"...a sunken wall, cold, horizontal and black"

In light of the 25th anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, I strongly recommend finding a copy of Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision.

From the WaPo:

Hers was a radical notion for a monument on the mall -- a sunken wall, cold, horizontal and black, etched with the names of more than 57,000 dead soldiers. At the announcement ceremony in the spring of 1981, Jan Scruggs, a veteran and prime force behind the memorial, leaned over the microphone in front of a shy, giggling Lin and said, "I'd like to point out that really the finest architects in the country and some of the highest-priced architecture firms in the country did enter this competition. And they lost." They lost to a 20-year-old kid from Athens, Ohio, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Maya Lin's story is the stuff that American dreams, and documentaries, are made of.

Using old footage, Mock revisits the divisive debate which included vehement opposition from the likes of media personality-turned-presidential-candidate Pat Buchanan.

As people lashed out at her design at a U.S. Commission of Fine Arts hearing, Lin sat in the room neither smiling nor frowning -- stoic, quiet, like a granite wall. She seemed so young, yet so unwavering in her conviction.

"Imagine the courage that took," said architectural historian Vincent Scully, Lin's professor at Yale. "The fiber. The word for Maya is courage. And effrontery."

At one point she says, "An artist struggles to retain the integrity of a work so that it remains a strong, clear vision."

Lin opines on-camera often -- too often -- in the film. The narrative of her life and work is interspliced with shots of her sitting on a stool talking about her work or in a turtleneck hunched over her drafting table, gooseneck lamps overhead, cold drink nearby. Though she speaks eloquently and convincingly about her creations, the power of the movie, as the power of her art, is when things are shown and not explained.

For example, she tells us that when she designed the Vietnam memorial, "I really did mean for people to cry."

In the next scene, we see men standing at the black wall, crying. It is a power-charged moment.

I've never been to DC and I've never had much interest in seeing the monuments there, I'm just not a history buff, but I have always wanted to see The Wall. I was in high school as the Vietnam war wound down and that particular war, particularly because of the draft, was a daily part of everyone's lives unlike our current quagmire. The Vietnam Memorial speaks to everyone who lived through that time whether they fought in the war, fought against it, or stood by dumbstruck by the tragedy of it all.