• 1 Michael Mandelbaum, “Vietnam: The Television War,” Daedalus, Vol. 111, No. 4, “Print Culture and Vi (...)
• 2 “If my own experience is any guide, I’d say that sixty per cent of the people in this country right (...)
• 3 Daniel Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and the Vietnam War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (...)
• 4 Ibid., 163 or Michael Mandelbaum, op. cit.167.
• 5 Marshall McLuhan, “The Vietnam War,” Montreal Gazette, May 16, 1975; William Hammond, Reporting Vi (...)

1The Vietnam War has been dubbed the world’s first “television war”.1 Michael J. Arlen even named it the “Living-Room War” when he investigated into what sort of Vietnam coverage the American viewers were being given. Although Arlen’s title was meant to be slightly ironical,2 there is no denying that the Vietnam War was characterised by exceptionally wide news coverage, made possible by technical innovations such as light video cameras and the almost unrestricted access to the war zones for journalists. This specificity has led to much debating about the role of the media in the Vietnam War. Historian Daniel Hallin recalls that many in the U.S Government would blame the media for the public’s increasing disillusionment with the war.3 Researchers now argue that the media may have reflected rather than provoked the waning support for the war.4 They also point out that anti-war movements were intertwined with the counterculture movements of the 1960s whose questioning of traditional values fostered more general distrust of the establishments. What is beyond doubt, however, is that never before or since has such extensive coverage of human suffering as the result of warfare been available in the media, bringing “the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room”5 of ordinary people in the U.S. as in the rest of the Western world.

• 6 Bill Nichols, “Newsreel: Films and Revolution,” Cinéaste Vol. 5, No. 4, “Radical American Film”, 1 (...)
• 7 Both Like Tell Me Lies and Far from Vietnam are structured on assembled fragments, both including (...)

2The impact of this extensive coverage on the increasing awareness that people in Western countries had of the war is precisely at the heart of Peter Brook’s film Tell Me Lies. In this respect it fully participates in the battle of images that emerged at the time when challenging the official discourses gained momentum through alternative forms of documenting both the war and the protest against it. For example the Newsreel Collective, which was founded in New York in December 1967 by Leftist film-makers and civil rights activists, was “dedicated to the creation of a radical alternative to the mass media”.6 However when Brook’s film was released in February 1968, there had only been a couple of films about the Vietnam War (one Canadian, Beryl Fox’s The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam in 1966, the other two French: Pierre Schoendoerffer’s The Anderson Platoon and the collective film Far from Vietnam,7 both released in 1967). Tell Me Lies was actually released the same year as John Wayne’s infamous The Green Berets and Eugene S. Jones’s A Face of War, which is considered the first American documentary about the war. It is also noteworthy that both Tell Me Lies and A Face of War were first selected at the Cannes festival but then withdrawn by the board of directors – even before the whole festival was curtailed – because the peace talks were due to start in Paris at the same time. It is telling, though, that while A Face of War, which follows the daily life of a Marine platoon, was listed in the documentary category, Tell Me Lies was registered under “fiction”.

• 8 It is telling that the film does not appear in the Wikipedia list of films about Vietnam and more i (...)
• 9 Jean-Jacques Malo and Tony Williams argue that virtually all Hollywood films ignore the perspective (...)
• 10 Barbara Kowalczuk, “From Vietnam, VA, to Iraq, CA: The Spectrality of Violence in An-My Lê’s Small (...)

3Such labeling may at first sight be surprising since Tell Me Lies has hardly any plot and no real characters either. The film is quite unique in the way it blends documentary techniques with fiction in a disjointed, kaleidoscopic structure, but also in the way it tackles the subject of the Vietnam War. Indeed, as its subtitle “A film about London” indicates, the film is not so much about Vietnam8 as about what the war means to various types of British people who carry on with their daily lives in a country far removed yet indirectly involved in the conflict. In this regard the film may incur the criticism leveled against many American films about Vietnam, of focusing on a Western point of view that neglects or ignores the perspective of the Vietnamese people themselves.9 Instead, it documents the anguish and frustration of people who are confronted to the “accumulative effect of horrendous images”10 of war and human suffering. As the filmmakers explained:

• 12 Paul Schrader “Films and Vietnam,” Los Angeles Free Press, 14 February 1969, 18.

4This oblique treatment may explain why Tell Me Lies was equally criticised by people who found it was indulgently anti-American and by anti-war crusaders who thought it was not critical enough. When the film was released in New York in 1968 at the height of the anti-Vietnam protest (after the March on the Pentagon of October 1967, during McCarthy’s New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries), Stanley Kaufmann of the New Republic thus declared that “it was the wrong film at the right time.” One year later Paul Schrader considered it “an oddity or museum piece.”12 But this oddity is also what makes the film transcend what was devised as an urgent response to a contemporary burning issue. Beyond the issue of the Vietnam war Tell Me Lies questions the tensions between the diffusion of war images and their receptions. In so doing the film provides a challenging reflection about the power of art, and film in particular, to represent the horrors of war, but also of the type of impact that these representations can have.

• 13 In addition to the Royal Shakespeare Company, the project involved playwright Charles Wood, assista (...)
• 14 US opened at the Aldwych theatre on 13 October 1966 and played for five months. See John Wyver, Sc (...)
• 15 Brook described it as “a show about Vietnam called US, spell and pronounce it as you will.” Quoted (...)

6Tell Me Lies is Peter Brook’s fifth feature film which he directed in 1967 after his own film adaption of his play Marat / Sade. Like Marat / Sade, Tell Me Lies is directly inspired by another of his plays but it was actually the result of collaborative work that involved the whole of the Royal Shakespeare Company along with other writers and directors.13 The play was developed from December 1965 over nearly a year of research into documentary material, meetings with politicians, journalists and activists and fourteen weeks of rehearsals.14 Its title, US, already showcases the fundamental ambivalence of the project, playing on the dual meaning of the letters as referring to the United States as well as the pronoun ‘us’.15

• 16 Micheal Kustow, Peter Brook. A biography, London: Bloomsbury, 2005, 159.
• 17 Ibid.
• 18 See “Interviews with Peter Brook,” in Gilles Duval & Severine Wemaere, Peter Brook et le Vietnam. T (...)

7Peter Brook explained that the play was born out of a sense of urgency and a desire “to test theatre against the convulsions of the Vietnam war.”16 Michael Kustow, who was one of the collaborators and would be Brook’s biographer, describes it as Brook’s “most directly political and reflective theatre-piece.”17 However, Peter Brook was distrustful of simplistic political engagement. Despite their obvious formal influence on his own productions, Brook disapproved of the didactic approach of straightforward agit-prop or Brechtian epic theatre.18 Rather than expounding pro- and anti-war arguments, US’s main purpose was to question how theatre could compete with the flow of images that came from newsreels and television documentaries. In other words, rather than pretending to expose the horrors of the war, what the play offered was to interrogate the possible relationships between the war in Vietnam and a theatre company in London.

• 19 Susan Sontag, On Photography [1977], London: Penguin Books, 1979. Sontag’s collection of essays, or (...)
• 20 The phrase will provide the title of her follow-up book in which revisits the same topics: Susan S (...)
• 21 Ibid., 17.
• 22 Ibid., 20.

8Brook and his company were actually addressing one the main questions that Susan Sontag would ask just a few years later. In her seminal essays on photography,19 the author investigates the power of images to produce a moral position in the face of atrocities and the “pain of others”.20 Sontag contends that pictures can only reinforce a moral stance that people already hold.21 Most importantly, she expresses her concern about the deadening effect of the proliferation of images on the viewer’s ability to feel sympathy or even understand.22

• 23 “In the case of Vietnam, it is reasonable to say that everyone is concerned, yet no one is concerne (...)
• 24 Ibid., 10.
• 25 Peter Brook quoted in Wyver, op. cit., 97, my emphasis.

9This meant for the company first to probe into their own contradictions resulting from the intolerable tension of “hold[ing] in [their] mind[s] through one single day both the horror of Vietnam and the normal life [they are] leading” and then to confront a public with these contradictions.23 “Contradictions” and “confrontation” are indeed the two key terms that Brook uses to sum up his project: “we were interested in a theatre of confrontation”24 which he defines as “an attempt to make the theatre a meeting place of contradictions.”25 Albert Hunt, one of Brook’s collaborators, recounts:

• 27 Brook thus started afresh while adopting the same method of improvisation. What remains from the p (...)

11Interestingly US was the subject of a documentary called Benefit of the Doubt (Peter Whitehead, 1967), which actually records a specially performed rehearsal at London’s Aldwych Theatre, interspersed by interviews of the playwrights and actors. As in Brook’s film adaptation of his play Marat / Sade, Whitehead’s camerawork enters the commotion of the stage amidst the actors, adding movement of its own to convey the evolving dimension of the play as a stage performance. Brook’s own adaptation of his play adopts a radically different approach. Although the link with the play is made manifest through the casting of the same actors, Brook did not want to just ‘adapt’ his play for the screen but instead wanted to find cinematographic devices to achieve the same effect that he defined as “confrontational”.27

• 28 Nichols defines the participatory mode as a mode in which “the filmmaker does interact with his or (...)
• 29 Other famous people include Labour MPs Reginald Paget, Tom Driberg and Ivor Richard, the radical Bl (...)

12What is most significant, however, is that the film explicitly interrogates this very notion of confrontation. Like the play, the film’s starting point lies in the acknowledgement of the limited power of art to provoke an effective call for action. But while the play was the result of the actors’ interrogations and contradictory answers to this issue, the film actually dramatises this questioning, making its elusiveness and sense of angry frustration the mainstay of its narrative. It thus takes on the overt form of a quest, close to what Bill Nichols describes as a documentary in the participatory mode.28 The narrative starts with three Londoners, Mark, his wife Pauline and his friend Bob, being confronted with a picture of a bandaged and mutilated child, which prompts them to investigate into the impact of news coverage of the war on their countrymen while in search of what a meaningful political commitment could mean. The film thus adopts a cinéma vérité style documenting life in the homes and streets of London in 1967, with the actors meeting real people who expound their own views and attitudes towards the war. In this respect the film is a genuine investigation into British political attitudes of the time, with discussions and statements from groups and individuals who represent various shades of opinion, from various committed artists like Glenda Jackson quoting Che Guevara to the conservative-leaning editor of the Sunday Telegraph Peregrine Worsthorne.29

• 30 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, New York: Verso, 2004, xviii.
• 31 Ibid.
• 32 In French, these two conditions are encapsulated by two sound-alike verbs “dévisager” and “dé-visag (...)
• 33 Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti”, October, vol. 33, 1985, 31–72, 64.
• 34 Quoted in Séamus Kealy (ed.), Punctum: Reflections on Photography, Salzburg: Fotohof, 2014, 125.

14In her essay Precarious Life Judith Butler recalls that in Levinas’s reflections on ethics the face plays a central part: “the Levinasian face […] communicates what is human, what is precarious, what is injurable.”30 Thus, she argues, it might help “understand how best to depict the human, human grief and suffering, and how best to admit the ‘faces’ of those against whom war is waged into public representation.”31 Here the viewer is confronted with two faces that juxtapose two conditions of “visageity”,32 one outfacing us, the other defaced. The spectator is actually caught in an oppositional dynamic that governs the gaze in contradictory pulls, one pulling inward, the other outward. With the child thus deprived of his/her face, our gaze is drawn towards the gaping hole of his/her mouth, engulfing us into the picture. To use Barthes’s famous terminology, the hole acts as a punctum, the detail that exceeds the informational content, or “stadium”, of the picture, but instead punctures its general meaning, “rupturing or lacerating it, and thus pricking or bruising the spectator.”33 Indian photographer Gauri Gill appropriately calls it “the wound in the photograph by which we enter”.34 At the same time the mother is looking straight at the camera, staring back at us, calling into question our position of viewer, raising the issue of our ethical responsibility to the photographed subject.

• 35 As Peter Brook explained, “the audience is forced, maybe with irritation, to keep asking itself: ‘I (...)

17This arresting use of a photograph is the first of a series of powerful disruptions. Throughout the film, the narrative line in the documentary mode is undermined by the irruption of pieces to camera with musical interludes, staged performances, Brechtian “alienating effects” such as the superposition of titles and self-reflexive comments. For example, what is introduced as a genuine press conference by an official spokesperson in front of the American embassy is immediately contravened by a title card that reads “English actor playing American embassy official” [19:15]. While throwing light on the staging of official discourse, the documentary code of the scene is in turn exposed as staged.35

• 36 Walter Benjamin, L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique, Paris: Gallimard, 2000, (...)

18In addition, not only does the film abruptly juxtapose the immediacy of newsreels with fiction, images as “evidence in the trial of history”36 and staged reenactment, it also blends them using sound bridges that overlap the heterogeneous sequences, creating a series of extreme contrasts and tensions. These recurring contrasts clearly expose the scandalous juxtaposition of two worlds, the unfathomable tension created by trying to acknowledge the horrors of a distant war while living safely in England. What is more, they not only depict these tensions within the narrative but also problematise their representation through the kaleidoscopic aesthetics of the film itself, thus producing the confrontation with the spectators that Peter Brook was aiming for. Indeed, Tell Me Lies is self-consciously aware of the inadequacy and potential indecency of denouncing war horrors through its representations.

• 37 The song lyrics relate the choices of career and lifestyle of different western characters, each co (...)
• 38 Glenda Jackson’s speech is followed by a similar tirade by an unknown man standing in Grosvenor Sq (...)

20The scene actually concludes a sequence built on extreme contrast, whereby footage of newsreels of war casualties is shown while on the soundtrack actress Marjie Lawrence sings the casual lyrics of “Any complaints”.37 The song’s chorus “what’s wrong with that?” is then used to illustrate her closing speech, which sounds outrageously indecent: “My name is Marjie Lawrence. We in this film have been working on the war in Vietnam for a long time now and most of the time we’ve fairly enjoyed it.” [1:22:23] Far from eschewing the question of its own ethical grounds in incorporating horrors into a spectacle, the film actually dramatises this thorny issue. It thus provides an uncompromising insight into the benumbed complacency of the Western world, which Glenda Jackson sums up at the end. Facing the camera, she defiantly acknowledges her lack of ethical engagement and sympathy for others as long as she remains safe: “I don’t care beyond the circle of my life. I know that what’s happening in Vietnam could kill me and I care but I don’t care that it would also kill the people next door. I like theorizing because it deflects. I like feeling angry because then I feel involved when I’m not and I like being in England because it’s easy to forget and I’m glad it’s easy.” [1:29:05-1:30:44]38

• 40 Judith Butler, op. cit. 146.

23This issue is at the heart of Tell Me Lies and its ending seems to be a direct response to Rancière’s question. The last scene actually comes full circle, opening on the very first picture of the mother and child that triggered the whole narrative [1:33:11]. Showing the picture to Bob, Mark inquires: “How long can you look at this before you lose interest? … If it came through the door – then what?” [1:33:27-1:33:52] The camera follows the direction of Bob’s gaze to frame the door and freeze. It then gradually fades to white in an impressively long take – more than two minute – showing an empty and in-between space [1:33:52-1:35:54]. This inconclusive ending, which underpins the last words spoken in the interrogative mood, certainly conveys the defeat of any representation to effect a sustained attention but on the other hand, it acquires a performative dimension as Butler puts it in her essay Precarious Life, insofar as it “must not only fail to capture its referent but show this failing.”40

• 41 Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” in New Challenges for Documentary, Alan Rosenthal (ed.), (...)

25To do so, the film adopts constant shifts of aesthetic regimes, creating a filmic collage. Interestingly film critic Bill Nichols has qualified the use of filmic collage in documentary as a “strategy of contention”,41 echoing Brook’s own notion of confrontation. Coming back to Rancière, I would suggest the film’s unstable regimes of representation underpins what he calls “fiction”:

• 43 Ibid., 67.
• 44 The title actually refers the first song that occurs in the film and abruptly interrupts what has (...)
• 45 See Peter Brook’s interview on DVD Bonus “Rencontre avec Peter Brook”, Tell me Lies, Sophie Dulac D (...)

26For Rancière, if art can touch on politics and ethical concerns, it must be through the agency of fiction.43 In this regard, the change of the film’s title, from the play’s US to Tell Me Lies, is quite significant.44 It still implies the ambivalence of the personal pronoun (‘me’ referring to characters in the film and to anyone). But Brook explained he wanted to foreground another type of ambiguity, depending on which term was stressed – whether one focused on “lies” to denounce the spurious rhetoric that makes wars acceptable (as in seeing through the political lies), or on the verb “tell”, implying that telling stories can help one live with what is unbearable in the world and the inner contradictions it entails.45 Brook’s film may not be effective to end the evils of war, it may not even help understand the issues that were at stake in the Vietnam war but it undoubtedly provides a thought-provoking fiction on the powers of images and film.