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.”
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.