Acting Facts tells a story of a massacre that resulted in the deaths of several hundred unarmed civilians, murdered by American soldiers on the morning of 16 March 1968 in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. When the news of this bloodbath finally came out late in 1969, it caused widespread incredulity and shock. This was the first report of a war crime that had been committed by American soldiers, and even those who were violently opposed to the war in Vietnam would have never thought such an atrocity possible. In 1970, the events at My Lai were officially investigated by the Peers Panel and the findings were widely publicised and discussed. At home, the support for military action in Vietnam began to waver.

The text of Acting Facts is composed of different testimonies presented before the Peers Panel; it is an account of what happened in My Lai drawn from the public recollections of eye-witnesses and perpetrators. These memories are mediated through an actor who at times recites the text, but who also falls into acting it out, taking on the different personae – the bullying officer, or the grenadier who straightens up when addressing his superior. The action appears to be happening just outside the frame of the video. Some of the scenes appear very familiar, as the popular genre of the Vietnam drama or action film has informed our general knowledge of this war. But some scenes are at odds with our expectations. There are repeated breaks in the continuous and uncut development of the story as the film alternates between a verbalised account of the action and its visualisation.

Acting Facts is to be seen in connection with the larger installation Capitulation Project, 2003, that also deals with the experiences of My Lai. In 1971 in New York, Performance Group staged four versions of an improvisation that aimed at coming to terms with these crimes committed by contemporaries of the performers and their audiences. The actors based their texts on official documents, recollections and media reports and made the audience participate, taking on the roles of both, victims and perpetrators. The viewers see the resulting film by Moser / Schwinger from the stage on which the original improvisation was re-enacted, placing them at the same time within and outside the performance.

For Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger, theatre is not about enacting fantasies, but about the investigation of information transfer. They use theatrical form and its mediation in film as an approach to furthering knowledge about communication and about cognition. Their films concentrate on the performative aspects of introspection: in affection riposte (affection retort), 2001, they re-enact the drama of a theatre scene from John Cassavetes’s film Opening Night, 1977, that informs the acted relationships among the film's protagonists. In Internment Area, 2002, they restaged a theatre therapy session based on the work of psychotherapist Jacob L. Moreno, with actors playing patients acting out their own lives. They bring emotions to the stage, and through the filming add a further perspective that makes an analysis of the processes of acting possible.

Moser / Schwinger work with non-narrative narratives; their films do not present a full story, they do not elaborate a linear development of one theme, but are rather elliptical and at times also decontextualised. Acting Facts therefore cannot only be seen as a film about Vietnam or about My Lai, as these places are never even mentioned in the spoken text, but as a pathology of armed conflict, as a study in dehumanisation and the methods of coming to terms with it.


Axel Lapp