The film opens with an image of the statue of Frenchman Marquis de Lafayette who fought on the side of the rebels in the American War of Independence (1775–1783), to which is added a diffuse soundscape in which one can distinguish the extremely slowed down noise of helicopter rotors. “The music of America today is the helicopter in Vietnam. That’s ‘musique concrète’,” de Antonio explained in 1969. By recalling a time when the so-called New World was a British colony itself, the US invasion of Vietnam is put in the context of a long history of liberation whose contemporary heroe is the Vietnamese people. “In the Year of the Pig” remains one of the most unusual and illuminating films about this war and others that followed.