In 1967, a group of filmmakers collaborated on Far From Vietnam (Loin du Vietnam), a manifesto film to affirm their solidarity with the Vietnamese people in their fight against the American aggressor.

Initiated by Chris Marker, the film gathered Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Claude Lelouch, and more than 150 anonymous collaborators, in a collective omnibus at the margins of documentary, fiction, and militant cinema. Their goal was not to document the war but to interrogate its imperialism and question their own position, and ours, as spectators of what was the first televised conflict.

Composed of eleven chapters, the film represents, imagines and comments on what its narration calls “a war of rich against poor”, assembling war documents, archival footage, interviews and staged fiction. Each filmmaker contributes in their own style – Ivens' reportage, Godard's self-reflexive commentary, Resnais' fiction, Klein's direct cinema – and Chris Marker’s montage weaves every fragment together into a coherent yet not unified narrative.

Escaping a dogmatic argument and a Manichean denunciation, Far from Vietnam is essayistic in its plurivocal nature. Playing with echoes and resonances, Marker’s montage invites us not to take an image for what it shows, but to understand it in relation to other images and webs of signification.

There is never a right way to film a war. Perhaps the only way, as Godard put it, is to make films politically, questioning who films, who is filmed, and who is watching. Far From Vietnam reminds us that political cinema is never only about politics, it is about cinema too.

GVN