Nguyễn Trinh Thi

내러티브를 창조하고, 이야기를 들려주고, 세계를 경험하기 위한 이미지에 대한 서구화된 의존에 저항하며, 영화는 베트남 중부 고원지방 사람들의 토착 문화인 듣기를 통한 인식의 한 방법으로 음악과 소리에 눈을 돌린다.

내러티브를 창조하고, 이야기를 들려주고, 세계를 경험하기 위한 이미지에 대한 서구화된 의존에 저항하며, 영화는 베트남 중부 고원지방 사람들의 토착 문화인 듣기를 통한 인식의 한 방법으로 음악과 소리에 눈을 돌린다.

내러티브를 창조하고, 이야기를 들려주고, 세계를 경험하기 위한 이미지에 대한 서구화된 의존에 저항하며, 영화는 베트남 중부 고원지방 사람들의 토착 문화인 듣기를 통한 인식의 한 방법으로 음악과 소리에 눈을 돌린다.

내러티브를 창조하고, 이야기를 들려주고, 세계를 경험하기 위한 이미지에 대한 서구화된 의존에 저항하며, 영화는 베트남 중부 고원지방 사람들의 토착 문화인 듣기를 통한 인식의 한 방법으로 음악과 소리에 눈을 돌린다.

내러티브를 창조하고, 이야기를 들려주고, 세계를 경험하기 위한 이미지에 대한 서구화된 의존에 저항하며, 영화는 베트남 중부 고원지방 사람들의 토착 문화인 듣기를 통한 인식의 한 방법으로 음악과 소리에 눈을 돌린다.

Three-Channel Video, Four-Channel Sound, 15 minutes Different versions of the same history – one personal, another depicted by cinema, the third described by the media – are laid on top of each other and collapsed. Mixing footage from 80s and 90s Hong Kong movies, with wire service footage of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese refugee crisis in Hong Kong from the late 70s until 1997, with an interview with the owner of ‘Paul’s Records’ in Hong Kong, Everyday’s the Seventies continues to explore Nguyễn’s interests in gaps, holes and disconnections in between personal memories/history and other kinds of collective histories. ‘Reading from Below’, Times Art Center Berlin, 2020 State of Motion 2020: Rushes of Time, Singapore 2020 “The sun teaches us that history is not everything”, Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong 2018 Installation, Glasgow Short Film Festival, Glasgow, Scotland 2018 https://wp.me/p2M4CU-ao

Explores a subjective understanding of the artist’s homeland, Vietnam. Nguyen interrogates local, official histories and external viewpoints on Vietnam, together with the wider ideals of women and men, the role of the artist in society, and the landscape as metaphor. The 55-minute video proposes a homegrown authority that is derived from the artist’s own culture, expanding the concept of "Fourth Cinema," which was originally conceived by Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay in the 1990s. According to Barclay, “Fourth Cinema” is a cinema by, about, and for indigenous peoples defined in opposition to the framework of First (American), Second (Art House) and Third (Third World) Cinema.

In Vietnamese artist Thi Nguyen’s tranquil essay film, a letter exchange unveils the changing uses of space in various provinces and the different ways its inhabitants remember history.

Eleven Men combines footage from a range of Vietnamese classic feature films produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio with Franz Kafka’s short story Eleven Sons. Focusing on a single actress, Nhu Quynh, and spanning three decades of her career, Eleven Men transposes Kafka’s male family imaginary to the analysis of a woman’s relation to her lovers.

Vietnam the Movie uses a carefully structured montage of clips from drama and documentary films to give a chronological account of Vietnamese history from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, encompassing the end of French colonialism and America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. But this is no conventional history lesson. Rather, the excerpts chosen contrast a variety of external and often oppositional views, ranging from mainstream Hollywood drama to European art-house. Source material from the US includes Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July and Forrest Gump, whilst Europe is represented by the works of Harun Farocki, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Jean-Luc Godard. The result suggests that any ‘true’ picture of Vietnam has been lost to the multiplicity of symbolic purposes to which the country, its people and their tribulations have been put.

Composed of found photographs from newspaper reports that show people pointing into a seemingly empty landscape: something often found in Vietnamese newspapers as photographers usually arrive at the scene of an event only after it has taken place.

Set in a factory in Asia during an undefined celebration event, Europeans in suits are seen in long wandering shots as they greet one another, shake hands discreetly, and look about themselves expectantly. Further into this ambiguous opening, and propelled by classical Western opera and symphonic orchestrations, Asian workers are observed putting finishing touches of paint and polish onto gleaming surfaces of what will soon be on display in motorbike showrooms. The images and music are sharply punctuated by the abrupt and raw intrusions of live factory sounds that conclude in a jarring visual exclamation, exhuming the verses of an Emily Dickinson poem and laying them out in a contemporary and globalized context.

Set in a factory in Asia during an undefined celebration event, Europeans in suits are seen in long wandering shots as they greet one another, shake hands discreetly, and look about themselves expectantly. Further into this ambiguous opening, and propelled by classical Western opera and symphonic orchestrations, Asian workers are observed putting finishing touches of paint and polish onto gleaming surfaces of what will soon be on display in motorbike showrooms. The images and music are sharply punctuated by the abrupt and raw intrusions of live factory sounds that conclude in a jarring visual exclamation, exhuming the verses of an Emily Dickinson poem and laying them out in a contemporary and globalized context.

Through Master Luu Ngoc Duc, one of the most prominent spirit mediums in Hanoi, and his vibrant community, the film explores how effeminate and gay men in homophobic Vietnam have traditionally found community and expression in the country’s popular Mother Goddess Religion, Đạo Mẫu.

The film uses footage from Trần Đắc’s eponymous feature-length classic produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio. Based on the story of a real-life hero, the original 1973 film was made to provide encouragement to young soldiers serving in the war. Accompanied by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, this recut, with its rapid rhythm and suspenseful images leading to ambiguous intervals imbued with both violence and sensuality, facilitated a multilayered experience that disturbs and detours from the source material’s clear-cut message, content and aesthetics. An exploration of cinematic language, the film simultaneously investigates the narratives generated by collective memory and official history, as it seeks and questions the truth and the possibility to construct it from images. A pioneering found footage work in Vietnam, Song to the Front exemplifies Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s experiments with moving images.