Giving Hanoi the Mad Ave Treatment
Eisen, Jonathan
WHAT IS most interesting about Felix Greene's new film—Inside North Vietnam, now showing in New York and theatres throughout the country—is that, for all its claims to truthfulness and...
...Greene relates, are becoming emancipated thanks to the labor shortage...
...I guess we could say he's really seeing spots before his eyes...
...and that only one out of 123 commercials activates the viewer from the very first time he watches it...
...The others appear less motivated by their own ideas and passions than by the script that is everywhere in evidence and transforming them into the very puppets the Western press says they are...
...The horror notwithstanding, Mr...
...Unfortunately, the result is that thanks to both stilted questions and a rather too obvious staging, what emerges is a Prime Minister and a young worker saying virtually the same things in the same language, and an interviewer who looks more the fool for his hyper-sincerity and eager agreeableness...
...Greene has taken his camera and produced a montage of half-truth, almost embarrassingly simplistic in his obvious yearning to make a point that is by now common currency...
...One professor of social psychology estimates that only three out of 10 commercials are consciously perceived by the audience...
...Indeed, if there is a unifying theme in Greene's film, it is not how much pain and suffering the United States has inflicted on these unfortunate people—though devastation was amply in evidence—but how the war is acting as a positive force...
...Scene after scene portrays unity, forbearance, courage, and the progress North Vietnam is making, despite and sometimes because of the war itself—as in the case of the women who, Mr...
...He has thereby perverted his intention, which was presumably to show the North Vietnamese as they are suffering, into a piece of ideological trumpetblaring...
...About 60,000 separate television spots...
...Because it didn't start in small doses with them...
...Greene has produced another war film which subtly glorifies war as an institution by manufacturing the agit-prop figure of the "warrior-citizen," not merely denying his real troubles but his reality as well...
...The Medium Is the Message Bruce Stauderman, creative director of Ogilvy & Mather, Inc., New York, has been addressing members of the Australian Association of National Advertisers in five cities down under...
...that only one out of 20 succeeds in mobilizing certain buying behavior...
...Greene's method was to interview workers and peasants, a colonel, the Prime Minister, and a captured American flyer, in an effort to "present" their viewpoint to an American audience...
...The only interview that actually comes off is with a peasant whose wife and young son were killed three days prior to Mr...
...People are getting tired of the old ways of advertising...
...Greene's arrival...
...They never really built up a tolerance for it...
...they've been blasted with it since they've been born...
...In marked distinction to the others who passively relate their determination to fight the American aggressor and turn toward peace with their American brothers, etc., etc., SCREEN AND STAGE this is the only man who displays burning anger at the atrocity and its perpetrators, and actually seems the only one who hates the war...
...Especially the young...
...In his speech, entitled "Anatomy of the Television Commercial," he is reported to say: "Now when it comes to television, the estimate is that every year the average viewer watches approximately 430 hours of commercials...
...Mr...
...WHAT IS most interesting about Felix Greene's new film—Inside North Vietnam, now showing in New York and theatres throughout the country—is that, for all its claims to truthfulness and humane feeling, it employs a strategy of propaganda not radically different from that of the Bell Telephone Hour, and thereby renders itself useless as the documentary it purports to be...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
