Public Tv: Custom-Tailored

• Share

When they heard that the National Educational Television channels were going to run a 49-minute excerpt of a documentary filmed in North Viet Nam, 33 U.S. Congressmen signed a letter accusing NET of "acting as a conduit of enemy propaganda." It was precipitate on two counts: 1) they had not seen the film, and 2) if they had, they would lave realized that there was no cause for alarm. Northth Viet Nam: A Personal Report, filmed by British Journalist Felix Greene, was so transparently tailored that only a twelve-year-old would buy its presumed authenticity.

The fault was in the aim. Much of the film was shot in rural villages purportedly laid waste by U.S. bombing. Many of the participants, however, seemed to have come from Central Casting. They were indomitable, photogenic people, barefoot and singing as they cleared away the rubble. (The implication was that the songs were traditional Vietnamese, though according to South Vietnamese sources, they are Red Chinese in origin.) The camera would pan a lovely pastoral tableau. Then the air-raid sirens would scream, and everyone would scramble for one-man, cement-lined foxholes. One sequence depicted a captured American airman. Inevitably, there were affecting shots of injured children and of surgeons working on the wounded by flashlight, and Narrator Greene would ask plaintively: "How many bombs will it take to destroy the tens of thousands of people who move rivers with their hands?" Four peasant girls worked cheerfully at a waterway in clothes that seemed more for Sunday than for hard labor. At the fade, a genial "Uncle Ho" was seen touring among his admiring people.

To provide perspective, which in this case was superfluous, NET staged a 60-minute debate between two differing Asia hands from academe. The discussion was urbane and informed but not particularly illuminating. Former CBS Correspondent David Schoenbrun, now a professor of Vietnamese history at Columbia University, conceded that Greene's "emphasis on civilian targets gave a false impression," but called the film "a useful counterpoint to our own propaganda." Robert Scalapino, who teaches political science at Berkeley, observed that the documentary "did not mention the word 'Communism' once," and summed up that it "presented North Viet Nam as the North Vietnamese Communists would like to have us see it." And so it did.