The war that still torments Americans
Directors Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and producer Sarah Botstein were at The Chronicle on Thursday, July 27, talking about “The Vietnam War,” the 10-part documentary to be broadcast on PBS starting on Sept. 17 (check out the Facebook Live interview online: http://bit.ly/2vbiS72). They’ve been going around the country talking about this big project — 18 hours to watch, 10 years in the making — and later that day, they were at the center of an event hosted by KQED at the Palace of Fine Arts.
Here, as John Diaz has written, they talked with members of the editorial board; later, at the Palace of Fine Arts, hundreds of people — supporters of KQED, local filmmakers, Vietnamese who have immigrated to the United States, documentary participants — watched a 45-minute clip and listened to a postshow discussion. When Burns invited people who had participated in the war or in actions against the war to stand, perhaps a quarter of the audience rose. Forty years after the war, its mention arouses emotions.
At the reception, I asked Peter Coyote, the documentary’s narrator, about his own experience with the Vietnam War draft. He’d applied to be a conscientious objector and written an essay expressing his beliefs, and was turned down. He started graduate school and dropped out, and then “they drafted me. I went into the psychiatric interview, and said I would go ... ‘but I am not going to go and kill people.’ ” He was classified 1-Y, to be called only in extreme emergency, he said. “I told the exact truth, with the worldview I could have written today.”
Coyote said he has done 170 narrations, some of which — for “The Roosevelts,” for example, which he felt touched upon his parents’ lives and beliefs — involved him emotionally. “But when this one came up, this is one time I was flabbergasted at the degree my emotions and my memories were in my throat,” he said.
The series is a woven web of testimony and historic footage showcasing more than 10 years of research and filmmaking. “I think we bit off more than we could chew,” said Burns, “and then tried to learn how to chew.” As the filmmakers researched the project, “everything we were beginning to construct was more complicated than we thought.”
The post-preview onstage discussion, moderated by KQED’s Scott Shafer, included the filmmakers, former Marine Philip Brady and South Vietnamraised former Immigration Court Judge Phan Quang Tue.
Brady, a gung-ho enlistee who’d joined the Marines in the 1960s, was shocked, soon after arriving in Vietnam, when a superior told him we were losing. Tue said that when the Americans pulled out and the war was won by the North Vietnamese, “The most precious thing that we lost was our national pride.” Americans, he said, “are very good at winning, but not good at losing.”
Friday, July 28, was donor appreciation night at the airy Napa Valley Museum, on the grounds of the Veterans Home of California in Yountville, and there weren’t cater-waiters passing artisanal hors d’oeuvres. Nope. Aproned volunteers grilled hot dogs and hamburgers; condiments were in plastic squeeze bottles.
The exhibition “Sound Maze,” by composer and inventor of instruments Paul Dresher, which is at the museum until Aug. 20, is the meat and potatoes of this item. But to appreciate the lighthearted afternoon gathering, you have to picture its informality, not only in its vittles, but also in its vitals. The content of the exhibition: Fascinated adults listened to explanations, and kids jumped into action, making noise by hitting, strumming, pinging Dresher’s instruments.
Dresher, in Hawaiian shirt and flipflops, patiently showed off creations he and Daniel Schmidt had made, the smallest of which — a Hurdy Grande — was pingpong-table size; the largest of which reached to the tall ceilings and spread wide. A collaboration with Naomie Kremer, who was there, featured her video of a series of metal hoops, making golden ring images and ringing noises when they were twirled on a concave platform.
I watched as 5-year-old Felix Boucou, who was there with his mom, played the Big Wheel. He picked up a variety of wooden balls, sent them down a chute, turned a wheel to pop them against a wooden surface and bounce them through a hole, through which they went cascading down a set of metal pipes. Young Felix moved from one side to the other, reaching up for those balls, bending down to listen to that silvery sound. He set a great example, so I did it, too.
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I don’t know how Melanie will survive school. Chef won’t be available for a week.” Woman on tram at Sacramento airport, overheard by Holly Bennett