Just One Film is a series that recommends individual films from festivals around the world—the movies you otherwise might have missed that deserve to be discovered.
In an interview conducted for the BBC in 1985, a fisherman from the west of Ireland named Seán Ó hEinirí relayed old legends in Irish to an academic from University College Dublin. Ó hEinirí’s voice was recorded for posterity not only for his skill but for his unique and melancholy status as possibly the last living monolingual speaker of Irish. His death in 1998 not only ended a specific, once dominant, then minority, then extinguished relationship to a particular language, but a distinct system of consciousness. A living world of rituals, personages, and landscapes that was animated with every utterance of his tongue and then joined him in the earth as his grave goods.
Nguyễn Trinh Thi is chasing after another cultural vanishing point, under a different context. Formerly a journalist, she has been active as a filmmaker and video artist since 2007. Her work, for the most part, finds its subjects and muster in her home country of Vietnam, with the tribulations of its many different indigenous, ethnic minorities (who make up roughly 15% of the population) and the ethics involved in framing these different cultures, encompassing a significant strand. One first explicitly pulled with her short essay film, Letters from Panduranga (2015), which was prompted by a joint Vietnamese and Japanese proposal to build a nuclear power plant on the land of the Cham people. She explored this side-lined section of Vietnamese life in a more expanded and ultimately global form with her short feature, Fifth Cinema (2018). It takes as its framework and text a manifesto by Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay on the need to develop a “fourth” Indigenous cinema, postulating a screen art broken free of its national boundaries.
Nguyễn’s newest work, How to Improve the World (2021)—a three-channel installation turned 47-minute film which just recently premiered at the 17th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, along with a short retrospective of the artist’s career—takes her to Central Highlands region and several villages populated by the Jarai people. She presents a landscape in shards, with scenes of this community arranged in kaleidoscopic fashion to a contrapuntal rhythm. All orbit around a single pillar: a man named Ksor Sep. He’s a warm and wiry figure, a respected elder musician and storyteller who we see and hear mull over his relationship to sound and perform with another, younger musician Rơ Chăm Tih, in duetting compositions using voice and bamboo instruments such as the k’ni—a bowed, one-string fiddle that is resonated using the player’s mouth. Together they play in the local style, which is marked by incandescent textures and complex melodies roaming atop a highly repetitive structure. We also see and hear an ensemble performing with gongs, in practice and as part of recurring scenes of rituals. Their distinctive sound casts over the film a hazy glow, like a lingering summer rain.
Interviewed by an off-screen Nguyễn, Ksor repeatedly vouches for sound, or his capacity for listening, as not only essential for his vocation but the very thrust and anchor of his being. It’s the prism which intercedes and allows him to comprehend the world around him and express himself. This pontificating on one form of perception is offset with a tentative claim for another, as Nguyễn interlaces footage of her teenage daughter, An Nguyễn Maxtone-Graham, whose preferred method of reception and projection is the image, with sound a secondary, less trustworthy consideration.
Unlike Ksor, who speaks Jarai, Nguyễn Maxtone-Graham speaks English and Vietnamese with an American accent. While Nguyễn and crew come to Ksor, to surroundings that are not only familiar to him but where his art and personhood takes root, Nguyễn’s daughter seems to be perched in an anonymous, borderline non-space of what looks to be a studio or a hotel room. Under the scrutiny of not just one but two extreme close-ups set at near-identical angles, like the piercing eyes of a pair of hardball interrogators, as her sequence is presented in dual-screen. Her slightly tense presence, and the lack of sure elaboration in her answers to her mother’s questions, offsets the confidence of Ksor, whose delineation of the world is clear and firm. At one point he emphatically states that he, a human being, is for listening while that, gesturing towards the camera, is for looking.
Nguyễn is set on mimicking Ksor’s view of things and challenging the act of looking. From early on the image is established as a suspect character, with unheralded switches between color and black and white and the inclusion of an “outtake” where one of the lenses constraining the young An gets fogged up. On the other hand, the use of sound, a dense accumulation recorded and mixed by Nguyễn herself, is frequently the most expressive aspect of the film.
Through this meticulous constructed soundtrack both the topography and interior of this world are laid bare. The act of hammering nipple gongs into shape bleeds into and interlocks with a separate recording of them being played. The film presents music, its construction and rendering, as a transcendent process, simultaneously abstract and graspable with a pair of hands. Rainfall on a metal roof acts as a bridge between two other recordings: asserting that music as something man-made and yet inseparable from the nature surrounding it.
The notion of identity as context based and fluctuating—a muscle that, like any other, needs to be stretched and tested or else it will atrophy—is evident throughout the film, but is brought to a particularly troubling point by Ksor when he mentions that many songs and stories have been erased from his memory through lack of use. Victims to an ever-shifting ground, as the Jarai, like other Indigenous peoples, have found their lives redefined by outside forces. Vietnamese, or Kinh, people and the French have come in and claimed their territory. Different institutions and ideologies, from Christianity to the Communist Party, have asserted their control and imposed their daily prohibitions, removing the literal and figurative basis for the music and yarns that were Ksor’s and many others’ bread and butter. However, rituals like buffalo sacrifice, another recurring strand and spoke which nearly bookends the film, and Ksor’s obstinate presence show how the old ways can adjust and persist.
The buffalo sacrifice, a staged metaphor of finding life in death, of a community finding unity and expression through reducing a vital resource to cinders, speaks to the film’s ultimate optimism and vividity, which co-exists with, not eclipses, the still palpable sense of loss. Nguyễn is determined to show that these are still living communities by not just filming those grand moments of catechism or performance, but by including more casual scenes of congenial idling, where the young and old alike mill and fool around. There are also more pointedly arranged moments of linkage across different activities, such as a bravura sequence where a shot of a dressed up young women darting around chatting, going on their phones, and generally filling up the screen in anticipation of an event, is steadily blanketed with the sound of gongs. Eventually it cuts to an older crowd engaged in a more traditional round dance.
Ultimately, Nguyễn is attempting to collapse similar cultural and generation barriers with the collision of the scenes with her daughter and those of Ksor too. Despite their clashes in mood and in their conclusions, there’s a shared lineage. The daughter is at one end, at the formation of her identity, as an individual and as part of something greater, and Ksor on the other, as an older person who has lived with who he is for many decades. Their juxtaposition recalls a scene where Ksor describes an old custom. A Jarai elder would blow into a newborn’s ear and whisper a hopeful premonition of their eventual entry into the wider world as a perceiving adult. Nguyễn is attempting to do the same here with cinema, connecting a living museum with a young woman, an individual with their community and the community’s present with its past and future.