A visionary Vietnamese film-maker and his impact

by Prof. Wimal Dissanayake

[Continued from last week]

As Minh says, in Vietnamese peasant cultures, the interactions with ancestors and spirits and other-worldly forces are a fact of cultural reality. In his films such as When the Tenth Month Comes and Nostalgia for the Countryside this is clearly evident. Closely related to this is his desire to create films that bear the mark of a poetic realism.

Dang Nhat Minh

Dang Nhat Minh is a filmmaker who speaks not of Vietnamese society but out of Vietnamese society. In other words, as a film director he is an embodied participant in the unfolding of his society and culture. In keeping with this desire, on the one hand, he seeks social truth. He is interested in exploring the plight of the poor, especially women, and arriving at certain social truths. Going beyond that, on the other hand, Minh is invested in discovering poetic truths through his work in cinema. The quest for social truths and the quest for poetic truth, to be sure, are intertwined at a deeper level of artistic apprehension. It seems to me that Dang Nhat Minh's distinctive approach to realism merits close consideration.

Third, Minh, in many of his films, has chosen to depict the predicament of women in patriarchal societies. In films such as 'When the Tenth Month Comes', 'Nostalgia for the Countryside' and 'Don't Burn', the women are at the center of various tragic events. In fact, they constitute the emotional center of these films. They are the sufferers. Minh is particularly effective in reconfiguring the suffering if women. However, the way he depicts the suffering of women invest them with a measure of dignity. In his mind, there is a clear correlation between the suffering of women and their ability to achieve a measure of dignity. There is a certain Buddhist strain to the suffering of women in Minh's films. In Christianity suffering leads to redemption, while in Buddhism suffering opens a gateway to self-knowledge. The female characters in Minh's films underscore this fact.

Empathy

Fourth Dang Nhat Minh has a distinctive way of generating empathy in the viewers regarding the plight of his chosen characters. The way he cinematically frames their suffering, we are willy-nilly drawn into their world of bitter experience. At the same time, at crucial moments, he pulls himself back so that we are able to locate that pain and suffering in a wider context of human and cultural understanding. This calls for what I wish to call a critical empathy. Indeed, this is what Dang Nhat Minh as a filmmaker is interested in. He wants us to feel and think at the same time. This critical empathy is a product of that inclination.

As a filmmaker Dang Nhat Minh is interested in, as I stated earlier, a poetic and realist cinema that privileges meditation and self-reflexivity. It is easy for a filmmaker traversing this cinematic path to end up with many loose ends and throw-away images. This is certainly not the case with Minh's films. His narratives unfold on the screen in a leisured place and the temptation is great under these circumstances to include elements that are not directly and integrally connected to the main narrative discourse; however, every image in his films fits into the larger pattern without any throw-away images floating around. This is a tribute to his careful craftsmanship.

Fifth, the idea of nostalgia is central to his work in cinema. After all, the title of one of his films is Nostalgia for the Countryside. The word nostalgia is derived from a Greek word 'nostos' and literally means home sickness. What Dang Nhat Minh says about this homesickness is that home sickness and being sick of home are intermingled in a curious way. For example, in Nostalgia for the Countryside the character of Quyen represents this blend.

Etymology

For Minh, the ideas of nostalgia, which encourage the longing for the past and modernity which literally means nowness are vitally interconnected. Nostalgia, for Minh, grows out of modernity. This projected intersection of nostalgia and modernity gives a newer vibrancy to the experiences reconfigured by him in his films.

Nostalgia, as the etymology suggests, highlights a longing for a place; however, it is vitally connected to a yearning for a past time as well. This is clearly reflected in Minh's films. Quyen's nostalgia in Nostalgia for the Countryside is a nostalgia for a place as well as time. In addition, as I indicated earlier, in Dang Nhat Minh's work, nostalgia does not exist in opposition to modernity, but rather grows out of modernity itself. Nostalgia, most often, speaks in terms of riddles and conundrums, and hence gifted filmmakers find it a most useful concept-metaphor to be explored in their work. The intersection of time, loss and longing that mark nostalgia paves the way for these riddles and conundrums and Dang Nhat Minh is fully aware of this fact.

For Minh, nostalgia is both retrospective and prospective; what I mean by this is that it is both backward-looking and forward-looking and Minh underlines this fact. In addition, as a film-maker he realises that there are two types of nostalgia - what I refer to as re-creative nostalgia and interrogative nostalgia. Re-creative nostalgia, somewhat unproblematically, seeks to produce an idealised past; often, a romantic halo surrounds it. Interrogative nostalgia, on the other hand, recognized the ambivalences endemic to nostalgia; it sees the longed for idealized past as an impossible place. Dang Nhat Minh's work endorses the second approach to nostalgia.

Sixth, I observe in Minh's cinema what I term a poetics of absence What I mean by this is that in his film discourses, very often, he instigates an interplay between the idea and feel of absence and the idea and feel of presence. This interplay is vitally to his thematic interests. For example, in When the Tenth Month Comes we know that Duyen's husband has been killed in battle. However, she wants to hide this fact from her ailing father-in-law. He believes that his son is still alive. This interplay of absence and presence is central to the narrative discourse.

Thematic intent

Similarly in his film Don't Burn, Dang Thuy Tram who had volunteered to serve as a doctor in a battle field hospital was killed. Later her diary was found. It is through her diary that she speaks. Again the inter-animation of presence and absence is pivotal to the thematic intent of the film. It is not only at the level of content that this interplay is found in Dang Nhat Minh's films. It is also discernible at the level of style and representational strategy. In his films the images are well connected to each other forming a unified image system. At the same time, many of his images point beyond themselves to certain uncharted areas of feeling.

In other words he is straining to reach the ineffable and unseen. Jean Paul Sartre once said that a mark of genius was the way in which he or she negotiates the conflict between finite presence and infinite absence. If I understand Sartre correctly, he is suggesting that genius manifests itself in the way that an artist reaches out towards absence.

Seventh, I wish to point to the complex way in which the Buddhist outlook and sensibility have shaped Minh's cinematic imagination. After our panel discussion on his films Dang Nhat Minh was extremely pleased with my interpretation of his work, especially the way in which I related it to a Buddhist sensibility. The idea of suffering, especially that experienced by women, is deep and pervasive in his filmic discourses. The idea of suffering is, of course, central to the Buddhist outlook. While the concept of suffering is important for Christian thought as well, in Christian thought it is linked to notions of redemption. In the Buddhist case the idea of suffering opens pathway to self-knowledge and self-awareness ultimately leading to self-liberation. This line of thinking is clearly present in Minh's work.

Earlier, I alluded to the concept of critical sympathy that one discerns in Dang Nhat Minh's films. Once again, this can be usefully related to Buddhist ways of thought. Buddhism sees the value of feeling as a form of moral discrimination and moral evaluation.

Imagery

The way Minh develops his idea of critical empathy in his films is clearly connected to this moral imagination. It is only by sympathising with the plight of others even as we seek to situate them in larger contexts of understanding that we would be in a position to attain that desired moral imagination that I referred to earlier.

Minh's use of visual imagery in his films, I contend, is animated by a Buddhist sensibility. For example, in many of his films, there are numerous sequences dealing with water. There is nothing unusual about this as there are many water ways in Vietnam. What is distinctive is the way he represents water cinematically as well as the symbolic value he forces them images to carry in the filmic discourses. For example in some of his films such as Nostalgia for the Countryside he uses the visual-concepts of the boat and the river to suggest Buddhist notions of death and transmigration. One of the defining features of Buddhism is its distinctive theory of causality. Buddhism has advocated a complex and multi-faceted notion of causality instead of the simple and linear notion of causality that we are used to. The Buddhist concept of causality is referred to as dependent co-origination. It highlights the fact that every point-instant of reality emerges in dependence of others; it emphasizes that every point-instant of reality emerges in dependence on a constellation of point-instances, which it necessarily succeeds.

It arises in functional dependence on a totality of causes and conditions that are its immediate antecedents. Hence, what this concept of dependent co-origination points to is that existence is fundamentally dynamic, processual and consists of a chain of points instants that are interdependent. According to this concept, therefore, we cannot assert that a cause produces some object or event. All what we can say is that an object or event arises in functional dependence on a plurality of causes.

Narrative discourse

This line of thinking has a great relevance to Dang Nhat Minh's approach to film-making and narrative discourse. The way he constructs his cinematic events, we observe a plurality of causes at work. For example in When the Tenth Month Comes, the beautiful young widow Duyen wishes to conceal from his father-in-law that sad fact that her husband had died in battle. In order to keep up this pretense he enlists the help of the village school teacher Zhang to write letters that are supposed to be from her husband. This leads to complications. Some relatives and acquaintances think that she has having an illicit affair with the school teacher. The school teacher also finds him being drawn towards her emotionally. In the mean time all that Duyen wants is to conceal the fact of her husband's death from her father-in-law.

Here, we see that the cinematic event constructed by Dang Nhat Minh has multiple causes that are concurrently operative. The idea of the Buddhist sublime can be invoked productively to frame the discussion of Minh's cinema. The concept of sublime has a long and distinguished history in western societies beginning with the Greeks. The Greek theorist of rhetoric Longinus had many interesting observations to make on this topic. In the eighteenth century, in England and other European countries, this concept was revived with vigor. The writings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant are important in this regard. In numerous passages Kant highlights the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful gives rise to pleasant enjoyment while the sublime combines beauty with terror. Kant believed that beauty is concerned with limited forms and objects while the sublime is to be sensed in forms and events that are limitless.

Indian tradition

The idea of sublime is also found in the classical Indian tradition. Notions such as chamathkara - rasa - daham sanvegaya; - point in this direction. If we examine the Buddhist literature carefully we would realise that there is a Buddhist sublime at work in some of the texts. It is not a combination of beauty and terror as Kant believed, but rather it is a blending of beauty and spirituality. Earlier on I said that Minh was interested in seeking to grasp the absent, and this ties in with his quest for the Buddhist sublime. These, then, are some of the ways in which Buddhist thought and sensibility work in and through Dang Nhat Minh's cinema.

What I have sought to do in this short essay is to offer a general overview of the works of the distinguished Vietnamese filmmaker Dang Nhat Minh to those in Sri Lanka who are not familiar with his work. My evaluation of his work is based purely on my reaction to, and understanding of, his 'oeuvre.' Minh is a realistic filmmaker who wishes to explore the possibilities of what I term cultural realism.

At the same time he is an artist who is in search of social truths as well as poetic truths. Minh's films are motivated by the desire to know and acquiring the freedom to arrive at cognitive and emotional truths that knowledge uncovers. I stated earlier that there are no throw-away images in his work. That is primarily because one observes in his work an extraordinary and rich interconnectedness. It seizes us unyieldingly. Dang Nhat Minh, through the power of his cinematic resourcefulness and poetic impulses, transforms unpalatable realities into shared experiences leading to important truths. He is basically a low-budget filmmaker, His most expensive film to date The Season of Guavas cost about 70,00 U.S. dollars whereas an average American film costs about one hundred million dollars. Working under difficult and challenging conditions, Minh seeks to turn these very limitations into cinematic virtues. His is an austere cinema that is immensely rich in feeling and insight.

Concluded