For High School Students—Notes and Images from the Viet Nam War (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Bill Nichols

Produced and directed by Jill Godmilow; written and edited by Jill Godmilow & Erick Stoll; historical consultant Howie Machtinger; recording engineer Andy Kris; sound mix by Michael Simon. Color and B&W, 45 min., distributed by jgodmilo@nd.edu and available for viewing here.

The United States has triumphed in war against industrial powers such as Germany, Italy, and Japan, but against less developed countries—not so much. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq alone can fill record books with instances of duration, cost, and folly. Histories are written, reckonings made, and it seemed for a while that Ken Burns and Lynn Novick had gained the final word on Vietnam with their eighteen-hour 2017 PBS epic, The Vietnam War (see review in Cineaste, Vol. XLIII, No. 1/Winter 2017). What more could be said? Turns out, quite a lot. The Burns/Novick film’s chronology of who did what when, the sound bites of major players, pundits, and representative participants, and the apparently all-knowing and dispassionate guiding voice of the narrator—these staples of the expository documentary bent on conveying factual truth and historical judgement announce themselves as The Final Word. That’s part of what makes Burns such a star at PBS. He does it all with a visually engaging style and a verbally neutral tone. It’s clearly the way it was, as we can all see and hear. We should agree with Ken. He’s reasonable and thoughtful. The war was fought with valor, mistakes were made, things went wrong, we didn’t win, but that’s the way it was.

Or was it? Burns wants to appear as the one who has found safe middle ground, the one who can sum things up in a way with which we can all agree. No axe to grind, no ideology to defend, just an honest appraisal of what happened.

Jill Godmilow has a different idea.

In her sharp, unforgiving view, the war was an utter disaster from day one, born of ignorance and arrogance, and it terminated only when total defeat was inevitable. This stemmed less from mistakes than from faulty logic and a black-and-white ideology of Us vs. Them, stalwart democracy vs. contagious communism. Godmilow refuses to pawn off this reductive, binary view of things as simply how they happened and instead insists that it was a grotesquely distorted view of the world that cost countless lives and has done nothing to make the world a safer place.

Godmilow aims her film at high-school students. It is her personal message to them. She wants the students of today to think long and hard about this or any other war and the logic that justifies it. In her voice-over, Godmilow names three aspects of American history that high-school teachers cannot reconcile with the self-serving myths of American exceptionalism: the abject failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War, the ghastly cost of western expansion, and the folly of the Vietnam War. 

The film begins with a two-minute collage of photos from the war before her voice-over comes in. Some are beautiful, some horrifying, but none are self-explanatory. Photographs never are. They invite a story. We strive to supply one. A context and a narrative must come into play. It is Godmilow’s own voice that provides one. She abstains from any live-action footage. There is no archival footage that would reanimate the war, that would share narrative control and offer, as they do with Burns, conflicting points of view for us to assess. This is purely Godmilow’s honest, unsparing assessment and she invites us to take it very seriously.

Godmilow’s focus is not on political pronouncements or military strategy but on the human cost of the war to both sides. Everyone had a plan, everyone had a goal, everyone rationalized their actions, but in the thick of all this the horrendous cost of a pointless war relentlessly accumulated. Godmilow makes this painfully obvious with her superbly orchestrated montage of visual evidence and verbal judgment. 

The cost begins with the high price of ignorance. Vietnam was never anybody’s domino, but a fiercely proud nation that struggled to fend off the Chinese, Japanese, French, and Americans over the course of several centuries. A Civil War between North and South became a Cold War between democracy and communism when American leaders could not take off their anticommunist blinders and recognize classic nationalism when they saw it. Arrogance followed. The United States backed corrupt puppet leaders and ignored the lessons the seemingly less savvy French had learned and tried to pass on. We see the cost in the archival images Godmilow provides of devastation, sometimes vast (entire forests), sometimes small (a score of dead bodies strewn across a road) but always searing.

Godmilow wants us—the high-school student in all of us, as we try to make sense of what came before and what we can learn from it now—to focus on the cost in land, community, and human lives, let alone in honesty, integrity, and basic human decency. Part 2 of the film reminds us how ruthlessly the war was fought: Agent Orange to poison the very earth and inflict grievous harm on anyone, from any country, exposed to it, even in the womb; napalm to tenaciously adhere to whatever it came in contact with as it burned inextinguishably; torture and assassination of suspected enemies with utter disregard for due process of any kind; free-fire zones where anyone present was assumed to be an enemy; “zippo raids” where entire villages were burned to the ground; and rape as a demonic weapon of terror. President Putin’s tactics in Ukraine are clearly war crimes but he is not the first to commit them (Godmilow does not make this point, but the parallels are hard to ignore.)

Godmilow’s voice-over reflects her personal distress at both the war and how it can become sanitized as a “lesson,” or a “misguided effort,” that pulls the sting from the massive, murderous impact it had on people both here and in Vietnam. Ignorance and arrogance are not easily unlearned. Photographic evidence and Godmilow’s commentary make this clear. Godmilow’s exclusive use of still images made me wonder about Susan Sontag’s pronouncement that increased exposure to images of atrocity has a dulling effect; tolerance rises, and impact diminishes. This effect may depend heavily on the context in which such images are received, but for me these images, when used as Godmilow does and as others have used images drawn from the Holocaust, continue to have a profound emotional impact. They remain images of real people damaged or destroyed by heinous policies and hideous acts. I can see no way to become immune to their impact—unless they are contextualized as part of a rationalization for the atrocities to which they attest or reduced to sensationalist ends. Godmilow does no such thing.

For High School Students summons up the resistance mounted by Civil Rights movement leaders, black militants, students, workers, and active military service members as well as veterans and deserters. It urges us not to recoil from an ugly chapter in American history, but to gain awareness that what led to Vietnam can lead us into other countries where a distinct history, complex social relations, and unique structures and institutions, often functional, but with rigid hierarchies almost impossible to dislodge, make military victory and the birth of democracy near impossible, at least within a single election cycle. 

Jill Godmilow has explored the underbelly of social history and cultural traditions through most of her work. Films such as Far from Poland (1984), Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (1994), and What Farocki Taught (1998), among others, are formally inventive and politically incisive. For High School Students: Notes and Images from the Viet Nam War, possesses less a reflective or formal documentary approach in favor of more emotionally direct engagement. It is as if Godmilow is telling us, “This is what an unjust war is really like at a visceral level, not as little kernels of personal anecdote or ex post facto wisdom, but as a massive wave of horror that sweeps all men and women of conscience before it.” Jill Godmilow has shared her notes and images, drawn on her wisdom, offered her judgments, and now it is up to us to find a way forward that builds on the lessons from a tragic past.

Bill Nichols is completing the fourth edition of Introduction to Documentary and is the 2022 recipient of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Career Achievement Award.

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