Far From Vietnam

(Loin du Vietnam, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, 1967, 115 min., 35mm, French w/ subtitles)

Here and Elsewhere. Incensed by the Vietnam War, Chris Marker assembled an international consortium of auteurs, as well as more than 150 other artists, intellectuals, technicians, and friends to produce a “film-manifesto” that would affirm, by the exercise of their craft, solidarity with the Vietnamese people in their struggle against aggression. Blending documentary footage taken on the Indochina Peninsula and at anti-war protests in New York City and Paris; interviews with Fidel Castro and Anne Morrison, widow of Norman Morrison, the Quaker pacifist who burned himself alive in front of the Pentagon in 1965; self-interrogating monologues by Godard and Resnais’s fictional surrogate played by Bernard Fresson; and an array of repurposed pop cultural ephemera and electronic media, Marker’s unifying editorial vision weaves eleven stylistically unique contributions into a web of competing perspectives. The result challenges the divide between East and West, asking how cinema might bridge the distance articulated by the title and encourage solidarity from afar.