THE VISUAL NARRATIVES OF THE VIETNAM WAR
Angelus Novus, Sexual Violence and the case of Civilians on a Path at My Lai (1969)
[ ELCS0047 · Topics in Visual Representation 25/26 · SHLQ7 ]
THE VISUAL NARRATIVES OF THE VIETNAM WAR
OVERVIEW
PRELUDE
01
CONTEXT
02
Angelus Novus
THE VISUAL NARRATIVES OF THE VIETNAM WAR
OVERVIEW
THE AMERICAN LENS
03
THE RUPTURE
04
05
FRAMEWORK
THE VISUAL NARRATIVES OF THE VIETNAM WAR
OVERVIEW
07
CODA
06
WORKS CITED
Such a feverish extent has been reached, that individuals are not allowed to properly process visual information anymore. The capitalistic, imperialist storm of ‘progress’, unstoppable at its core, will not allow time for the spectator to watch, not just see.
Nowadays, in the twentieth-first century, with humanity finding itself in the apogee of imperialism, propaganda and ideological warfare, Benjamin’s idea of progress remains more relevant than ever, and particularly, in the realm of visual culture.
However, it wasn’t always this way. There was a time in which the production of images was not accessible or readily available at the hands of everyone. In fact, very few institutions were the ones in control of the production and microdosing of visual culture that would reach citizens, which was cardinal to the fabrication of popular narratives. Such is the case of the United States government—if not the most blatant.
With each war or international conflict that ensues, more and more cultural wreckage accumulates. The acceleration of the modern world emphasizes this percolating violence, which forces the manufacturing of images to accelerate as well.
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress" (258).
PRELUDE: ANGELUS NOVUS or THE ANGEL OF HISTORY
In the year 1940, Walter Benjamin, inspired by a monoprint from a friend of his, Paul Klee, called Angelus Novus (1920), developed his theory of “the angel of history”, which was later on published in his work Theses on the Philosophy of History. Within it, he describes his vision on progress.
Indeed, it is also popularly believed that one of the causes for the withdrawal of the United States from the conflict was the role belonging to the popular media. As Hagopian states, “it was not until the photographs pushed these realities into the face of the public, and until the reaction to them forced policy-makers into an institutional response, that these crimes became politically consequential” (203).
Therefore, the role of violence as well as the levels in which it operated will be explored, firstly within the governmental hegemonic narrative, which will be touched upon briefly, and then within the popular media coverage, including how the output of certain photographs, particularly Ron Haeberle’s Civilians on a Path at My Lai, caused a visual rupture in these instrumentalized visual economies because they confronted the viewer with a vulnerability and unfiltered suffering difficult to assimilate.
CONTEXT: THE VIETNAM WAR & ITS CONTESTING NARRATIVES
While propaganda and the fabrication of appealing media initially played a big part in recruitment and the swaying of public opinion, the output that independent newspapers and photojournalists were trying to bring into the living rooms of people helped an already-growing scepticism to spread. The government tried to visually mediate the footage that reached American citizens, but the popular coverage revealed the atrocities soldiers were enacting upon the Vietnamese population and the extent of their war crimes, which included the massacre of entire villages such as My Lai, and unprecedented levels of sexual violence and exploitation to women and girls alike. To this day, many of these crimes remain undocumented.
It is said that the Vietnam war, and the subsequent involvement of the United States government from the year 1965 until 1975, became what is known today as the first ‘television war’. Academics such as Patrick Hagopian remark that it should be better addressed as a ‘celluloid war’ (201), but nonetheless, one thing remains undeniable—what happened in Vietnam was not just an armed conflict, but a war of narratives.
In this case, the sexualizing rhetoric operates in another realm within misogyny, which is race—the figure of the Vietnamese woman is presented as an exotic being that can expose the soldier to potential dangers.
This poster of propaganda was spread during the sixties and seventies in the military landscape, most likely to warn trainees about the surge in venereal diseases and ensure political loyalty. Such must have been the amount of sexual exploitation.
All of these visually mediated products contributed to the brutal outpour of sexual violence from the symbolic into the material realm, which only photojournalists were able to capture.
The case of this 1968 M-16 Rifle Manual, illustrated by Will Eisner for the U.S. Army, and handed along with the M16A1 rifle to every soldier stationed in Vietnam, demonstrates the encoding of misogyny into propaganda in such a blatant way that it borders on the uncanny.
This pedagogical pornography can be easily discerned in:
- The chapter titles: ‘How to Strip Your Baby’, ‘Sweet 16’, ‘All the Way with Négligé’, ‘LSA Lube Guide’, among others
- The erotic caricatures presented, such as the character of ‘Maggie’, a bullet cartridge that has been feminized, drawn with legs, lips and false eyelashes
A culture of sexual violence, already latent, was recycled and used for the purposes of propaganda—in this case, sexual analogies are infused into a manual of weapon care to cement discipline and camaraderie between soldiers.
THE AMERICAN LENS
The hegemonic visual narrative that the United States government was pushing particularly weaponized an already existent culture of sexualization.
It encoded sex into its propaganda, transforming it to a structuring force to make war legible both to the public and their own troops.
Let's look briefly at two examples:
FRAMEWORK · BARTHES
In his 1980 work Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes established his theory of ‘studium’ and ‘punctum’, regarding the two possible elements that can be found within a photograph.
While the ‘studium’ refers to the general historical and cultural consensus around a photograph, the ‘punctum’ is never coded, it is always an entirely subjective detail that ‘pricks’ the spectator, ever-changing and resistant to meaning.
“The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond, as if the image launched…beyond what it permits us to see” (60).
THE VISUAL RUPTURE
On the 16th March 1968, a United States military unit spent the day committing a massacre in the village of Son My, one that would have remained unseen if not for Ron Haeberle, a twenty-six year-old army photographer who had been just assigned to that division that very same morning.
He did not know about the atrocities he would have to witness that morning—much like what happened to the American citizens when his photographs were revealed to the public a year later.
It is known that “because he didn’t use an Army issued camera, his photos stayed out of the sight of military officials” (Stouffer).
What occurs in the image of Civilians on a Path at My Lai remains particularly poignant because of its immediacy. The viewer is right away face to face with a distressed mother, watching the huddling villagers, aware that atrocity has happened before, and will happen after this frozen moment in time. The composition and tragedy make the studium.
The truth is that it is difficult to point to one single punctum. The eye travels through the photograph, and what comes to find is a cascade of pricking details, relentless and unstoppable.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. by Ron Howard. Hill and Wang, 1982.
Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 1st ed., Routledge, 1990, pp. 255–263.
Hagopian, Patrick. “Vietnam War Photography as a Locus of Memory”. Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, edited by Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister, 1st ed., vol. 4, Berghahn Books, 2008, pp. 201–222.
Stouffer, Meghan. “The Vietnam War: The Press on the Front Lines”. Heinz History Center, August 2019, https://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/blog/collection-spotlight-vietnam-war-press-on-the-front-lines/
The crying mother, the hands of her daughter hugging her from behind whilst trying to tie her clothes back up, most likely because she has just been assaulted; the child clutching their mother with a terrified, glassy-eyed gaze, the other mother holding her baby while tying her clothes—all of this causes an oversaturation of puncta, breaking through any presupposed narrative that had been established before. It resists containment from the single definition of punctum, and fractures the facade of propaganda with its immediate, unfiltered vulnerability. That is why their existence became so politically consequential—because the suffering is irrefutable. The viewer is aware that sexual assault has happened before, and that death will happen after. The citizens became witnesses to the crime.
CODA · Return to Angelus Novus
Much like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, when observing photographs of atrocities, the spectator is stuck in place, frozen in time. Civilians on a Path at My Lai perfectly demonstrates this: the harrowing helplessness, the realization that there is no possibility to do anything but simply witness. However, nowadays, ‘progress' pushes the modern world onwards, conflict after conflict, without allowing the spectator to properly be one. That is what one must resist, it seems—the acceleration. That is what remains necessary. To be a conscious witness, to face atrocity, and to refuse manipulation has become our moral responsibility. Above all, we owe it to the victims, to the integrity of visual culture, and ultimately, to ourselves.
THE VISUAL NARRATIVES OF THE VIETNAM WAR
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Transcript
THE VISUAL NARRATIVES OF THE VIETNAM WAR
Angelus Novus, Sexual Violence and the case of Civilians on a Path at My Lai (1969)
[ ELCS0047 · Topics in Visual Representation 25/26 · SHLQ7 ]
THE VISUAL NARRATIVES OF THE VIETNAM WAR
OVERVIEW
PRELUDE
01
CONTEXT
02
Angelus Novus
THE VISUAL NARRATIVES OF THE VIETNAM WAR
OVERVIEW
THE AMERICAN LENS
03
THE RUPTURE
04
05
FRAMEWORK
THE VISUAL NARRATIVES OF THE VIETNAM WAR
OVERVIEW
07
CODA
06
WORKS CITED
Such a feverish extent has been reached, that individuals are not allowed to properly process visual information anymore. The capitalistic, imperialist storm of ‘progress’, unstoppable at its core, will not allow time for the spectator to watch, not just see.
Nowadays, in the twentieth-first century, with humanity finding itself in the apogee of imperialism, propaganda and ideological warfare, Benjamin’s idea of progress remains more relevant than ever, and particularly, in the realm of visual culture.
However, it wasn’t always this way. There was a time in which the production of images was not accessible or readily available at the hands of everyone. In fact, very few institutions were the ones in control of the production and microdosing of visual culture that would reach citizens, which was cardinal to the fabrication of popular narratives. Such is the case of the United States government—if not the most blatant.
With each war or international conflict that ensues, more and more cultural wreckage accumulates. The acceleration of the modern world emphasizes this percolating violence, which forces the manufacturing of images to accelerate as well.
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress" (258).
PRELUDE: ANGELUS NOVUS or THE ANGEL OF HISTORY
In the year 1940, Walter Benjamin, inspired by a monoprint from a friend of his, Paul Klee, called Angelus Novus (1920), developed his theory of “the angel of history”, which was later on published in his work Theses on the Philosophy of History. Within it, he describes his vision on progress.
Indeed, it is also popularly believed that one of the causes for the withdrawal of the United States from the conflict was the role belonging to the popular media. As Hagopian states, “it was not until the photographs pushed these realities into the face of the public, and until the reaction to them forced policy-makers into an institutional response, that these crimes became politically consequential” (203).
Therefore, the role of violence as well as the levels in which it operated will be explored, firstly within the governmental hegemonic narrative, which will be touched upon briefly, and then within the popular media coverage, including how the output of certain photographs, particularly Ron Haeberle’s Civilians on a Path at My Lai, caused a visual rupture in these instrumentalized visual economies because they confronted the viewer with a vulnerability and unfiltered suffering difficult to assimilate.
CONTEXT: THE VIETNAM WAR & ITS CONTESTING NARRATIVES
While propaganda and the fabrication of appealing media initially played a big part in recruitment and the swaying of public opinion, the output that independent newspapers and photojournalists were trying to bring into the living rooms of people helped an already-growing scepticism to spread. The government tried to visually mediate the footage that reached American citizens, but the popular coverage revealed the atrocities soldiers were enacting upon the Vietnamese population and the extent of their war crimes, which included the massacre of entire villages such as My Lai, and unprecedented levels of sexual violence and exploitation to women and girls alike. To this day, many of these crimes remain undocumented.
It is said that the Vietnam war, and the subsequent involvement of the United States government from the year 1965 until 1975, became what is known today as the first ‘television war’. Academics such as Patrick Hagopian remark that it should be better addressed as a ‘celluloid war’ (201), but nonetheless, one thing remains undeniable—what happened in Vietnam was not just an armed conflict, but a war of narratives.
In this case, the sexualizing rhetoric operates in another realm within misogyny, which is race—the figure of the Vietnamese woman is presented as an exotic being that can expose the soldier to potential dangers.
This poster of propaganda was spread during the sixties and seventies in the military landscape, most likely to warn trainees about the surge in venereal diseases and ensure political loyalty. Such must have been the amount of sexual exploitation.
All of these visually mediated products contributed to the brutal outpour of sexual violence from the symbolic into the material realm, which only photojournalists were able to capture.
The case of this 1968 M-16 Rifle Manual, illustrated by Will Eisner for the U.S. Army, and handed along with the M16A1 rifle to every soldier stationed in Vietnam, demonstrates the encoding of misogyny into propaganda in such a blatant way that it borders on the uncanny.
This pedagogical pornography can be easily discerned in:
A culture of sexual violence, already latent, was recycled and used for the purposes of propaganda—in this case, sexual analogies are infused into a manual of weapon care to cement discipline and camaraderie between soldiers.
THE AMERICAN LENS
The hegemonic visual narrative that the United States government was pushing particularly weaponized an already existent culture of sexualization.
It encoded sex into its propaganda, transforming it to a structuring force to make war legible both to the public and their own troops.
Let's look briefly at two examples:
FRAMEWORK · BARTHES
In his 1980 work Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes established his theory of ‘studium’ and ‘punctum’, regarding the two possible elements that can be found within a photograph.
While the ‘studium’ refers to the general historical and cultural consensus around a photograph, the ‘punctum’ is never coded, it is always an entirely subjective detail that ‘pricks’ the spectator, ever-changing and resistant to meaning.
“The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond, as if the image launched…beyond what it permits us to see” (60).
THE VISUAL RUPTURE
On the 16th March 1968, a United States military unit spent the day committing a massacre in the village of Son My, one that would have remained unseen if not for Ron Haeberle, a twenty-six year-old army photographer who had been just assigned to that division that very same morning.
He did not know about the atrocities he would have to witness that morning—much like what happened to the American citizens when his photographs were revealed to the public a year later.
It is known that “because he didn’t use an Army issued camera, his photos stayed out of the sight of military officials” (Stouffer).
What occurs in the image of Civilians on a Path at My Lai remains particularly poignant because of its immediacy. The viewer is right away face to face with a distressed mother, watching the huddling villagers, aware that atrocity has happened before, and will happen after this frozen moment in time. The composition and tragedy make the studium.
The truth is that it is difficult to point to one single punctum. The eye travels through the photograph, and what comes to find is a cascade of pricking details, relentless and unstoppable.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. by Ron Howard. Hill and Wang, 1982. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 1st ed., Routledge, 1990, pp. 255–263. Hagopian, Patrick. “Vietnam War Photography as a Locus of Memory”. Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, edited by Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister, 1st ed., vol. 4, Berghahn Books, 2008, pp. 201–222. Stouffer, Meghan. “The Vietnam War: The Press on the Front Lines”. Heinz History Center, August 2019, https://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/blog/collection-spotlight-vietnam-war-press-on-the-front-lines/
The crying mother, the hands of her daughter hugging her from behind whilst trying to tie her clothes back up, most likely because she has just been assaulted; the child clutching their mother with a terrified, glassy-eyed gaze, the other mother holding her baby while tying her clothes—all of this causes an oversaturation of puncta, breaking through any presupposed narrative that had been established before. It resists containment from the single definition of punctum, and fractures the facade of propaganda with its immediate, unfiltered vulnerability. That is why their existence became so politically consequential—because the suffering is irrefutable. The viewer is aware that sexual assault has happened before, and that death will happen after. The citizens became witnesses to the crime.
CODA · Return to Angelus Novus
Much like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, when observing photographs of atrocities, the spectator is stuck in place, frozen in time. Civilians on a Path at My Lai perfectly demonstrates this: the harrowing helplessness, the realization that there is no possibility to do anything but simply witness. However, nowadays, ‘progress' pushes the modern world onwards, conflict after conflict, without allowing the spectator to properly be one. That is what one must resist, it seems—the acceleration. That is what remains necessary. To be a conscious witness, to face atrocity, and to refuse manipulation has become our moral responsibility. Above all, we owe it to the victims, to the integrity of visual culture, and ultimately, to ourselves.