There once there was only silence, the Vietnam film has become so common and codified that any new effort needs a gimmick to distinguish itself from the pack. Such is the case with Patrick Duncan`s ``84 Charlie MoPic,`` a resourceful independent production that presents itself as pure documentary-the raw footage taken in the field by an inexperienced cameraman with the Army`s 84 C Motion Picture division-but is an entirely fictional recreation. The action is set in the late 1960s and so, in a sense, is the film`s esthetic: Duncan draws on both the false documentary format of Jim McBride`s 1968 ``David Holzman`s Diary`` and the narrative tactics of Pierre. Schoendorffer`s ``The Anderson Platoon,`` 1967`s Academy Award-winner for best documentary. Like Schoendorffer`s film, ``84 Charlie MoPic`` follows the members of a single unit on a single expedition-here, the six members of a reconnaissance team, wandering lost in the Central Highlands after losing their radio in an attack on a Communist camp. The film plays out in long takes, the camera whipping nervously from face to face, background action to foreground reaction.

Duncan is striving for absolute realism, and at times his film achieves a breath-snatching immediacy, as when the men, moving through some high grass, find themselves almost on top of a Vietnamese column on the march, and practically press themselves into the earth in their desperation to hide. The camera hits the ground, too, and keeps running through the near fatal encounter. It`s a brave stylistic experiment, but Duncan`s film doesn`t always succeed on its own terms. Blizzard Launcher And Installer Has Stopped Working Starcraft 2. Many of the shots-including, alas, the opening one- reveal a too careful choreography of actors and camera, as the members of the cast enter and leave the frame on cue. While it`s an effect that would even seem elegant in an overtly fictional film-it has something of Welles and Fuller in it-it`s fatally self-conscious here. And while the soundtrack has an authentic roughness (to the point where much of the dialogue is unintelligible), the images, shot in the high-resolution super 16 mm. Format, are much too clear and carefully lit.

Behind his radical technique, Duncan reveals himself a disappointingly conventional dramatist. Azax Syndrom Discography. The unit is made up of the same too-careful mix of ethnic and personality types that characterized the propaganda films of World War II, and the relationships between the characters are largely restricted to a dewy macho romanticism-a weirdly eroticized view of pain and suffering. The film also indulges the strange reverse racism that seems endemic to the Vietnam movie, insisting that only the unit`s black leader, OD (Richard Brooks), has the instincts-street smarts? Bol Basic Fast Smart Charger Manual. Race memories?-to survive in the jungle. Though it`s only partially successful, ``84 Charlie MoPic`` reflects the kind of adventurousness one would like to encourage in American films in general and independent productions in particular (which are often more stylistically conservative than Hollywood product).