April, 2010 - 35th Anniversary of the end of the U.S. War in Vietnam

Friday, April 2
Special Showing of Hearts and Minds (1974)
112 minutes, Rated R for language, war and sexual violence
Directed by Peter Davis

7P.M. FREE LARGE SCREEN LIGHT REFRESHMENTS
(Doors open at 6:30p.m.)

Peace Center of Delaware County, 1001 Old Sproul Rd., Springfield, PA (just off the corner of Old Marple & S. Sproul Roads, behind the Mr. Car Wash, in Springfield, Delaware County) For directions, visit www.delcopeacecenter.org or call 610-544-1818. Co-sponsored by the Brandywine Peace Community.

The Academy Award winning Best Feature Documentary in 1975, Hearts and Minds is the classic documentary about the Vietnam War. Released shortly before the war's end, the film is also about U.S. militarism and arrogance, of a belief in U.S. rightness of action around the world, and of a time, a place, and a legacy of war that forever defined a generation. Directed by Peter Davis, the film's title is based on a quote from President Lyndon B. Johnson: "the ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there".

Michael Moore has cited Hearts and Minds as the one movie that inspired him to become a film maker, calling it "not only the best documentary I have ever seen, it may be the best movie ever". Many of the cinematic techniques used in Hearts and Minds are similar to Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 .

The film includes one of the most widely recognized images of the war in which a nine year old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phúc, is shown running naked down a pathway after being severely burned from a napalm attack on her village. Another scene described as one of the film's "most shocking and controversial sequences" shows the funeral of an ARVN soldier and his grieving family, as a sobbing woman is restrained from climbing into the grave after the coffin. The funeral scene is juxtaposed with an interview with General William Westmoreland - commander of American military operations in the Vietnam War at its peak from 1964 to 1968 and United States Army Chief of Staff from 1968 to 1972 - telling a stunned Davis that "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."

The film also includes clips of George Thomas Coker, a United States Navy aviator held by the North Vietnamese as a prisoner of war for 6½ years, including more than two years spent in solitary confinement.One of the film's earliest scenes details a homecoming parade in Coker's honor in his hometown of Linden, New Jersey, where he tells the assembled crowd on the steps of city hall that if the need arose, that they must be ready to send him back to war. Answering a student's question about Vietnam at a school assembly, Coker responds that "If it wasn't for the people, it was very pretty. The people there are very backwards and primitive and they make a mess out of everything."

The film also features Vietnam war veteran and anti-war activist Bobby Muller, who later founded the Vietnam Veterans of America. Daniel Ellsberg, who had released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, discusses his initial gung-ho attitude toward the war in Vietnam, and then says: "We're not on the wrong side [in Vietnam]; we are the wrong side."

Thirty-five years ago, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it an "epic documentary ... [that] recalls this nation's agonizing involvement in Vietnam, something you may think you know all about, including the ending. But you don't." Canby included the film among his ten best of 1975, calling it a "fine, complex, admittedly biased meditation upon American power" and a movie "that will reveal itself as one of the most all-encompassing records of the American civilization ever put into one film."

After film discussion with special guest: Dr. Sophie Quinn-Judge, just back from an extended visit to Vietnam, aid worker during the war, Associate Director of the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture, and Society, http://www.temple.edu/vietnamese_center/sqj.htm