The Deer Hunter & The Importance of Film

I am tremendously skeptical of film. I feel like the potentials inherent in the medium of film are too great for most people involved in the business. The complexity of the production demands a rare sense of subtlety and restraint. Films are hard to make and easy to ruin much like poems. Unlike poetry there is a lot of money in film, it is an industry, and can be used as a means of obscuring truth and reality (sometimes to the chagrin of the actors and directors).

The Deer Hunter is a nearly perfect film because it attempts to realize the potentials inherent in the medium. Like a great poem it uses a set of particulars to reveal the universal. It doesn't achieves this by reduction or simplification, but by condensation. I mean that the specific details in every frame carry within them a nearly infinite set of relationships to the history, politics, religion, sexuality, life, chance, etc.. There is something of the older notion of totality in The Deer Hunter. Unlike many other Vietnam films TDH grounds the horror of war at home, in the church or the grocery store, in cultural practices that produce concepts like honor, survival, heroism, marriage, and American-ness.

What a film like TDH make clear is that it is possible to pierce the veil of commonplace (the typical material for most films) and in doing so show us the importance and obviousness of what we had failed to realize. TDH is important because it teaches us to see what is right in front of our faces. Check it out--Walken and De Niro are incredible.