Natural Landscape of Vietnam in the Documentary Film In the Year of the Pig

Abstract

This essay examines the cinematic landscape in Emile de Antonio's 1968 documentary In the Year of the Pig, arguing that the film's recurring sequences of Vietnam's rivers, mountains, and land do more than frame the Vietnam War: they stage a shifting relation between beauty, looking, and military violence. Drawing on W. J. T. Mitchell's theorisation of landscape as a culturally specific medium and John Berger's account of the de-centring movie camera, the analysis traces how the film's opening and closing shots present a harmonious, pre-emancipatory landscape inhabited by Vietnamese boatmen, before this landscape is progressively militarised as American warships, tanks, and refugees enter the frame. Reading the camera eye through Paul Virilio's theory of the sighting device, the essay shows how camera movement mimics the trajectory of a weapon, transforming the act of looking into an act of military reconnaissance and destruction. The essay further situates this militarised looking within a broader problem of visual authority, asking who has the power to determine what counts as beautiful in a documentary about war, and closes by reading the film's landscape imagery alongside the self-narration of ageing and ravaged beauty in Marguerite Duras's The Lover. The essay contends that the minor, subsidiary status of landscape within both the documentary genre and the mainstream art-historical canon makes it a productive site for uncovering the aesthetic and political stakes of colonial and wartime spectatorship, revealing how cinematic landscape carries the collective memory of a colonised nation.