Artist Nguyen Trinh Thi and the organizing team would like to invite you to a screening of two of the artist’s found-footage films: Song to the Front (2011) and Eleven men (2016). Taking place at the birthplace of the original footages – the Vietnam Featured Film Studio – the event seeks to create an atmosphere for personal connection with and contemplation of history. Song to the Front – first from the intended “Vietnamese Classics Re-Cut Series” by Nguyen Trinh Thi (2011) – abstracts a feature-length 1970s Vietnamese war propaganda film and its aesthetic and political elements into a 5-minute vignette. Set to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which represented a sacred pagan ritual in pre-Christian Russia where a young girl dances herself to death to propitiate the god of Spring, Song deconstructs the melodramatic and romanticized elements of the original social-realist drama. Playing with the original plot line in an ambiguous manner, the filmmaker desires an imaginative space for the viewer’s reinterpretation of the historical event and perspective.
ELEVEN MEN is composed of scenes from a range of Vietnamese classic narrative films featuring the same central actress, Nhu Quynh. Spanning three decades of her legendary acting career, most of the appropriated movies — from 1966 to 2000 — were produced by the state-owned Vietnam Feature Film Studio. The film’s text was adapted from “Eleven Sons”, a short story by Franz Kafka first published in 1919, which begins with a father’s declaration: “I have eleven sons”, then describes each one of them in acute and ironic detail. Transposing the father’s voice of Kafka’s story, the film begins with a woman stating: “I have eleven men”.
The screening is expected to last 35 minutes. There will be a Q&A session at the end.
Film Screening: Nguyen Trinh Thi and Found-footage Films will be held on 21 Nov 2017 at 4 Thuy Khue Str, Hanoi.