Nguyen Trinh Thi

Letters from Panduranga (2015)

Through a network of Champa scholars, Nguyen spent a number of residency periods in Ninh Thuan between 2013 and 2015. Letters from Panduranga extends her experimentation between documentary and fiction in an essay film portraying a Cham community living in the most southern and last surviving territory of Champa, an ancient kingdom dating back nearly two thousand years and conquered by Dai Viet (present day Vietnam) in 1832. The essay film, made in the form of a letter exchange between two filmmakers, was inspired by the fact that the Vietnamese government is to build Vietnam’s first two nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuan, right at the spiritual heart of the Cham people, threatening the survival of this ancient matriarchal Hindu culture. Public discussions regarding the project have been largely absent in Vietnam due to strict government controls over public speech and media, and local communities have also been excluded from consultations.^[4] The film alludes to the legacy of war and colonialism; exploring and reflecting on landscape and portrait, documentary and fiction, and art and ethnography as methods of working in film and art, and their limitations in accessing other cultures, peoples, and experiences, as well as history and the past. Nguyen Trinh Thi says, “As artists, we have contradictory desires: to be engaged, but also to disappear.” Among other references are facts relating to the United States’ destructive bombing during the Vietnam War, artifacts from colonial exhibitions and art collections, the vulgar place of tourists and the cultural policies of UNESCO, and quotes from one of Nguyen’s main influences, Chris Marker, notably his film essay Letter from Siberia (1957), and Statues Also Die (1953), both of which were incisive and novel in their critique of the impacts of industrial and colonial movements.

Song to the Front (2011–2012)

Nguyen Trinh Thi re-edited the historical Vietnamese war film, Bài Ca Ra Trận, which was originally produced in 1973 by the Vietnam Feature Film Studio. She transformed the obscure black-and-white classic into a vignette that deconstructed the melodramatic and romanticized elements of social-realist drama.

An original Northern Vietnamese film, Song to the Front is a propagandist story of patriotism, a typical genre of this style of cinema that glorifies the heroic struggle of the proletariat class. Nguyen uses a form of suspense editing akin to the mastery of Hitchcock, where the composition of the lens, grade of color, and sound dramatizes the narrative. In Nguyen’s edit, this near-blinded young man is shown as a human being with emotion who transforms into a fighting machine. A starry-lit sky cuts in and then a series of birds take flight. This young man’s eyes may be bandaged but his memories give him strength. After receiving surgery for his battle wounds, this heroic soldier is very weak with poor sight, but determined to continue to fight. The piece ends with the sounds of firing bullets and a young man’s crazed glee at qualifying as marksman to return to the front with a gun in his hands.

Nguyen extrapolates the central narrative of the film into a five-minute abstraction, her jump cuts and use of still frames are heightened with her use of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, referring to the ritual in pre-Christian Russia where a young girl dances herself to death – a vision that Stravinsky claimed was to propitiate the god of Spring. For Nguyen, these young soldiers who gave their lives for their country are the sacrificed pagans.^[5]

Series: "Unsubtitled" (2010), "Que faire" (2012), and "Solo for a Choir" (2013)

In this series, Nguyen explores the possibilities for combining video installation with performance art, and of preserving differences of individuals while creating a sense of collective experience. Nguyen worked on a long-term film project about the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm affair – the suppressed literary movement of the 1950's and the only instance of widespread intellectual dissidence ever to occur in North Vietnam – and its legacy of dissent in Vietnamese art over the past five decades. Thematically, she continues to study these issues and reflects on the history and development of the role and position of the artist in Vietnamese society and issues related to Vietnam’s problems concerning censorship and artist freedom of expression. Nguyen invited nineteen Hanoi artists who make up the social constellation of Nha San Studio to face the camera, eat a food item of their choice, and to then state their name followed by the food item they had just consumed. Individually, these are statements parodying the Maoist practice of self-criticism, interrogation sessions where the artist in question must unequivocally explain the meaning of his work. Collectively, the chorus evokes a quiet protest against the long-running methods of surveillance and intimidation that are still pervasive in Vietnam.

Landscape Series #1 (2013)

Nguyen’s Landscape Series #1 (2013) meditates on the idea of the landscape "as the silent witness of history.” During her search for photos, Nguyen came across hundreds of images of unidentified people in landscapes in the same position: pointing to indicate a past event, the location of something gone, something lost or missing. In these images, the figures are all in a similar pose, pointing at something unseen in the distance – a drama, a disappearance, a tragic episode, something that clearly seems to represent a past or a present threat, a yawning gap – which, since it cannot be seen, can only be pointed out. Together these anonymous witnesses, portrayed in compelling uniformity by innumerable Vietnamese press photographers, seem to be indicating a direction, a way forward out of the past, a fictional journey.^[6]

Love Man Love Woman (2007)

Nguyen's documentary Love Man Love Woman (2007) explores the lives of gay men in Vietnam and focuses on the prevalent theme of repression in society. The film portrays master Luu Ngoc Duc, a famous spirit medium in Hanoi, as well the Mother Goddess cult in Vietnam, whose communities offer a haven to many gay Vietnamese. The Dong Co, or the religion’s priestesses, perform rites and rituals that include dazzling altars, flamboyant costumes, candles, incense, sequins, and feathers.^[7]