First Kill

Directed by Coco Schrijber. 2001.
VHS video. 52 minutes. Color.
Available from First Run / Icarus Films,
32 Court Street, 21st Floor,
Brooklyn NY 11201.
Website: http://www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens,
Department of Art,
University of Northern Iowa,
Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A.

ballast@netins.net.

In early 1968, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, head of the South Vietnamese police (and, later, a Maryland restaurant owner), led a bound Viet Cong POW into a Saigon street, pulled out a pistol and, in full view of journalists, shot him pointblank in the head. By chance, an Associated Press photojournalist raised his camera at the same time (not knowing the general's intention), and captured everything on film. And yet, as that newsman confesses in an interview in this film, he had witnessed so much brutality by then that the killing did not phase him and, indeed, a few moments later, he wandered off to go to lunch. It is largely because of the violence shown (or described, in painful detail) that this film is so very disturbing, sometimes almost unbearably, and yet, it is also so riveting that one cannot help but continue to watch. But that is exactly the point that is made by the filmmaker, Coco Schrijber: In human experience (deeply ingrained in the animal brain of, at least, young males), there seems to be some kind of perverse delight (in this film, repeatedly likened to sex) in malicious violence, and, specifically, in killing. In the words of one Vietnam veteran who is interviewed, to kill a perceived enemy is "better than any dope you can get on the street…it's a high that you cannot imagine." Or, as war correspondent and author Michael Herr (writer of the screenplays for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket) puts it: "If war was hell and only hell," people would simply not put up with it. Rather, we do it because we apparently get some kind of exhilaration (an unparalleled involvement) from the experience of stalking and murdering things. In spite of the fact that the footage consists mostly of interviews with Vietnam War veterans (both soldiers and journalists) and scenes of the tourists who visit there now (where, next to a sofa-sized Mona Lisa, they can also buy a painting of General Loan shooting that Viet Cong prisoner), it would be a terrible error to think that this film is specifically or even primarily about that particular era. It's really about American society at this very moment, in the sense that the questions it raises pertain to events in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the widespread appeal of ultra-violent video games, to explicit violence in films (including this one), and to the shootings of peers and superiors by high school students and factory workers. Deservedly, this film has won several awards at international film festivals. It is smartly and superbly filmed, conceived, and edited. A cry of concern, it is a stunningly beautiful work about the most terrifying of subjects.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, Summer 2003.)