A visionary Vietnamese film-maker and his impact

by Prof. Wimal Dissanayake

A few days ago I was on a panel that discussed the work of the veteran Vietnamese film-makers Dang Nhat Minh. He was himself there, ready to respond to our comments. There was a retrospective of his films including his well-known and internationally recognized films such as When the Tenth month Comes - Nostalgia for the Countryside - Don't Burn.

Dang Nhat Minh

I first got to know Dang Nhat Minh's work when I was closely associated with the Hawaii International Film Festival when Jeannette Paulson Hereniko was its director. In the md-1980s we showed 13 new Vietnamese films including Dang Nhat Minh's work When the Tenth Month Comes. Most of us who watched the film then felt that something important had taken place in Vietnamese cinema. Since then I have been deeply interested in his work and progress.

When the Tenth Month comes is a most interesting film that emerges from the depths of Vietnamese culture. It won the golden lotus and numerous other awards including that for the best director at the 7th Vietnamese film festival in 1985.The story dramatised in the film centres around the character of Duyen. To her utter consternation, she comes to learn that her husband had been killed in the war, fighting at the southwest front.

What she seeks to do is to hide this devastating fact from his ailing father; she does not want him to know the bitter truth and bears the grief alone. He thinks of a plan to protect her dying father-in-law from this painful truth by imploring the village school teacher to write letter to his family as if they were from her husband. This leads to complications as some of her relatives and acquaintances suspect that Duyen is having an illicit affair with the school teacher.

Opera

The school teacher, for his part, finds himself being attracted to Duyen. One night there takes place a cultural performance at the village community centre; Duyen plays a role in this popular opera as a woman who sees her husband going away to join the fighting. The sorrow endured by this woman has the effect of re-igniting her own loss and painful memories. In a mood of despair, she flees to the consult the presiding deity of the village subsequent to that, in the seventh lunar month on the fifteenth day she visits the Ying Yang market and there she has the opportunity of meeting her husband.

Her father-in-law oases away and not knowing about his son's death. The film is based on a simple story that his deep resonances for Vietnamese people and as a filmmaker Dang Nhat Ming seeks to expand the bounds of realism. His intention is to follow the dictates of what I call cultural realism, that is realism shaped by cultural imperatives.

Realism

Minh works within the conventions of realism. However, he is also aiming to push against the limiting walls of realism so that he can bring the virtual into it. The episodes dealing with tutelary gods and encounters in the Ying Yang market are emblematic of this. Many hundreds of years ago Aristotle raised the problematic issue of plausible implausible. What we find in this film is this plausible implausible; the plausibility arises from the fact that the virtual and the spectral arise out of Vietnamese cultural imagination and hence there is no disruptive incongruity. This is indeed a feature that one discerns in many of Dang Nhat Minh's other films as well.

The second film by Minh that I wish to focus on briefly is titled Nostalgia for the Countryside. This is again a film that garnered many international awards including the best director's prize at the 11th Vietnamese film festival held in 1996.

This film is based on a well known short story by the celebrated Vietnamese writer Nguyen Huy Thiep. This is a short story that feeds on the sights and sounds and smells of the Vietnamese countryside. The story is set against the background of the 1990s which witnessed important social transformations, a compelling one being the movement of the economy from a subsistent to market economy. This had great implications for structures of society as well as interpersonal relations. The countryside has always been the backbone of Asian societies and now things have begun to change.

The story of Nostalgia for the countryside revolves around three characters. The 17-year-old Nham, his sister-in-law Ngu and Quyen a neighbor of the family who went abroad illegally a decade ago.

She has now come back from the United States, where she is domiciled, to re-visit her past. They represent three important facets of the social meaning contained in the narrative discourse. Each of them in his or her own way projects a vision of social change and modernity.

In many of Minh's films one across women who are suffering, who face increasingly hardships yet are determined to move on. It is through their suffering that their dignity is acquired. Ngu incarnates the traits of traditional Vietnamese womanhood. Her husband, for all intents and purposes, has abandoned her.

And she knows very little about her whereabouts. She experiences the emotions of loneliness, betrayal, abandonment, resolve to tide over unfortunate circumstances, and quest for self-fulfillment. Within the traditionally sanctioned social space, she lives out her life caught in the contradictory pulls of acceptance and refusal.

Vitality

Quyen, on the other hand, represents the disruptive vitality of modernity. She has seen the world, lived in the west for ten years, and is both attracted and repelled by peasant life in Vietnam. She experiences a sense of nostalgia but it is not a simple counter position to modernity as is normally supposed; rather it is one that grows parallel to modernity.

Ngu and Quyen represent two approaches to tradition and modernity. The third important character of the film is the seventeen year old Nham and is the only responsible mail in the family. He is an aspiring poet given to flights of fancy but empathizes with both Ngu and Quyen and their respective predicaments. It is through the interplay of these three leading characters, by and large, that Dang Nhat Minh reaches out to capture a facet of Vietnamese rural reality. Both films that I have discussed deal with ordinary people seeking to eke out a living against severe odds. Raymond Williams once remarked that culture is ordinary and it is the complexities of ordinariness that Minh is concerned with thereby shining a light on the contours of peasant culture in Vietnam.

The third film that I wish to highlight is titled Don't Burn. It deals with the tragic life of a woman who worked as a doctor at the war front. At the age of 24, Dang Thuy Tram volunteered to work as a doctor in a National Liberation Front battlefield hospital. This was located in the Quang Ngai province. Two years later she died in battle; she was killed by the firepower of American forces. She had kept a diary. It was written between 1968 and 1970.

In it she comments, among other things, on her dedication to her family, and friends and associates, the brutalities of war and her loyalty to her country. She also records her longing for her high school sweetheart. Although the experience is very culture specific Dang Thuy Tram seeks to address humankind in general highlighting the futility of war and the desire for peace.

Her diary was discovered, after her death, by an American intelligence officer. He had strict orders to destroy all documents that did not have any military value. As he was about to throw it into the fire, he was persuaded by his Vietnamese translator to save it. .The diary was, eventually, published in Vietnamese and later translated into English. When it was first published, it generated a great deal of interest. Dang Nhat Minh made his film based on this true story. These three films, it seems to me display Minh's characteristic cinematic interests and strengths

There are a number of features in Dang Nhat Minh's life and work that merit close attention. In the interests of space, I would like to identify seven of what I think are dominant features. First, he emerged as an auteur, that is to say, as a filmmaker who had a definite vision and whose works were unified by a set of common interests.

An auteur, rises above the film genre he is working with and in, and establishes his distinct identity and personal voice. According to some scholars, there are three important stages of evolution of Vietnamese cinema.- cinema during the struggle for liberation (1945-1954), cinema during the struggle for reunification (1954-1975) and cinema of reconstruction (1975 to present).

Officially, the Vietnamese film industry was established in 1953. Some others maintain that the first real stage of the growth of Vietnamese cinema was from 1953-1975. This was a period of war and the films produced during this period focused on issues of patriotism, resistance to aggression and the power of the people.

Re-unification

The second real stage is from 1975-1986. This was the period of re-unification. After the end of terrorism, a massive effort was launched to re-unify the country and the films produced during this period were marked by this desire. The third stage begins in 1986 when certain talented film-makers were interested in making films with a personal vision. Dang Nhat Minh is a good example. During this period several important and interesting films were made, a number of them by Dang Nhat Minh. Towards the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new trend was discernible - commercial films aimed for a rising consumer society that imitated, in large measure, Hollywood blockbuster films. Films such as Bar Girls, The Long-legged girls and Heaven's Nest are indicative of this trend.

Personal vision

The films produced in the first two phases were largely propagandistic in nature where the ideological construct dominated at the expense of the director's personal vision. Many of the films produced in the 21st century manifest the power of the commercial and consumerist imperatives at the expense of the director's personal vision. Hence, the work of directors such as Dang Nhat Minh became all the more significant because they were able to emerged as auteurs (authors) who succeeded in stamping their work with the recognisable signatures.

The second important feature, to my mind, in Minh's work is his use of realism. He is a realist film-maker; he operates within the parameters of realism. To be more specific, he works within the codes and conventions of cultural realism. What I mean by this is that various cultures have various ways in which they construct reality.

To be continued