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We’d like
to begin with a quote from Siegried Kracauer’s 1927 essay on
photography: “memory-images appear to be fragments but only
because photography does not encompass the meaning to which
they refer and in relation to which they cease to be
fragments. Similarly, from the perspective of memory,
photography appears as a jumble that consists partly of
garbage.” Our project, Unidentified VN, is a sifting through
of some of that detritus leftover from the VN war. We are
mining the artifacts of the SVN Embassy film collection in a
process similar to archaeology. Our project hopes to
illuminate the connections between history, politics, visual
representation and cultures.
The
propaganda films we have researched document events of the
past–evidence of US involvement in SE Asia, and the
complicated relations involved in US political aims that can
be said to mascquerade as aid. Ngo Dinh Diem arrived as the
President of South Viet Nam when the newsreels began. We see
banners declaring “US/VN friendship is forever”, and
“Destroying Comumnist forces is the responsibility of all
citizens.” The films posit a demonized Other in the North
Vietnamese National Liberation Front. In opposition to this,
they evoke a romanticized, idyllic everyday life, and an
idealized portrayal of the South Vietnamese government. They
deliver an imagery of power, modernization, and military
prowess.
We are
interested in the relationship between the document and
history–how each shapes the other. Artifacts and documents of
the past have been memorialized and monumentalized as
evidence. The films we have examined are artifacts. They were
the rescued refuse from a nation that is no longer. They now
serve as an index to a war that was never declared. A war that
has been reconstituted as a conflict. History does not stop
once it happened. It continues to redefine itself through the
trivial, the comic, and the traumatic. It becomes oral,
published, or forgotten through collective memory, or
collective amnesia. From the films, we see history as at once
negotiated and indecipherable. Our investigation is inclusive
of the tangential as well as the institutional—histories that
exist simultaneously with and without the emblazoned capital
‘h’.
There is
an underlying assumption in documentary filmmaking that if one
records the voice of the people, one is able to represent the
people. Our process counters that assumption. It is impossible
to fully represent “the people” as if they are a unified,
collective identity. This is why we seek out participants in
our project to collaboratively imagine how history can be
interpreted through lived experience, through time, distance,
and memory. Can history be interpreted through the images in
this collection? We are interviewing people who are familiar
with Vietnam and Vietnam/US relations from 1955-75 through
personal, professional, or political experiences. Their
insights, confusions, and misidentifications call attention to
the discrepancy of information and our lack of access to the
historical, political, and possible cultural references. Their
responses unpack the image- what do these images represent
today; what role did they have at that particular time? For
us, the collected responses, contradictory and
confirming—fragments like the photographic image
itself—narrate and contextualize an isolated period of South
Vietnamese history within a framework of a global present. The
results are as much about the process of interpretation as the
information they provide. Here is a sample of the responses we
have collected so far:
From
history books we learned that the US had invested
millions of dollars to support the French’s hold on VN.
Millions more were expended as it sent tens of thousands
of “military advisers” to “train” the SVNmese army to
fight the North. We are reminded of how history repeats
itself in terrible ways when some of the
interviewees–whether government worker, educator, or
anti-Vietnam War protester–link their past to current
events. Can the demonization of Ho Chi Minh during the
Red Scare be compared to the demonization of Sadaam
Hussein, Osama bin Laden or the Taliban in this current
“War on Terrorism”? We know the liberation of the
Vietnamese people was a rationale for violence in
Southeast Asia. What can we say about the proposed
liberation of Iraq
today? “They must see Americans as strange liberators,”
the Rev. Martin Luther King passionately cautions us in
his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam.” He goes on to ask this
question of the US government then that we could repeat
at this present moment: “Is our nation planning to build
on political myth again and then shore it up with the
power of new violence?”
To return
to Kracauer’s essay, he draws a correlation between
photography and ghosts: “Ghosts are simultaneously comic and
terrifying. . . . [Photography] represents what is utterly
past, and yet this refuse was once the present. . . . Spooky
apparitions occur only in places where a terrible deed has
been committed.”
Copyrighted by Lana Lin & H. Lan Thao Lam, 2003
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