The Power of the Void

This essay was transcribed from a talk by Đỗ Văn Hoàng, which took place on 19 August 2018 at Six Space, Hanoi as part of the British Council Vietnam project Heritage of Future Past.

I.

Film restoration, in a technical sense of the term, refers to the transferring of 35mm or 16mm film prints to digital files, and the alterations made on those files. This can involve restoring spots that have become molded or damaged, discolored or have lost certain details. This can be achieved through processes such as color correction, lighting correction or audio-remastering.

In Vietnam, a significant milestone in introducing cinematographic works to a new and broader public was the release of a DVD collection of classic Vietnamese films, a project undertaken by the production/distribution company Phuong Nam Film in the 2000s. However, having viewed various entries of the collection, I found that no changes had been made to the digital files. In our current digital age, quite often digital-based restoration can generate major impacts on films.

There are many instances where a film has been ‘saved’ after being transferred to digital: Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day – one of Taiwan’s classic films from the 1990s – is one such example. With the 4K-resolution version of the film restored and released by World Cinema Foundation in 2009, the color correction task was carried out by none other than the renowned auteur Wong Kar-wai; and yet according to Wong, his job was only to replicate the sunlight seen in the original version – a case of paying respect to film-makers of previous generations and their cinematic styles.

In recent years, there have been increasingly more restoration projects based around archived, digital files – such as those by the Criterion Collection or by national film institutions in many countries (the British Film Institute being one prominent example). Having said that, in certain cases the restored version inadvertently diluted the spirit or the technical decisions of the original film and its makers.

A good example is the restoration of works by Senegalese film-maker Djibril Diop Mambéty, Brazilian film-maker Glauber Rocha or various film-makers from Argentina or Cuba – key figures of a wave of Third World cinema in the 1960s-1970s. Inspired by the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement, these directors made works with low budget and simple technical equipment, thereby making the voices of poverty-stricken developing countries heard and portraying a cinema style most true to those countries. Having watched the restored versions, in my opinion they became far too beautiful and removed from reality, losing the ideology and spirit of indigenous filmmakers back then, filling up the gaps and voids of the original film.

I do not think that film restoration is analogous with this, but is rather about treating the voids as an artistic technique.

Film restoration can, thus, be described as giving a name to what is not there, making known what is silent, and re-discovering the social context and styles of times past. Cinema is the art of image and sound, constituting the manifestation of many elements, including those that are lacking. These lacking elements could well be a deliberate, stylistic decision, an emotional expression through image amplified by sound, of what is unseen but all around. Robert Bresson’s film-making style is a prime example of this.

As we have seen, the fact that certain types of lackings exist could also be due to the context of the period in question. Let us reconsider the case of Vietnamese cinema through the example of Trần Vũ’s film Chuyến xe bão táp (An Unquiet Ride). The film was made in 1977 in a very special situation when most Vietnamese films were still dominated by a propaganda tone championing the efforts in liberating the South and reunifying the country. In its own early day approach, the film speaks of the downside of Vietnamese society at the time. The story revolves around a journey to Hanoi and features archetypal characters: an old couple from the countryside taking their granddaughter to visit her parents, or soldiers returning from the frontline – all faced with struggles throughout the journey due to the irresponsibility of a bus driver secretly colluding with smugglers.

In one scene, a soldier tries to buy a bus ticket to return home. Beside humorous dialogues that speak of bureaucracy and inadequacies, we notice what was audible in the ticket hall: there are only a limited number of audio channels and we could only hear rustling sounds and faint voices.

In those times, the sound in most Vietnamese films was not recorded live, rather made in-studio with the most basic and inexpensive techniques. As such, what one would often hear in the final film was often not vivid, cinematic nor have its own narrative, rather more of an after-addition to help illustrate the images. Nevertheless, sometimes a shortage in technology highlights shortages in many other aspects of the society then: watching the films we could almost feel that shortage, and hear the sound of conscience.

Similarly, in another scene of Chuyến xe bão táp, the bus passes through a particularly bumpy area. Instead of the sounds of the surrounding environment, we seem to hear only people’s destitute belongings falling off the racks and seats: cassolettes, pots, pans, items most closely associated with the country’s subsidy period. As the film reaches its climax, the little girl who has become even more ill because of the ride has to be transferred to an ambulance. Here, Trần Vũ juxtaposes the scene with a parallel situation of another car ride wherein the director of the bus company is talking about how to improve the livelihood of the company’s drivers. The siren of the ambulance gets louder than everything else, which does not quite make sense: for a scene taking place inside the bus company director’s car we do not hear the car’s engine nor other internal sounds – all we can hear is the glaring ambulance. Clearly, many complementary sound lines are missing, and the only decision left for the film-maker here is in terms of the sound used to express the nature of the scene: the sound of morality not normally put into words, and the subtle portrayal of social conflicts.

II.

In the second half of this talk, I would like to discuss a project idea of Lê Kim Hưng, a fellow

Vietnamese filmmaker. For this potential project, Lê sees ‘film restoration’ as a form of cinematic language.

After having the opportunity to watch Kiếp hoa (Life of a Flower) – a film from the earliest years of Vietnamese cinema and the first Northern-made film to feature recorded dialogues – Le Kim Hung came up with the idea of re-shooting the film, but keeping the original audio tracks. Without discussing this project with Le directly, I have thought about the artistic choices he might make if this remake project is to be realized.

The first Vietnamese film to have its sound recorded live, Kiep hoa was made in 1953 and released in 1954. In Vietnam, the film was ‘rediscovered’ in recent years and screened eight years ago. The film centers around the social migrations and disturbances at the time it was set in, when the youth was faced with the choice between a fleeting yet untroubled existence, and a revolutionary path. The city of Hanoi from those years eventually became a legend that did not survive. For the film’s images, external scenes were shot in Vietnam, mainly in Hanoi and other Northern provinces, while interior scenes were shot in Hong Kong. The script was written by Tran Lang (or Tran Viết Long), owner of the cai luong company Kim Chung, who was also the film’s producer; while the director and cameraman were Cantonese.

Watching the film, one immediately comes to notice an aspect that has been prominent throughout decades of Vietnamese acting: the way actors speak, clearly accentuating the words, not unlike techniques associated with Vietnam’s traditional performing arts. Aesthetically speaking, this decision made sense as the actors and actresses involved had been formally trained in cai luong or cheo singing – they were all renowned performers who acted in films during the day and got on stage in the evening. In terms of the sound, one notices the film only recorded live voices, internal scenes and stage performances. The sounds in external scenes, together with the soundtrack, are not synchronized; while background sounds are not rich and mostly belong within the film’s narrative boundaries.

With such choices, the film-maker did not turn Kiếp hoa into a musical film, nor did he aim at that to begin with. The film’s developments are expressed through those of internal emotions, through movements and the way a scene is structured. The lack of real sounds in the film partly depicts the reality of Hanoi in those years where silence spoke more than anything, and every noise – no matter how quiet – caused one to shake up, fearing it could be a gun in the dark.

Kiếp hoa chose to fill that frightening space with music. The romantic Vietnamese songs from that period reflect almost perfectly the exuberance of Hanoi in 1954, the vocals filled with emotions as if saying one last goodbye to a world of dreams, in an attempt to forget everything. The nature of the music used is thus overwhelmingly dramatic. In essence, Kiep hoa does not have a rich cinematic language, the mise–en–scène is skeletal, and the editing does not result in any visual rhythm. The film exudes naivety in the way it was shot, showing a desire to capture as much beauty as possible in a foreseeing of the city’s destruction.

As such, it can be said that the film’s value lies in its documentary–like (rather than artistic) aesthetic. If he is to go ahead with the idea of remaking Kiep hoa, Le Kim Hung will invariably be faced with a problem present in many Vietnamese period films: that of setting – or more precisely, the lack of it. Many of the film’s external scenes are set in Hanoi locations like Hoan Kiem Lake, Truc Bach Lake, the areas of Ngu Xa or Chau Long, amongst others. Naturally, there is no way to film these settings in the way they used to exist back then, and to try and realistically stage the atmosphere of the 1950s would also be quite difficult. With foreign film productions, CGI might be a readily available technology for bringing back – inside a studio – settings that no longer exist. Such is, however, not a viable option given Vietnam’s current standards.

As such, once again we see how shortages urge filmmakers to find a way to transcend reality, as cinema should not and cannot be merely an illustration of reality, buckling under the weight of reality. From my point of view, I hope Le will remake the film with an approach inspired by visual art, perhaps in the form of a play where the settings of 1953 would be re-drawn in a contemporary, minimalist style. Transforming real-life into painted theater-like settings within which environment actors and actresses would find their way of acting, rather than be influenced by previous works. They would be led by sound.

I think that a filmmaker who chooses this style would be able to find the right colors, shapes and structures that are true to real-life settings and the spirit of old times. The harmony of sound and image functions as a “search for lost time” enabled by imagination, where the past is echoed through sounds (Dư âm (Echoes), a song by composer Nguyen Van Ti, is also the theme song of the original Kiep hoa). This approach also lends distance to the cinematic language: viewers would always be aware that they are watching a reconstructed film; there would be a distance between them and the emotions on the screen, an allusion to Hanoi as a city constantly being destroyed and reborn. Only the noises, sounds, voices of the past – in a rare, lucky instance of the digital age – are preserved wholly, in all their innocence.

What has just been discussed is a personal interpretation for a potential remaking of the film

Kiếp hoa. I hope that, no matter the approach, film restoration and archiving will always revoke a possibility for cinematic language. Any restoration project should start with studying the cinematic language of the times when the original film was made, so as not to lose the voids deliberately planted therein. In an era where we are provided with too many possibilities for change, it is likely that these voids would be completely filled, whereas it is precisely them that represent cinema.

About the author:
Đỗ Văn Hoàng (b. 1987) graduated from the Academy of Theatre and Cinema in Hanoi. Some of his works include: Underneath It All (documentary, 17m), At Water’s Edge (documentary, 17m), A Film on Sofa (short film, 17m), A Silent Shout (short film, 20m), False Brillante (short film, 22m), Drowning Dew (collaboration work with Art Labor Collective and Truong Que Chi). Hoang’s films have been shown at Hanoi Docfest, Yamagata Film Festival, EXPERIMENTA at BFI London Film Festival, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Times Museum (Guangzhou), and Playtime Festival (Ho Chi Minh City).