What is the greatest antiwar movie ever made?

[frazzled]

73. I'm going to go out on a limb and say "Far from Vietnam"

Though I don't remember much of it at all. I saw it in Paris in 1970, and never since. But I will never forget Bill Klein's segment of the self-immolation. I don't really want to see this film again because it's probably a hot mess. But when you're 20 years old, living abroad as an ex-pat far from home during the height of the war and the March on Washington, and enamored of the French New Wave, it hit a chord.

It could be both the most eloquent and rankling protest film ever made, but it has gone unseen for so long that only cinéastes and New Wave aficionados remembered to hope for its reappearance.

Never released on home video in North America, the 1967 anthology movie “Far From Vietnam” was in its day intended as a cinematic intervention, a cataract of antiwar activism delivered by a dream team of New Wavers: Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, the fashion photographer-turned-filmmaker William Klein and the old-guard Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens. Along with a virtual army of sympathetic technicians, actors and producers, the directors staged the cinematic equivalent of an angry peace march: if not the first documentary about Vietnam, then the first to be made in direct resistance to the American invasion there.

...

Seen today, “Far From Vietnam” comes across as a mournful, enraged chant. Mr. Marker, the French New Wave’s most mysterious artist, was the project’s primary architect, and its editor. The segments, which are not attributed to individual directors, are conscientiously eclectic in strategy and form, mixing stock footage, firsthand documentary scenes, pop-media imagery and, in the case of Mr. Resnais’s portion, actors and scripts. (The actor Bernard Fresson plays a spineless French intellectual articulating excuses for his class’s political apathy.)

The mix includes self-condemning speeches from Hubert H. Humphrey and Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the folk satirist Tom Paxton singing “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation,” a detailed stock-footage history of postcolonial Vietnam, footage of a “traditional” North Vietnamese clown play about President Johnson weeping over his Air Force’s failure, on-the-street explorations of protests on the home front, interviews with Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, portraits of Hanoi inhabitants and their one-man concrete bomb shelters, and so on.

...

The hammer blow of “Far From Vietnam,” however, comes with Mr. Klein’s segment about the legacy and family of Norman Morrison, a 31-year-old Baltimore Quaker who in 1965 doused himself with kerosene outside the Pentagon office of Robert McNamara, then secretary of defense, and set himself ablaze. Grief doesn’t prevent Mr. Morrison’s serene pacifist widow from endorsing her his martyrdom, and Mr. Klein makes clear that Mr. Morrison immediately became a folk hero in Vietnam.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/movies/the-filmfar-from-vietnam-returns-after-decades.html

ON EDIT: Ooh, I found a trailer: