简介
This film, actually several feature films combined into one, consists entirely of interviews with American POWS in North Vietnam. The Americans talk at great length about their lives, values, and Vietnam experiences, in consistently fascinating exchanges with the invisible interviewers. In the process, more is revealed than intended, on both sides. The American testimonies should be published in the West for the light they throw on the new impersonal, 'remote-control' killers of our day: 'honorable men', all of them. But the East German revelation is equally fascinating; for the obscene but quite serious premise of this film, in their eyes, is that these were freely conducted interviews among equals. The filmmakers do not seem to realize that some of the prisoners sweat profusely while talking, that all make pro-Vietcong statements, and that there is fear in the back of their eyes: Heynowski, at a press conference, expressed surprise that the pilots addressed him with 'Yes, Sir'- 'I don't know why they did that. . . .' They did it because, given the circumstances of its production, such a film, far from being 'cinema verite', is a particularly pernicious (since unacknowledged) kind of courtroom interrogation without the usual safeguards and with the prisoner already under lock and key, imagining that good behavior before the camera may in some way improve his condition" - Amos Vogel from 'From As A Subversive Art' Part I: Yes, Sir Part II: Hanoi Hilton Part III: Der Job Part IV: Die Donnergötter
