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Seeing Double: Two Films by Hong-An Truong
*Viet Thanh Nguyen *
/ University of Southern California/
vnguyen@usc.edu
(c) 2006 Viet Thanh Nguyen.
All rights reserved.
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1. For those whose image of Viet Nam comes only from the reel
projected by Hollywood, the version of that country that appears
in Hong-An Truong's films may seem alien territory. Truong's
colonial-era Viet Nam didn't exist by that name, but was
partitioned by the French into Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina,
which, along with Cambodia and Laos, composed Indochina. The
colonial past she explores so delicately is truly a distant
colony, far removed both from the sweatshop that is the country's
semi-capitalist present and from the brothel it was in the
American era. One way for us to measure the difference between the
later American style of domination and the earlier French one is
with our eyes, for if the American military swaggered memorably
through Southeast Asia in olive-green fatigues, French colonizers
possessed a far more romantic sense of style. As part of their
dowry to the Vietnamese, the French left behind not only fine
coffee and crusty bread, but also cinema-worthy architecture and
white colonial suits. While those effete trappings are no match
for the strong-arm seductions of an American like Colonel
Sanders--the only man left in Ho Chi Minh City still wearing a
white suit today--they provide the French, and the world, with the
sepia-toned illusions of a more civilized period of rule. Truong's
films quietly but persistently demand that we look twice at these
illusions.
2. For her, as for Viet Nam, the crucial year is 1954, close enough
to the line dividing the century between its black-and-white half
and its second half in color. After the visual and stereophonic
blitzkrieg of the United States' "Vietnam War," the period of
French colonialism with its black-and-white artifacts and scratchy
78-rpm recordings of Edith Piaf felt like it belonged to a
different century. Far removed from our present or the recent past
of the American war, French colonialism is an age that was not
recorded in color, and hence is one that we see differently,
remember differently, /feel/ differently. Filmed in
black-and-white, the French artillery barrages seen in "Explosions
in the Sky" seem like only so much archaic sound and fury. In fact
during this battle of Dien Bien Phu nearly 10,000 Viet Minh
soldiers died, along with some 1,500 of the French forces (Duiker
455). Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" might have beeen an
obvious selection for the soundtrack, at least from the
perspective of someone who was not Vietnamese, but Truong's choice
also makes us hear the event differently, for the bilingual South
Vietnamese version of "Sounds of Silence" that rocks the film is
notably anachronistic. Based on the Simon and Garfunkel hit of
1966, this song earmarks these scenes as edited from a southern
Vietnamese point of view, one that only comes into being because
of Dien Bien Phu. The defining--and dividing--event of 1954, the
catastrophic defeat of the French by Viet Minh forces at Dien Bien
Phu, would lead to the cleavage of Viet Nam into North and South.
3. Truong subtly insists on seeing, and hearing, from the southern
perspective through both of her films because this perspective is
long neglected in the west, where French and Americans have paid
more attention, and respect, to Northern Vietnamese or Communist
perspectives on the Indochina wars. In postwar exile, South
Vietnamese refugees discovered that they lost not only their
country but their history, too, which was dismembered both by
their Communist enemies and by their western hosts. One way these
refugees managed to survive was by resorting to the tried and true
method of losers everywhere: singing and listening to
western-style pop tunes and soft rock ballads about longing and
heartbreak, a genre epitomized in the diaspora by songs like "I'd
Love You to Want Me" by Lobo and the bilingual cover of Nancy
Sinatra's "Bang Bang," heard in Nguyen Tan Hoang's video, "Forever
Linda!" Southern Vietnamese refugees carried those songs with them
as the aural equivalent of the shirts on their backs, so that for
decades "Black is Black" and "Hotel California" remained staples
for hard-rocking cover bands at wedding banquets. Playing these
songs for southern Vietnamese refugees was an act of defiant,
recalcitrant nationalism, for after 1975 and the Communist
takeover of South Viet Nam, this "yellow music," tainted by its
affiliation with southern comprador decadence, was banned by the
revolution in favor of "red music" and its paeans to political
purity.[1 <#foot1>] The cover of "Sounds of Silence" is not one of
these yellow classics, but as an archival find the song is a
delight, ironic as a soundtrack to the gunfire, but also laying
down an emotional bridge for the Vietnamese in the diaspora who
know it or one of its cousins, allowing them to cross, once again,
to those smoky cabarets of a bygone Saigon.
4. Set to this melody, Truong's film also allows some of us to
experience the ecstatic pleasure found in watching big guns go
boom. Truong can afford to treat French artillery as a show of
fireworks, knowing that it must seem quaint compared to the
"all-owning spectacle" that is the American edition of Viet Nam
(Trinh 1991). Typified in the genre of the "Vietnam War" movie,
this spectacle is Hollywood's version of shock and awe, projecting
both American military might and American atrocities in full
color. While the moral of these movies may be that war is hell,
the subliminal message advertises for the antiheroic American
self--tortured and flawed, yet utterly charismatic. But when
Truong turns to the period before 1954 in "The Past is a Distant
Colony," she enters a time when the French still possessed movie
star qualities, albeit those of a more classic era. This suave
French colonialism is glamorized in Régis Wargnier's vehicle for
Catherine Deneuve, Indochine, a romance that works like Hollywood
war movies, ostensibly condemning colonialism but always reminding
us of how lovely life on a rubber plantation was, forced labor and
all. Faced with these seductions of colonialism and the classic
narratives of a cinema-industrial complex, Truong is unafraid to
use stiff-arm tactics to hold off their charms. She sets her film
to a funereal pace and composes a soundtrack of two women's voices
murmuring in French and Vietnamese, most of which she refuses to
translate for the viewer's ease. Truong also refuses to give in to
the temptation of staging and spotlighting black-and-white or
sepia-toned photographic images of colonial life, which one can
find fashionably sentimentalized in the galleries of restaurants
with names like Le Colonial or Indochine both in the United States
and in Viet Nam. In these eateries, the painful past isn't papered
over. It's merely hung on the walls themselves, a kind of
soft-core exotica to stoke the customer's appetite for an other's
culture.
5. Truong won't permit "The Past is a Distant Colony" to be dolled up
in such a fashion. This can happen even to a film like Apocalypse
Now, which I recently saw projected onto a downtown L.A.
skyscraper for the entertainment of chic bar patrons who didn't
spill a drop as Martin Sheen hacked Marlon Brando to death.
Truong's film can challenge the bland palate of consumer culture
because it is still fresh enough to be raw, provoking us through
the filmmaker's signature strategy of selecting obscure film reels
and duplicating their images side by side, as if mirrored. Obscure
and evocative, elusive and allusive, these cinematic Rorschach
blots compel reactions that might tell us more about ourselves
than about the film. I see in the structure of the mirrored images
a brilliant formal expression of the 1954 division of Viet Nam
itself into North and South, a cleaving evident in the chiasmus
between the mirrored images. While it would be difficult to say
that there were ever only two sides to any one issue for the
Vietnamese, the overriding historical urgency after 1954 and the
departure of the French was this sense for the Vietnamese of
having to choose between one side or the other. Instead of
representing heterogeneity and endless difference, as we see
happening in Trinh T. Minh-ha's meta-documentary Surname Viet
Given Name Nam, "The Past is a Distant Colony" opts for the visual
metaphor of a duality that is not only elegant but threatening,
signaling as it does the way that neutrality and the suspension of
choice are restricted during war time to that thin demilitarized
zone between the two opposing images.
6. If this duality is suitable for expressing the political cleavage
between communism and capitalism as well as between North and
South, it's also a visual reminder of the film's concern with the
duality of gender, which it voices through women's speech.
Soldiers, artists and politicians on both sides of the colonial
divide use metaphors of gender and sex in their propaganda, but
Truong firmly silences that language of power in favor of a
Vietnamese nun speaking of suffering, in Vietnamese, and another
woman speaking of her Indochinese life, in French. The French
woman's account is suffused with sadness and sensuality, as she
recounts a melancholy childhood and a failed love affair. Is she
French or is she Vietnamese? Is she colonizer or colonized? Truong
leaves her nationality ambiguous, suitable for the confusions and
contradictions created by the /mission civilisatrice/ and its
lesson that all its colonized could count among their forebears
"our ancestors, the Gauls," regardless of their race or obvious
exclusion from French culture and citizenship. Perhaps these
indigestible confusions and contradictions, part of the
malnourished diet of colonized life, account for the other duality
in the women's stories between Vietnamese Catholic sacrifice and
French colonial ennui. Both are understandable responses to the
trauma of being colonized, which saturates both women's voices and
the visual images they speak over: little boys learning how to
cross themselves; cheering people at what may be a political
rally; Pham Van Dong, Ho Chi Minh's lieutenant, both as an older
man and when he was young, pacing in what may be the courtyard of
the Palace of Fontainebleau in 1946[2 <#foot2>]; and glimpses of
the exodus of over 800,000 northern Vietnamese refugees fleeing
south on flimsy boats, most of them Catholics who feared
persecution in a Communist north after 1954. Many of these
refugees would flee yet again in 1975 at the end of yet another
war, doubly displaced, doubly erased.
7. These stark snapshots from a distant colony lead up to a string of
advertisements about the good life of a faraway metropole, during
the unreeling of which the women's voices are silenced, as if
their voices cannot carry over the geographic and cultural chasm
separating Indochina from France. Here we see the French version
of the spectacular in all its grandeur, especially the
architecture and boulevards of Paris, which served as the model
for the French urban planners of Saigon, channeling the crowds, on
foot or on streetcar, to cafes and shows, to see, perhaps,
Josephine Baker, who once even performed as a "petite
Tonkinoise."[3 <#foot3>] Despite their silent era patina, these
metropolitan pleasures were no doubt as sensuous as our own,
although any delight we feel in these images is reduced by the
eerie absence of music. It's as if we were invited to sit down to
a feast but not allowed to eat it, even as we could smell it. Our
sensuous engagement is further curtailed when Truong cuts in
testaments to the colony burning far in the distance: wounded
soldiers, the wreckage of a bombing, and the heads of rebels
decapitated by the French and ensconced in baskets. In what may be
the climactic shot of "The Past is a Distant Colony," Truong pans
silently over these heads and the unnervingly peaceful expression
of the man in the center, in whose eyes we see the last moment of
his own life, offered as a silent rebuke.
8. Truong wisely chooses neither to sentimentalize this image nor to
demonize its makers. The matter-of-fact tone of her film perfectly
suits the actual banality of the photograph, which was not
suppressed by French authorities; indeed, French /colons/ could
purchase it on a postcard and send it to relatives and friends.
This more innocent time in the history of media and of foreign
domination would be over by the time of the American war in Viet
Nam, when GIs realized they could only smuggle home Polaroid
snapshots of atrocities. For some French recipients of this
postcard it was undoubtedly little more than a conversation piece,
but for others it must have left a retinal imprint. I like to
imagine that some of them, after turning out the lights, would
remain awake and unsettled, the anonymous man's unblinking gaze
staring back at them in the darkness. Truong's film arrives like
that postcard in our mailbox--a brief, insistent and disturbing
reminder that not everyone saw French civilization with the same
two eyes.
/ Department of English and Department of American Studies and
Ethnicity
University of Southern California
vnguyen@usc.edu /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. See Taylor for a discussion of yellow music in the
postwar era (39-45, 120-22).
2 <#ref2>. Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong's trip to Fontainebleau,
where they fruitlessly negotiated with the French government for
recognition of Vietnamese independence, is discussed in Duiker
(373-76).
3 <#ref3>. Brent Hayes Edwards mentions Baker's performance
briefly (162).
Works Cited
Duiker, William J. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion, 2000.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature,
Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2003.
Forever Linda! Dir. Nguyen Tan Hoang. 1996.
Indochine. Dir. Régis Wargnier. Perf. Catherine Deneuve, Vincent
Perez, Linh Dan Pham. Paradis Films, 1992.
Minh-ha, Trinh T."All-Owning Spectatorship." When the Moon Waxes
Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics. New York:
Routledge, 1991. 81-105.
Surname Viet Given Name Nam. Dir. Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1989.
Taylor, Philip. Fragments of the Present: Searching for Modernity
in Vietnam's South. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 2001.