April 23, 2003

By JULIE SALAMON


o compose "The World of Charlie Company," a 1970 CBS News report from Vietnam, the correspondent, John Laurence, spent more than five months tagging along with a military unit there. Or put another way, about four months longer than the war in Iraq lasted.

This painstaking, thoughtful documentary unfolds like a prose poem, a melancholy and exquisite observation about the grim dullness that constituted many soldiers' days. But the absurdities inherent in commercial television war coverage — now exaggerated by competitive cable channels — had already taken root. It is bizarre to switch from Mr. Laurence's elegiac portrait of young men coping with terror and misery to a commercial for Edge shaving cream, promising to end "the warfare between the razor and the face."

The Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan has included "Charlie Company" and five other documentaries from the Vietnam era in its television documentary festival, which begins tomorrow and runs through May 4.

These cinéma vérité films, made with hand-held 16-millimeter cameras and mobile sound equipment, were revolutionary then. Now the methodology is familiar, but the films carry a different shock: most of them, shown during prime time on the major networks, unfold with a narrative leisure almost unimaginable on mainstream television today.

These programs hold special interest now, as viewers try to sort out the images that have bombarded them in the past few weeks.

In the Vietnam films, particular set pieces appear over and over: men trudging through streams; delicate-looking peasants wading in rice paddies; helicopters landing or taking off; soldiers sweating and slapping bugs. These intimate portrayals of life on the front also show graphic views of the wounded and dead from both sides, as well as poignant glimpses of ethereal waifs. The imagery may seem familiar even to those too young to have watched these documentaries and daily coverage on television. That's because these reports became blueprints for later, noisier Hollywood versions of the war, like "Apocalypse Now" and "Full Metal Jacket."

Unlike those movies, made after the fact, the documentaries do not deal as much with the legitimacy of the war as with the general folly and daily grind of it. Though the occasional dissenting grunt appears wearing a peace sign, there is little discussion of politics, geography or military strategy, nothing compared with the deluge of information and hypothesis presented now on CNN or MSNBC or "Nightline." But these were documentaries, intended for the long view, leaving dissection and analysis to the nightly newscasts.

Still, just as today's viewers get one perspective of the world from Fox and another from the BBC, each of these portraits of Vietnam reflects the sensibility of those delivering the news. "The Anderson Platoon," a 1967 documentary broadcast on CBS but produced by Pierre Schoendoerffer for French public television, takes an existential, new wave approach. The narrator, with a heavy French accent, declares that in exploring Vietnam, "I discovered, above all, America." In this beautifully photographed black-and-white film, men wade through streams to the accompaniment of Nancy Sinatra singing "These Boots Are Made for Walking."

A documentary with the portentous title "I Am a Soldier" and part of a series called "The Saga of Western Man," was shown on ABC in 1966 and announces its cinematic purity up front: "This program is about soldiers at war and not the reasons why," intones one of the producers, John H. Secondari, narrating with patrician diction. Filmed in 1965, the program captures the mesmerizing aesthetic of war: the strange attractiveness of battle fatigues, the exotic locales, the swagger and vulnerability of soldiers unable to articulate the cause for which they are fighting.

The Canadian producers of "The Mills of the Gods," shown on CBS in 1965, were more pointed in their skepticism. A soldier expresses his despair at the difficulty of defining the enemy, when enemy soldiers and civilians seemed indistinguishable. "We don't know who they are, but they sure know who we are," says a soldier as the camera takes in bamboo huts that could be concealing underground tunnels.

The oddball in the mix is "Basic Training," made in 1971 by the patriarch of documentary vérité, Frederick Wiseman, and shown on PBS. Like many Wiseman films, this one includes long stretches of repetitive nothingness before stumbling on a revelation. But the revelations here — the martial-arts beauty of bayonet practice, the repetitive displays of how to break someone's neck — were out of sync with the news.

Most remarkable is "Vietnam: It's a Mad War," a 1964 NBC documentary narrated by Chet Huntley and produced by Ted Yates. This more traditional documentary stepped outside the purely observational and tried to provide context. One result is a prescient account of the pitfalls ahead, not just for American actions in Vietnam, but for subsequent foreign policy. When this program was made, American troops were still called "advisers"; the observation is made that the United States could face the same problem in Vietnam that defeated the French in their Indochina war, when the government proceeded without the support of the people.

This shrewd piece of work, written by Robert Rogers, is openly cynical about American officials who were assuring the world that the war was going splendidly. Such criticism is largely missing from the other films, which were made after those advisers had officially become soldiers in a war, albeit undeclared. Departing from cinéma vérité orthodoxy, this film goes beyond its immediate surroundings to offer historical analysis and sly observation.

The cameras visit the Saigon airport, where commercial jets land on a strip across from the mortuary where dead Americans await shipment home. With a nice nod to Graham Greene, Mr. Huntley observes the debarking passengers: "Each arriving commercial plane carries its cargo of generals, Paris dress designers, mutual funds salesmen, C.I.A. agents and round-the-world tourists."

The reporting covers the position of the peasants ("given a choice, the average peasant would probably choose no government") and the slipperiness of military spokesmen. As an official discusses the weekly "kill ratio," the camera pans across corpses in ditches. "In a war where statistics are often cited to show that our side is winning, it is surprising that there are no accurate figures on the number of people killed and wounded," Mr. Huntley says.

"It's a Mad War" has some chilling thoughts for today's policy makers facing the future for Iraq. "Theoretically the United States is in Vietnam to defend a free country," Mr. Huntley says. "But in fact we're still trying to nurse one into existence. That is the problem."

Found at: www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/arts/television/23DOCS.html?

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