In the Year of the Pig

When de Antonio created the documentary, In the Year of the Pig, many Americans already had their minds made up and were against the war. De Antonio's goal was to address those Americans who were undecided. He used found footage and created a montage by putting those clips of found footage together in such a way to get the audience to think that the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was morally wrong and that we as Americans should not be there.

De Antonio utilizes a unique style of documentary film making in, In the Year of the Pig, similar to what he used in Point of Order, his first documentary film. Since de Antonio does not like using the typical "voice of God" to narrate his film, he uses interviews and audio of actual people talking during clips. In In the Year of the Pig, de Antonio always shows the person who is talking for a few seconds, but as they continue to talk, he shows pictures and clips from his found footage and uses them in a way to support what the person talking and being interviewed in the background is saying. By creating the documentary in this way, de Antonio uses both synchronous and non-synchronous sounds.

At the beginning of the film, de Antonio shows a series of pictures from events that have taken place in Vietnam. While showing the pictures, he plays a unsettling sound in the background. This noise is what the Vietnamese had to listen to everyday. By introducing this noise at the beginning of the film, he is preparing his audience's mood for the rest of the film. This is an excellent technique he uses because it helps him get his audience thinking the way he wants them to think so that he can get his point across more easily. When showing the pictures at the beginning of the film, de Antonio flashes the image for a few seconds and then shows a black screen for a few seconds before showing the next picture. I think he does this so that viewers have time to really think about the image they just saw and the meaning of that image. Some of the pictures are very unsettling. The one of the Buddhist man burning, for example, was very shocking for people to see. There was also a clip of a U.S. soldier's hat which said, "make war not peace" which shows that Americans are the aggressors. Combining the pictures with the horrid noise is a great way to prepare the audience for the rest of the film.

Many Americans did not really know exactly why we were getting involved in this war occurring in Vietnam. De Antonio's mission is to show them why and that we really have no reason to be involved. The United States government helped get Diem, Diem's brother Nu, and Madame Diem installed at leaders in Vietnam. In the clips that de Antonio shows of Madame Diem, she is always wearing extravagant clothing while the people of Vietnam are in rags of clothing. De Antonio does this in order to convey that Madame Diem always put herself above the people. Her main concern is to protect her family and keep them in power. When de Antonio kept flipping between the interviews of General Curtis Lemay and General Mark Clark, it showed that American people had very different viewpoints on whether we should be involved. While General Mark Clark was speaking, the center of the picture focused on a woman, probably his wife. She kept looking back and forth between the interviewer and General Mark Clark. She represents the American public because she does not really seem to know or understand what is going on with our involvement. Overall, I think the film conveyed to many people that we had no need to be fighting in Vietnam. We fought our own civil war amongst ourselves and Vietnam should be fighting theirs without us intervening.