"Vietnam the Movie" & "Eleven Men"
a film screening by Nguyen Trinh Thi

Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invites you to a film screening by Nguyên Trinh Thi.

"Vietnam the Movie" uses a carefully structured montage of clips from drama and documentary films to give a chronological account of Vietnamese history from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, encompassing the end of French colonialism and America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. But this is no conventional history lesson. Rather, the excerpts chosen contrast a variety of external and often oppositional views, ranging from mainstream Hollywood drama to European art-house. Source material from the US includes "Apocalypse Now", "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Forrest Gump", whilst Europe is represented by the works of Harun Farocki, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Jean-Luc Godard. Director Nguyễn Trinh also splices extracts from the films of Nagisa Oshima, Satyajit Ray and Ann Hui into the mix. The result suggests that any ‘true’ picture of Vietnam has been lost to the multiplicity of symbolic purposes to which the country, its people and their tribulations have been put.

"Vietnam the Movie" (2016)
Single channel video, 47 min, color and B&W, sound

“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”.

with text adapted from
Eleven Sons by Franz Kafka
(translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)

"Eleven Men" (2016)
single-channel installation, sound, 28 minutes