One of my fundamental beliefs surrounding filmmaking is that even pieces of narrative art must be conscious about their role as a document of the land and the humanity on display. It doesn’t matter if the text is realist or a work of high fantasy; effective filmmaking serves its living canvas above all else.
The aspect of The Little Girl of Hanoi that deeply struck me was the reverence held by the visual language’s depiction of space. Everything from the sprawling greenery to everyday public spaces to the wreckage of war is treated with the necessary respect; the camera quietly lingers, slowly gliding through these environments with the awareness of their potential destruction. This awareness brought upon by war reveals a deep sense of spirituality and mourning in every image, capturing both the beauty and tragedy of the land before… it gets erased.
In contrast, the presence of active destruction is presented through the distortion of space. Though the documentarian’s tongue is still present, the film adopts an almost surrealist form as the chaos of destruction is reduced down to its base emotions: a dehumanizing binary captured through B&W contrast.
To make a successful “anti-war” film requires the decentralization of war itself, as the spectacle of violence serves as a fundamental basis of the dehumanizing effect of war films. Not only does this film construct itself in its expression of community, but I would argue that it directly places itself in dialogue with the dehumanization of war texts—the degradation of formal reverence exposes the faults in the dramatization of war. Simply an awe-inspiring film.
One of my fundamental beliefs surrounding filmmaking is that even pieces of narrative art must be conscious about their role as a document of the land and the humanity on display. It doesn’t matter if the text is realist or a work of high fantasy; effective filmmaking serves its living canvas above all else.
The aspect of The Little Girl of Hanoi that deeply struck me was the reverence held by the visual language’s depiction of space. Everything from the sprawling greenery to everyday public spaces to the wreckage of war is treated with the necessary respect; the camera quietly lingers, slowly gliding through these environments with the awareness of their potential destruction. This awareness brought upon by war reveals a deep sense of spirituality and mourning in every image, capturing both the beauty and tragedy of the land before… it gets erased.
In contrast, the presence of active destruction is presented through the distortion of space. Though the documentarian’s tongue is still present, the film adopts an almost surrealist form as the chaos of destruction is reduced down to its base emotions: a dehumanizing binary captured through B&W contrast.
To make a successful “anti-war” film requires the decentralization of war itself, as the spectacle of violence serves as a fundamental basis of the dehumanizing effect of war films. Not only does this film construct itself in its expression of community, but I would argue that it directly places itself in dialogue with the dehumanization of war texts—the degradation of formal reverence exposes the faults in the dramatization of war. Simply an awe-inspiring film.
