Maya Lin's 'Clear Vision'

When the design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in 1981, some people praised its healing qualities, its accessibility, its quiet power. Others called it a black bat, a boomerang, a hole in the ground. One vexed vet lost his cool before the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and branded it nothing but a big, black scar. "It's insulting and demeaning," he snarled.

In the finely crafted documentary about the memorial's architect, "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision," we are reminded of the chasm the memorial created between those who saw it as a salve and those who saw it as a salvo. And we learn about the life and work of one of the most provocative artists in 20th-century America.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Feature Documentary in 1995, but is only now being shown commercially in Washington. Directed by Freida Lee Mock ("Rose Kennedy: A Life to Remember") and produced by Mock and Terry Sanders, it follows Lin from the time she first heard about the national competition as a Yale undergraduate to the 10th anniversary of the memorial in 1992. In those 12 years, we see Lin mature. But we are left with the sense that from the very beginning she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

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.

Complete article at The Washington Post.