This spring, the International Forum of Young Film at the Berlin Film Festival presented a program about the war in Vietnam. As well as some films from the people's republic itself that show the consequences of the war with a new frankness going beyond a heroic or propagandistic presentation, two film essays by Adam Simon and Hartmut Bitomsky outlined, respectively, the amazing parallelism of the horror film with the radical changes after '68, and the machinery of death connected with the B-52 long-distance bomber from an American point of view. For »in America people say Vietnam War, in Vietnam people say America War,« as Bitomsky, who has been living in Los Angeles for years, drily remarks from the off in his film »B-52.«

[b]Nightmare USA[/b]

While early cinema from Germany recorded horror from »from Caligari to Hitler,« the lack of horror films after Hitler is all the more noticeable. Only with Schlingensief and Buttgereit did the terror that comes from Germany achieve a cinematic form that is destructive in the common sense. This emptiness becomes even more apparent when it is compared with Adam Simon's film essay »The American Nightmare.« The director shows the connecting threads between US-American politics around 1968 (invasion of Vietnam, murderous everyday racism, paramilitary suppression of rebellions) and the »progressive« horror film of those years. Simon's essay takes us from the reinvention of the genre with George A. Romeros »Night of the Living Dead« (1968) to the backlash with John Carpenter's »Halloween« ten years later.

»Why does a culture need a horror film?« asks Adam Simon in an interview with »FilmMaker.« »Traditionally, the horror film is a reactionary genre in the sense that it neither represents the belief in progress nor the hope for humanity, but looks at the existence of the outsider with extreme disgust. But these horror films are radical because they turn this attitude upside down ... terror could be lying in wait right next to you.« While monsters once came as cold-war warriors from outer space, now they were shown as civil-war warriors of the interior.

At the start, the film zaps through ruined houses in black-and-white, then shows cut fingertips, Vietnam battle scenes, smoke bombs, zombies, militias, dead bodies at the edge of the road as if after a hunt, men in protective clothing, screams, blood, and chaos. In Adam Simon's version, the American nightmare uses pictures from TV news and horror films, and edits them together. »The horror« about which Captain Kurtz will whisper at the end of »Apocalypse Now« has a terrifying store of pictures.

Director John Landis speaks, as a comtemporary witness, about the positive shock »The Night of th Living Dead« gave him: »Wow, there's a black guy – and he's the main character! ... It hit me from all sides.« These horror films ran as a double feature with a »shitty sex film,« which says something about the status accorded to them. »'Living Dead' had reality – verité,« according to Landis, since TV news presentations were also in black and white. »When we talk about family values – I love the film. It was way ahead of its time,« he says while describing the scene in which a girl stabs her mother with a trowel. »It broke all the kosher laws,« jokes film professor Adam Löwenstein. The situation is no longer under control; one sees slavering sheepdogs and a militia with a license to lynch, because the people were said to be dehumanized zombies that you could shoot down like cattle. The zombie remains are carried away using meat hooks – in the same way the US army also didn't touch the dead Vietcong, but dragged them off with nooses made of telephone wire. »We filmed a lot of stuff. Twenty years later, we discovered what it really meant,« says horror specialist Tobe Hooper.

[b]It's only a film?[/b]

The actor and special effects make-up artist Tom Savini was drafted while he was still a greenhorn. »Here I am now – I loved to be frightened,« he says about the situation in Vietnam; but the shock of the battles affected him deeply. Only looking through the camera protected him from the dead. Put at a distance by the lens, he committed every detail to memory, and thought over how he would reproduce it, in the same way as he had copied effects from Frankenstein films on television.

Children burnt by napalm run over the road, in Kent State the National Guard shoots at students, Savini exposes body parts on the screen: Here, what is horror, and what is sadism? Wes Craven's film »Last House on the Left« of 1972 was accused of containing the latter. Segments show blood on hands, electronic sounds, screams, an extremely punky look. The film was advertised with the trailer »Repeat: it is only a film, it is only a film, it is only a film...« Landis makes a distinction between this new, nasty horror, and Hitchcock's suspense: »There you're in the hands of a master,« but in the unbridled films of a new anti-Hollywood »you're in the hands of madmen.« Tobe Hooper's classic »The Texas Chainsaw« of 1974, which is set during an oil crisis, shows a murderer masked with other people's faces. In the gossip columns at the time, there were rumors of monsters that shed their skin, and pulled that of their victims over their face. Here, associations with concentration camps easily come to mind, which raises the question of why there is no comparable German horror-film tradition that relates to National Socialism in this way. For the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, the inability of post-war Germans to grieve is reflected in the shocking fact that psychological defects were not to be found the majority of those examined. In the USA, however, a door to another world is opened that people would rather keep closed, says lecturer Carol Clover: »the unconscious is not a nice place.« Although Hooper's film plays with the fact that the passive viewers in a movie theatre are captive and at his mercy, the chain-saw massacre of Texas carries emacipatory messages: »Don't try to help girls! Girls can get to safety themselves.«

[b]Staying Alive[/b]

In Romero's sequel »Dawn of the Dead« of 1976, the psychological landscape of the USA has changed: after the end of the Vietnam War, wealth, disco, roller skates and the Bee Gees dominate the »malls of America.« The »lost souls« no longer wander over cemeteries and through southern state provinces, but stroll through shopping centers as consumer zombies. Those being pursued isolate themselves behind glass in the little world of the mall, and live as if they were in paradise: »Let's go shopping first!« The film moves between summer-sale riots and a slaughterhouse. »That was my job: how you kill people in a special way,« make-up artist Tom Savini says about Romero's commission. The dehumanized people are shot down like clay pigeons, beheaded, smashed to pieces. »To make you numb through violence« was Romero's idea – as in Vietnam. »Can a whole nation have a nightmare? Then it has to wake up,« says film expert Tom Gunning about the national trauma. »The apocalypse isn't now, it's always,« according to Adam Lowenstein.

John Carpenter's »Halloween« (1978) is a step back both politically and sexually, with active, alcohol-drinking girls being bumped off with deadly certainty. »I didn't mean to end the sexual revolution – and I apologize for doing so,« Carpenter said, poking fun at his critics. »Halloween« was the first of a wave of commercially successful horror films that emerged from the pornographic corner. Landis calls this a »funhouse film«: »Don't scare me too much – only a little.« Adam Simon's film essay glides out into the snowy landscape, over a cemetery. The graves of the (civil) wars are buried, normality seems intact once more. However, Wes Craven expresses his desire to keep on showing the »other side of Disney.« So the film closes with the beautiful dance of the monster with the chainsaw in the rustic sunset, endlessly repeating itself.

[b]Thrust Reversal[/b]

How big is the largest and longest-used bomber in the world? Hartmut Bitomsky's documentary film »B-52« jumps from one detail to another, and still can't comprehend. Everything at the base seems old: the Cold War on ice. Then military officials are heard talking about »fragmentation,« »electronic warfare,« or cruise missiles that »penetrate bunkers.« The huge bomber has to look even bigger on the enemy's radar screen so as not to be hit. The so-called payload of up to ten tonnes, however, was always flexible: atom bombs (tests), cluster bombs (Vietnam), cruise missiles (Gulf War). The bombers – first sketched out in 1947 in a hotel by Boeing engineers during a single weekend and already put into service by 1952 – are kept in trim for these purposes. One hundred of the bombers are still in use. Every four years, they are taken apart completely, checked, and overhauled: »The plane is almost built for a second time.«

From 1966 the B-52, originally used as a high-altitude bomber, was adapted for low-level flights over South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. One woman can be seen among the present pilots, all of whom have white skin. Then the film shows the almost treeless countryside in Dông Lôc, scarred by bomb craters. This is where the Ho Chi Minh Road started; a movie recalling the defence of this strategic position later takes us here. Brackish rainwater collects in the holes. An eyewitness from Hanoi tells how radio broadcasts used to announce the approaching bombers: 20 kilometers, 10 kilometers ... The region was »totally flattened,« and his family died. Archive material shows soldiers pulling pieces of wreckage through the town in triumph.

Forty-five bombers were deployed for »Desert Strike« in the Gulf. The B-52 can refuel in the air and doesn't need overseas airbases. »Global reach, global power from home base,« as a commander of the bomber squadron in Minot, North Carolina, calls it. In March 1999, six bombers were also used in the war in Kosovo. The new strategy was control, and no longer the destruction of other terrains.
Three B-52s with nuclear arsenals on board crashed in Spain, Greenland and the USA. Farmers tell how the upright point went through the field like a monstrous plow. Bitomsky's film seems to want to show this bomber's enormous energy, which at most can be diverted, not stopped. The pressure of military production pushes its output before it like a huge terminal moraine of rubble. In the Arizona desert, there is a well-ordered cemetery. 2,500 »Stratofortresses« are cannibalized, reused, or sold to junk dealers. A half-a- billion dollar profit can be made in this way, year after year. Bitomsky's camera lingers on one of the bombers while it is being wrecked: for example, when a titanium guillotine weighing five tonnes hurtles down from the crane again and again, separating the wings from the fuselage.

»The true location of the Cold War was perhaps the production centers.« One thousand people in 100 factories produce the bombers. The reutilization chain for an old bomber seems as long as its production chain. At the end of it you find scrap metal, copper wire, gold plugs, collectors' items, art installations for the office, spare parts depots organized by private industry, or some form of reuse. The closing image shows the Boeing factory near Seattle, into which the powers of military production are directed like lava that, being unstoppable, needs a bed to be dug for it. Thrust reversal is the name of the procedure needed to brake a military, industrial colossus like this.

[b]»I've seen the horror«[/b]

Shortly after the Vietnam War ended, Francis Ford Coppola's »Apocalypse Now« played it through again in the form of a filming battle. Coppola had mortgaged his private fortune of 16 million dollars, the crew had to endure typhoons, the main actor's heart attacks and other catastrophes. With the addition »redux« (back to the beginning), the revised long version alters the perspective of the military operation by referring to colonial background history. A neatly cultivated French colonial plantation emerges from the mist – past the wreck of a B-52. The Vietnamese personnel of the de Marais family has mastered nouvelle cuisine, the widow has mastered the »seduction scene.« Why don't they go back to France? »Why go back?« the patriarch hisses, and recites a list of past wartime defeats. »You Americans won the Second World War, not us.« After being driven out of Algeria, they seem to have buried themselves here – as a ghostly colonial power that has lasted 150 years.

[b]The orange-colored poison[/b]

»What do Americans look like?« »They say, like Frenchmen.« Luu Trong Ninh's film »Bên Không Chông / Wharf of Widows« begins after the French colonial era, which lasted from 1859 to 1954. This also marked the time when the country was divided. The film is one of a series of films coming from Vietnam that takes a new look at the »America War« after more than 25 years. It's not the conflicts that are emphasized here, but their effects on the »home front.« The destruction takes place inside the people. The consequences of occupation are shown mostly from the point of view of the women who helped in the war effort in villages, in the fields, or as soldiers, admittedly as seen by a male director.

In the village live many (wartime) widows, so the arrival of war hero Van, who has been invalided out, is greeted with yearning gazes. The war is still present as a working song sung in the fields. An old woman with her feet wrapped in pieces of leather shuffles over the street. »Do you know anyone in the village who never cries?« the stooped old woman asks, combining grief and lovesickness, yearning and shock. Luu Trong Ninh's film depicts war and hard work as a compensation for prohibited desire. »Do you want to embrace your gun your whole life long?« Van is asked. The social control of the village – when Van has his first physical contact with a »big landowner,« the other women in the village immediately start banging saucepan lids at night – doesn't make desire seem opportune.

In 1975 one of the village's sons returns home in a jeep. »I've heard that radar technicians can't do it,« the teenagers in the village whisper to one another. Under pressure from the family court, a married »woman without a child« returns to her mother. »Perhaps her husband has been infected by the orange poison.« Uncle Van wants to help, and is degraded by the new elite. After a night spent together, it seems as if the two outcasts will be able to stand by each other, but then the woman leaves the village for the city. She comes back years later with the child, but the village laughs at the small family. »I'm not afraid,« she says, in contrast to former generatons; but the banging of pots begins once more. The film ends with Van being cut down from the tree from which he has hanged himself over the river.

[b]Pit[/b]

Nguyen Thanh Van's film »Doi Cát / Built on Sand« explains in the front credits that the northern part of Vietnam was separated from the southern part for twenty years after the Geneva ceasefire of 1954. After »reunification,« Mr. Canh decides to leave his present family in the north to visit his former wife Thoa in the south. But how do loving bodies come together again after 20 years?

The field in the north is full of bomb craters and, during the trips from north to south, frequent fade-ins show a sandy desert that has to be crossed. The hole that has been torn in time is bridged over at the cemetery. »Those are the gravestones of my grandparents, they died in 1962,« or »The laws of 1959 were a terrible time«: scenes of a land split apart, where each side first has to tell its own story.

»Nice that you still recognize me,« a one-legged man says to an old friend. The cripple can't stand erect, something to which he gives a sexual connotation. »What are you digging there?« a legless woman – like him a mine victim - later asks him. »A grave. I want to die in a planned fashion,« the one-legged man answers. He constructs the hole as a pit, above which he could shut the cover with piles of earth. This is where the two unhappy, crippled lovers meet. But only the coffin maker sleeps with the legless woman, motivated by a skewed humanity – she is to look after the child. As the legless woman's pregnancy becomes apparent, the one-legged man sticks by her and claims paternity. He fills in the pit and puts burning incense sticks on top of it as if something had been borne to its grave here. »We can't live like this,« he says, and that calls to mind figures of Beckett in their most malicious Adorno interpretation.

[b]Yesterday[/b]

In contrast to other films in this series, Phi Tiên Son's film »Vào Nam Ra Bac / Heading South, Going North« is set in the urban present. Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City is filmed from a car as a metropolis glittering with neon lights. The night bar «International Tourist« promises a new sort of luxury, where one can dance to soft pop. The camera keeps its distance from this milieu, although it remains unclear whether it is criticizing the implied prostitution or the North American-influenced way of life.

Businessman Quang thinks he recognizes one of the dancers as being a girl who rescued his life during the war while he was fleeing from the army. Her gestures next to him provoke flashbacks. He is seen with other soldiers lugging pieces of stone strapped to his back over a pass. After an air raid, someone pushes a package into his hand that he is to bury in a remote place. While digging the hole, a bloody, cut-off hand rolls towards him – a seldom shown horror of the war that is nonetheless just as grotesquely empasized as in a U.S. -American horror film.¹

Quang wants to strike out for the north, and ends up in the ruins of a farm. A playful brother/sister romance grows between him and the girl; they hold absurd parades or sail a paper ship in a bomb trench. In it, two approaching jet fighters are reflected. Bombs fall, and the explosion causes the water to spray up so that the camera ends up fixed on a grotesque rainbow.

In the next scene, a soft rock version of »Yesterday« immerses the disco. Quang pushes a few bundles of notes into the hand of the woman he has supposedly rediscovered so that she doesn't have to let herself be exploited anymore. A revolutionary song is playing. At the bidding of her new patron, the girl gets on a train, but gets off it again at the next station. While the businessman is boasting of his good deed in front of new office buildings, a can of cola in his hand, the girl returns to her shared flat, puts on a severe dress, and sets off for her philosophy course.

The fact that a war refugee can become the main character of a film shows thenew direction taken here by state-controlled film production. »I really didn't fight; I just waited three years, and then the overall social situation helped make it possible for me to film my script without any serious cuts,« is how the director, Dang Nhât Minh (»Mùa Ôi / The Season of Guavas) describes the reversal in the social climate. Thirty-six run-down film studios bear witness to great times. Now, the principles of market economy apply here, simply because there is a lack of subsidies. Cinema production has shrunk to four films a year on average – as compared with 300 TV productions. Films are now being made using ancient equipment. The post-production tone makes the speech sound very intimate and the ambience sound artificial. The numerous explosions are not done using pyrotechnical tricks, but are dangerously real, for financial reasons. The train scenes in »Heading South, Going North« were able to be filmed more cheaply, because the director, cameraman and railway boss met while studying in former East Germany – how else can you make a movie with a budget of the equivalent of 150,000 marks? Luu Trong Ninh, who directed two films to be seen at the Berlin Film Festival, but was also the cameraman for »Heading South, Going North,« received his training in Babelsberg, Potsdam.

[b]The direct path[/b]

In his film »Ngã Ba Dông Lôc / Ten Girls of Dông Lôc,« which came out in 1997, it's still possible to suspect the presence of a socialistic heroism that tries to smooth over battle scenes with vague closeups and pathetic songs. During an attack, only the rice hats of the dead are seen spinning around on the field. Is this the poetry of suggestion? Or, rather, timidity in the face of horror? Does the depiction of a youth assault troop at the junction of the Ho Chi Minh Road have something of a sexy-girls-camp feeling about it, or does it show people under attack rising above the situation, and not wanting to see themselves as victims?

»The bombs may shake mountains and forests, but not our hearts and minds, Mother,« a seventeen-year-old female soldier writes. Bombs from air raids rain down on an earth road. There's a lot of laughing and whispering in the film. »I can't forget your warm hands,« letters say, or »Take care of yourself, my daughter.« Replies are written in bomb craters during the breaks in fighting. The women soldiers complain to the commander about the standard size of bra provided: »How can I wear a bra like this?« One of the women regularly leaves her unit without permission simply because she can't bear the large numbers of people in the camp.

Jets constantly hurtle through the air. A school has been built in the jungle. Before the campaign starts, they put their jewelry in a common jewelry box and tie on their camouflage cloths. From a hill, the women soldiers from the youth assault troop use telescoples to search the sky for bombers. If a shell doesn't go off, a soldier hurries off and marks it with a red flag. The old woman who again appears in »Wharf of Widows« walks with her stick directly through a minefield. »I prefer the direct path,« she says, fearlessly. »How lucky you are not to wear a ring,« a soldier explains to her. A small needle carried on the body would have been enough to trigger off the magnetic sensors of the mine.

A team of volunteers has to go out and blow up the mines using a piece of metal tied to some rope. They are more scared of a field rat. The trenches are filled in to the sound of singing in chorus, the roads are made passable. The women soldiers act as guides at night or push trucks back onto the road. The wounded are transported on a hammock strung between two bikes. Flare bombs above the road, burning trucks, a hasty kiss snatched among the flames. Later, a bath in a bomb crater lake, while the troops march past. People greet one another with operetta–like singing: »Come back with peace. We'll see you at your wedding.«

A jet appears in a telescope, the sky turns dark, and dirt flies up, where the women soldiers otherwise scarcely received a scratch even in the most intense turmoil. Cut: nine coffins in a row, the tenth victim wasn't found. »The earth is so cold,« the funeral oration says. Cut: a man in a wheelchair pushes himself onto the asphalt road towards the memorial at the junction. The closing credits announce that this was a true story from the »American War«: »They sacrificed themselves on 26 July, 1968.«

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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