Vietnamese Cinema First Views

Department of History, National University of Singapore
Vietnamese Cinema: First Views

Author(s): John Charlot
Source: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 33-62
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Department of History, National University
of Singapore
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Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 22, 1 (March 1991): 33-62
? 1991
by National University of Singapore
Vietnamese Cinema: First Views
JOHN CHARLOT
Vietnamese cinema has only recently become known outside of the East Bloc coun
tries.1 The first public showing of a Vietnamese feature film in the United States was
that of When the Tenth Month Comes at the 1985 Hawai'i International Film Festival
in Honolulu.2 At the 1987 Festival, a consortium of American film institutions was
formed with Nguyen Thu, General Director of the Vietnam Cinema Department, to
?
organize the Vietnam Film Project the first attempt to introduce an entire new film
industry to America.3 The purpose of this article is to provide a brief description of
Vietnamese cinema along with an appreciation of itsmajor characteristics and themes.
I base my views on my two visits to the Vietnam Cinema Department in Hanoi ?
for one week in 1987 and two in 1988 ? on behalf of the Hawai'i International Film
Festival. During those visits, I was able to view a large number of documentaries and
feature films and to discuss Vietnamese cinema with a number of department staff
members. I was able to obtain more interviews during the visits of Vietnamese to the
Hawai'i International Film Festival in Honolulu.4 This article cannot claim to be an
'in1983, selections of Vietnamese films were shown at the Mostra International del Cine Nuevo at
Pesaro and in Algiers. In 1984, a selection was shown at a conference in Spain to commemorate the 10th
anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. The American cinematographer Haskell Wexler and the Viet
namese director Bui Dinh Hac attended this conference. That same year, a week-long series of Vietnamese
films was shown in Paris. A few Vietnamese films have also been screened at the Festival of Three Continents
at Nantes.
2This was followed by Once Upon a Time in Vu Dai Village the next year. In 1987, Fairy Tale for
17-Year Olds was shown along with the documentary l/50th of a Second in a Lifetime. Through connections
made at the festival, the former film was shown widely in the United States and then at Sao Paolo and the
Berlin Film Festival. A showing of When the Tenth Month Comes was also arranged at the 1988 Hong Kong
International Film Festival.
3Members of the consortium included Nguyen Thu, Geoffrey D. Gilmore of the UCLA Film and
Television Archive, L. Somi Roy of the Asia Society, Victor Kobayashi of the University of Hawai'i Summer
Session, Emily Laskin of the American Film Institute, Stephen O'Harrow of the US. Committee for Scien
tific Cooperation with Vietnam, and myself. The project began with the screening of five films at the 1988
Hawai'i International Film Festival and the participation of two film makers and a film critic from Vietnam.
The panel discussions with Vietnamese and American film makers at that festival were, to my knowledge,
the first public bilateral discussions of the war to be held in the United States. An American tour of those
five selected films and others is now in progress, including an estimated thirty-five sites.
A number of international contacts for Vietnamese cinema were made through the Festival as well. For
a major example, Neil Gibson and Leslie Gould founded the Campaign for Vietnam Cinema in England,
which has shipped more than a container load of equipment to Vietnam, has organized in 1990 a Season
of Vietnamese Films at the National Film Theatre in London, and has arranged for the sale of five features
and two documentaries to Channel 4. Gibson's documentary Vietnam Cinema (1960) is an important historical
record.
4I would make special mention of Vice Minister of Culture Nguyen Dinh Quang (both visits and 1988
festival), the General Director of the Vietnam Cinema Department Nguyen Thu (second visit and 1987
festival), the Deputy General Director Bui Dinh Hac (second visit and 1988 festival), and the directors
Nguyen Xuan Son (1987 festival) and Dang Nhat Minh (1988 festival), who spent two months in Hawai'i
as Filmmaker-in-Residence at the Institute of Culture and Communication, East-West Center. Also very
helpful were Nguyen Van Tinh, Pham Ngoc Diep, and Duong Manh Hien, who cared for me in Hanoi.
33

34 John Chariot
adequate introduction to the history of Vietnamese cinema, a task I hope will be under
taken with the aid of my informants and the sources I list as completely as possible.
I am able to provide a sketch of Vietnamese cinema at the end of the 1980s, a par
ticularly important period for the industry as well as for the nation. The people Imet
were at the cutting edge of Vietnamese glasnost, using their prestigious positions as
artists to win greater freedom of expression and to support a nation-wide rethinking
of history and society. That process continues today, and the trends I describe towards
On those visits and festivals,

see, e.g., Anonymous, "Day La Lan Dau Tien Toi Duoc Gap Ke Thu... ",
Tuoi Tre Chu Nhat (15 January 1989): 9; P. B., "Giua Viet Nam Va My", Saigon Giai Phong (15 January
1989); Ethel Greenfield Booth, "The Vietnam War: De-Rambo-ized by the Vietnamese", Los Angeles
Times/Calendar (19 March 1989): 65; Burl Burlingame, "Festival offers insight on Vietnam", Honolulu
Star-Bulletin (29 November 1988): B-l; John Chariot, "Vietnam, The Strangers Meet: The Vietnam Film
Project", in The East-West Center Presents the Hawai'i International Film Festival, November 27-December
3, 1988 (Honolulu: The East-West Center, 1988), pp. 44-49, "Vietnamese Cinema: The Power of the Past",
Journal of American Folklore 102, No. 406 (October-December 1989): 442-52 and "Victims of a Common
Tragedy", The Los Angeles Times, Calendar Part II: Festival '90 (26 August 1990): 5, 19; Tran Dae, "Suy
Nghi Bau Dau Cua Mot Nha Nghien Cien My Ve Phim Truyen Viet Nam [Initial Thoughts of an American
Researcher on Vietnamese Feature Films]", Nghe Thuat dien anh, No. 2 (1987): 55 ff; Roger Ebert, "Hawaiian
fest promotes East-West understanding", Chicago Sun-Times (12 December 1987), "How the other side views
Vietnam: Hollywood images trigger festival fire", Chicago Sun-Times (11 December 1988): 3, 6; Janice
Fuhrman, "In film, U.S., Vietnam making peace: Emotions run high as film festival presents both sides of
a common tragedy", The Japan Times (9 December 1988): 15; Barry Hampe, "Vietnamese gov't preps
docu series", The Hollywood Reporter (10 November 1987a): 1, 4 and "Vietnam seeks co-prod'n deals",
Hollywood Reporter (3 December 1987b): 1, 18; Eric Herter, "Antidote to Hollywood: Vietnamese Films
Show The Human Face of War",East West 8, No. 3 (Spring 1989): 12, 14; Karen Jaehne, "Cinema in
Vietnam: When the Shooting . .. and the Filming Began", Cin?aste 17, No. 2 (1989): 32-37; Victor
Stopped
Kobayashi, "Vietnam cinema flourishes without war stories", Honolulu Star-Bulletin (19 May 1988): A-23;
Dang Nhat Minh, "Phim Vietnam o Ha-oai", Nhan Dan/Chu Nhat (12 March 1989): 4; Stephen O'Harrow,
"Vu Dai Village in Those Days", in The Hawaii International Film Festival, November 30-December 6, 1986
(Honolulu: The East-West Center, 1986): 50; Jay Scott, "Comparing images of a shared wound: Filmmakers
on both sides look at Vietnam War", The Globe and Mail, Toronto (9 December 1988): Cl; A. A. Smyser,
"Spotlighting movies made in Vietnam", Honolulu Star-Bulletin (29 March 1988): A-3; Xuan Son, "Gap Go
0 Ha-oai [Meeting in Hawai'i]", Nhan Dan (16 January 1988): 3; Charles Turner, "Vietnamese filmmaker
says 'our art does reflect life'", Centerviews (January-February 1989): 5; Bob Welch, "Just like the movies:
Her turkey dinner helped bring opposing nations together", Journal-American, Seattle (28 December 1988):
A3. The American tour of Vietnamese films has occasioned a large number of articles.
I have since received letters with news from Vietnam and have had the opportunity of updating my
information in long conversations with Neil Gibson at the 1990 Hawai'i International Film Festival, after
he had spent six months in Hanoi. I am grateful also for the observations of the non-Vietnamese with whom
1 discussed Vietnamese films. Due to communication difficulties with Vietnam, my information is still
incomplete on a number of points and references and I was unable to double-check others.
More information can be found in the publications of the Vietnam Cinema Department and other
Vietnamese organizations, in English, French, and Vietnamese: Anonymous, Dang Muc Phim Viet Nam
1980-1982: List of Vietnamese Films (Hanoi (?): The Viet Nam Film Archives, 1983); Anonymous, Viet
namese Feature Films, de Fiction
Films Vietnamiens: Catalogue 1972-1984 (Ho Chi Minh City: Magazine
"Dien Anh" [The Cinema], 1985); Trinh Mai Diem, 30 Years of Vietnam's Cinema Art (Hanoi: The Vietnam
Cinema Archives, 1983); Banh Bao and Huu Ngoc, L'Itin?raire du Film de Fiction Vietnamien: Exp?riences
vietnamiennes (Hanoi: ?ditions en Langues ?trang?res, 1984); Ngo Manh Lan, "Cinema of Viet Nam on
the Way of Approaching Life" (Typescript, n.d.) and "Looking Inwards: Vietnamese Cinema in the Eighties",
Cinemaya, No. 2 (January-March 1988-89): 6-14; Nguyen Duy Can, ed., Lieh Su Dien Anh Cach Mang
Viet Nam (Hanoi: Cue Dien Anh, 1983); also to be consulted are the Vietnamese-language film magazine
Dien Anh and the English-language Film Vietnam. Vinafim regularly publishes mimeographed information
sheets on new films.

Vietnamese Cinema: First Views 35
openness and critical independence have reportedly intensified over the last years. My
article reflects generally the view that the Vietnamese gave me of themselves and their
work, a view supported by the films they showed me and the general impressions I
received.
For many of the Vietnamese Imet, I was "their first American". I had never been
to Vietnam, but the country was naturally filled with emotional associations for me.
Almost immediately, my hosts and I began to communicate with unusual directness
and intensity. I felt they were people who had experienced so much that they no longer
had time for pretence and manoeuvring. They on their side were anxious for me to
be perfectly frank with them because they had so few opportunities to hear foreign
evaluations of their work. By the end of my first visit, we had formed friendships that
have continued despite the distance between us. We had also established a stimulating
intellectual relationship. At the end of my first visit to Hanoi, my hosts asked me to
speak to the Cinema Department about their work; the entire presentation with discus
sion took over two hours. Since then, we have exchanged writings and mutual criticisms,
which we have been free to accept or reject. For instance, the director Dang Nhat Minh
told me that my view of the alienation theme in The Lamp in the Dream is excessively
Western; I countered that he did not see the full originality of that work.
An adequate evaluation of Vietnamese cinema will need to be based on a larger
program of research. This article is a first look by aWesterner, an American, who was
provided with a special opportunity to experience Vietnamese cinema at a key moment
in its history.
The Vietnam Cinema Department
Cinema was introduced to Vietnam in 1910 by the French colonists, and films from
France, the United States, and Hong Kong were distributed mostly in the urban areas.
Documentary footage of Vietnam was taken by various individuals and organizations,
and a number of feature films were made starting in the 1920s with local French and
Chinese capital. Some Vietnamese made short films with a nationalist thrust, but Viet
namese film historians currently trace their cinema back to a newsreel of Ho Chi Minh's
declaration of independence on 2 September 1945, filmed by a French amateur (incor
porated into the 1975 documentary Independence Day 1945). A number of documen
taries were subsequently produced, some of which were screened abroad. The State
Enterprise for Photography and Motion Picture was established on 15March 1953,
by a decree signed by Ho Chi Minh. Several short documentaries were released that
year, followed in 1954 by the major, five-reel Dien Bien Phu.5 The first feature film,
5This film was the product of a Vietnamese team that included the work of the camera-man Nguyen
Thu, now the General Director of the Vietnam Cinema Department. A separate film was made by the
distinguished Russian director Roman Karmen, Vietnam on the Road to Victory, working with the script
writer Nguyen Dinh Thi and the director Pham Van Khoa. On the prior history of cinema in Vietnam, see
Bao and Ngoc "L'Itin?raire": 3 ff. I am unable to discuss pre-1975 South Vietnamese films. The majority
of these were reportedly entertainment movies, often including music. Dang Nhat Minh told me that the
one artistic film he knew was Xin Chon Noi Nay Lam Que Huong. After 1975, the South Vietnamese
industry was reorganized by Northerners, and a number of North Vietnamese directed movies at the Ho
Chi Minh City studio, such as Hai Ninh with First Love and Hong Sen with The Abandoned Field. All
but a few of the post-1975 films I have seen were produced in North Vietnam.

36 John Chariot
On the Same River, was released in 1959. Production was naturally sparse during the
war years, but now averages twenty feature films a year.
The Vietnam Cinema Department was founded in 1956 and placed under the
Ministry of Culture. Its main institutions are the two feature film studios in Hanoi
and Ho Chi Minh City and the Documentary and Scientific Films Studio in Hanoi.
Recently, a third feature film studio has been founded under Hoan Tich Chi. The
department manages also an animated cartoon studio, technical enterprises, film dis
tribution, and import and export. Its Vietnam Cinema School was merged with the
Hanoi College of Dramatic Art and Cinema at the University of Hanoi, also under
the Ministry of Culture. The Vietnam Film Archives are also placed under that Ministry.
Three other film units are outside the Ministry.6
The department has undergone a number of changes over the years. I will describe
its procedures, as I observed them in Hanoi. The salient problem is its lack of funds.7
Vietnam is one of the five poorest countries in the world, and staffers have been told
by foreign film makers that they are labouring under perhaps the worst conditions
anywhere. The department is housed in some converted brick buildings. Equipment
is antiquated and scarce. At one point, sound mixing was being done in a car. This
naturally limits the types of films that can be made. Battle footage, for instance, is
big-budget. For one movie, since airplane models were too expensive, camera-men were
sent out to film real air battles! The greater part of a feature film budget is spent on
materials, which must be paid in precious foreign currency.8 So little film stock is
available that the shooting ratio can be as low as one to two-and-a-half, although it
rises occasionally to six or seven. The overuse of the zoom lens in some movies may
see Diem,
6For details "30 Years": 33-41.
1980s, a typical budget approximated
7In the late forty million dong; the exchange rate with the U.S.
dollar varied from 380 dong to 4000 (monetary reform has since stabilized the situation). The necessary
money is loaned from a bank and must be repaid from funds generated by selling the film to the distributor,
who now has the right to refuse to accept a film. Recent competition from television has depleted financing,
resulting in even lower budgets and shorter shooting schedules. The earlier distributing agency has now been
divided into Fafim for internal distribution and Vinafim for external. External distribution has until recently
been limited mainly to East Bloc countries.
8All purchases were apparently being made from East Bloc countries. film, all 35 mm., was usually
The
the East German (Orwo NT55 Firma negative, Orwo PF2 Firma stock),
although the Vietnamese would
have preferred the more expensive Kodak. Orwo black and white is passable, but the colour film has proved
so unstable that the department cancelled its plans to start filming most features in colour (they wanted to
make colourful, historical films for the international market). The Campaign for Vietnam Cinema has now
provided a 35 mm. hot processing negative machine that can handle Fuji and Kodak, but because of the
expense of those stocks, the first purchases are reportedly being made of the West German Agfa.
German, Soviet, and American cameras are used (Arriflex 2-B is mentioned), but they are practically
antique. Some lenses have lost their sharpness in depth-of-field focus, and filters are few. A great deal of
time is lost adjusting lights that are too old and too few. The indoor studio in Hanoi is an old, dusty, barn
like structure without heat or air-conditioning. Little work is done in video because of the lack of equipment,
but more video and television work is projected. The latest work of the director Dang Nhat Minh was in
video. Recent donations of equipment by the Campaign for Vietnam Cinema should improve the situation
markedly.
?
Film making ? as other enterprises in Vietnam is complicated by the government's policy of guaranteed
employment. The shoot I witnessed was burdened by a work group of fifty people, when twenty-five would
? as
have sufficed. The superfluous ones simply got in the way and watched. Government policy well as
more reasons ? can encourage the department to its few funds as as rather
personal spread widely possible
than concentrating them on the very best film makers.

be due to the fact that it is one of the very few effects available. The high technical
quality of Vietnamese films is remarkable in view of the limitations to be surmounted.
Hai Ninh, Director of the Feature Film Studio in Hanoi, stated in an interview, "We
"
can't make poor films because we're poor. We have to achieve international standards.
Salaries are low as they are throughout Vietnam. A major star can receive up to
the equivalent of US$1,200.00 per picture. Tra Giang, the top female star in Vietnam,
leaves work on the back of a friend's bicycle. Staff can but need not belong to the
Vietnam Cinematography Association, which reportedly ismost active in establishing
relations with colleagues in East Bloc countries. The highest officials of the depart
ment are reportedly members of the Communist Party, but no pressure is apparently
applied to others to join. One prominent director joined only after the current liberaliza
tion had begun. All those I have met, however, are fervent Vietnamese nationalists,
whatever their criticisms of aspects of the current regime.
The number of theatres in Vietnam has grown from two hundred and forty-two
theatres in 1983 to eight hundred halls and twelve hundred open-air venues, serviced
by over 2,000 cinematographic units, the majority mobile. Low prices encourage attend
ance. "70% of the films screened are from abroad, mainly from the Socialist coun
"9 For rare
tries. screenings of American films, tickets could fetch high prices on the
black market. Recently strong competition has begun to be felt from television, espe
cially official and unofficial (now illegal) VCR theatres at which pirated or illegally
imported videotapes are often shown.10 The government has had little success in
regulating the private and even public circulation and use of videotapes. A recent trend,
reported by Neil Gibson, is to show them at small, dimly lit gia khat "refreshment
cafes", which cater mainly to young couples.
Government and Film Makers

Film making in Vietnam is clearly a government enterprise, but the impact this
exercises on the films themselves is variable and not easily defined. Government in
fluence has not had the oppressive and retardative effect found before the recent,
pre-crackdown period in the People's Republic of China.11 The major reason for this
seems to be that all the directors of the pertinent government agencies are themselves
artists. The Vice Minister in charge of culture and the arts isDr. Nguyen Dinh Quang,
theatre director, writer, and professor of drama. The top management of the Vietnam
Cinema Department is composed without exception of film makers.
In fact, the film makers at lower levels seem to feel they are being protected by their
bosses from possible outside interference. For example, Dang Nhat Minh's When the
Tenth Month Comes was criticized for the scenes in which the village god appears to
the heroine and in which the dead meet the living on the Day of Buddha's Forgiveness.
Some government officials felt that he was making propaganda for religion. Minh argued
that the scenes were perfectly understandable in the context; "If any woman says she
"
sees her dead husband because of this film, I'll withdraw it. Dinh Quang, chairman
9Lan, "Looking Inwards": 10.

10Webster K. Nolan, "Vietnam glasnost: 'Socialist formulas don't work'", The Honolulu Advertiser
(12 August 1988): A-27.
11
See Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), pp. 41 ff, 44, 61, 69-82, 156-60.

38 John Chariot
of the censorship board, approved the film with the words, "An artistic style that shows
the metaphysical side of life is legal in Vietnam." Nevertheless, the scenes remain
remarkable as products of a Communist film industry. I have heard that the actors
did not believe at the time that the scenes would be allowed to be shown in public.
Inmy discussions with some of the people involved, I felt that the word "metaphysical"
was being used as a substitute for "religious" or "spiritual"; that is, an effort was being
made by Minh's colleagues to render the scenes ideologically innocuous in order to
save them because they were successful and expressive. But the motivation was probably
deeper even than the aesthetic. Vietnamese folk religion is an important expression of
nationalism, and the Vietnamese remain, whatever ideology they profess, innately
religious. The scenes were authentically Vietnamese in content and therefore important
for the development of a national cinema.
This quasi-independence of film makers is reinforced by the prestige accorded the
arts in Vietnamese culture (many of the major politicians are published poets), by an
anti-authoritarian streak in the Vietnamese personality, and by a certain humorous and
?
personal approach. That is, there is concern not about the constitutional question
interference ?
whether government is legal but about the individual government
official in charge of one's department. If he is good, his subordinates feel he is a help
rather than a hindrance, even if he in fact possesses the power of interference. As Dang
Nhat Minh once said, "Why are Americans worried about government control of our
films? For me, who is the government? It's Mr. Thu!" Similarly, when Dinh Quang
told me he had just directed a play satirizing Vietnamese society and I asked him
whether he had submitted it to the censors, he said, "I was the censor. I was both
judge and jury!"
The fact that the Vietnam Cinema Department is controlled by artists explains the
aesthetic emphasis in the Vietnamese film industry. Directors are given artistic control
of their films. Films are rated for their aesthetic quality on a five-point system that
is operated independently of any other criteria. As a result, a director will receive a
bonus for high aesthetic achievement even if his film is a financial failure. Moreover,
he will receive preferential treatment for his next film. Dang Nhat Minh feels that this
policy frees the artist's mind from worries about financial success or popularity. In fact,
the aesthetic emphasis of the department seems to be shared by the audience; films
that are highly rated aesthetically are often commercial successes as well. The Vice
Director of the Vietnam Feature Film Studio in Hanoi, Tran Dae, told me, "We know
"
that our poetic films are not only better, but more popular. The general taste may
however be deteriorating with the importation of kung fu thrillers from Hong Kong.
This variable relation between government and artists can be seen in censorship.
Descriptions of the procedures used vary, and I suspect that a good deal of informality
and personal communication are involved.12 In general, one can say that until recently,
scripts and projects had to receive prior approval from a board composed of represen
tatives of the Ministry of Culture (Dinh Quang) and the department. This responsibility
has now been given to the department as part of a general government movement to
12Iwas unable to obtain an exact definition of the credit line Bien Tap "Script Approval", an office of
the Ministry of Culture (Neil Gibson, personal communication), or to discover the function of a woman
Imet who was checking a new print of a film that had already been released (possibly another make-work
position).

decentralize itself and confer authority on the responsible parties. Approval to begin
production is now given by Deputy General Director Bui Dinh Hac and the director
of the studio involved. A final check is made and final approval given before sound
is added; by then, of course, the studio has already made a major investment in the
project. If there is a controversy about or objections to a film that has been released,
the old board can be reconstituted to examine the question. For instance, after the
release of Dang Nhat Minh's The Young Woman on the Perfumed River in 1987,
objections were raised to its sex scenes and to the fact that the foil of the faithless
Communist official is a South Vietnamese Army veteran who marries the heroine, a
former prostitute. Minh compromised by cutting one of the sex scenes, but saved the
role of the veteran, which he considered more important. An indication of the depart
ment's new authority was that it successfully supported Minh against certain officials
in the Ministry of Culture.
There are obviously limits to what a Vietnamese film maker can do. I was told that
no film would be allowed that attacked "the very principle" of the government. But
contrary to what one might expect, the very strong criticisms of party officials seen
in several films have not been a target of censorship. There is a long tradition of such
anti-authoritarian criticism in Vietnamese culture, and no government official apparently
wants to be seen as defending the bad characteristics attacked. Moreover, autocriticism
is encouraged in socialist societies. As a result, Vietnamese movies can be as scathing
about officialdom as any liberatarian would require. The outer limits of such criticism
were explored by Tran Van Thuy's Hanoi Through Whose Eyes (1983) and Report on
Humaneness (1986), described below, which indeed provoked a negative response among
government officials. But Nguyen Van Linh, the General Secretary of the Vietnamese
Communist Party, ordered the films to be released. They did a booming business and
became two of the pioneering works of Vietnamese glasnost.13
Vietnamese film makers seem to feel that censorship is just another of the problems
"
that any artist has to face. "No one makes films in a vacuum, says Dang Nhat Minh.
Film makers are given the opportunity to defend their work and argue their points and
seem to have sufficient confidence in those making the final decisions. In fact some
prefer to deal with a board than with a single studio head. American film makers are
themselves limited, they argue, by financial considerations, which are in effect just
"
another form of censorship. "We go before our board of censors, Minh says. "You
"
go before your board of financiers. Although Vietnamese film makers could always
use more freedom and support, they do not feel at this time that the involvement of
their government in film making compromises their artistic integrity. Hai Ninh states,
"We film makers need freedom and independence. My life is a trip on the road to that
purpose." Neil Gibson reports an ever increasing openness in the last three years.
13The only film that I was told had been suppressed after completion is Hai Ninh's Shipwreck Beach
of 1984, which was withdrawn after its showing at that year's national film festival. Reports vary widely on
the reasons for this action. Apparently not a factor was the nudity in the film ? more than in any other
Vietnamese film to date and earlier by three years than Minh's The Young Woman on the Perfumed River.
When the film was first shown, one government official objected to the scene in which the very evil villain
describes living in Vietnam as being in a prison; the official called this "a slap in the face of the government".
Others say the film was not released because of its aesthetic failings, a real possibility.

40 John Chariot
Nguyen Thu
The importance of personal influence in Vietnamese film making is illustrated by
the role of the General Director of the department, Nguyen Thu.14 Thu brought con
siderable prestige and authority to his post as well as exceptional energy and decisive
ness. He is able to cut through red tape and bring his forces into line to reach his goals
? in as bureaucratic an environment as Vietnam. Moreover, Thu is
always difficult
extremely broad-minded. In my work with him on the Vietnam Cinema Project, I saw
time and again how his thinking would expand immediately to the greatest potential
of a possible decision.
Thu's subordinates give him the major credit for encouraging high standards and
new directions. The director Nguyen Xuan Son told me that there was much resistance
in a department meeting to his script for his first film, The Last Distance Between Us,
because it was "so sad". Thu signed off on the script with the words, "War is sad".
Dang Nhat Minh went to Thu's sickbed with his first ideas for When the Tenth Month
Comes and was greatly encouraged by his enthusiasm for the project. Thu says, "I told
him he absolutely had to make that film!" Thu encourages a stronger dramatic sense
in scripts. The Last Crime now ends with a shoot-out between gangsters on a beach,
whereas the original script had them being arrested by the police, in fact a more
socially uplifting ending. "Can you imagine how flat that would have been?" Thu
asked me.
Thu's major emphasis is, however, on the distinctive national character of Viet
namese cinema. "Why make something that exists already? If every artist did the same
thing, why do it? I dislike films that borrow from other cinemas, that express unreal
"
people. Authentic Vietnamese cinema arises from a study of society. For instance, the
"metaphysical" scenes inWhen the Tenth Month Comes are true to Vietnamese culture
and personality. Moreover, that national character should be "in every scene". There
are some rules of scene construction common to world artists, but the special Viet
namese ?
art tradition with its vivid expression of the humanity, philosophy, and
? should be made visible.
feelings of the Vietnamese
Education and Influences

The first Vietnamese film makers "learned on the job, read books and practised
their skills by making newsreels and documentaries".15 (The foundation of Vietnamese
cinema in documentary work will be discussed below.) The Vietnam Cinema School
was established in 1959 to train staff in all aspects of production. The school offered
a three-year course for directors taught mostly by East Bloc artists such as Ajdai
Ibraghimov, an Azerbaijanian from the Soviet Union (East Bloc artists have periodically
14Born in Hanoiin 1934, Nguyen Thu started work as a camera-man in 1952, contributing footage to
more ten documentaries,
than including the first version of Dien Bien Phu (1954). While working on that
film, Thu lost a leg while moving in a mine field to get a better camera angle. From 1960 to 1964, he studied
at the Faculty of Feature Films Direction of the All-Union-States Institute of Cinema in the USSR. After
further work as a scriptwriter and director, he became in 1978 the Deputy General Director of the Vietnam
Cinema Department and Director of the Feature Films Studio in Hanoi. In 1984, he became the General
Director of the department and a member of the National Assembly (and member of the Culture and
Education Commission of the Vllth and Vlllth Legislatures of the Assembly).
15Diem, "30 Years": 21.

provided training and lectures in Vietnam). In the first graduating class of 1962 were
the directors Tran Vu ? whose excellent student work The Golden Bird is considered
an early classic, Hai Ninh ? now director of the Feature Film Studio in Hanoi, and
Bach Diep, the most important woman director. In 1980, the cinematographic section
of the school was joined to the School of Dramatic Art to form the Hanoi College
of Dramatic Art and Cinema at the University of Hanoi.16 The school is well respected
and is given much of the credit for the good work done by its graduates. Many artists
and staff members have studied in East Bloc countries and China, and a few have
studied in France.17 A further source of training has been collaboration with East Bloc
film makers, notably with Roman Karmen on his documentary on Dien Bien Phu.18
? either or
Nguyen Thu is actively seeking collaborative projects co-productions
the provision of services and facilities to foreign companies ? which would provide
further opportunities for training. Secofilm, "Service and Cooperation Film Company",
has been established under the direction of Luu Xuan Thu, former director of the
Central Studios of Documentary and Scientific Films, to coordinate this enterprise
(seco means "will have" so the name is an expression of hope). Three French films are
currently in production, including a high budget film coordinated by the great director
Pierre Schoendoerffer on the battle of Dien Bien Phu. A multinational production was
in progress, and a British one is being planned.
Exposure to world cinema is uneven. Diem reports that by 1959 "hundreds of classi
cal and modern films" were available from Socialist countries as well as "a few pro
gressive films from capitalist".19 Eisenstein is much admired as are such later Russian
films as The Cranes are Flying. Vietnamese in Europe have had the opportunity to
view a wider range of films, and the French embassy in Hanoi has occasionally made
available modern French productions. There seems to be some acquaintance with classic
American films, such as Citizen Kane and Chaplin's work. Francis Ford Coppola
presented the department with a 35mm. copy of Apocalypse Now, which has been
viewed by many. Platoon has been shown in video theatres and is generally appreciated.
Many Vietnamese find Coming Home similar to Vietnamese films in its concentration
on the effects of war, rather than on the war itself. Rambo, shown privately on video,
is considered ridiculous. Dang Nhat Minh stated, "you can look at all the films in
Vietnam, and you'll never see a 'Rambo'. Jamais. Jamais."20 Film makers would
welcome more exposure to American films, a possibility now limited by the U.S. trade
embargo on Vietnam. Among the now available vid?ocassettes, kung fu and American
adventure films seem particularly popular.
Some influence of foreign films can be noticed. Hai Ninh's large facial closeups shot
16On Russian teachers in China, see Clark, "Chinese Cinema": 40 ff. The Vietnam Film Archives and
the Cinema Technique Institute were founded in 1979, Diem, "30 Years": 37-40.
17For instance, the directors Hong Sen and Dang Nhat Minh studied in Bulgaria; Nguyen Thu, Nguyen
Xuan Son, Le Duc Tien, and Do Minh Tuan in the Soviet Union; and Luu Trong Hong, Chief of the
Technical Section of the Hanoi Feature Film Studio, and his chief engineer Nguyen Kim Cuong in East
Germany. Pham Ky Nam and Dang Nhat Minh studied in France.
18Iwas told of a 1975 co-production with the Soviet Union on the bombing of Haiphong, Coordinates
of Death. In 1987, the department collaborated with the German Democratic Republic on Life in the Forest,
the story of a German fighting with the French army who defected to the Viet Minh.
19Diem, "30 Years": 22.
20Susan Manuel, "Vietnam's view: The other side of the picture: Vietnam's filmmakers depict war in
human terms", Honolulu Star-Bulletin (November 1988): B-l.

42 John Chariot
from down up, as in The 17th Parallel ? Day and Night, may derive from Eisenstein
and his successors. Sections of The Abandoned Field reminded some American viewers
of Russian films of the 1930s. Large masses of peasants charging up smoke-filled hills
seem similarly inspired. A curiosity is the scene of this type in When the Tenth Month
Comes, which represents the heroine's unrealistic, media-influenced imagining of battle.
An anonymous reader of this article suggested the existence of Chinese influence in
the 1960s, but I did not see or hear of such. I would see influence from French films
? those of the 1950s ? in the common 90-minute
particularly length (films tend
to be longer in other Asian nations), the international style of narration, and the
expressive black-and-white photography. Dang Nhat Minh writes that Alain Resnais
made "the deepest impression" on him as a youth.21
The better Vietnamese films could not, however, be described as derivative. I found
that directors consistently took an informed and critical stance toward non-Vietnamese
films. Hai Ninh was asked by a Russian director if he had based the demonstration
scene in First Love on Strike. Hai Ninh replied that he had not seen that particular
film. Similarly, an Algerian asked Ninh whether he had graduated from a U.S. school.
Ninh expressed his position very clearly: he does not take a xenophobic stance but adapts
good elements from East and West; foreigners can, of course, recognize influences.
Vietnamese self-assurance in the face of foreign influences is in fact characteristic
of the culture, a result of millenia of contact with both larger and smaller nations.
Their solid appreciation of their own culture enables them to enjoy unproblematically
? in others.
their wide interests ? both scholarly and creative Despite all their con
flicts with China and France, the Vietnamese continue to a
feel deep cultural sympathy
with both and learn from them without losing their identity.
Documentary and Scientific Films
Documentaries are unusually important in Vietnamese cinema history and current

practice. The decision to create a government film agency was based on the perceived
need to record the momentous events of the war of independence, and the production
of war documentaries has continued up to In sheer numbers, more documen
today.22
taries are produced in Vietnam than any other type of film. Moreover, most of the
?
directors of feature films notably Pham Ky Nam, Hai Ninh, Hong Sen, and Dang
Nhat Minh ? began their careers in documentaries, and that work exercises a con
tinuing influence.23 For instance, Hai Ninh made City at Dawn, the first department
21
Dang Nhat Minh, "In the Realm of Darkness and Light", Cinemaya, No. 7 (April-June 1990): 12.
22For the history of the Central Studios of Documentary and Scientific Films, Hanoi, see Diem, "30 Years":
34 ff. In 1985 Luu Xuan Thu was appointed director of the studio. Born in 1932, he began his career as
an actor and became a famous cinematographer for both documentaries and feature films. He is still
active as a director of documentaries. He has recently been appointed director of Secofilm, described above.
23Dang Nhat Minh, "So That Different Peoples May Come Together", in The East-West Center Presents
the Hawai'i International Film Festival, November 27-December 3, 1988 (Honolulu: The East-West Center,
1988): 40-43. Hong Sen began as a army camera-man and turned to features only after the war, using his
experiences as a basis for The Abandoned Field. The development of feature films from documentaries
parallels the earlier one of prose novels from journalism. In Vietnamese literature, prose was used mostly
for government reports and short folk tales, while "novels" were in verse. Twentieth-century journalism
influenced the creation of modern Vietnamese language and new genres, especially the prose novel, which
could be romantic, but was more often realistic; e.g., Nguyen Khac Vien and Huu Ngoc, Anthologie de la
? 1945 (Hanoi: ?ditions en Langues
Litt?rature Vietnamienne, Volume 3, Deuxi?me Moite du XIXe Si?cle
?trang?res), pp. 54 ff, 369.

documentary on Saigon in 1975, and immediately afterwards began his feature First
Love, using some of the same locales and subjects: prostitutes, drug addicts, and night
life. The romantic feature When the Birds Return follows two documentaries, including
Dong Ho Painting Village, on the area in which the story is located. Indeed in many
early features, such as Tran Vu's We Will Meet Again, the documentary-type sections
are much more assured than the dramatic.
Documentaries are not considered merely informative, but are recognized as essential
products of the general aesthetic quest of Vietnamese film makers. For instance, Diem
writes: "The poetic touch in the national character was presented in every film even
in the midst of the fighting"; The Electric Line to the Song Da Construction Site "was
"24
essentially a cinema poem, short, concise.... Completely without dialogue or
commentary, the film is a beautifully photographed and involving one-reel documen

tary on the construction of an electric line by workers using mostly low-tech means.
The contrast between their tools and methods and their results reveals much about
development in third-world countries.25 Similarly carried by its beautiful photography
is 1750th of a Second in a Lifetime, a one-reel documentary on Vo An Ninh, Vietnam's
most famous photographer. Other aspects of documentary making can be equally
aesthetic. Nguyen Ai Quoc ? Ho Chi Minh a
is masterful, if hagiographie, narrative
of Ho Chi Minh's life up to 1945, in which archival materials, photographs, interviews,
and modern footage of the sites discussed are expertly integrated by one of Vietnam's
major directors, Pham Ky Nam.26
The aesthetic interest of the Vietnamese documentary makers is evident in their
numerous films on specifically artistic subjects. Particularly successful are those on
traditional Vietnamese music. Two famous examples have been filmed of cheo village
opera, an art form predating the tenth century: The Goddess Quan Am and Luu Binh
and Duong Le. Cheo opera is extremely popular in North Vietnam among all sections
of society ? and of great interest toWestern scholars, who have not yet been able to
study it adequately. Filmed in colour with rather poor sound, the films communicate
with appreciation and enthusiasm the excitement of the form: striking costumes, lively
music, vivid characterizations, and much humour and action. Love Duets of Bac Ninh,
1987, is about a traditional village song festival, the setting for the 1974 feature film
We Will Meet Again. Young people, divided into male and female choirs, serenade
24Diem, "30 Years": 15 ff.

25Arriving at
the Steps of the Bridge, on a Vietnamese-Soviet construction project, is influenced by
Electric Line, but less successful. A number of documentaries are undoubtedly bland, if informative on the
many interesting aspects of Vietnamese culture ? such as Lacquer Painting, The Secret of the Statue of the
Dau Pagoda, and The Conical Hat. A number of other works can be categorized as "newsreel documen
taries", often with a heavy ideological slant. Ho Chi Minh City, May 1978 describes the city three years after
the 1975 takeover, reporting on the efforts at social reform. The Class for Compassion's Sake describes
efforts to care for disabled or homeless children in the city. The Day of Return [Ngay VeJ, the first docu
mentary to be made in Kampuchea after the invasion by the Vietnamese, combines moving interviews with
Kampuchean displaced persons and victims of the Pol Pot regime with unfortunate footage of a staged
victory parade and rally. I have described a number of documentaries in John Chariot's "Fairy Tale for 17-Year
Olds", "Vietnamese Documentary Films", in The 1987 Hawai'i International Film Festival, November 29
December 5, 1987 (Honolulu: The East-West Center, 1987), pp. 65 ff, 67-70.
26I have not seen the sequel, which carries the biography beyond 1945, but have been told it is equally
successful.

44 John Chariot
each other with traditional songs, which often allude to places and events in the
neighbourhood. The documentary provides a good deal of background information
on the customs of the festival and on the songs, which are performed at the very sites
mentioned. The viewer is thus able to appreciate the social, historical, and artistic
dimensions of this extraordinary music.
The effort to place a subject in its historical, social, and also ideological setting is
characteristic of Vietnamese documentaries and scientific films. For instance, The Red
Cochineal describes the natural environment of the insect, its varied industrial uses
along with their economics, and also the ethnic minorities that live in the area and
exploit this resource. Similarly, The Forest of Cue Phuong describes, along with the
flora, fauna, and ethnic minorities, the archaeology and history of the forest, efforts
to preserve it, and the possible uses of some of the plants. This concern to establish
a context for a subject is especially evident in documentaries on historical subjects.
Most often, as in Independence Day 1945, historical footage is supplemented by foreign
materials, photographs, interviews, and so on, in order to place the object of discussion.
This method can be illustrated by a sequence of films on the 1972 Christmas bomb
ings of Hanoi and Haiphong. The earliest, The Evil and the Punishment, was being
shown in Europe two weeks after the event and consists of almost raw footage of
bombs and anti-aircraft shells exploding, planes falling in flames, American flyers
being brought in through the darkness by soldiers and civilians, people being rescued
from the rubble, foreign observers taking photographs, and so on. The horror of the
event is communicated very directly. The later films on the same subject, Hanoi, an
Epic Poem (produced by the Vietnam People's Army Film Studio) and Unforgotten
Days and Nights, enlarge the focus: they are portraits of the fullness of life of the city
at that moment in its history. The historical background is given, various sectors of
the city's population are shown (including foreign visitors), the operations of the anti
aircraft units are described, the attack is narrated from its beginning to its results, and
the foreign reaction is emphasized. Aesthetic devices are used, such as symbolism:
shots of dead flowers are juxtaposed with those of dead people. As in many Viet
namese documentaries on the war, the point is emphasized that life must go on ?
every effort ismade to continue the normalcy of living. Young students play classical
music; babies are born during the bombing that has killed other babies; newspapers
and books continue being published underground. Similarly, the work of reconstruc
tion begins immediately as bulldozers start clearing the rubble.27
Some of the immediacy of the battle footage can be lost in this later contextualiza
tion. In fact, Vietnamese film makers generally prefer the shorter 1954 documentary
Dien Bien Phu to the longer version made in 1964, Victory at Dien Bien Phu, as "closer
27An interesting aspect of this effort at completeness is the attention paid in war documentaries to all
those involved in the war effort, especially those whose work is usually unnoticed. For instance, Battleground
along the Route describes the activities of those charged with keeping the supply routes open, from the
? ? to the but like
dangerous work such as exploding anti-personnel mines ordinary necessary, tending
gardens. The film can be compared to the French 1952 documentary Avec la Rafale (directed by Kowal) about
armoured trains. Keeping the routes open is a subject of segments of other French documentaries of the
time. The influence on Vietnamese cinema of documentaries made by the French army on the
possible
Indochina war should be explored.

to the facts".28 Nevertheless, the war documentaries considered most successful ?

such as On the Crest of the Waves, Facing the Storm and The Citadel Vinh Linh ?
are those that show the community as a whole simultaneously confronting the crisis
of the war and making every effort to continue its functions.
This long background in documentaries explains perhaps why two of the most
imaginative and daring modern Vietnamese films are in that genre. Hanoi Through
Whose Eyes by Tran Van Thuy is in fact an editorial in the guise of a travelogue of
Hanoi ? the city that symbolizes more than any other the national identity. Thuy
shows how people are forgetting the history of Hanoi because of their preoccupation
with modern creature comforts. He uses his visits to the royal tombs to quote the
sayings of kings and nobles about the necessity of treating the people well; thus
admonishing the current revolutionary government in a particularly galling but un
assailable way. Report on Humaneness is even more unusual. Members of the Docu
mentary and Scientific Film Studio meet at a friend and colleague's grave on the
anniversary of his death. The film cuts back to his burial at the site. It cuts back again
to the friend on his death bed, ordering them to make this film: "If you don't, I'll come
back to take you with me!" Emboldened they set out into their contemporary society
to ask the question, "What is humaneness?" Their fellow citizens are only too eager
to provide answers. Thuy's two films are among the most important pieces of evidence
of the new openness of Vietnamese society, an openness being pioneered by Vietnamese
film makers. In view of the place of documentaries in Vietnamese cinema history, it
is characteristic that the way would be led by a documentary maker.
Characteristics of Vietnamese Cinema

I have already mentioned several characteristics of Vietnamese cinema, and a more
extended discussion would be useful before examining feature films. This section
should, however, be read in conjunction with the following one, in which the films I
mention are placed in their historical context.
Vietnamese film makers and historians are frank about the propaganda purpose of
many of their early works and blame it for the shortcomings of their results: "the
formalist and simplistic manner"; "Routine, formalism, lengthy commentary and
monotonous "29 a bricklayer in Report on Humaneness
imagery.... When asks the
film crew why they make such boring documentaries, footage of heroic, happy peasants
working on a community project is cut in. Hai Ninh stated:
During the war, we concentrated on war films. Now we have turned to other sub
jects, comedy, sport, and so on. Recently our government and party recognized that
the role of culture and cinema is very important, that they contribute to the building
of the country as other fields do. So the most important task of films now is to
express the humanity of man in society. Our newest films concentrate on humanity
and moral character.
to Dien ?
^Return Bien Phu
The Hope is the record of an anniversary celebration of the battle, which
shows the current state of
the site. The hope for peace is personified by the ethnic people of the region,
who have suffered for centuries from living in such a border and battle zone. They can now enjoy peace
and unity with their neighbours, as symbolized in their circular dance of welcome into which the visitors are
drawn.
29Diem, "30 Years": 11, 16. Also Nolan, "Vietnam glasnosf. Compare Clark, "Chinese Cinema": 44 ff.

46 John Chariot
This echoes the remarks of many Vietnamese film makers that their works do not
show the war as a subject in itself, but rather its impact on human beings. (On the
other hand, scenes that might seem propagandist to Westerners may be perfectly
realistic; for instance, the flag waving in the last scene of When the Tenth Month Comes
is normal on the first day of school.) Such remarks should not be understood as
denying the importance of nationalism in Vietnamese films, as seen from the remarks
of Nguyen Thu, reported above. In fact, Diem lists among the three characteristics
of Vietnamese feature films ? along with film being a "Weapon of revolutionary
struggle", employing "the methods of creation of socialist realism": "Each film has a
national character, reflects the joys and sorrows, concerns and hopes, aspirations and
will of the people, and the soul and way of life of the nation. "30
The Vietnamese are an extremely nationalistic people, with a patriotism forged
through millenia of resisting powerful neighbours. Vietnam is holy ground, and they
have a sacred duty to protect it. This relation to the land is emphasized in The Aban
doned Field, in which the male protagonist spends a good deal of time contemplating
the beauty of the terrain around him, which the camera sees through his eyes ? this
is the land he is fighting for and these the emotions he brings to the struggle.
In their remarks, Nguyen Thu and Diem place the emphasis on content ? as
exemplified by the specifically Vietnamese cultural elements inWhen the Tenth Month
Comes and Bom the Bumpkin. Indeed, a full appreciation of Vietnamese cinema is
impossible without a close comparison with literature, both ancient and modern. But
Vietnamese character is expressed also in certain elements of style.
Poetry is at the centre of Vietnamese culture and sensibilities, and cinema cannot
be divorced from it.31This poetic sense separates their creations clearly from conven
tional socialist realism. Poetry and musical lyrics are in fact often central elements in
plots and scenes. The heroine of When the Tenth Month Comes breaks down while
singing a role in a village opera that mirrors her own situation. The young girl inFairy
Tale for 17-Year Olds reveals her feelings while reciting a poem in class.
Symbols are unusually important in Vietnamese films. Traditional Vietnamese
icons are used, such as the woman and her baby who turned to stone waiting for her
husband ? referred to in such films as City Under the Fist, Fairy Tale for 17-Year Olds,
and Legend of aMother. Film makers regularly create symbols as a means of expres
sion. In Hong Sen's The Abandoned Field, the liaison family lives in a hut on stilts
in the delta. As the water rises, they must raise the level of the floor, leaving them less
room between it and the ceiling. At the same time, the Americans are "escalating" the
war and closing in on the couple. The helicopters that attack the family are seen from
down up, their broad undersections forming a sort of ceiling that lowers down upon
the fleeing targets. (These exceptionally powerful scenes were inspired by the director's
own frightening experiences of helicopter attacks during the war; in filming the scenes,
he cooperated closely with a pilot friend of his to create the exact effects he sought.)
Vietnamese tend to understand foreign films in symbolic terms. Dang Nhat Minh
was struck by the scene in Peter Markle's Bat 21, in which a downed American enters
a peasant's hut and takes food. The peasant returns and asks indignantly (unfortunately
30Diem, "30 Years": 27. For China, compare Clark, "Chinese Cinema": 56 ff, 63 ff, 101, 117 ff, 125 ff,
133-37, 166, 180.

31Minh, "So That Different Peoples": 43. Chariot, "Power of the Past": 448-51.

without subtitles), "What are you doing in my house?" In that situation and question,
the whole meaning of the war seemed to be symbolized for Minh.
Similarly, quite realistic characters can be understood as exemplary. In war films,
the suffering of women is depicted as the most powerful means of presenting that of
the people as a whole (in fact, women occupy central roles in all the Vietnamese
features I have seen, an indication of their recognized place in culture and society).
In several films of the post-war situation, the prostitute is a key case for Vietnamese
reconciliation and reconstruction. The problems of the veteran in Brothers and Relations
reveal those of the society; as do those of the adolescent in The Lamp in the Dream.
Also poetic is the creation of multiple layers of meaning. For instance, inWhen the
Tenth Month Comes, a woman, wanting to spare her sickly father-in-law, asks a village
schoolteacher to write letters as if they came from her dead soldier husband. This
complex event is seen in different ways throughout the film. There is the surface
appearance: the understanding between the principals. There ismisinterpretation: the
villagers think the woman is carrying on an affair with the teacher. There is a deeper
emotional level at which the teacher is indeed falling in love with her. Their story is
placed in the context of the war, and that war in turn is placed in the context of the
thousands of years of Vietnamese resistance. Similarly, in Fairy Tale for 17-Year Olds,
a girl escapes into fantasies about a young soldier at the front, while her family and
friends urge her to face reality. The soldier is killed, but his last letter expresses his
gratitude for her love for him, the last beautiful thing in his life, and thus acutely real
for him as for her. Multiple levels of meaning can be present in films in surprising and
interesting ways. In The Last Distance Between Us, many of the statements and actions
of the father have a double meaning because he is an underground agent.
Much Vietnamese poetry is lyric, indeed, love poetry, and this fact encourages the
world-wide tendency to include romantic interest in movies. In the most "socialist
realist" film I have seen, The River of Aspiration, a rather cursory, but potentially in
teresting, love interest was included. Eroticism, a major part of the traditional literature,
has become the subject of controversy. Generally suppressed in socialist countries, it
makes its presence felt under the surface of a number of films and in several ? such
? has become
as, Shipwreck Beach and The Young Woman on the Perfumed River
overt and an occasion for debating questions of realism and artistic freedom. Hai Ninh
argues that in both films, nudity and sexuality were necessary to describe accurately
and dramatically the life of prostitution that provides the impetus for the plots. In
terestingly, lyric love poetry, long deemphasized as not socially constructive, is being
reintroduced into the curriculum.
Related to this romanticism is the emphasis in Vietnamese films on tenderness. The
American director Richard Sykes found the films he saw a combination of "sophistica
tion and gentleness". A "war film" like The Abandoned Field seems to spend an
inordinate amount of time showing the young parents playing with their baby and
each other. Children play together at length inWhen Mother Is Away. The mother con
soles her son in When Grandmother Is Away, as the young university student does the
veteran in Brothers and Relations. The Vietnamese obviously derive a good deal of
emotional satisfaction from watching people being nice to each other.
This tenderness is very much part of Vietnamese humour, which tends to teasing
and jollity and is a frequent mood in conversation. All the characters of A Quiet
Little Town have something to recommend them, no matter how much they can make

48 John Chariot
us laugh. Moreover, just as romance can become eroticism, Vietnamese humour can
assume an almost surrealistic character, as in the butterfly scene in The 17th Parallel,
discussed below.
Some purely visual aspects of Vietnamese cinema can be related to their long art
tradition. Unusually handsome black-and-white camera work is widespread in both
documentaries a
and feature films and argues for basically aesthetic approach (colour
ismuch less developed artistically). Night scenes can be remarkable, with whites glow
ing against a black background much as in lacquer work, a Vietnamese specialty. The
sinuous lines and atmospheric effects of many outdoor scenes recall ink paintings on
silk ? as do many of the subjects chosen: the boy on a buffalo in A Quiet Little
Town is a motif of both high and folk art.
The very popular Vietnamese dance drama has left its mark on cinema; negatively
in some melodrama and stock characters, and positively in an emphasis on body
language and graceful and appropriate pacing. Camera movements (except for over
zooming) can be subtle and expressive. Music tends to be Western and overly lush;
much more could be done with traditional native instruments.
The danger of the Vietnamese emphasis on emotions is of course
that it can en
courage overacting, a problem in many older Vietnamese movies and in some newer
ones as well. I have in fact watched a director urging an actress to broaden her style
(since sound ismixed later, a director can give continual instructions, as in silent movie
? a humorous and ?
making); and the People's Artist Tra Giang energetic woman
is too often called upon to mist over her eyes. But the acting in the better Vietnamese
movies is remarkably understated and effective, and the emotional climaxes can be
powerful. Moreover the acting style seems more Western than the Asian of the stereo
type, which is a definite help for an occidental audience.
The cinema language is also generally international. From the earliest film I have
seen, The Golden Bird, the better Vietnamese directors have been able to use that
language in a quiet, subtle, and assured manner, in which all elements are carefully
integrated and interrelated. For instance, inWhen the Tenth Month Comes, the heroine
leaves the stage when she breaks down; the male opera singer turns to his right toward
her to continue singing and is confused when she is not there. In the audience, the
school teacher has been watching the opera with his quasi-girlfriend. He leaves to
follow the heroine. His girlfriend turns to her right to speak to him and finds he has
left. Because of the direction of the camera, the actor and the girlfriend have turned
to opposite sides of the screen, creating a lovely visual effect. The sequence has,
however, more than a visual interest. The quiet parallelism expresses the film's theme
that contemporary experience is a repetition of the past, a later chapter in the long
Vietnamese tradition of war and loss.
Similarly, in The AbandonedField, a long shot shows the wife pushing off in the
family dug-out to harvest flowers. Almost unnoticed, her husband drops a cloth into
the boat as she leaves. Later, when she is attacked by a helicopter, she puts the cloth
over her head as camouflage (a practice followed by the guerrillas in other scenes). That
is, her having the cloth was a matter of life or death. The point is made very quietly,
but it is one of many such that create the mood of the film: the family is living in
constant danger and will in fact suffer tragedy. Such reminders render poignant the
scenes of normal family life. The effort at maintaining a kind of normalcy despite the

war is, as stated above, a theme of Vietnamese movies. Dang Nhat Minh said that the
Vietnam war was different from World War II, in which all normal life was suspended
for four to six years. The Vietnam war lasted from 1945 to 1975, and the Vietnamese
had to try as much as possible to carry on their lives.
The Western viewer must therefore be aware of specific cultural differences that may
be masked by the apparent accessibility of the cinematic language. The husband and
wife in The Abandoned Field seemed too saintly to some Hawai'i viewers. But the
Vietnamese film maker Bui Dinh Hac mentioned in discussion that the wife had to
suffer not only through the war but from the "brutality" of her husband; he slapped
her once. Hitting someone on the head is in fact a major offence in Vietnam, but the
American audience did not realize this. The wife was slapped because through her
negligence, their baby had fallen into the water and almost drowned. The Vietnamese
audience would consider this also a major failing. The film had, therefore, provided
a much rounder characterization of the couple than the American audience perceived.
Feature Films and Directors
While visiting Vietnam, I was naturally shown films considered outstanding, so I

cannot comment on the general quality of Vietnamese cinema. Nevertheless, levels
were easily noticeable, and the weaknesses of middling films permit a more accurate
appreciation of the better ones. For instance, When Mother Is Away has long scenes
of the heroine's five children disporting themselves, an obvious delight to the Vietnamese
audience; these scenes helped me understand that the passages in The Abandoned Field
of the liaison couple playing with their child were both especially appealing to the local
audience and much more controlled than those in the former film.32
A number of films are stagey: the camera remains more or less fixed and the actors
move before it, reciting their lines as if in a play. This practice is found especially in
older films, such as sections of We Will Meet Again, but has continued in such films
as Once Upon a Time in Vu Dai Village by the historically important director Pham
Van Khoa.33 Many Vietnamese films, as ones from other Asian countries, tend to
melodrama. The Peal of the Orange Bell treats the interesting topic of Agent Orange,
but turns it into a collection of antiquated plot turns rendered with a slowness of
action unusual in Vietnamese
movies. Similarly, The Last Crime takes up the interesting
theme of the social r?int?gration of the prostitutes and gangsters prominent in South
Vietnamese society, but the heroine's few facial expressions are all appeals to an easy pity.
The Vietnamese now criticize much of their early work as propagandist. The only
such recent feature film I have seen is The River of Aspiration, the story of an honest
32Anonymous, "Vietnamese Feature Films": 33. When Mother Is Away was a popular success, but was
heavily criticized by the army, which protested that it would never let a mother of five children ? or even
two! ? leave them alone to go on a mission. Such a mother would not be asked to serve except in a support
capacity, and if she absolutely had to leave, her children would be placed in the care of others. The Vietnam
Cinema Department replied that it was taking artistic license to tell a good story.
33In that film, the director reportedly left his actors largely to their own devices. On Pham Van Khoa,
see Diem, "30 Years": 23, 26, 56, 58; Hoang Quy, "Veteran Film Director Pham Van Khoa: People's Artist",
Film Vietnam, No. 2 (1984): 14 ff; Anonymous, "Vietnamese Feature Films": 39, 73; on the film, O'Harrow,
"Vu Dai".

50 John Chariot
manager trying to raise production at an electric plant. The heavy-handed socialist

realism and old-fashioned narrative style of the film may be due to its being the
department's offering on the occasion of a party congress.
None of the above films is totally without interest. The Last Crime features the fine
acting of Tran Quang as a menacing but attractive gangster. The children of When
Mother Is Away seem unaware of the camera (Vietnamese films generally use children
very well). In The River of Aspiration, a number of scenes are injected with humour;
for instance, a workers' representative quotes Marxism to argue against working too hard.
Occasionally, what should be a merely workmanlike production rises to a higher
level. When Grandmother Is Away was the directorial debut of Nguyen Anh Thai and
intended as a low-budget film for children. The story is a clear temptation to senti
mentality: tension in the family leads a grandmother to leave the apartment and make
her living in the streets; her grandson, suffering greatly from her absence, tries to find
her. The film is carried off without a trace of sentimentality, but with a good deal of
? an
realistic emotion. Modern family problems are described very frankly important
? as are those of the urban poor in Hai
theme in this very family-centred society
phong. The ending is not the grandmother's return, but the boy's accident as he
catches a glimpse of her and jumps out of a bus window into the street. In the hospital
he has a dream that leaves everything beautifully unresolved. When Grandmother Is
Away is a small and unexpected masterpiece.
An unevenness can be found in the work of certain directors, such as that of the
prolific, pioneering Tran Vu.34 His graduation project, The Golden Bird (1962), a short
fiction film, is a masterful exercise in international cinema language expressing Viet
namese content. The narration is well-paced and concise; the photography is poetic
and expressive; a wide but not showy array of camera angles, movements, and techni
ques is used; the acting is expressive and unstrained; the background music enhances
the mood without distracting from it; and the emotional effects are realized. Details
are used well throughout; the fact that the Frenchman and his Vietnamese underlings
are not the peasants they are disguised to be is seen from the fact that they roll their
cigarettes with paper instead of leaves. One putative peasant looks very funny with his
dark glasses; another with the whiteness of his legs when he rolls up his pants. The
story is told more in such images than in words. The Golden Bird is the creation of
an artist educated and at ease in his art form. Apart from its expert documentary
passages and a few good dramatic scenes, Tran Vu's later We Will Meet Again (1972)
is a step backward. The camera is fixed before a room in which the melodramatic
villain stomps and expostulates. A clump of embarrassed peasants trots along a marked
path waving rakes and hoes, supposedly in insurrection. However, in his last film,
Brothers and Relations (1986), Tran Vu recovers his earlier form. The story of a veteran
returning to Hanoi to find an indifferent society is told with an economy and under
statement that express only more effectively the strong personalities, emotions, and
philosophical differences involved. Each scene is interesting in itself and contributes
unfailingly to the whole. Brothers and Relations achieves a quiet perfection in its genre.
34Diem, "30 Years": 23, 24, 26, 55, 57 ff; Anonymous, "Vietnamese Feature Films": 11, 19, 31; Chariot,
"Vietnam, The Strangers Meet": 47 ff.

Similarly uneven, but on a lower level, is the work of best known woman director,
Bach Diep.35 Apart from its heavy over-use of the zoom lens, Punishment (1984) is
an interesting character study of a South Vietnamese Army officer during the chaos
of the 1975 fall of Hue. Despite some extraneous material, the basic story of his
demoralization, his escape from society and the consequences of his action, and his
final decision to return, is told clearly in terms of his relation to his family and fellow
soldiers and to the North Vietnamese officers. The destruction of his career and family
is a reflection or symptom of that of the South Vietnamese army and society, pre
paratory to its reconstruction on another basis. Unusually for Vietnamese films, the
narration does not move sequentially in time, but ? perhaps influenced by Dang Nhat
? to reveal itself gradually. There
Minh's City Under the Fist plays with chronology
are a number of nice touches: a young North Vietnamese soldier does a little imitation
of a macho SVA officer to amuse a little boy. Bach Diep's later Legend of aMother
(1987) is a retrogression to staginess and melodrama. This is particularly regrettable
because the interesting story of a woman who adopted children during the war and
returned them afterwards to their families did inspire some good scenes of Vietnamese
women interacting among themselves and taking care of the very physical needs of
infants. But the villainous men are ludicrously broad (one pours knockout powder into
the whiskey he offers his secretary), and a dream sequence is crude enough to be funny.
The two films are distant enough in style to make them unrecognizable as the work
of a single director. Neil Gibson reports that Bach Diep's latest film, A Small Alley,
an examination of the personal consequences of poverty in contemporary Vietnam,
is stylistically much more accomplished.
The director Hai Ninh has long been a pillar of Vietnamese cinema, entrusted with
some of its major projects and now Director of the Feature Film Studio in Hanoi.36
He completed a number of productions during the war under difficult conditions. The
bombings of Hanoi played havoc with the work on the sound track for The 17th
Parallel ? Day and Night, but gave him the idea for his film The Girl of Hanoi. His
work illustrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of the industry. Hai Ninh has
the Vietnamese capacity for self-criticism. He finds his early films often too slow, the
movements and action too long. The propaganda content seems very high to him now,
which makes them seem old-fashioned especially to the younger Vietnamese audience.
"Nobody wants to listen to propaganda now," one young person told me. Even Ninh's
latest film, Shipwreck Beach, is an argument in favour of the Vietnamese position on
the boat people: they were deluded with false promises by criminals.
Hai Ninh's movies are often melodramatic, with cardboard heroes and villains and
devices like the drugging of the heroine's drink to have sex with her. In First Love, an
seemingly benevolent American adviser is in fact stealing Vietnamese children to send
them as orphans to the U.S. where they will be trained as spies to be slipped later back
into Vietnam. Hai Ninh regularly twists realism to make an ideological point. For
instance, in The Girl of Hanoi, the young heroine climbs into a one-person bomb
35Diem, "30 Years": 26, 57 ff, 60; Anonymous, "Vietnamese Feature Films": 13, 25.
36Diem, "30 Years": 23 ff, 26, 44, 56, 58 ff; Anonymous, "Vietnamese Feature Films": 5, 9, 17, 35.
During my second visit to Hanoi, Hai Ninh received Geoffrey Gilmore and me graciously at the studio and
accorded us four interviews, which I have used in this article.

52 John Chariot
shelter, a few bombs fall, and she emerges smiling?1 In First Love, the scene of a
? with an aerial view of the
protest demonstration begins well plaza as citizens and
? but then
police square off in a geometric pattern degenerates as the students start
shoving the police around. The unreality of this is revealed in the next scenes, which
show the police chasing people through the city at night. At the end of The 17th
Parallel, the villain has finally cornered the heroine, but he wants to hear her com
munist propaganda just one more time before he kills her. She reads a paper so
eloquently that the South Vietnamese soldiers revolt, are joined by a crowd of women,
and kill the villain.
The plots of Hai Ninh's films often seem to go in circles rather than spirals. For
instance, The 17th Parallel comprises two feature-length sections; the second starts off
with the same characters in basically the same situation as the first. Even the main
villain, whom we thought we saw killed, appears with a large scar on his face. As a
result, Hai Ninh's films often lack a sense of forward momentum.
For all these faults, his work has undeniable good points. He encourages the fine,
often sensuous camera work that is characteristic of the best Vietnamese films, both
features and documentaries. He can achieve striking images, such as some of the close
ups in The 17th Parallel and the almost surrealist flotsam and jetsam of American
artifacts in Saigon. He can narrate some sections through mainly visual means, such
as several flashbacks in First Love and the heroine's search for her family in the
bombed ruins in The Girl of Hanoi. Some scenes are strikingly original, like that of
revolutionaries conferring while sitting in round basket boats on a river in The 17th
Parallel. In the same movie can be found one of the funniest and strangest scenes in
all Vietnamese cinema. A South Vietnamese Army troop is receiving a tall, lanky CIA
agent and his obligatory Vietnamese mistress. The troop makes a formal path before
the agent by lining up double-file facing each other. Suddenly he turns to his right,
raises his arms in an odd way and starts pacing away from the reception ceremony in
long, slow, spidery steps. The Vietnamese officer at the other end of the line raises
his arms and starts moving in the same way toward the American. They continue this
strange dance toward each other, gradually sinking lower and lower on their haunches
and lowering their arms forward until their slowly waving hands come together on the
ground over a butterfly. The CIA officer was just using his cover as a lepidopterist.
One of Hai Ninh's most interesting achievements is his depiction of Duy, the male
protagonist in First Love. By no means a cardboard character, he is the subject of an
almost existentialist analysis of alienation. When Duy loses his first love, he loses hope
and then "life becomes irrational". He cannot believe in the Americans, but cannot
join the resistance. In his aimlessness and thus listlessness, he becomes the perfect
victim of the corruption of war-time Saigon, where "life belongs to the prostitutes and
the Americans". Having left his place in society, he turns against it and his family. This
theme of the need for a moral, hopeful purpose in life ismajor in Vietnamese cinema
and also in their conception of the war. Hai Ninh's works are in fact a key to our
understanding of many of the themes treated in Vietnamese films, such as that of
reconciliation. Hai Ninh can also be recognized as a pioneer in the opening of the
37A Vietnamese who lived through the bombings told me that fear and some panic were the normal
reactions. In contrast, in Hai Ninh's The 17th Parallel, the children are horrified rather than edified by the
burning of an old villager who has worked for the resistance.

industry to newsubjects. The nudity and sexuality in Shipwreck Beach were un

precedented. In The Girl of Hanoi, the child is told the story of the Vietnamese hero's
receiving the magic sword to smite the invaders and has a sort of vision of the event,
told through animation; an anticipationof later expressions of the "metaphysical" in life.
In contrast to Hai Ninh's productivity, Pham Ky Nam is famous for one feature
film, The Young Woman of Sao Beach (1963), but it is one of the most interesting
ever made in Vietnam.38 Despite occasional weak points ? some melodrama and
sentimentality, some overlong scenes, and soupy music ? the film is bursting with
originality. The lustrous black-and-white camera work is unusually expressive even for
Vietnamese cinema, with interesting angles, camera movements, and lighting. In one
night scene, a baby is being born while a battle is sounding outside; inside the room,
the lone ceiling lamp is set swinging, causing a variety of light effects. Scenes of actual
combat ? rare in Vietnamese films ? are handled expertly. The complicated and
interesting narrative is told in very bold scenes. In one plot line, the heroine meets a
South Vietnamese officer she once knew. He tries to rape her, but is interrupted by
a French officer who enters the hut, sees the heroine's anguished face, and ? saying,
"What a beautiful expression!" ? photographs it.He then shoos the South Vietnamese
out the door and rapes the heroine himself. The scenes of her post-trauma suffering,
her husband's reactions, and the effect the rape has on their relation to each other are
described with unusual fullness. In a final, long, silent scene, the two reach a qualified
understanding. The husband is soon killed in battle. Later in the movie, Viet Minh
commandos attack the French officer. He has returned to his room, put a record on
the machine, and is settling back to relax. They burst in, and the violent ? and most
?
interestingly photographed struggle is carried on to le jazz hot?9 Created so early
in Vietnamese film history, The Young Woman of Sao Beach must have had a very
positive effect on its future development. Even today, an artist like Dang Nhat Minh
can look back to it for inspiration and even validation.
Hong Sen is recognized as having produced the modern breakthrough film for Viet
namese cinema, The Abandoned Field ? Free Fire Zone?0 Hong Sen's other works
are considered less successful. Left Alone, which I have not seen, has an original
subject: a downed American flyer is offered refuge by a woman from an ethnic
minority. The film's exoticism has attracted foreign viewers, but the Vietnamese found
it less interesting, and aesthetic objections were raised by other film artists. According
to Neil Gibson, the climactic scene of the woman breastfeeding the American was
judged to need re-shooting and the film has never been released generally in Vietnam.
Hong Sen is now finishing a new production.
The greatest talent of the next generation of Vietnamese film makers is Dang Nhat
38Diem, "30 Years": 23, 51, 55 ff, 60; Anonymous, "Vietnamese Feature Films": 21.
39Earlier, the officer has been shown looking at the photograph he took of the heroine while he listens
to some piano playing. When the husband attacked the South Vietnamese officer, a needle stuck in the
groove of the record being played. Curiously, a French army documentary of 1952, Aviation de Chasse en
Indochine (directed by Kowal), uses jazzy piano playing as background music to a scene of the fighter plane
approaching and attacking the target.
^Diem, "30 Years": 26, 54 ff, 59, 61; Van Hac, "Hong Sen and his Works", Film Vietnam, No. 1 (1984):
10 ff; Anonymous, "Vietnamese Feature Films": 23, 27, 45, 55; Chariot, "Vietnam, The Strangers Meet":
45 ff.

54 John Chariot
Minh, whose When the Tenth Month Comes is worthy to rank as a classic of world
cinema.41 I have discussed that film elsewhere and will concentrate here on the films
produced immediately before and after that work. City Under the Fist is the most
experimental feature film made in Vietnam. Going much further than earlier flashback
techniques used by Pham Ky Nam and others, the complicated story is told through
a chronological kaleidoscope, the narrative jumping between at least four different
periods through visual and thematic connections. Interjected are imaginary scenes
expressing the protagonist's fears or speculation as to what might have happened. All
this complication has a definite expressive purpose: the film is describing the prot
agonist's almost feverish rethinking process stimulated by an historic event; he is being
forced to reshape his views of history, society, and his own past actions. Moreover, that
event had provoked the same thought process in the government and the society as
a whole; so the mental effort of the audience to follow the narrative is a personal
recreation of their own experience as well as that of the protagonist and a reliving of
the historical moment described.
The protagonist's story is embedded in that historical event or ? perhaps more
? in the now
accurately generally accepted interpretation of that event, which I will
need to describe in detail. After 1975, the North Vietnamese went through a period
of ideological enthusiasm. The government decided that, with the end of the war, they
could move rapidly to restructure society in a scientific, socialist form. To do this, they
banned folk practices, such as the song festival of Bac Ninh, and made efforts to
purge untrustworthy people. In the general atmosphere of suspicion and repression,
an individual could be judged not only on his or her own actions but on those of
relatives as well (the correction of this bad practice continues today). The atmosphere
of recrimination caused a good deal of unhappiness and unrest in the country.
This ideological movement was a product of the conservative wing of the Vietnamese
communist party, which is generally identified with the high party official Truong
Chinh. Truong Chinh was in turn identified with the faction of the party that leaned
41
Anonymous, "Vietnamese Feature Films": 51, 61; John Chariot, "When the Tenth Month
Comes... ",
in The Hawai'i International Film Festival, November 26-December 8, 1985
(Honolulu: The East-West
Center, 1985), p. 48; "Vietnam, The Strangers Meet": 46 ff; Minh, "Phim Vietnam", "In the Realm", which
contains an autobiography and filmography, which should be compared with the following information from
different sources. Dang Nhat Minh's documentaries (director and script writer) include On the Trails of Geologists
[Theo Chan Nguoi Dia Chat], 1968; Ha Bac
-
My Native Land [Ha Bac - Que Huong], 1969; The Faces
of May [Thang 5 Nhung Guong Mat], 1975; Nguyen Trai ? Great Vietnamese Poet of the 18th Century
? ? Thanh Pho
[Nguyen Trai], 1980;Hanoi City of Flying Dragons [Hanoi Rong Bay] (video), 1986. Feature
Films: Nhung, a Young Woman of Saigon [Chi Nhung], 1970; Stars on the Sea [Nhung Ngoi Sao Bien],
1973; A Rainy Day at the End of the Year [Ngay Mua Cuoi Nam], 1978; City Under the Fist [Thi Xa Trong
Tarn Tay], 1982; When the Tenth Month Comes [Bao Gio Cho Den Thang 10], 1984; The Young Woman on
the Perfumed River [Co Gai Tren Song], 1987; [the following item is from Minh's 1990 filmographyl A Man
Alone [Chi Mot Nguoi Con Song] (video), 1989. On the three before the last item, Minh was scriptwriter
as well as director; I have no further information on A Man Alone.
Minh was born in 1938 in Hanoi, the son of a prominent doctor. He studied at the lyc?e at Hue and,
when his parents joined the resistance, in the forests of Tuyen Quang Province, graduating in 1954. He
studied later at the Institute of Russian Language and Literature, Moscow, graduating in 1959. He worked
as a Russian translator at the Vietnam Cinema Department until he was asked to direct a documentary. He
received six months training in Bulgaria in 1976 and eight months in Paris in 1985. He has published award
winning short stories and film criticism. He was elected General Secretary of the Vietnam Cinematography
Association in 1989.

towards the Chinese as opposed to the Russians. Further complicating factors were the
deteriorating relations with the People's Republic of China and tensions within Viet
nam between the ethnic Vietnamese and the ethnic Chinese minority, many of whom
had to leave the country as boat people. The final shock came with the Chinese
invasion across the northern border "to teach the Vietnamese a lesson". A connection
was made between the invasion, the local Chinese considered disloyal or at least
divided in their loyalties, and the earlier repressive atmosphere, now blamed on Chinese
influence. Interestingly, a very similar sequence of events had occurred after the defeat
of the French. In 1955-56, the Vietnamese began an ideological land reform so severe
that it provoked a peasant revolt that was savagely repressed. The government later
issued an apology and blamed Truong Chinh and Chinese advisers.42
Some historians, including Vietnamese, disagree with the above interpretation of
events. My only concern here is how it is used in City Under the Fist. Told sequentially,
the story is about a young man who abandons his fianc?e because her family has come
under suspicion and he does not want to jeopardise his career in journalism. The
suspicion has been cast on the family by a local Chinese who is actually a spy and
tries to recruit the protagonist to Maoism. At the invasion, the journalist is sent north
to inspect the ruins of a town destroyed by the Chinese, the town in which he used
to visit his fianc?e. There he rethinks his past and confronts the external and internal
negative influence of Chinese-style ideology. He realizes that out of fear and ambition,
he has acted in a way that is unworthy of a human being. His suspected fianc?e is now
married to a heroic Vietnamese army officer. Told cinematically, the story is a marvel
of visual poetry, photographed with a peculiar texture and following the leaps of the
protagonist's mind as he works his way with anguish towards a new way of thinking.
The director writes, "The film is an act of repentance for many Vietnamese who for
a long time allowed a simplistic ideological orthodoxy to destroy their feelings."43
Similarly, a scholar from China stated in 1987, "After the excesses of the Cultural
Revolution, we don't ask so much about the ideology of an idea or a policy, but
whether it's human or inhuman."
This search for the authentically human is a characteristic of Vietnamese cinema
today and a theme of Minh's latest film, The Young Woman on the Perfumed River,
based on a true story: a prostitute helped a revolutionary who then tried to ignore her
after the country was reunited and he was appointed to a government post. The film
was controversial because of its sex scenes and its contrast of the official to a faithful
South Vietnamese Army veteran. The social criticism of the film is sharp, for instance,
about the suppression of journal articles by government officials. One journalist
decides to quit because she doesn't want to continue writing the "phoney" articles her
editors demand. The film is thus important evidence of Vietnamese glasnost. The use
of a prostitute as personifying the problems of reconciliation and social reconstruction
in the country is found in a number of movies and will be discussed below. The film
is Dang Nhat Minh's first in colour, and he clearly enjoyed some of the effects he was
able to produce. His creative use of symbolism is also evident, for instance, in the shot
of the prostitute's tiny boat being towed away by a large armoured military river vessel.
The film does not, however, have the artistic unity so characteristic of Minh's two
42Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 225 ff.
43Minh, "Phim Vietnam": 40.

56 John Chariot
earlier films. Visually, it is divided between the lush, moody, romantic photography
of the first third ? the life of the prostitute on the river ? and the very flat, at times
overlit photography of the later sections. Similarly, in his narration, Minh seems to
waver between a reportorial style and a romantic, pictorial one. The acting of the two
principals tends to the melodramatic and sentimental, and some of the background
music is clumsy. Minh seems to have been stretching his work in new directions in this
film, directions that will undoubtedly find a more skilful expression in later works.
Dang Nhat Minh's contemporary, Nguyen Xuan Son made his debut with the
remarkable feature film, The Last Distance Between Us (1981).44 The title refers to the
need for reconciliation between former enemies in the North and South. In a 1988
interview, Xuan Son told me, "The greatest distance is that between people. In my
I
film, wanted to say that we had to settle the distance between former Saigon soldiers
and ourselves. That distance is very large." The story describes the life of a low-level,
undercover resistance worker living among his neighbours in the South: an older,
alcoholic veteran of the South Vietnamese army and the widow of a veteran. As they
live together, they become ever closer and more sympathetic to each other. The life of
the revolutionary is told in a very practical, undramatic way. He has small jobs but
big worries. He is torn between his duties as an agent and as an only parent to his
young daughter. When his comrades suspect the veteran of informing on him, he says
he will vouch for him, because he feels sorry that the veteran's life seems so futile.
When he feels the police closing in, he hints to the widow that she might have to take
care of his child. The arrest scene is masterfully understated, one of the best pieces
of editing I have ever seen. The revolutionary looks a second longer than usual at the
widow as he goes out the door. The people become so real, so ordinary, that the brief
scene of the widow being tortured by the police is shocking.
A strong point of the film is the casting ? the actors seem to be living their roles
rather than playing them. The father's role is filled by a very ordinary-looking Saigon
stage actor. For the veteran, Xuan Son chose a former Saigon documentary maker who
had studied in Japan. "I could see vividly the feelings I wanted existing in his soul.
When I asked him to play the role, he was surprised and suggested I look at his films.
But I told him, T don't want your films. I want you.'" The camera work is as quiet
but careful as the other aspects of the movie. The effects seem more beautiful because
they call no attention to themselves. Few films are so convincing.
Son's later film, Fairy Tale for 17-Year Olds, is quite different. Perhaps under the
influence of When the Tenth Month Comes, it emphasizes overtly poetic camera work
to express the romantic fantasies of a young girl. Despite its strong points, which I
have described in an earlier article,45 it does not always achieve a unity between its
depiction of different dimensions of reality and suffers from some overacting. Xuan
Son seemed to be stretching his art in new directions in the film and was remarkably
successful in passages.
^Nguyen Xuan Son was born in 1938 and studied directing at the Vietnam Cinema School from 1965
to 1968, where he then worked there as a lecturer until 1972. From 1972 to 1979, he studied feature film
direction at the All-Union-States Institute of Cinema in Moscow. Besides the two films discussed, Nguyen
Xuan Son has directed A Blunder, 1983; Looking for the Land, 1984; and The River Mouth (documentary),
1985. Anonymous, "Vietnamese Feature Films": 69.
45Charlot, "Fairy Tale for 17-Year Olds": 65 ff.

The older directors of the Vietnam Cinema Department are very proud of their
younger colleagues and give them a good deal of encouragement and, more important,
the opportunity to work. Since the reduction of production money, however, one case
of a senior director using his position to obtain preference has been reported.
A most impressive young director is Le Duc Tien, whose second film, A Quiet Little
Town, is a very original comedy.46 With an unusually deft and witty script, the movie
satirizes officious functionaries,
party the bureaucratization of life, and small-town
pretensions, provincialisms, and ambitions. A curious plot twist at the end permits the
audience to test itself on its own class prejudices or "feudalism", as it is called in Viet
namese Marxist terms. The movie, however, goes beyond the normal expectations of
the genre. It creates a very accurate and affectionate ? ?
though unromanticized
picture of a small, provincial town. An unusually large number and variety of characters
are portrayed with seeming effortlessness, and in the end, each retains his sympathy
and dignity. The very funny jokes are separated by quiet actions and views, so that
the mood is tempered into a gentle, almost elegiac vision. The narrative is framed and
punctuated by a boy riding a water buffalo, a common view in the countryside, a
motif in folk art, and a happy childhood memory of many. The director seems to be
evoking the roots of the culture as a criticism of and a refuge from many of the
problems of contemporary society.
Le Duc Tien's next movie, Bom the Bumpkin, is the first to base itself on folk
stories, songs, jokes, and motifs, much as Dang Nhat Minh's When the Tenth Month
Comes based itself on the poetic tradition. The film is the product of a conscious
effort to develop a distinctive, national cinema and reveals the affection contemporary
Vietnamese feel for their cultural past and the inspiration they draw from it. The
national content includes the self-portrait of the Vietnamese. Hai Ninh states,
In Bom, we are making fun of ourselves. We are using irony and humour about
our own character. We are more frank and open now about our good and bad sides.
The film makers wanted to show people how they should live in this society.
The film is also a big-budget historical pageant, filmed in colour, and using classical
dance troupes and many of the most successful actors in the industry. The project was,
in all likelihood, a film to test the international market. The colourful costumes establish
a festive, dreamlike mood, supported by stylized movements and gestures based on
folk opera (the camera work is sometimes a little flat for such a film). The clusters
of dramatized stories concern Bom's proverbial stupidity, the credulity that makes him
an easy mark (he is sold a flock of wild geese in a field), and the way he misunder
stands all the instructions intended to form him into a cultured scholar. These story
clusters are framed by fantasy sequences based on a folk song about Bom: he is offered
increasingly greater riches by a landlord in trade for his fan, but is too much the
poor booby to accept them. By the end of the film, the characters have acquired an
endearing reality, and the recurring motif a curious depth.
^Le Duc Tien was born 1967 to 1972, he worked as a war reporter for the military
in 1949. From studio
and from 1975 to 1979 studied
film directing at the Soviet University of Cinema. Le Duc Tien's professors
were A. Xtolpier and N. Ozerop. In 1982, he was assistant director on The Case of the Aimless Bullet and
in 1983 on The Mistake. In 1985, he directed The Sound of the Peace Bomb. Chariot "Vietnam, The
Strangers Meet": 48 ff.

58 John Chariot
Do Minh Tuan is the youngest director whose work I have seen. He graduated from
the University of Hanoi in philology and then from the Cinema School. The Lamp
in the Dream is his debut film. In it, he tells the story of a young teenager, Trung, who
is a product and a manifestation of the postwar society of Vietnam. In a private 1988
paper on the film, the director writes, "Fourie[r] said: from women and children we
"
can understand a nation. For Trung, the war is a childhood memory coloured with
celebrations of victory. He is typically Vietnamese, living in poverty, but open to his
society and moment in history and easily caught up in his "dream world". The society
he lives in is a troubled one, marked by separations and losses in the war. To these
are added modern problems. His parents are long divorced, and his father has dis
appeared. His stepfather was brutal, and Trung needed to be protected by his older
?
brother. Now Trung is living alone in a room. His mother comes to visit him, but
in an unusual scene for the Vietnamese ? he refuses to open the door through which
she is entreating him. The boy's older brother is involved in petty crime (typically
stealing bicycles), and their relation has become ambivalent. Trung has worked at a
little restaurant, but quits because he has had enough. His job at a lacquer factory
comes to an end when his hand is burned in an accident. He is gradually being
alienated from his family and society and is suffering the emotional consequences of
loneliness and anxiety, which are threatening to deform his character. At one point,
he uses his slingshot to break his stepfather's ceramic pots. He gives himself his own
birthday party, putting up a sign, "Birthday Party for Mr. Trung". He dreams of a
happy folk holiday for children and elders. "This is a Society full of paradox, misery,
"
but full of charity, the director writes. Trung's teacher ? who has felt his sadness
in one of his class essays ? and schoolmates notice his distress and make efforts to
help him. The teacher's boyfriend tries to befriend the boy. An old calligraphier en
courages his interest in art and promises to do a hanging scroll for him with the words
"A light that never dies". "The important thing," he tells Trung, "is to be moral, to
be able to live with yourself."
Butthe negative forces in society work against Trung. His older brother's stealing
gets Trung in trouble with the police. The father of the schoolmate who wants to help
him objects to her seeing such a disreputable boy. The old calligrapher dies before
he can finish the scroll. Trung is progressively thrown back on himself as, one after
another, the normal social attachments cannot provide adequate support. But although
thrown back on his isolation and suffering, he comes also to his own resources.
There is indeed a lamp in the surrounding darkness, a point of light by which he
can read; a play on the saying, "When a man reads a book, his eyes are bright for a
thousand years". The film ends with an image of Trung alone, but mounted on a
horse, certainly a symbolic, not a realistic image. Placed between the wounding and
the supportive forces of society, between temptations to crime and encouragement to
morality, Trung is realizing himself as an independent person, responsible for his own
journey through life.

The complicated story is told with the utmost delicacy and tact and with compas
sion for all concerned. Little touches describe the characters perfectly. The girl in
"
Trung's class takes the lead in helping him because "I'm a monitor. Her father puts
on his army uniform when he has something serious to discuss with the family. The
Lamp in theDream and When Grandmother Is Away, with their respectful and original

analysis of the problems of young people, compare favourably with such films as Luis
Bu?uePs Los Olvidados and Fran?ois Truffaut's The 400 Blows.
Themes of Vietnamese Cinema

The justice of the Vietnamese cause in the wars against the French and the Ameri
cans is taken so for granted that no time is spent offering the kinds of reasons for
involvement so prominent in American pro-war films like The Green Berets.A1 Sig
nificantly, such reasons are provided in films on Vietnam's involvement in Kampuchea,
as in the documentary The Day of Return.
Mourning is naturally a major theme in Vietnamese cinema. It is central in When
the Tenth Month Comes and Fairy Tale for 17-Year Olds. The framework of The Last
Distance Between Us is the return of the grown-up daughter to visit the graves of her
parents. Mourning is also an important plot element in other stories; the final section
of Brothers and Relations involves the search for the remains of a relative who has
fallen in the war. Such films can be compared profitably to American works on the
same subject. In fact, after a screening of When the Tenth Month Comes on Kaua'i,
an American woman rose to say that she had suffered terribly in the war and that
Minh's film was the only one she had ever seen that expressed what she had undergone.
Minh was flabbergasted.
Like all civil wars, the Vietnam conflict left many resentments, and members of
? former South
groups considered hostile or disloyal Vietnamese government and
army personnel, Roman Catholics, ethnic Chinese, and so on ? have suffered in
varying degrees. Vietnamese cinema, however, has emphasized the need for reconcilia
tion, as seen in The Last Distance Between Us. At the end of Hai Ninh's documentary,
"
City at Dawn, the voice-over states: "The Vietnamese family is now reunited. Hai
Ninh discussed the problem in an interview:
After liberation, we needed to create the harmony of a single people in a united
country. We needed unification of soul as well as of politics. To do this, we have
to get ? ?
down to human nature charity, generosity to unify ourselves on the
basis of equality.
Reconciliation extends even to American soldiers. They are shown acting humanely in
a
Legend of Mother, and their portrayal in The Abandoned Field, for all its faults,
attempts to give them sympathetic traits: camaraderie and family affection.
A common symbol of this problem of reconciliation is the prostitute, who during
the war symbolized the corruption of the South Vietnamese regime and American
influence. After the war, many were sent into reeducation camps and then offered
menial jobs. Their reception by society was generally non-supportive, and even negative,
47The Green Berets seems to have exercised an important influence on later films. Its training sessions
are echoed in Full Metal Jacket, and the famous "birth" scene in Platoon of soldiers deplaning in Vietnam
seems to have been taken directly from the parallel scene in The Green Berets. Dang Nhat Minh viewed a
large number of American films on the war while he was Filmmaker-in-Residence at the East-West Center;
his diplomatic "
response when asked to evaluate a film he disliked was, "It's better than 77?^ Green Berets.
Important and unrecognized has been the influence on American films of Pierre Schoendoerffer's La
317e Section [Platoon 317] (1965) and The Anderson Platoon (1967). Schoendoerffer is now coordinating
a feature film on Dien Bien Phu to be filmed in Vietnam. He was the French army camera-man
documentary
for that battle and was captured at the fall of the fortress.

60 John Chariot
as described in The Last Crime and The Young Woman on the Perfumed River. In
Hai Ninh's Shipwreck Beach, the conventional boyfriend rejects his fianc?e when he
discovers her past. Speaking of the film, Hai Ninh says:
There were lots of prostitutes after the war. People didn't want to compromise
themselves. But the prostitutes were victims of the war like any other. They had to
be helped to normalize their lives. Revolutionaries should have charity for such
people, should give them confidence and hope. So stories of prostitutes have a
broader reference. On the one hand, they committed mistakes because of the his
torical and social situation they were in, so they were like others who committed
crimes during the war. On the other hand, society can be judged by the way they
are helped and reintegrated.
Criticismof society and government is in fact wide-spread in Vietnamese films,

ranging from making fun of party zealots who figure as minor characters to films in
?
which criticism is the central theme. Human failings of officials can be targeted
such as vanity and bureaucratic bossiness ? but also large social trends and whole
government policy directions, albeit past ones, as in City Under the Fist. An important
basis for criticismseems to be a traditional view of social relations. In The Last Crime,
?
the young woman became a prostitute after her mother's divorce. Family tensions
caused by the father's concentration on his government job and desire to get ahead
? Is Away. Parental problems are
begin to destroy the family in When Grandmother
the initial cause of the young boy's alienation in The Lamp in theDream. Significantly,
the director of that film stated that he was using the boy as a symbol of society. The
? When Grandmother
fact that Vietnamese film makers take children so seriously Is
was as a children's film! ? be one reason use them
Away in fact made may why they
so well.
Aneven deeper theme than social and family relations is a general humanism, an
emphasis on being authentically human rather than a deformation from whatever
cause; for instance, ideological excess and fear in City Under the Fist. The ending of
A Quiet Little Town shows a young married couple standing on the high point of an
arched bridge, while the older functionaries, party officials, doctors, and so on, run
in place toward them, unable to rid themselves of their old ideas and attitudes and
become simply human. Tran Van Thuy's Report on Humaneness uses this theme
overtly as a criticism of government and society. Humanism implies morality, a sense
of hope and purpose in life, without which all is futility and vanity. As the father in
The Last Distance Between Us tells "the alcoholic veteran, "It is easy to die; it is hard
to do something."
The importance of these themes for Vietnamese society can be seen from their
?
central place in literature as well as cinema. They have also just as do the aesthetics
films ? a universal significance and appeal.
of Vietnamese
Vietnamese Films Discussed in this Article
As much information is provided as available.

?
The Abandoned Field Free Fire Zone [Canh dong hoangj, 1979, dir. Nguyen
Hong Sen.
Arriving at the Steps of the Bridge [Den Voi Nhung Nhip CauJ, 1983.

Battleground along the Route, 1970 (this may possibly be The Road Battle, 1971, dir.
Nguyen Kha).
Bom the Bumpkin [Thang Bom], 1987, dir. Le Duc Tien.
Brothers and Relations [Ahn va em], 1986, dir. Tran Vu and Nguyen Huu Luyen.
The Citadel Vinh Linh, 1970, dir. Ngoc Quynh.
The City at Dawn, 1975, dir. Hai Ninh and Nguyen Khanh Du.
City Under the Fist [Thi Xa Trong Tarn Tay], 1982, dir. Dang Nhat Minh.
The Class for Compassion's Sake.
The Conical Hat [Nom Que].
The Day of Return [Ngay Ve], 1979.
Dien Bien Phu, 1954, dir. Nguyen Tien Loi.
Dong Ho Painting Village [Lang Tranh Dong Ho].
The Electric Line to the Song Da Construction Site [Duong Day Len Song Da], 1981,
dir. Le Manh Thi?h.
The Evil and the Punishment, 1973.
Fairy Tale for 17-Year Olds [Chuyen Co Tich Cho Tuoi 17], 1986, dir. Nguyen Xuan Son.
First Love, 1977, dir. Hai Ninh.
The Forest of Cue Phuong.
The Girl of Hanoi [Em Be Hanoi], 1974, dir. Hai Ninh.
The Goddess Quan Am [Quan Am Thi Kinh].
The Golden Bird [Con Chun Vanh Khuyen], 1962, dir. Tran Vu.
Hanoi, an Epic Poem, 1973, dir. Phan Quang Dinh.
Hanoi Through Whose Eyes [Hanoi ? Trong Mat Ai], 1983, dir. Tran Van Thuy.
Ho Chi Minh City May 1978, 1978.
Independence Day 1945 [Ngay Doc-Lap], 1975.
Lacquer Painting [Son Mai], 1982, dir. Luong Due.
The Lamp in the Drehm [Ngon Den Trong Mo], 1987, dir. Do Minh Tuan.
The Last Crime [Toi Loi Cuoi Cung], 1979, dir. Tran Phuong.
The Last Distance Between Us [Khoang Cach Con Lai], 1981, dir. Nguyen Xuan Son.
Left Alone [Con Lai Mot Minh], 1984, dir. Hong Sen.
Legend of a Mother [Chuyen Thoai Ve Nguoi Me], 1987, dir. Bach Diep.
Love Duets of Bac Ninh, 1987, dir. Thanh An.
Luu Binh and Duong Le [Luu Binh Duong Le], 1987, dir. Pham Thu.
? Ho
Nguyen Ai Quoc Chi Minh, dir. Pham Ky Nam.
On the Crest of the Waves, Facing the Storm [Dau Song Ngong Gio], 1967, dir.
Ngoc Quynh.
On the Same River, 1959, dir. Nguyen Hong Nghi and Pham Hieu Dan.
Once Upon a Time in Vu Dai Village [Lang Vu Dai Ngay Ay], 1982, dir. Pham
Van Khoa.
l/50th of a Second in a Lifetime [Mot Phan Nam Muoi Giay Cuoc Doi], 1984, dir.
Dao Trong Khanh.
The Peal of the Orange Bell [Hoi Chuong Mau Da Cam], 1983, dir. Nguyen Ngoc
Trung.
Punishment [Trung Phat], 1984, dir. Bach Diep.
A Quiet Little Town [Thi Tran Yen Tinh], 1986. dir. Le Duc Tien.
The Red Cochineal [Canh Kien Do], 1987, dir. Vu Le My.
Report on Humaneness [Chuyen Tu Te], 1986, Tran Van Thuy.

62 John Chariot
Return to Dien Bien Phu ?

The Hope.
The River of Aspiration [Dong Song Khat VongJ, 1986, dir. Nguyen Ngoc Trung.
The Secret of the Statue of the Dau Pagoda [Dieu Bi An Trong Pho Tuong Chua Dau],
1987, dir. Phung Ty et al.
The 17th Parallel - Day and Night [Vi Tuyen 17Ngay Va Dem], 1972, dir. Hai Ninh.
Shipwreck Beach [Bai bien doi nguoi], 1983, dir. Hai Ninh.
A Small Alley, 1988 or 1989, dir. Bach Diep.
Unforgotten Days and Nights.
Victory at Dien Bien Phu [Chien Than Dien Bien Phu], 1964, dir. Tran Viet.
We Will Meet Again, 191A, dir. Tran Vu.
When Grandmother Is Away [Khi Vang Ba], 1985, dir. Nguyen Anh Thai.
When Mother Is Away [Khi Me Vang Nha], 1979, dir. Nguyen Khanh Du.
When the Birds Return, 1984, dir. Khanh Du and Anh Thai.
When the Tenth Month Comes [Bao gio cho den thang muoi], 1984, dir. Dang Nhat
Minh.
The Young Woman of Sao Beach [Chi Tu Hau Bai Sao], 1963, dir. Pham Ky Nam.
The Young Woman on the Perfumed River [Co Gai Tren Song], 1987, dir. Dang Nhat
Minh.


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Department of History, National University of Singapore

Vietnamese Cinema: First Views

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Vietnamese Cinema: First Views

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On those visits and festivals,

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The Vietnam Cinema Department

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Government and Film Makers

9Lan, "Looking Inwards": 10.

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Education and Influences

15Diem, "30 Years": 21.

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Documentary and Scientific Films

Documentaries are unusually important in Vietnamese cinema history and current

?trang?res), pp. 54 ff, 369.

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commentary, the film is a beautifully photographed and involving one-reel documen

24Diem, "30 Years": 15 ff.

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to the facts".28 Nevertheless, the war documentaries considered most successful ?

Characteristics of Vietnamese Cinema

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133-37, 166, 180.

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Feature Films and Directors

While visiting Vietnam, I was naturally shown films considered outstanding, so I

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manager trying to raise production at an electric plant. The heavy-handed socialist

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burning of an old villager who has worked for the resistance.

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industry to newsubjects. The nudity and sexuality in Shipwreck Beach were un

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45Charlot, "Fairy Tale for 17-Year Olds": 65 ff.

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journey through life.

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Themes of Vietnamese Cinema

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Criticismof society and government is in fact wide-spread in Vietnamese films,

Vietnamese Films Discussed in this Article

As much information is provided as available.

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Return to Dien Bien Phu ?