Vietnam.. Development

Tim Bowden photo from the incident in my script.                                                                                               American soldiers using villagers as human mine detectors.

While I have been working on this project for quite a long time I undertook this studio in order to focus my activities and hopefully develop a artefact that I may use to pitch it to a producer or funding body to secure further development funding. I have always been enamoured with the idea of telling such an epic tale from the point of view of the photojournalists who were there and took some of the most iconic images of our time. I felt that this war was the only time in history that reporters would have the unrestricted access to go where they pleased and report what they chose. This hasn’t happened since and will not happen again. Reporters are now ’embedded’ in locations and restricted in their ability to move about with such freedom.

I was influence by the book ‘Requiem’ which was a tribute to the photojournalists who were killed in Vietnam. I wished to bring these famous, and often reckless, heroes to life. I wanted to uncover their motivations and characters, and explore how their time in Vietnam changed their ideas about the war, and how they later felt about that. The freedom they were granted gave them a unique position to form opinions outside the propaganda of the military and official position. The stories of reporters and military personal so many years later is quite different to the accepted beliefs in relation to the war. The ‘truth’ of incidents can now be revealed with support and confirmation from a variety of sources.

The form I chose was a long dramatised documentary series, which would allow time to tell this epic story over a long period of time. I like the form of stand alone 90 minute episodes where various stories could interweave to introduce characters and strands which would lighten the tone of episodes. I find the research quite emotional and would like to introduce stories of friendship and love to give some respite to sad and traumatic tales.

I wished to focus on a time early in the war.. not to get too far ahead of myself. In my research I would begin with a photograph and research the events surrounding them. For the studio I just wanted to keep the time period early in the war. The early ‘swinging sixties’ is an exciting time culturally with the civil rights movement in America and Australia, female emancipation, anti-establishment sentiments, a new generation of music, rhythm and blues, a time of protests and the new radical values of the counterculture of the young. These are all threads that are available to interweave and create a vibrant and electrifying world for a radically different telling of the history of the Vietnam war.

I was inspired for my studio project by an account of an apparently unprovoked shelling of a village by American troops who Tim thinks were ‘just bored’. I have been talking to a Vietnam photojournalist Tim Page who lives in Brisbane and while researching his tales I stumbled upon this account by Tim Bowden. I try to listen to sound recordings and films to ‘get a feel’ for the personality and nature of the journalists. I desire my characters to be as true to life as possible to do justice to their stories and would like actors to resemble them in appearance.

The script I am developing, while dramatised, is essentially a factual account of events as Tim tells them. I have contacted him to enquire if I could use his photos of the incident and by strange coincidence he will be in Melbourne for the next six weeks and I hope to be able to conduct some interviews with him and perhaps record or even film them. I hope! For my dreadfully unsuccessful powerpoint presentation I selected photographs from the internet which could substitute for the real thing. Tim is happy to give me access to his photographs so I hope to incorporate them in my final artefact.

My research yesterday threw me into quite a quandary of the direction of my project. I listened to a number of radio stories by Tim and found that perhaps Australian journalists had a quite different slant to events than journalists from other countries.  I will be able to investigate that further when I meet Tim Page in Queensland. It may throw my focus more on an Australian telling of events than I had previously considered. Tim’s friend Neil Davis (character in my script) travelled with South Vietnamese forces for weeks at a time and his accounts of their activities are quite different to anything I have read. It may prove a great strand to integrate. I may have the opportunity to discuss with Tim who their friends would be in the bar and how they would interact and how sharing such an experience with others may play out. There are so many details  I was hoping to be able to authenticate.

That’s me so far..

 

 

 

 

 

As I further developed the short scene, I was working on, I realised where I lost my audience.. probably completely. In choosing to use a powerpoint presentation I thought I could regulate the time and get through the material within the time restriction of 3 minutes. In fact I was so devastated by the technical problems of my presentation I almost changed stories. Without the help, and patience, of my fellow students I couldn’t have done my presentation at all. It is my commitment to the importance of the project that helped me to persevere and stay with it.

In approaching the very broad story of the Vietnam War, I have been exploring the small worlds, ‘worlds-within-a world’, where my overarching stories and themes could be told.. mind-map time. One idea I was working on for my presentation was a bar where photojournalists would meet when they returned from the field. Another ‘world’ was the interior of a temple where they could discuss with Buddhist monks the oppression and violence of the Diem regime leading into the ‘self-immolating’ monk photograph. My Buddhist centre in Brighton has a beautiful ‘gompa’ with large statues and elaborate colours and textures. It would be a powerful representation of the callous and brutal destruction of Diem and the American regime.

Originally, for my presentation, I modelled the bar scene on an actual bar in Saigon. This changed dramatically as I  scouted for possible locations to ‘actually’ film my scene. The 2 bars I was looking at were much more vibrant in colour and ‘Asian looking’. I will need to delineate this idea of a ‘world-within-a-world’ more clearly in my final presentation. I also find I get caught up in the ‘authenticity’ of locations. For my presentation I find this not totally essential. A Vietnamese temple, for instance, would look very similar and I would be able to easily film in Brighton. Perhaps it was the dynamism of my fellow students presentations which encouraged me to be more adventurous. However that creative development works, I find the progression in my work is much more pleasing and inspiring.