Tạm biệt, 2012! Wishing you all a happy, healthy and very cinematic 2013!
Archives for the month of: December, 2012
At 1:30 am, we meet Linh, our youngest student, and her buddy Nghia at the flower market. As Linh and I wander the market filming women vendors organizing bundles of brightly hued roses, daisies and gladiolas and men driving motorcycles heaped with bright yellow chrysanthemums while keeping an eye out for stray dogs and random rats, Nghia tells Paolo that the best way to maintain peace is to have friends and that’s why the Vietnamese want to be friends with everyone. You certainly feel that energy… all day long folks on the street randomly yell Hello! and Goodbye! at us and every person you meet wants to know where we’re from, whether we have children, what we’re doing in Vietnam and when we can go eat Pho together.
Then it’s a loooooooooooooong ride to the other side of town for the 5 am shoot. When people say Hanoi is an early to rise early to bed kind of town, they aren’t kidding. Streets that are thronged with noisy traffic all day long are virtually deserted come midnight. Suddenly, it’s just us, our bikes and the secret, silent city. Magical.
We get to our destination with plenty of time to spare. Our student Hien will be meeting us here when the bus station opens at 4:30 but right now the place locked up tight as a drum. It’s without a doubt the coldest night of the year. We sit down at the only snack kiosk around and enjoy some instant coffee and dried shrimp ramen with a group of jovial off-duty taxi-drivers. The wind blows like the dickens. People begin arriving with huge bags and bundles… they throw the stuff over the fence, squeeze through the gate somehow and disappear. Finally the bus station opens, Hien arrives and we go over the camera mechanics with him (he missed the first class), attracting quite a crowd of lookie-loos in the process. As soon as he starts actually filming, security guards appear and haul him into the office. Hien returns, starts filming again, security guards appear and haul him into the office. This goes on several times. Then we all get hauled in to the office where the head of security very slowly and politely explains to Hien that he can’t film on the bus station property but he can film the bus station activity from outside the property. So be it.
By six am, we’re riding back to Doclab. The city is waking up.
At 10 am, Thanh arrives and we walk the neighborhood filming trees and leaves. A nice zen way to spend the morning.
At noon, Nam’s back for his second shoot and we ride over to the historic Long Bien Bridge. Built by the French in 1903, bombed repeatedly by the Americans, used as a crossing by zillions of bikes, motorcycles and trains each day, the “dragon of the river banks” spans the Red River and stands as an enduring symbol of resilience for the Vietnamese people. The island beneath the bridge, one of Nam’s favorite spots, is a haven for the poor, the homeless, nature lovers, urban farmers and nude bathers and has a kind of dreamy, tropical quality with sandy paths through groves of banana trees and stunning views of both the Long Bien and Chuong Duong bridges. It’s lovely to just sit for a while and watch the barges go by…
On your mark, get set, go! Today we begin shooting The Sound We See: Hanoi for real. And it seems appropriate that first up is Nguyen Trinh Thi, the person who’s the reason we’re here in the first place. We first met Thi, her talented husband Jamie Maxtone-Graham (a fabulous cinematographer and photographer) and dynamo daughter An (a veritable Tic Tac Toe ninja) almost ten years ago when they lived in LA and got involved with screenings and workshops at EPFC. When the family moved back to Thi’s hometown of Hanoi in 2007, we knew we’d have to visit. The success of Doclab, the media arts center Thi started based partly on her experience at Echo Park Film Center, and the prospect of working on a project with Doclab students only made it all the more enticing.
For the 11 am hour, Thi shoots portraits of the women who sell things at her neighborhood market on Lihn Lang Street. Their self-effacing demeanor in the presence of the camera belies some serious small-business acumen. At one of the market stalls, I sample the most delicious, freshest banana fritter in the history of the universe. Divine.
With a little downtime before the next shoot time, we check out the Ethnographic Museum (did you know there are 54 distinct ethnic groups in Vietnam?) where we explore life size models of indigenous dwellings and finally get to see a famed water puppet show in action. Puppeteers stand waist-deep in water behind a screen manipulate lacquered, wooden puppets that play out Vietnamese folklore tales (my favorite was the rice planting and harvest) against raucous live musical accompaniment.
Then it’s off to the Old Quarter to meet Nam for his shoot at Ta Hien Street, where locals and foreigners alike gather to imbibe in bia hoi, fresh light draft beer (aka “the cheapest beer in the world”) made and consumed daily. Party!
The next shoot isn’t until 2 am so we while away a few hours hours shooting and processing some test shots of the skateboarders in Lenin Park and enjoying a Flat White at Puku, the hipster cafe formerly open 24 hours but now forced to close at midnight due to police crackdowns. Stay tuned…
Another full day in Hanoi: stumbling across an early morning Buddhist funeral and the ceremonial burning of huge stacks of fake US 100 dollar bills, pedaling the 13 km West Lake, cruising the badlands of Chuong Duong Do, reading the stories of fierce lady guerrilla fighters and American War heroines at the Women’s Museum, drinking snowy lemon smoothies at Lean and Green, fixing the Eumig to run properly on the local current and voltage with overseas guidance from Guy and Dino in California and Ken in Michigan (You really saved the day, fellas… this is the only working Super 8 projector in all of Vietnam!), getting pummeled in a strangely enjoyable way by two young masseuses in an low-ceilinged attic, and last but not least participating in the jovial “Positive Mass” monthly bike ride organized by The Hanoi Bicycle Collective, a very inspiring bike shop/cinema/cafe run by the sunny spirited Guim and Thuy.
Tomorrow filming officially begins for the Sound We See and we’ll be going going going for 36 straight hours… time to get some rest!!!
A big part of the joy in doing The Sound We See is experiencing the ways the project evolves and adapts with each city and each group of participants.
The LA group was comprised of 37 students between the ages of 10 and 19, none of whom had shot 16mm film before. The Rotterdam gang was 17 students between the ages of 13 and 42, none of whom had shot 16mm film before.
The LA film was shot on b&w 16mm and all the footage was processed at a lab called Fotokem. The negative was cut by a very sweet lady named Chris Weber in Burbank. The Rotterdam film was also shot on b&w 16mm but this time Paolo and I hand processed the footage and cut the negative ourselves at the fabulous WORM.filmwerkplaats with the release print made at Cineco in Amsterdam, which sadly has subsequently gone out of business due to lack of business. Sigh.
Due to the fact that there’s virtually no analog film activity currently happening at a grassroots level in Hanoi, we knew we’d need to pack in most of the equipment and materials for the workshop and be totally DIY about our approach so it made sense to go Super 8 rather than 16mm this time around. We’ve got 12 students, all in their early ’20s, all super smart, all used to a collaborative working model thanks to Thi’s amazing tutelage at DocLab. But not only are they shooting Super 8 for the first time, they’re also going to be developing their own b&w reversal film stock (meaning each roll ends up as 3 minutes and 20 seconds of positive, projectable image) in the beautiful Lomo tank gifted to us by Super 8 goddess Dagie Brundert, and splicing it together into the final, 24-minute piece. Wow!
So today it’s time to get down to business: we mix chemicals and process two test rolls we shot during our first class. They turn out…. GREAT!!!! No matter how many times you hand process a roll of film, there’s still that feeling of complete wonderment when those images appear. We are off to a fabulous start.
How can so dang much happen in a single day? How can you edit and post a little film, take a leisurely bike ride into town, check out the Fine Arts Museum, eat a tasty bún chả lunch sitting on a little blue stool at a little blue table set up on the sidewalk along with the locals, zoom around the town on the back of motorinos-piloted by the world’s greatest assistants Mai Phuong and Be Duc-picking up bleach, thermometers, buckets and oodles of Kem Trang Tien in exotic flavors like “young rice,” hang out at DocLab munching on tiny green apples and learning Vietnamese folk songs, attend the most awesome, friend-filled, warm hearted Christmas Eve feast (featuring the unbelievably delicious Bo la lot aka betel leaf wrapped beef)/gift swap (featuring a red parka’d Santa free pouring red wine from a box while standing in the middle of the black lacquered dining table)/singalong (featuring an extremely rousing version of You Are My Sunshine), and then bike home through possibly the craziest traffic ever??? I have the pictures to prove it…
First up: a visit to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square. The Mausoleum is only open in the mornings and the grounds are already bustling by 8:30 with a long waiting line composed mainly of Vietnamese families. Despite Ho’s wishes for cremation after his death in 1969, his embalmed body lies on display in a dimly lit room as the crowds file constantly by in silent rows, except for two months a year when the body is sent to Russia for “maintenance.” Afterwards we check out Ho’s “used cars,” his house on stilts (a nod to austerity that could easily grace the cover of Dwell today), the One Pillar Pagoda, and the massive museum dedicated to Ho’s life and legacy. The presence of the past permeates the city in other ways too: dozens of billboards commemorate the 40th anniversary of Hanoi-Dien Bien Phu in the Air, aka The Christmas Bombing, during which North Vietnamese forces shot down 29 US B-52 bombers in December of 1972. But this Christmas, the focus is on food not bombs and the streets are filled with the sights and smells of a million delicious meals.
