Last night, Documentary Insider Sarah Jo Marks took me out on the town for a truly LA doc experience - the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Oscar Docs screening series of 1974’s documentary short Don’t and Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds, the feature award winner. I can’t even begin to tell you how blown away I was by what I got for my $5!

The Academy has been screening all the award-winning docs from either newly struck or newly restored prints. Don’t is a truly cinematic study of nature and the threads that connect us to our environment with a monarch butterfly as our guide. The print was absolutly stunning.

As wonderful as the short was, Hearts and Minds was not only a superb print but the film is astonishingly relevant today. If you haven’t seen it, director Peter Davis takes a long view of the Vietnam war in this project that was released in late 1974 after the war had ended. As he described before the screening, he wanted to understand why we went to war and how it effected us. To do this, his strategy was to look with an unflinching lens at the people and events he was filming. He talked about the moment in a newscast when the camera focuses on some aspect of a scene and then the lens zooms out to reveal a reporter, and that moment of zoom is considered dead air to a newscaster, but to the documentarian, it is the time the audience has to digest the reality they are witnessing. It is on these moments that Davis wanted his film to explore.

At first the film has a montage sort of feel, like disparate scenes and sequences related only by topic. But it is the collection of sequences that slowly reveals the deep wounds caused by the war to Vietnamese people and to Americans. It also reveals the foolishness of policy makers that lead us into that conflict, culminating in General Westmoreland’s famous interview where he says that the death of loved ones to “Orientals” is less grave and that “they” feel life is so abundant that it is cheap. During the Q&A, as the current war kept creeping into discussion, it was so painfully obvious that while all the mistakes have been made before, we as a society haven’t learned from them. The film made me wonder how we would remember this time with 30 years of hindsight? Davis said that it has become too dangerous to film in Iraq, which suggested that perhaps we won’t be able to reflect on our actions there like Hearts and Minds did for Vietnam just for the sheer lack of visual evidence of what has happened there.

It was an amazing evening of documentary history made alive and prescient.