Film

In the Year of the Pig

Name: In the Year of the Pig
Genre: Documentary, War
Released: 1969
Cast: David Halberstam, Daniel Berrigan, Harry S. Ashmore

An unnarrated indictment of the Vietnam War, assembled entirely from archival footage, newsreels and interviews. Emile de Antonio traces the conflict back through French colonialism, letting generals, diplomats and journalists convict themselves in their own words. It's confrontational, deliberately disorienting, and built for viewers who want history delivered as prosecution rather than balance — no narrator to soften the argument.

TMDb rating

7.1

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Hearts and Minds1974

The other great Vietnam-era documentary, made while the war was still going, just as angry — it won the Oscar and still detonates. If de Antonio's film is the prosecution, this is the closing statement.

But Similarly unsparing and unrelenting; if one gut-punch documentary about this war was plenty, a second may feel like punishment.

The Fog of War2003

Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the war, sits down decades later and tries to explain himself. Errol Morris just lets him talk, and the contradictions do the rest.

But It's reflective and interview-driven rather than archival collage — a calmer, quieter rhythm than the film that sent you here.

The Vietnam War2017

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick give the war the scale it demands across eighteen hours, weaving in Vietnamese voices most American accounts leave out entirely.

But Eighteen hours is a huge commitment, and the measured PBS tone is the opposite of de Antonio's righteous fury.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Night and Fog1956

De Antonio's method — damning footage instead of narration, forcing the viewer to draw the conclusion — descends directly from this film. Both refuse to let history's perpetrators off the hook by explaining them away.

Alain Resnais walks concentration camp ruins ten years on, cutting color footage of empty fields against black-and-white atrocity footage — the film that essentially invented archival collage as moral indictment, years before de Antonio picked up the technique.

But It's about the Holocaust, not Vietnam, and at 32 minutes it's a gut-punch rather than a full argument — brutal, brief, unforgettable.

Apocalypse Now1979

The fiction version of the same descent into madness — Coppola's Vietnam is mythic and hallucinatory rather than factual, but it gets at something true about the war's psychosis.

But It's more interested in dread and spectacle than in the political facts the documentary is built on.

Full Metal Jacket1987

Kubrick splits the film in two — dehumanizing boot camp, then the chaos of Hue — and finds the machinery that turns ordinary men into instruments of the war de Antonio indicts.

But It's cold and clinical by design, and some find that detachment alienating rather than illuminating.

Platoon1986

Oliver Stone served in Vietnam and it shows — grunt's-eye, sweaty, morally exhausted. It's the ground-level companion to the historical view de Antonio takes from above.

But Its melodrama and clear good-soldier/bad-soldier framing are more conventional than the ambiguity of a nonfiction argument.

Winter Soldier1972no page yet

Veterans testify to atrocities they committed or witnessed, on camera, in their own words — a direct, unfiltered companion piece to de Antonio's own collage of testimony.

But Raw and unpolished by design; it offers no relief and very little context.

The Post2017

David Halberstam's real-life journalism runs through this film's DNA — it dramatizes the Pentagon Papers leak and the press's fight to tell the public the truth about the war.

But It's a newsroom drama with movie-star polish, a far gentler, more crowd-pleasing register than the documentary's fury.

Casualties of War1989no page yet

Brian De Palma's underseen drama, based on a real atrocity, asks what happens to conscience inside a war machine — a fictional case study for de Antonio's larger argument.

But It's grim and punishing without much release, and its reputation has never matched films like Platoon.

Rambo: First Blood Part II1985no page yet

This is the mythmaking machine de Antonio was warning about, made flesh a decade later. Watch them back to back and you're watching the propaganda he diagnosed actually happen.

Sixteen years after de Antonio's indictment, Hollywood sent Stallone back into Vietnam to win it this time — a trashy, muscular revenge fantasy showing exactly how thoroughly pop culture rewrote the war's memory.

But It is, by design, dumb, jingoistic action cinema with none of the moral seriousness — if you want more of that, look elsewhere.

Waltz with Bashir2008

Same interrogation of national myth and complicity, but swapped from collage-of-evidence to animated inner landscape — proof the form de Antonio pioneered can stretch into a completely different medium and still ask the same moral questions.

Ari Folman animates his own fragmented memories of the 1982 Lebanon War, using rotoscoped dream-logic instead of archival footage to ask the same question de Antonio asks of Vietnam: how do you tell the truth about a war you were complicit in?

But The animation is striking but unsettling, and its personal, memory-driven approach is a world away from de Antonio's documentary rigor.