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.
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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
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