In a series like Whisper of History: Echoes of the Cold War in Asia, which focuses on the resonance between two histories, the featured films act as an archive of a point of view and a way to access other related historical moments. Consequently, the film series becomes a collage of perspectives. While it cannot realistically hope to be an exhaustive revival of memories of the time, this film series aims to pick out aesthetic and thematic commonalities between the films presented and the cultural impact of the Cold War.

All four films are war movies and documentaries in their own way, and each draws intentional narratives out of the same central conflict. Through the process of arranging this film series, the shift to remote viewings has prompted some reflection on the efficacy of documentary in the construction of historical narratives, as well as the audience’s shifting roles in response to this mode of filmmaking.

When examining the marketing of war movies, there appears to be some currency assigned to authenticity. The stamp of approval verifying films which were “based on a true story!” functions like a permission slip. This functions as an invitation to suspend one’s disbelief for two hours, safe in the knowledge that the story is true, that one does not have to look too far or too closely to find reality. The documentary The Future Cries Beneath Our Soils hews close to this valued authenticity and comes out feeling distant and strange.

Pham Thu Hang’s directorial eye favours long silences and the dim rituals of daily life, often conducted while the men face away from the camera. When one of the veterans breaks into mournful song, the documentary averts its gaze to the glittering sunlight through a canopy of leaves, as if releasing the audience in the face of something too private for our silent staring.

As a medium, film is uniquely suited to addressing the potency of machinery. In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin describes film acting as “performance produced in a mechanised test” (Benjamin, et al. 30). For the actor, succeeding in performing humanity means “[preserving] one’s humanity in the face of the apparatus” (Benjamin, et al. 31).

Documentaries like The Future Cries Beneath Our Soils, in which footage is captured spontaneously and later deliberately spliced into a story, call into question that dehumanising gaze of the camera. There are no second takes and no scripted scenes. Future Cries resists jeopardising the humanity of its subjects through long, low shots, which in turn makes the viewers themselves increasingly conscious of their own discomfort and humanity outside of the state of watching.

In Future Cries, when the ambulance comes for Loc the audience is made abruptly aware of the camera’s presence as the medics swerve the stretcher to avoid it. In Far From Vietnam, Godard makes explicit reference to the camera’s unwieldy presence in his segment. His camera is as cold and inscrutable as the machinery of war, spoken of in the same uncertain tone. This self-awareness stands out in a medium like film, which prizes the suspension of disbelief and traditionally avoids calling attention to the omnipresent camera.

The watching audience’s point of view takes place directly behind the camera’s field of vision, and if the camera and those who operate it are complicit in some form of inaction or inefficacy, then so is the audience. By calling attention to the tools of filmmaking as a disruptive presence in what they seek to document, both Godard and Pham invoke a self-conscious awareness within the audience of our position as silent watchers.

This effect is, however, disrupted with the advent of home viewing. In the absence of physical destinations, a new experience of space arises with the remote filmgoing experience. When observing a still image, there is an immediacy to the viewer’s response that can be extended with close analysis or moving to close the physical distance between the viewer and the image. This immediacy and control over the depth of viewing vanishes with the film medium, especially in a cinematic setting. In contrast, instead of moving our whole selves into the sphere of the filmgoing experience, the digital film series seeks entry into the carefully curated sphere of our personal devices.

The individual device operates as a mediating piece of technology which sits between the eye of the camera and the will of the viewer. We are reminded of our own distance from these histories, tethered only by a small screen and an Internet connection, a distance which is only exacerbated by the dissonance between high production qualities and the informality of our personal devices.

Traditionally, the wide screen lends an aura of legitimacy to films like Far From Vietnam and Little Girl of Hanoi. Over the years, the Vietnam War has been mythologised into a highly dichotomised conflict between America and Vietnam, and this prevailing narrative is in large part due to the prizing of high production values, high resolutions, and distinct characters in film. They are made with mass consumption in mind and as such boil the conflict down into a simplified emotional landscape: the American military forces versus Vietnamese civilians locked in a moral fable, an age-old story told at the expense of other participants in history and their own histories.

If, as Tacita Dean claimed, “film is time made manifest”, then the aforementioned films operate as intentionally constructed pockets of time as eminently re-playable sites of trauma meant to engender sympathy for Vietnamese citizens. Over time, however, distance and repetition erode the intended effect, while still creating a narrative that looms so large in our collective cultural consciousness that it eclipses alternative accounts, especially from citizens of neighbouring Southeast Asian countries.

This sheen of authority dictates the difference between a home video and a blockbuster documentary and is seen as a necessary condition of a filmmaker who wishes to participate in the process of history-making. Remote streaming gives the viewer control over this supposedly objective stream of time, and an unprecedented ability to participate in the construction of historical narratives. In a theatre, the wide screen enables a more seamless integration into the world of the documentary.

At home, however, the computer screen gives the audience the time, space, and freedom of movement to dissect and selectively consume the film. Without the community of fellow filmgoers, the experience becomes individualistic and unmoored from the collective atmosphere of a theatre. We are given more power than ever to intrude into these sites of trauma and freed from the expectations of community, and it is an unavoidable product of traditional modes of documentary filmmaking interacting with new technology.

As a counterpoint to the blockbuster war movie, Forgetting Vietnam takes on many of the same themes, ruminating on the lingering trauma of the Vietnam War. Most would not consider Forgetting Vietnam a documentary—it comprises footage from both 1995 and 2012, moving between digital and Hi-8 film, and many segments are filmed with a handheld camera amid the bustle of everyday life. To a contemporary filmgoer, both segments feel dated and reminiscent of a home video. Partway through the film, Forgetting Vietnam addresses its increasingly obvious age.

The text on the screen reads: “the high tech image/how cool do I look?” and “Sai Gon, in Hi-8”. Its low resolution, handheld quality, and lack of a storyline seem to exclude Forgetting Vietnam from consideration as a documentary: it is most commonly described as a “film essay” and “portrait of Vietnam”. This holds the audience at an arm’s length and prevents us from taking up the passive, voyeuristic role of the documentary viewer.

There are no distinct characters, and any tension in the film comes from several parties: the Vietnamese government, the unnamed but omnipresent American military presence, and the interplay between land and sea. The resulting trauma of the war is present and potent, but the audience is never made immediately privy to it and cannot inflict our own disruptive presence in the world of the film.

In an industry where filmic legitimacy represents the ability of a filmmaker to execute their vision, Forgetting Vietnam’s intentional elusiveness communicates a detached refusal to compete in the arena of documentary. It dwells in and honours the subjective microhistories of individual Vietnamese people, documenting not the war itself but its persistent memory in a cinematic Vietnam.

The low-resolution places it not in the far reaches of history but somewhere just beyond current memory, simultaneously recognisable and yet irretrievably past. Through this temporal dissonance the film gives space for a highly subjective memory while resisting incorporation into history, thus operating as a counterpoint to traditional narratives which makes the boundaries between documentary and personal account clearer than before.

While it may be tempting to denounce these new developments and fresh discomfort as the death of cinema, these changes also provoke reflection on film’s expanding capacity to encompass questions on the elusive, difficult faces of memory and viewership. Even if this new digital space signals an end to film as we know it, we might as well appreciate it before it goes. Turn an ear to the whispers of history, newly distorted and louder than ever.