
Still from Letters from Panduranga • Nguyễn Trinh Thi • Vietnam • 2015 • 34 mins
Foraging in the Ruins: Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s mycological moving image practice
by Philippa Lovatt
Program
Foraging in the Ruins: Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s mycological moving image practice
‘We are continuing to wander. Among these wanderings––and in the middle of them––here, all of a sudden, is a release. Or an opening’. ––John Cage. 1
Sensing a connection between her creative practice and Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), a film about people who make use of items that have been discarded by others, the Vietnamese moving image artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi has described herself as a ‘gleaner’ because of her ecological approach to producing moving image works. 2 Nguyễn uses montage to explore processes of historical erasure through found materials mostly sourced from the internet, due in part to the difficulty of accessing such materials via Vietnamese institutional archives. 3 Collectively, these materials––that include press photographs, tourist and colonial postcards, archival newsreels, drone footage, ethnographic film, popular and art house cinema––envisage the history of Vietnam through colonial, state, and cinematic imaginaries. Nguyễn brings these found objects into dialogue with her own video and audio recordings in her non-linear, experimental documentaries, essay films, and audio-visual installations. This essay will focus on Nguyễn’s Landscape series: Landscape #1 (2013), Letters from Panduranga (2015), Fifth Cinema (2018) and How to Improve the World (2020) and will explore how the interrelated and shifting macro-histories of global and national politics, colonialism, and the Cold War are being made visible and audible through the micro-ecologies and environments that these works depict. …
This article is published in Screen, Volume 62, Issue 4, Winter 2021, Pages 559–567, published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of Glasgow as part of the dossier ‘Tracing the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian Film and Artists’ Moving Image’ (co-edited by Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn and Philippa Lovatt).
You can read the full article on the Oxford University Press Website, or you can download the PDF.
- John Cage, For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles (Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 1981), p. 239.
- Nguyễn Trinh Thi, ‘Artists’ Moving Image in Asia’ roundtable discussion, IFFR January 2019. See also Susan Jarosi, ‘Recycled cinema as material ecology: Raphael Montanez Ortiz’s found-footage films and Computer-Laser-Videos’, Screen, 53:3, Autumn 2012, pp. 228-245 and William C. Wees, Recycled Images: the Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York, NY: Anthology Film Archives, 1993).
- In some of Nguyễn’s works she has used material from socialist realist films recently distributed digitally by the Vietnam Film Archive in Hanoi.
Dr Philippa Lovatt is a Lecturer in Film Studies at University of St Andrews where she is Co-Director for the Centre for Screen Cultures. Her research focusses on artists’ moving image, sound, eco-cinema, and independent film and video cultures in Southeast Asia. She is co-editor of the dossier for Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, ‘Theorizing Region: Film and Video Cultures in Southeast Asia’ co-edited with Jasmine Nadua Trice, which is forthcoming in 2021. She has previously published her research in Screen; Sound, Music and the Moving Image; The New Soundtrack, SoundEffects, and Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. Philippa is on the editorial board of the journal Sound, Music and the Moving Image and was previously on the editorial board of The New Soundtrack Journal. She is also a member of the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas and between 2016 and 2018 was PI on the AHRC funded research network, the Southeast Asian Cinemas Research Network: Promoting Dialogue Across Critical and Creative Practice with co-Is Prof Jasmine Nadua Trice, Prof Gaik Cheng Khoo and artist and filmmaker Nguyen Trinh Thi.