Life is cheap in the Orient

I was blown away by this documentary. I believe you can't fully grasp everything the movie throws at you in the 2 hour period in one sitting, you have to watch it twice (or even more than that) to fully understand the message and everything that goes on in the film.
I thought I had some knowledge about the visual aspect of the war from Platoon and FMJ, but I was completely wrong. This documentary showed what really happened, what actually happened as recorded by their cameras, and I don't know if I was ready for it.
I feel in learning about the Vietnam War, we are puzzle makers putting together a puzzle, and with everything we watch and learn, we are grabbing pieces of the puzzle from them to make a complete puzzle, but rather than being set pieces for a set position, the pieces mix with one another, some go here sometimes, they go here other times, its more complex than we could imagine.
With Hearts and Minds, I feel like I found pieces of the puzzle that I didn't think could even fit and threw away pieces that I thought for sure was part of the puzzle. The director's cinematography was so thought out and precise in its execution that I couldn't help but become completely engulfed in what I was watching. If there was ever rhetoric in a film it has got to be in this documentary. The pathos in this movie is heart-wrenching because its real emotion that the director has captured. I think the placement of certain scenes definitely add to their emotion. One clear example was the scene with the burial of a Vietnamese soldier. You hear his son crying for his dad through the whole scene, sobbing uncontrollably you already feel an incredible discomfort for him, and to top it off the soldier's mom proclaims she can not live anymore and attempts to jump down into his grave. Not staged, not acted, pure reality that we are seeing and it is a painful reality. This is followed directly by General Westmoreland's statement "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient." I think on its own, that statement is shocking; had it been said at the beginning of the movie before we had seen any scenes in the film we would have been shocked, but for it to have been said right after we witness the burial scene? That definitely triggers something in the viewer, disgust, horror, and down right anger towards him. This timing is so important for those two scenes because we have a certain emotion built up already and we watch that scene with the previous emotion still clearly in our minds.
Other scenes in the movie just really took my breath away in terms of their sad reality. One scene was only maybe 2 seconds long, but it was of a soldier shooting someone in the head. I was shocked, shocked that they showed that, shocked that they did that, shocked because I didn't know what was going on. It was just a horrible scene because we just saw someone lose their life before our eyes. Another scene that stood out to me was the scene in which a man describes the loss of his daughter to bombing. The tone of his voice was so important in what he was saying and I was trying really hard to blur out the translated voice because that took all emotion from the man's words. His choice of words was powerful, when he told the cameramen to take his daughter's shirt back to Nixon because she would no longer wear it, I just sat there blankly at the screen overcome by his words. One of the earlier scenes when they showed the two sisters who's village got destroyed, the sister who's house was destroyed made a metaphor of her house to birds nest, and that even a bird needs a home. This is compared to the old refugee man when he was telling of how they don't care about the Vietnamese lives, like they are flies to be swatted. I thought that by comparing themselves to animals, the Vietnamese felt they could give sense of what they felt to the Americans watching because the felt the Americans didn't see the Vietnamese, they don't know that they are civilized, that they can hurt and cry, but they know of birds and of flies. I definitely felt the Vietnamese side of the movie was driven by pathos indefinitely. I felt sorrow, I felt pity, I felt sad a lot of the times when scenes from Vietnam were shown, not to say that I didn't feel that while watching the stories of the veterans, I just felt like it was more emphasized with the Vietnamese people.
I only explored the pieces of the movie dealing with the rhetoric of the Vietnamese side of the movie because there is way too much to compile all of the techniques implemented in one blog post. Overall I really enjoyed this movie and it is on a different level than Platoon and FMJ since it was all reality. I think I gained some new pieces to the puzzle, took out some old ones, and became reassured that certain pieces do belong in the puzzle from watching Hearts and Minds and I'm sure the process will happen again when I rewatch it for a second time.