Song to the Front de la serie Vietnamese Classics Re-cut, 2011-2012, 5’14’’.
Sàn Art, Vietnam. www.san-art.org
Song to the Front by Vietnamese artist, Nguyễn Trinh Thi takes a Vietnamese war film from 1973 as its central source. Re-editing Bai ca rat ran (Song to the Front), produced by the Vietnam Feature Film Studio and directed by Tran Dac, Trinh Thi has turned this rarely seen black and white classic feature into a small vignette that decomposes the aesthetic and romantic elements of this social-realist melodrama.
The 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. It is based on the true story of the national icon Le Ma Luong, a Major-General and recent school graduate who was nominated to study abroad but instead enlists for military service. In Trinh Thi’s edit, this near-blinded young man is shown as a human being with emotion who transforms into a fighting machine. Trinh Thi 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. We are taken to the military hospital scene of this wounded soldier and suddenly images of a girl appear in laughter. 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 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.
Trinh Thi extrapolates the central narrative of the film into a 5-minute abstraction, her jump cuts and use of still frames are heightened with her use of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’. This climatic music refers to a sacred pagan 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 Trinh Thi, these young soldiers who gave their lives for their country are the sacrificed pagans.
The artists’ version of ‘Song to the Front’ plays with the original plot line in a deliberately ambiguous manner, designing an imaginative space for the viewer to reinterpret what were intended to be very literal epics that enforce an ideological view.
Nguyễn Trinh Thi (1973) is an artist, filmmaker and documentarian based in Hanoi, Vietnam. Her diverse practice has consistently investigated the role of memory in the necessary unveiling of hidden, displaced or misinterpreted histories, often making use of original documentary footage or undertaking extensive investigative field work. Trinh Thi is founder of DOCLAB in Hanoi (www.hanoidoclab.org), an independent centre for documentary film and video art. She is also an Asian Public Intellectual Fellow (2011-2012), currently undertaking research in Japan and Thailand. Her work has been exhibited in film festivals and exhibitions across Asia, Europe and the USA.