The Things They Carried

A documentary about the American war in Vietnam, made while the war was still being fought. Davis intercuts interviews with generals, officials, pilots, veterans, grieving Vietnamese families and ordinary Americans, setting the language of policy against what that policy did on the ground and at home.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the editing: Davis lets the war's architects talk at length, then cuts their words against a funeral, a bombed village or a cheering football crowd, and trusts the audience to feel the gap. The pedagogy is in how the film teaches viewers to hear the language of power, euphemism and abstraction included, while looking at what it covers up. Worth knowing that the juxtaposition is the argument, and General Westmoreland and others objected that their words were framed unfairly, so watch it as a persuasive documentary, not a neutral record.

A documentary about the GI movement against the Vietnam War, the soldiers who refused orders, published underground papers, set up coffeehouses near army bases and, in some cases, went to prison for it. Built from archive footage and interviews with veterans who were there, it asks why a story of thousands of active-duty troops resisting their own war has been so thoroughly left out of the standard account.

Why it’s here: The film puts the people the war machine depended on at the centre: soldiers who said no. What's punk is the refusal, and the way it's been written out of the record. What's pedagogical is the question the film leaves you with: whose history gets told as 'the antiwar movement', and who got dropped? It is a natural partner to Hearts and Minds, already suggested, and The Things They Carried.