The Anderson Platoon

The Anderson Platoon (1967)

La section Anderson

No editorials, no opinions . . . just the real story of the brutal Vietnam War.

A documentary feature by Pierre Schoendoerffer about the Vietnam War. Winner of the 1968 Academy Award for best Documentary Feature.

Date of release
1967-02-03
TMDB
6.7 / 10 (21)
Runtime
1h 5m
Genres
Documentary, War
Director
Pierre Schoendoerffer

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 2 · Nominations: 0. Including: Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film; Prix Italia

The Anderson Platoon is a documentary feature by Pierre Schoendoerffer about the Vietnam War, named after the leader of the platoon - Lieutenant Joseph B. Anderson - with which Schoendeorffer was embedded. Two decades later, a sequel was released as Reminiscence.

Background

In summer 1966, France Soir news magazine director and French public channel ORTF producer Pierre Lazareff proposed that war reporter and director Pierre Schoendoerffer complete the "unachieved" war documentary Schoendoerffer began in 1954.

Back in May 1954, Schoendoerffer was covering the First Indochina War for the French army's cinematographic service SCA. At the siege of Dien Bien Phu, he filmed the battle between the French Union forces and the Viet Minh, but his reels were captured when he surrendered to the enemy.

After French forces departed from Vietnam in 1956, the United States increased their support for the south, culminating in full-scale military intervention and the Vietnam War.

Arguing that "the war was the same, the French only switching with the Americans", Lazareff convinced the French veteran to return to Vietnam as a kind of second chance to complete his war documentary.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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