The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam | |
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Directed by | Beryl Fox |
Produced by | Beryl Fox Douglas Leiterman |
Cinematography | Erik Durschmied Tim Page |
Edited by | Don Haig |
Production company | |
Distributed by | CBC Television |
Release date |
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Running time | 56 min. |
Country | Canada |
Language | English |
The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam is a 1965 Canadian documentary film directed by Beryl Fox and narrated by Bernard B. Fall. [1] Made in the direct cinema style, the film documents the Vietnam War. [2]
In late 1965, Erik Durschmied shot The Mills of the Gods: Vietnam for the CBC series Document, produced and directed by Beryl Fox. During three weeks of filming Durschmied became ill, Tim Page was hired to continue filming until Durschmied regained full health. [3]
The film aired on CBC Television on December 5, 1965, as an episode of Document , the documentary companion series to the news magazine This Hour Has Seven Days . [4] At a time when the anti-war movement was in its infancy, the film opened conversations around the world.
In 1966, The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam won the George Polk Award for Best Television Documentary [5] and the Canadian Film Award for Film of the Year. [6]
The documentary depicts scenes such as American military personnel on board the USNS General Simon B. Buckner, the pilot of a US Skyraider aircraft on a napalm bombing raid; life in Vietnam, Vietnamese people, Vietnamese villages, and the Mekong Delta. It also depicts interviews and discussions, such as American servicemen explaining why they signed up and Vietnamese citizens giving their opinion on the war.
Many scenes are grisly and shocking, such as a montage of the dead and wounded (including a corpse still clasping a grenade), a claim that military officers killed entire villages due to the presence of communists in them, the rubble of a Vietnamese village with visible corpses, and a Viet Cong prisoner being waterboarded. The recording of a jubilant pilot describing strafing and dropping napalm became a famous eyewitness account for many film makers. [7]
The documentary claims that average Vietnamese citizens feel like they are paying for the war, that the Vietnamese want land reform and good governance to support the South Vietnamese government, and that the United States and South Vietnam are starting to win the war.
Phan Thị Kim Phúc, referred to informally as the girl in the picture and the napalm girl, is a South Vietnamese-born Canadian woman best known as the nine-year-old child depicted in the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph, titled "The Terror of War", taken at Trảng Bàng during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972.
Norman R. Morrison was an American anti-war activist. On November 2, 1965, Morrison doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire below the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the Pentagon to protest United States involvement in the Vietnam War, leading to his death. This action was inspired by photographs of Vietnamese children burned by napalm bombings, and may have been inspired by Thích Quảng Đức and other Buddhist monks, who burned themselves to death to protest the repression committed by the South Vietnam government of Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem.
This Hour Has Seven Days was a CBC Television news magazine that ran from 1964 to 1966, offering viewers in-depth analysis of the major social and political stories of the previous week.
Timothy John Page was a British photographer. He was noted for the photos he took of the Vietnam War, and was later based in Brisbane, Australia.
The cinema of Vietnam originates in the 1920s and was largely influenced by wars that have been fought in the country from the 1940s to the 1970s.
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1966.
Erik Durschmied is a cinematographer, producer, director and also an author, military history professor and a former war correspondent for BBC, CBS. Newsweek called him a "supremely gifted reporter who has changed the media he works in", while The New York Times wrote "He has seen more wars than any living general." Durschmied is best known for his book The Hinge Factor. For the sum of his literary work, he received the honorary citizenship of Austria.
Martyn Burke is a Canadian director, novelist and screenwriter from Toronto, Ontario.
A Face of War is a 1968 documentary about the Vietnam War The New York Times called it "one of the great Vietnam documentaries.". The film was produced and directed by Eugene S. Jones (1925-2020) a Korean War news photographer who rose to fame alongside his twin brother Charles Jones. The Jones brothers initially worked for the Washington Times-Herald before moving to NBC and traveling to Korea, where they made the first films from jet fighters in combat and the only films of the Inchon landing. Eugene was hired by NBC Special Projects, becoming a Today Show producer in the late 1950s before working on A Face of War.
The Vietnam Film Festival, founded in 1970, is a domestic film festival of Vietnam. It is considered as the major event of Vietnamese cinema with awards for numerous categories ranging from feature film to documentary film, animated film. The festival is held for each two or three years in different host cities all over Vietnam.
Ron Kelly is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. He began his career with the CBC film unit, directing many short and documentary films between 1952 and 1964. He traveled to France, Spain and Mexico producing and directing documentaries independently from 1956 to 1958. From 1959 to 1962 he studied at Pinewood Studios, England, on a Canadian Arts Council fellowship and while there produced and directed documentaries for the BBC, CBC and National Office of Film, UK. In 1967 he co-wrote and directed the feature film Waiting for Caroline, as a commemoration of Canada's centennial year. Waiting for Caroline was distributed internationally by United Artists, Hollywood. In Hollywood in 1968, Kelly directed for Twentieth Century Fox Studios and Disney Studio. In 1970 he returned to Canada, writing, directing and producing dramas and documentaries for the NFB and CBC. His most recent film is Victims of Victims (2004), a documentary exploration of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Beryl Fox is a Canadian documentary film director and producer.
Tiana Alexandra-Silliphant is a Vietnamese-American actress and filmmaker. Her indie movie From Hollywood to Hanoi was the first American documentary feature film shot in Vietnam by a Vietnamese-American. Tiana's life's work, Why Viet Nam? is about her personal story as a child of war and a widow of peace.
Don Haig was a Canadian filmmaker, editor, and producer.
Summer in Mississippi is a 1965 Canadian cinéma-vérité documentary short from Beryl Fox, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and first shown on This Hour Has Seven Days. It won the award for Best Film, TV Information, at the 17th Canadian Film Awards.
John Laurence is an American television correspondent, author, print reporter and documentary filmmaker. He is known for his work on the air at CBS News, London correspondent for ABC News, documentary work for PBS and CBS, and his book and magazine writing. He won the George Polk Memorial Award of the Overseas Press Club of America for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad" for his coverage of the Vietnam War in 1970.
Ronald Charles Tosh Weyman was a British-born Canadian film and television director and producer. A documentary film director for the National Film Board of Canada from 1946 to 1953, and a director and producer of drama television programming for CBC Television from 1954 to 1980, he was most noted as director of the Canadian Film Award-winning documentary film After Prison, What?, and as a producer of The Serial, a CBC drama anthology series which spun off many of Canadian television's most important drama series of the 1960s.
The 18th Canadian Film Awards were held on May 6, 1966 to honour achievements in Canadian film.
The 16th Vietnam Film Festival was held from December 14 to December 17, 2009 in Tuy Hòa City, Phú Yên Province, Vietnam, with the slogan "For a reformed and integrated Vietnam cinema".
The Last Round: Chuvalo vs. Ali is a 2003 Canadian documentary film, directed by Joseph Blasioli. The film centres on the 1966 boxing match at Maple Leaf Gardens between Canadian boxer George Chuvalo and world champion Muhammad Ali.