Hearts And Minds Film Analysis

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The Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds, directed by Peter Davis, is a an examination of the conflicting attitudes about the Vietnam War that existed during that time in history and still exist to this day. The way this is shown, visually and narratively, is through the many uses of juxtaposition of scenes that represented both sides of the conflict; American versus Vietnamese, Pro-war versus Anti-war, average citizens versus government leaders, et cetera. This comparison beings in the very first scene, as the film opens on a peaceful scene of a provincial Vietnamese town. We see children are playing, cheerful music is playing, villagers are working in the fields. Gradually, American soldiers on patrol begin to appear in this rural scene, demonstrating the American presence that existed in Vietnam for almost twenty …show more content…
With this segment, Davis tries to show the parallels between the struggle the American colonists had and what the Vietnamese people were going through at the time. In one interview, one of the reenactors describes the situations during the American Revolutions, with the struggle of real people, risking everything, and fighting against the world’s most powerful military. This almost exactly represents the situation in Vietnam, a truth that many people of the time either did not know or chose not to believe. You can see this ignorance in another interviewee, who is offered the interviewer is trying to draw a connection between our fight for independence and that of the Vietnamese. This is a very important segment to the overall message of the film, in that this film was not designed entirely to be anti-war, but to show the American people the Vietnam War from a new perspective , from the eyes of the people fighting in it, the Vietnamese who were directly affected by it, and the real powers-that-be that had gotten us involved in this conflict in the first
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