Three films by Nguyễn Hồng Sến
%%If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat;%%
%%%and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink;%%%
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Three films by Nguyễn Hồng Sến
(intended as a cursory introduction, something to refer
back to eventually, when I come to can offer weightier
observations).1
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Two generalizations on the topic of Vietnamese and
American war films
If the Americans lost the the war in Vietnam,2 you would not know it
from the films they made about it.3 If the Vietnamese won their war, you would
not know it from the films they made about it.
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BRIEF GUIDE TO Hồng Sến /
THE HUMANISTIC STATEMENT /
NATAL SOD
Hồ Chí Minh declared his artists combatants. Film and literature were front lines. Hồng Sến (1933-1995) was one of those that took up the call. He joined a small cadre of documentary filmmakers as a cameraman, working on most of the notable wartime pictures. After the end of the war against the Americans, he got shipped off to East Germany to learn how to shoot features, returning to take part in a Vietnamese cinema renaissance.
The string of features that Hồng Sến shot in the late 1970s and early 1980s are unexpected—perhaps not only for someone, like me, that saw them with the most cursory knowledge of postwar Vietnamese cinema, but, I believe, also, given what came before, for their audience at the time.
These films were made within a state studio, but under the direct control of the party-state, under the supervision of culture industry bureaucrats, but they are complex and often provocative. (I realize that I am betraying my prejudice—the prejudice of someone that imagines the Vietnamese culture industry operating like the Chinese culture industry, when it was completely distinct, not at all under its influence or tutelage, and closer to the Soviet Union, with which cultural exchange was more fruitful.)
They are not about war, exactly, or, more accurately, they stage war in a way that rarely resembles any conventional war movies. War is distant. It is something that comes from far away to disrupt everyday life; its horrors are not communicated in lingering shots of heaped corpses or bombed out buildings but in the dislocation and disruption of normal life. Although the deeds of partisans and the People's Army are glorified,4 the subject is more often people outside of the military.
Hồng Sến was not afraid to depict the enemy either. The American invader is, surprisingly, given what they inflicted on the country,5 rarely reduced to vicious caricature. Countrymen fighting against the revolutionary cause are more likely to be misguided than irredeemably wicked.
These are humanistic statements.
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THE FIRST ATTEMPT (his and mine):
Mùa gió chướng (1978)
Hồng Sến’s first feature film and his first of several collaborations with writer Nguyễn Quang Sáng, Mùa gió chướng is the most conventional war picture they made.6 The influence of documentary cinematography remains, but Hồng Sến and his team are beginning to take risks.
Although Hồng Sến attempts to stage several battlefields, this is a film observing day-to-day life.7 The glorious death and destruction of war that provides heroes and martyrs is rare; vicious and chaotic disruption is more likely.
Bé Ba (Thúy An, the director’s wife) is a liaison girl,8 carrying messages for the partisans. She falls in love with a young fighter named Châu (Nguyễn Phúc) that arrives at her wetlands hideout unannounced. Concealed under a blanket, Bé Ba is fast asleep, and Châu, falling asleep, too, doesn't notice her. Their muddy toes meet. She strokes her AK in her sleep and then is stroking his shoulder. She wakes up with a shock, grabbing her AK and holding it to him, before realizing, after a tense exchange, that he is the sweet partisan boy that her friend told her about.
The rifles slung over their shoulders during their chaste, playful courtship are the only hint that they are living under a cloud. Long before Châu is cut down in a shootout, we know their love is doomed.
Hồng Sến’s pictures are often about women. More specifically, they are about the strength of women. Girls form conspiracies against the invader. Wives take revenge for sons and husbands. The war is fought to save the motherland, but more immediately the mothers. And this is true in Mùa gió chướng: it is a team of women guerrillas and co-conspirators that take down Captain Long (Lý Huỳnh), who commands Republic of Vietnam forces in the area. Rather than shooting him outright, they present him to the village crone. As he is held at gunpoint, she tells him—letting him inspect her knobby knuckles—that he is looking at the hands that brought him into the world. This authority is enough for him: he agrees to a demand to defect to the revolutionary cause and broadcast a message ordering his troops to fight back against traitors and invaders.
There are never any happy endings, but this comes the closest.
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FREE FIRE / MOTHER-SON:
Cánh đồng hoang (1979):
Hồng Sến’s Cánh đồng hoang,9 the most notable of his Vietnam war meditations and collaborations with Nguyễn Quang Sáng, lingers on daily life, again, and a couple—Ba Đô (Lâm Tới) and Sáu Xoa (Thúy An again)—raising a child under the shadow of American airpower. The helicopters hover but life goes on. They eat, they sleep, they live. The child suckles at his mother's breast. These are not fighters or partisans; they will pick up a gun to defend themselves, but they would pick lotuses.
We see, too, the daily life of the Americans. They make a brief appearance in Mùa gió chướng, but they are central to Cánh đồng hoang. The film frequently shifts from the countryside to an American base and a pilot played by Robert Hải.10 The enemy is not faceless. He is one of the men piloting helicopters over the wetlands and indiscriminately killing the people below,11 but it doesn't seem that we are meant to hate him. He is not a wartime caricature.
The two worlds collide. The pilot catches Ba Đô in his sights and kills him.
When her husband falls, Sáu Xoa sets down her child and rushes out to take up his rifle. After she shoots down the helicopter, she notices a photograph of the pilots’s wife and child that has slipped out of his pocket.12 We see the child struggling to stand, unable to comprehend what has happened but seemingly stricken, crying out for his mother or father. There is no sound but crackling fire.
The child crying out is the child that lies bleeding in the crashed helicopter. Both mothers would like nothing more than to take their sons into their arms and comfort them. The mother holding the rifle is the mother that raised a son to die in Vietnam. Even if the pilot is beyond his mother’s protection, she would protect him, just like Sáu Xoa is protecting her son.
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Motherhood / nursing:
Còn lại một mình (1984)13
In Còn lại một mình,14 another collaboration with Quang Sáng, Hồng Sến makes the humanstic statement with even more force.
Here, we see the day-to-day life of a Montagnard tribe. We are even more distant from the war: these are people disconnected from both sides, perhaps sympathetic to the revolutionary cause but just as likely not, and living in isolation. Despite the distance, the village is destroyed by an American air strike.15 A survivor of the strike—a woman played by Phương Thanh—tends to her dying husband, buries the corpses of her family and friends, and scavenges for wild roots and plants to survive and feed her child.
Worlds collide again. The enemy is still not faceless. At the same time as the Montagnard woman is burying her husband, an American pilot (played by Robert Hải again) is shot down by Việt Cộng antiaircraft fire.16 His legs are broken and he is starving. These are the last people left on Earth, or at least within several square miles of dense forest.
The American survives by stealing foraged weeds from her home. One day, he spots a lighter in one of the huts and lights a fire to try to signal American jets overhead. He nearly burns himself to death and also reveals himself to the Montagnard woman. She can tell that he might not make it. She could leave him to die, but she is unwilling. She squeezes milk from her breast into the pilot’s canteen and saves his life.17
She walks off into the wilderness, carrying her child and a cargo of unexploded munitions. Maybe she will take revenge someday; maybe she won’t. But she was not willing to leave the pilot to die in the rubble.
This is the humanistic statement in its clearest form. She is feeding the enemy from her own breast.18 She is feeding a man that might be directly responsible for the death of her family. But she chooses to preserve her own humanity.
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This is the best I can do. I will return to this topic soon.
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I can’t claim any expertise. I have seen the movies. There must be errors here. I am sure of it. But I find this topic interesting. I find these films incredibly moving and I hope this might inspire people to seek them out. I won’t bother providing links, since they will be die eventually, but you will be able to find them if you plug their titles into streaming site searches. If you add “English” to the search, you might even find some with subtitles.
Insofar as they were driven from the country and their allies defeated, they lost. They sacrificed a hundred billion American dollars and tens of thousands of American lives. This is a simplistic way of looking at things, though. Numerous stated and unstated strategic goals were achieved.
Winning a war in the movies is more important than winning a war in the Southeast Asian jungle.
It is correct to glorify these things, I would argue. I am not being cynical. I mean that they are glorified in correct measure. By comparison, these are nothing like Chinese films on Korea, for example, which lay on the glory a bit thick; they are nothing like the Chinese films on the Sino-Vietnam, either, which tend to be incredibly cynical and dark.
I suspect the reader is aware that the Vietnam war was not a nice one. An estimated two million civilians were killed. Aerial bombardment went on for a decade. These are movies made in the aftermath of this.
Most of these films have no official English translation of their titles. Mùa gió chướng is sometimes known as Whirlwind Season.
There is a 1989 Los Angeles Times article about Hồng Sến consulting on HBO’s Vietnam War Story: the Last Days (he is identified as a director but also "a former Viet Cong fighter in Southeast Asia"), where he talks about technical limitations: if they had massive budgets, perhaps they would have staged air and ground assaults. This might be true. Still, the war is distant, usually, as I said. I came across the quote in an article by Laurel Westrup, where she agrees that “economic and technological issues do not entirely explain Vietnamese reluctance to make battle-centric films.”
This is a translation of cô gái giao liên or, more generally, nữ giao liên. The liaison girl, deep in enemy territory, passing messages to the Việt Cộng, is the subject of poetry, songs, and films.
This is known in English as The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone. Unlike the others, which only ever screened officially outside Vietnam in Eastern Bloc countries, this was eventually shown in the United States.
After being discovered on the street by a film director, Robert Hải made a career playing Europeans and Americans. Still an infant when his French father and Italian mother were killed in Hải Phòng, he was taken in and raised by his Vietnamese nanny.
In zones judged to be free of friendly elements, rules of engagement for American forces gave them the freedom to shoot anything that moved.
Or we—the viewers—see it, at least. I am still not sure whether or not we are supposed to think that Sáu Xoa has seen it.
I am jumping to this picture, eliding some Hồng Sến work in the early 1980s, including a 1983 movie called Hòn Đất, scripted from an Anh Đức story. I have never seen it.
Apart from a 1991 John Charlot article, attempting to "provide a sketch of Vietnamese cinema at the end of the 1980s,” it’s hard to find any reference to this film in English-language writing. He translates the title as Left Alone. I’m fine with that. Còn lại—to be left—một mình—alone. Interestingly, he admits that he hasn’t seen the movie. We truly do live in a golden age! You can find this easily on YouTube now.
Once again, the war seems meaningless and chaotic, just like in the free fire zone, with helicopters unleashing indiscriminate automatic fire. The focus is not on the atrocities carried out with malicious intent. This fascinates Americans, perhaps because they find it uniquely disturbing—the idea that the boy they went to high school with could massacre women, the elderly, children, and set fire to their village… The Vietnamese filmmakers are more interested in this kind of meaningless violence, which might be as destructive, but which is harder to explain.
The downed airman was the subject of wartime propaganda. For a less humanistic view, see: Rồng lửa Thăng Long (1973), an animated short about the December of 1972 B-52 raids, featuring a Satanic Richard Nixon, and a pilot crashed in the jungle reverting to an apelike form, subsisting on rats caught in caves.
There is also a scene of a mother nursing in Cánh đồng hoang. A hard cut between the face of the pilot (played by the same actor in both films) and Sáu Xoa’s baby at her breast seems to foreshadow the scene in Còn lại một mình.
This idea—a woman feeding a man from her breast to keep him alive—appears other places, of course. Perhaps the inspiration is Mai Dantsig’s Partisan Ballad, in which a Belarusian partisan feeds another fighter from her breasts, which is itself intended as a patriotic recasting of a Rubens painting—Roman Charity—that the artist came across at the Hermitage in Leningrad. There are similar stories, too, in classical Chinese literature, with filial women feeding their toothless mothers-in-law from their own breast. And it comes up in revolutionary China, too: In Red Cloud Ridge 红云岗 (1976) (this is a film of the opera of the same name) and Ode to Yimeng 沂蒙颂 (1975) (this is a film of the ballet), adapted from supposedly true events, a patriotic young woman saves an injured Eighth Route Army soldier by feeding him from her breast. These stories, though, all reflect loyal sacrifice to family or nation. It is something else entirely to sacrifice one’s self to keep the enemy alive.