Abstract
The Vietnam War represents a crucial moment in U.S. contemporary history and has given rise to the conflict, which has so intensively motivated the American film industry. Although some Vietnam movies were produced during the conflict, it has been since the end of the war that the subject has become one of Hollywood's best sellers. Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Rambo or Platoon are some of the titles that have created so much controversy.
Cinematic representations seem to have supplanted even so-called factual analysis as the discourse of the war, as the place where some kind of reckoning will need to be made and tested.
Why should films be so intimately associated with the reality of what has come to be known as the Vietnam experience? One answer is that the Vietnam War was the most visually represented war in history, existing, to a great degree, as moving image, as the site of a specific and complex iconic group.
