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Hearts and Minds

In partnership with the Center for Asian Studies. Special video intro by director Peter Davis!

Hearts and Minds

Here is a documentary about Vietnam that doesn't really level with us on a simple technical level. If we know something about how footage is obtained and how editing can make points, it sometimes looks like propaganda, using such standard tricks as the juxtaposition of carefully selected but unrelated material to create a desired effect. And yet, in scene after scene, the raw material itself is so devastating that it brushes the tricks aside.

"Hearts and Minds" was filmed over a period of a year at a cost of about $1 million, making it at the time the most ambitious American documentary since "Woodstock." And then it was shelved for a year because its original distributor, Columbia, feared legal problems. The ironic result is that it went into wide release in 1974, just at the moment when the whole Vietnam experiment seemed to be collapsing. By then, the hard-hat parades, the returning heroes lecturing school-children, the television promises of Johnson and Nixon, the hawkish line of Walt Rostow and the surprisingly racist banalities of Gen. William Westmoreland all seemed not only tragic but pathetic.

We see a tearful graveside scene in North Vietnam, for example, with a widow trying to throw herself onto her husband's coffin, and then we get Westmoreland soberly explaining that Orientals don't place a high value on life. In this and his other comments about what he calls "the Oriental philosophy," Westmoreland comes over as not only racist and stupid, but incredibly lacking in awareness of how his remarks will sound. This man ran a war for years in a country he didn't begin to understand.

— Roger Ebert

Hearts and Minds

Free show!

Sat February 4, 7:30 PM, Muenzinger Auditorium

United States of America; 1975; in English, French, Vietnamese; 112 min

Director: Peter Davis, Cast: Clark Clifford, John Foster Dulles, Georges Bidault, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower

recommend

Tickets

10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission. $7 w/UCB student ID, $7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.

Parking

Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.

RTD Bus

Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus

International Film Series

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Established 1941 by James Sandoe.

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(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

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(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil Grillo.

Celebrating Stan

Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.

C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.

Thank you, sponsors!
Boulder International Film Festival
Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

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