel cluster bombs, which look like strange fruit, and the creation of personal bomb shelters from concrete. While the scenes of North Vietnam serve to humanize the Vietnamese people by showing them up close, these same peoples’ opinions and voices are often absent. In contrast, many scenes do showcase the diverse perspectives of Americans. A number of these were filmed by William Klein, the sole contributor who was a US citizen (since 1948, he had primarily been expatriated in Paris). Despite ’greater geographic proximity to Vietnam and French involvement in the First Indochina War (1946–54), which could be seen as merely the first phase of Vietnam, Europe was politically a degree further removed from the conflict in by 1967. The European filmmakers perhaps enjoyed a greater critical distance from their subject. Equally, America and Vietnam are foreign to most of them. Especially because Far from Vietnam juxtaposes conflicting viewpoints—usually with no or limited narrative framing them—it compelling provides a sense of the radical divisions that characterized the era.

Indeed, while an early example, Far from Vietnam fulfills the criteria of an “essay film” as defined by film historian Nora Alter: this experimental mode of creation breaks conventions of genre and “strives to be beyond formal, conceptual, and social constraint … The essay film disrespects traditional boundaries, is transgressive both structurally and conceptually, it is self-reflective and self-reflexive.”[11]  [11]
Nora Alter, “The Political Im/perceptible in the Essay Film,” New German Critique 68 (Spring/Summer 1996): 171. Alter is not the only writer to define this genre. For more on the essay film see Laura Rascaroli, "The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments," From: Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media49, no. 2, (Fall 2008): 24-47 Distinct sections enable the juxtaposition of Far from Vietnam’s diverse content. Intertitles with white text on a black background mark the breaks (or suture points, depending on one’s perspective). They push written language back into the visual field of cinema.[12]  [12]
Intertitles were of course a key component of silent films and are proper to a longer history of the medium.  

The intertitles also provide the film with the reflexivity Alter describes. One, “A Parade is a Parade,” a quotation from one of the organizers of a parade supporting American troops, has a tautological quality common to many titles found in works of art at the time. The section shows marching soldiers whose tours have ended; young businessmen brandishing their draft cards and gleefully screaming “Bomb Hanoi!” as a ring of protesters chants “Big firms get rich, GIs die!”; and, most chillingly, young boys, who might soon enlist or be drafted, marching in uniformed rows. Another patriotic performance is paired with the manifestations of support for the war effort in America: “Johnson Pleure” (Johnson Cries) consists of colorful street theater critiquing the US in North Vietnam (fig. 6). “Flash Back,” “Vertigo,” and “Camera Eye” all refer to the history of cinema, acknowledging that the lines between reality and representation, event and spectacle can be blurred when mediated by moving images. A flashback is a filmmaking technique common to Hollywood, which often takes the form of a montage of elements that occurred prior to the diegetic thread of the film. In Far from Vietnam, the flashback is mostly historical; the section takes the form of a standard documentary, seemingly made up of newsreel footage, which recounts the longer history of colonialism and war in Vietnam going back to French involvement.[13]  [13]
For more on the theme of anti-colonial cinema see, Matthew Croombs, “Loin du Vietnam,” Third Text 28, no. 2 (March 2014): 493.  However, at various points, comic-book images of war splash gaudy color on-screen amid the silvery shift of history. Near the end, there is a fragment of a statement by the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh: no matter how long the war takes, he says—five, ten, twenty years—the United States “will never win.” Although the war was difficult to envision, it was nevertheless important to plot its history, according to Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg had worked as a military advisor before becoming an activist and whistleblower, when he released the Pentagon Papers in 1971. In his 1972 book Papers on the War he warns about the “quagmire myth”—that the experience of the war was like sinking into quicksand, where the United States kept going deeper and deeper without ever intending it. Ellsberg saw this metaphor as dangerous because it seems to suggest there was no agency, no particular decision taken. In order to critique this dominant discursive trope and its associated false ideology, it had to be displaced by facts. “Truth is the first casualty” affirms Joseph Goulden of the Gulf of Tonkin affair, an apparent attack by the Viet Cong on US ships, today suspected of being a fabrication, which sped American involvement. [14]  [14]
See Joseph Goulden, Truth Is the First Casualty: The Gulf of Tonkin Affair—Illusion and Reality (Chicago, 1969).  

The segment entitled “Vertigo” (also the title of a 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film) shows America as a nation reeling from the conflict. It depicts protests and demonstrations; citizens for and against the war forcefully debating as well as more hysterically and emotionally engaging one another. An antiwar protester repeatedly shouts and stutters, as if traumatized: “NA-NA-naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa . . . Napalm!” Others talk about the need to support the war as a patriotic act. In one of the scenes, a protester wields a sign with a handmade replica of Robert Indiana’s LOVE (first made as sculptures in 1964–1966 and as a graphic image in 1965), a work that was quickly embraced by the counter-culture (fig. 7). For Love (1966) by James Rosenquist, who is perhaps most famous for his critique of the military-industrial complex in F-111 (in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art), also seems to trade similar ideas related to the slogan “Make Love Not War” (fig. 8).

In “Camera Eye” Godard narrates a fact-filled description of a scene of war. He sits behind a camera, musing about the North Vietnamese government’s denial of his request to film there. He affirms that he nonetheless attempted to work aspects of Vietnam into all of his films. The director reflects on his own particular subject position—neither an “ABC cameraman” nor “a Soviet cameraman,” and describes the kinds of shots he might have taken, suggesting that he could have shown the real effects of a cluster bomb on a woman’s body. The fact that he did choose to make images about making such an image, at a remove from the actual subject, implies the inadequacy of rendering such trauma in celluloid. He speaks about the revolutionary potential of cinema vis-à-vis actual revolution, as shots of the operation of the apparatus of cinema (camera, lights, rolling film) are mixed with scenes from Godard’s La Chinoise, a school and bomb drill in Vietnam, the impact of the war on plant and animal life, and the Rhodiaceta textile strikes in Besançon, which had concerned both Marker and Godard the same year.[18]  [18]
See Trevor Stark, “‘Cinema in the Hands of the People’: Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant Film,” October 139 (Winter 2012): 117–150. In fact, further forming a link between these apparently distant sites and conflicts, Far from Vietnam premiered in Rhodiaceta.[19]  [19]
Croombs, 493. Calling for solidarity among the oppressed around the world, Godard suggests “creat[ing] a Vietnam within ourselves” as a mode of resistance. The montage accelerates to faster cuts until Godard, with the director’s command, “cuts” the whirring camera and lights turn off and the next scene begins.

Hans Haacke, one of the younger generation of creators whom Lippard supported, affirmed “a system is not imagined; it is real.[27]  [27]
Hans Haacke, “Untitled Statement,” 1967. Notably, many of Haacke’s works appear reproduced in Rickey’s Constructivism: Origins and Evolution (New York, 1967). ” Haacke produces art that engages with reality in order to reveal “which way the wind blows” within art institutions.[28]  [28]
Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” in Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia Records, January 1965, 7” vinyl.  Resonating with activist calls to fight or “name the system,” Haacke’s artworks typically incorporate real changes and intervene in and highlight naturalized systems.[29]  [29]
Paul Potter, “The Incredible War,” April 17, 1965, Voices of Democracy: The US Oratory Project, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/potter-the-incredible-war-speech-text/ (accessed March 29, 2018). His Condensation Wall (1963–1966/2013) is a Plexiglas container with a small amount of water, which changes state—from liquid into gas and back (fig. 12). With its foggy panels, Haacke’s work registers the controlled climate requisite to maintain the privileged class of objects known as “Art.”

According to Sarris’s assessment, Far from Vietnam lacks “personal statement[s]” and is instead a displeasing “patchwork.” The film is fragmented into over dozen parts, each marked by a title, echoing in some sense of the societal ruptures the war provoked; the flow is hardly unified. Despite being the production of a constellation of luminaries of vanguard cinema, who might amplify one another, it is often unclear who was responsible for each section. The parts are generally not credited and, in the case of the found footage and reportage, not at all “directed.” Thus, even though it trades on the aura of the its celebrity-director’s names on the billboard, the film’s jarring combination of information undermines standard filmic structure and singular authorship. Woven together via Marker’s post-production, their footage took on the cooperative character of a SLON film.[30]  [30]
For more on SLON, see William Van Wert, Chris Marker: The SLON Films, Film Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Spring, 1979): 38–46. By this, Far from Vietnam challenged Sarris’s view of cinema as individualistic creation: five years earlier, he articulated the trend toward personal directorial style in his pioneering “Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962.”[31]  [31]
See Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture27 (Winter 1962–1963): 1–8. Some more recent commentators have viewed the film in terms of “auteur theory.” For an analysis focused on Lelouch’s and Godard’s contribution to Far from Vietnam in relation to their broader oeuvre, see Jonathan Ervine, “Representations of War: From the New Wave to the New Millennium, Journal of War & Culture Studies 2, no. 1 (2009): 81–91. Matthew Croombs also sets the film in conversation with other examples from Godard’s cinematic output. See Croombs, 489-505.  

In the visual arts, there were also attempts to eschew signature style. Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings—impermanent, site-specific works executed by others—were an important solution (fig. 13). Interestingly, LeWitt’s very first work in this vein, Wall Drawing #1: Drawing Series II 18 (A & B) (1968), was born in the context of a protest against the Vietnam War. It was realized for the Paula Cooper Gallery’s inaugural exhibition Benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (1968). The other works included alongside LeWitt’s were abstract and minimalist, underscoring how non-objective artwork was understood to imply objections to the status quo.

Collective creation closer to the polyphony of Far from Vietnam characterized a number of antiwar art initiatives, such as the contemporaneous print portfolio Artists and Writers Protest against the War in Vietnam (1967), which included Ad Reinhardt’s No War, a rejection of the conflict.[32]  [32]
This portfolio is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (2350.1967.1–16) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2006.50.1–16). The printed work takes the form of an airmail letter addressed to the “War Chief, Washington, DC, USA”—a missive that, like the film, seems to similarly acknowledge distance and mediation of the war. Other instances include the Angry Arts Week (January 29 to February 4, 1967) and the 1966 “Peace Tower” (sometimes called “The Artists’ Tower of Protest”) overseen by Marc di Suvero and Irving Petlin and erected in West Hollywood. Slightly later collectives, such as the Art Workers Coalition (which included Haacke and Lippard among its core members) and the Guerilla Art Action Group also staged antiwar projects. Although the trend to create portfolios with multiple contributing artists extended far beyond antiwar initiatives, important coproductions in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, such as serial boxed sets S.M.S. 1–6 (Shit Must Stop) (1968) and Experiments in Art and Technology’s (EAT) New York Collection for Stockholm Portfolio (NYCSP) (1973) do contain politically committed works expressing antiwar sentiments among their stylistically disunified contents. William Copley, the director of S.M.S., saw the range as pedagogical: “We are not trying to push any kind of art but rather to suggest how many different ways ideas can go.”[33]  [33]
William N. Copley speaking of his S.M.S. “SHIT MUST STOP” portfolio. Joseph Cornell papers, 1804–1986, bulk 1939–1972 [General Correspondence, Box 2, Folder 3], Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.  

Julie Martin—who, along with artist Robert Rauschenberg and engineer Billy Klüver, spearheaded EAT—said of the NYCSP: “It embodied the range of new work of the early and middle 1960s: geometric abstraction, Pop Art’s depiction of everyday materials and themes from the mass media, the use of industrial fabrication by Minimal artists, incorporation of new technology, and the reintroduction of politics into art as reaction to the Vietnam War."[34]  [34]
Julie Martin quoted Broadway 1602 Gallery, “EXHIBITIONS: EXPERIMENTS IN ART AND TECHNOLOGY (E.A.T.)’S THE NEW YORK COLLECTION FOR STOCKHOLM PORTFOLIO (1973),” May 7–July 1, 2016, Broadway 1602, 2016, http://broadway1602.com/exhibition/experiments-art-technologys-new-york-collection-stockholm-1971-1973/ (accessed March 25, 20) Though fairly subtle in many cases, politics crops up in various projects in the portfolio. Haacke’s contribution consists of the results of one question from a para-sociological poll at John Weber Gallery, where he asked visitors demographic questions as well as their opinions about political issues (fig. 14). His print reveals the New York art world’s overwhelming allegiance to George McGovern, the democratic candidate who ran on an antiwar platform against Richard Nixon in 1972.

Interfusing paperwork and artwork, Andy Warhol produced photocopies of Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976) for each number of the edition (fig. 15). Paralleling Marker’s moves in Far from Vietnam, Warhol used mechanical reproduction as a productive interruption, to achieve distance from his mass-reproduced subject. The still relatively new communications and replication technology of the Xerox copier enabled Warhol to decrease in fidelity an image of the iconic Chinese leader. Warhol realized the project—which distorts a legible image toward abstraction—by copying and recopying an image, enlarging and elongating it by 1 or 2 percent each time he pressed the photocopy button. Mao was on the minds of many because President Nixon arranged a meeting with the Chinese Premier in 1972, with the goal of improving America’s geopolitical position vis-à-vis the USSR in order to resolve the Vietnam War.

In contrast to Warhol’s dematerialized portrait of the Chinese leader, Roy Lichtenstein’s pointing finger echoes the indexical gesture of the quintessentially American Uncle Sam, found in posters calling upon citizens to transform into combatants (fig. 16). The suit sleeve and shirt cuff—conservative attire associated with politicians or businessmen—seem to imply that soldiers ultimately serve the interests of economic and political elites. Lichtenstein’s print conjures the lyrics of the protest song performed by Country Joe and the Fish at the Woodstock Music Festival a couple years before:

Well, come on all of you, big strong men / Uncle Sam needs your help again. . . . Come on Wall Street, don’t be slow / Why man, this is war à gogo / There’s plenty good money to be made / By supplying the Army with the tools of its trade / But just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb / They drop it on the Viet Cong.[35]  [35]
Country Joe and the Fish, ““I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” in I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die, Vanguard Records, November 1967.  

Roy Lichtenstein importantly engages questions of art’s ability to represent historical events in the age of the image. His output of the era grapples with the legacy of history painting too and also intersects with the tactics of Far from Vietnam. Unlike Kawara, the pop-art painter employed his characteristic comic language of bold lines, primary colors, and discernible Benday dots. Lichtenstein continued to mine comics for inspiration, but his subjects shifted in relation to the war. In the context of Vietnam, it is difficult not to see projects like Explosion (1967) or the triptych As I Opened Fire (1966) as responses to the conflict raging in Indochina (figs. 17, 18, 19, 20). Like Kawara, Lichtenstein negotiated a provocative solution by repurposing and translating images. He incorporated drama and emotion without falsifying a “true” explicit or exact rendering of history; with his flat pop idiom he dodged the traps of history painting and its grandiose images. Moreover, like Far from Vietnam, which juxtaposes actual violence and comic-book images close to the end, Lichtenstein too reflects upon the ways that images from commercial mass culture and the war flowed into one another. Further, both the film and the paintings suggest, perhaps, that overly simplistic “comic-book” notions of good and evil—which had informed understandings of World War II—were no longer adequate. Resnais’s character, Claude Ridder, says as much, invoking the legacy of Nazi occupation and resistance in France: “Until the end of time I will kill Germans and love Americans; except that the Americans are the Vietnamese’s Germans” (fig. 21). Other works Lichtenstein made during the war, such as Peace Through Chemistry and Peace Through Chemistry Bronze (both 1970) (figs. 22, 23) and the 10-by-18-foot canvas Preparedness (1968, in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) prove a similar point. Lichtenstein seems to channel Fernand Léger, as well as Louis Lozowick or Jólan Gross-Bettelheim—artists associated with the Works Projects Administration (WPA) and communist-aligned American Artists’ Congress (AAC).[40]  [40]
See Roy Lichtenstein, “Preparedness,” Collection Search, Guggenheim, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2496; for more on Lozowick and Gross-Bettelheim, see Joyce Tsai, “American Mosaic: Modern American Prints,” in Three Centuries of American Prints, exh. cat. (New Haven and Washington, 2016), 163, 164–165. By adapting styles (and size) of the past to his own ironic pop syntax, he achieves critical distance. The artworks conjure up some of the social commitment of Lichtenstein’s artistic predecessors but imply that total faith in patriotism and utopian technological progress was naively facile in the late 1960s.

In his monologue, Ridder affirms that images of the war are so ubiquitous, no one could have the excuse that they did not know about its horrors. He notes the strangeness of how death and destruction enter homes via a piece of furniture—the television: “You can show massacres to try to cure people from wars. But they’re on show all the time. It doesn’t stop anything.” These observations signal the ways in which information overload hardens and numbs viewers to the images they consume nightly. Reflecting upon the situation in the United States, in which the war similarly entered homes via TV and magazines, the artist Martha Rosler saw mediation increasingly reducing viewers to “audience spectators rather than citizen participants.”[41]  [41]
Martha Rosler, “Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful,” quoted in Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent (Manchester, 1999), 172.  

Rosler’s series Bringing the War Home (1967–1972, fig. 24) also investigates the representation and consumption of war. These works consist of photomontages of images of the Vietnam War—soldiers, haggard civilians, broken bodies, and mangled, bombed-out landscapes—juxtaposed with luxury interiors found in the glossy spreads of periodicals like House Beautiful. The title of her series had specific period connotation that may be less obvious today than in 1967. “Bring the war home” was a phrase that implied ending the war and returning soldiers to the United States, and was also employed to describe a need for radical actions to combat the systems that had led to the war in the first place. Rosler implies that a common network linked the war with bourgeois consumer goods. Stephanie Schwartz argues Rosler’s series emphasizes how “the military-industrial complex produces, simultaneously and necessarily, the private home and more Vietnams.”[42]  [42]
Stephanie Schwartz, “Anti-Photojournalism: Working Against the Grain,” in In Focus: Waiting for Tear Gas 1999–2000 by Allan Sekula, ed. Stephanie Schwartz  (London, 2016), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/waiting-for-tear-gas-allan-sekula/anti-photojournalism (accessed March 31, 2018) (original emphasis).  

According to Matthew Israel, “Rosler’s works reacted to what she has called the dangerous, dualistic separation between ‘the here and the elsewhere,’ by trying (in some, but importantly, not all, collages of the series) to bring the war home to the American public.”[43]  [43]
Matthew Israel, Kill for Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War (Austin, 2013), 78; Martha Rosler, “Here and Elsewhere,” Artforum 46, no. 3 (2007): 50; quoted in Israel, 78. Strikingly similar still photomontages of the war intermixed with magazine pages or advertisements appear in a layered filmic sequence near the end of Far from Vietnam (fig. 25). As with Rosler’s artworks, this admixture reminds viewers that Vietnam is not so far away from the consumer societies of the West; moreover, it proposes a consideration of the way the war had become a spectacle with mass-mediation, one more thing to be morbidly consumed. Marker and Rosler’s respective juxtapositions yield uncanny results.[44]  [44]
I employ the term “uncanny” in the sense Sigmund Freud attributed to it. Freud describes it a particular kind of terrible aesthetic, when a familiar thing is changed just enough so that it “arouses dread and creeping horror.” In German, the term has additional resonances; unheimlich literally translates to unhomely. See Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London, 2003), 123–124. The familiar contents of the weekly or monthly magazine become strange.

Far from Vietnam investigates the mass media by mediation as well: shots of General Westmoreland on television capture the texture of televisual light patterns and a swaying vertical hold. Similar sorts of grainy images are cut into the fabric of the film in various sequences. The spectacular images become opaque via the interruption. No longer are they a transparent language that just transmits information about their subject; instead they, too, become an object of study when sewn into the film. In many ways, Far from Vietnam is an extended montage—a series of streams of information and interruptions proper to cinema that nonetheless, when used correctly, can produce shocking new understandings of the world. This characteristic resonates with Godard’s sentiments: “To me, pure film, pure cinema is pieces of film assembled. Any individual piece is nothing. But a combination of them creates an idea-montage, you can call it that. But there are many kinds of montage.”[45]  [45]
Jean-Luc Godard quoted in Peter Wollen, “Theory and Practice,” Journal of Media Practice 6, no. 2 (2005): 76. The montage of Far from Vietnam produces a new understanding of history and awareness. By recombining then-contemporary events with the archive of film and television, new understandings arise. The film reveals limits of vision as it recognizes the politics of visibility; it provides a necessary counter-image to the Vietnam War presented in the commercial mass media.[46]  [46]
Chantal Mouffe, “Agonistic Democracy and Radical Politics,” Pavilion 15 (May–July, 2010): 249.  

The political theorist Chantal Mouffe emphasizes the “the distinction between antagonism (friend/enemy relation) and agonism (relation between adversaries)” when defining democratic politics. Mouffe continues:

We are better able to understand why the agonistic confrontation, far from representing a danger for democracy, is in reality the very condition of its existence . . . democracy cannot survive without certain forms of consensus. . . . But it must also enable the expression of conflict, which requires that citizens genuinely have the possibility of choosing between real alternatives.[47]  [47]
Mouffe, “Agonistic Democracy and Radical Politics,” 250.  

It is precisely the two types of relationships Mouffe identifies—antagonistic warfare and agonistic civil disagreement and debate, and the rift between them—that are the focus of Far from Vietnam. Indeed, the multifaceted movie can be considered an exercise in agonism. It shows us what democracy (and its discontents) looks like by presenting numerous perspectives, many irreconcilable. Thus, we might view the complex movie as a form of political philosophy.

The film’s politics are not merely theoretical, but spill into practice as well. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, when screened at the New York Film Festival in autumn of 1967, Far from Vietnam did more than just capture combat and disputes; it catalyzed heated discussion too, “creat[ing] more angry debates than anything else I had seen that year.”[48]  [48]
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (Chicago, 2010), 143.  Far from Vietnam asks its audiences to position themselves in response to its images (fig. 26). Even those removed from the conflict by geography and the passage of time, must consider their own stance in relation to history.