Événement

Vietnam and Modes of Resistance

Sat Aug 18: 4.00pm

National Liberation Front of South Vietnam & Third World Newsreel Film Collective / David Loeb Weiss
Vietnam / US
1969 / 1968
1h 32m
Series - 1968: Expressions of a Flame

About
The Young Puppeteers of Vietnam
(Prod. National Liberation Front of South Vietnam & Third World Newsreel Film Collective, Vietnam, 1969, 25 min)

Vietnamese teenagers make puppets out of downed U.S. tanks & planes in this National Liberation Front-produced newsreel. In rural villages of liberated South Vietnam, our young performers learn to build and manipulate their uncanny creations, finally developing touring performances for children, all while U.S. warplanes buzz overhead. Powerful cultural resistance through the peoples art of puppetry.

About
No Vietnamese Ever Called Me N*****
New 4K restoration
(David Loeb Weiss, US, 1968, 67 min)

In 1967, Black citizens of Harlem marched to the UN in the largest protest against the Vietnam War, which was claiming Black lives at a disproportionate rate. David Loeb Weisss newly restored documentary switches between streetside interviews during the march with Harlem residents and a more expansive private interview with three young Black men explaining their radicalization process. What we get over the course of the film is a portrait of a community that understands all too well its sunken position, and which is able to describe its condition with crystal clarity. Patriotism is a joke, and the war a murderous holiday. One of the interviewees, a combat veteran, admits, If this country ever decides to exterminate all black people, Im sure theyre not going to exclude me (just) because I fought in Vietnam. Later, the white fascists of the National Renaissance Party are interviewed with signs exhorting murder and bombing, which are to get publicity and were getting it. Sound familiar? An expertly constructed film, and a crucial political education. Necessary viewing.

The movies title, itself a potent form of political enlightenment, was taken from the printed placards that the SNCC marchers carried although the sentiment is so closely associated with Muhammad Ali, who refused induction into the Army on April 28, 1967, but never actually said it, that some assumed that Weisss movie was about Ali. Its not but it also packs a wallop. J. Hoberman, New York Times