Ed. note: Here’s another letter coming later than scheduled—I had hoped to write this sooner, and then, and then. Thank you for your patience with me as I continue to learn from this project! Also, speaking of learning: I am hoping to migrate platforms and divest from Substack soon, while still continuing to write this series. If you have any suggestions around newsletter/subscription-based platforms, particularly those that incorporate payment methods, please let me know.
In the opening frames of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, an unexploded bomb—turned on its side and hollowed out—has been repurposed as a flower planter. Set in a rusty metal frame, the apparatus looks like one of Duchamp’s Readymades, the tapered nose of the ordnance a shape unmistakably meant for violence. Four yellow flowers spring from the body of the bomb. To my eye, as I revisit the photos I took when I saw the film three months ago at Nguyen’s show at the New Museum, the flowers look a bit like chrysanthemums.
They could be chrysanthemums; they could be marigolds. It’s hard to tell from the stills available online. Both species have yellow flowers; both are displayed during Tết, or Vietnamese New Year. Really I am using this as a way into writing about Nguyen’s film, which moved me deeply when I saw it, and which I am thinking about today.
In Unburied Sounds, Nguyệt, a Vietnamese woman born in 1976, runs a scrapyard with her mother in the province of Quảng Trị. The central highlands were some of the most heavily bombed areas of Vietnam during the war; the countryside remains strewn with unexploded ordnance and shrapnel. Unlike most others, Nguyệt feels neither fear nor disgust when it comes to the bombs—one shot captures her rolling a massive, missile-shaped projectile across the road with gloved hands—and she uses the scrap metal to make delicate, shimmering mobiles reminiscent of Alexander Calder’s. When she discovers that her birth date is closely aligned with Calder’s death date—in my memory of the film, the two dates are 49 days apart, or the time it takes a soul to find the afterlife in Buddhist tradition—Nguyệt wonders if her existence and Calder’s are connected somehow.
What I’d heard about the show made me think that the film was about a woman who believed herself to be the reincarnation of Alexander Calder, which it is. But it is primarily a film about the physical and spiritual transformation of the aftermath of trauma.
Though the war has been long over by the filming of Unburied Sounds, its injuries are freshly present. Nguyệt’s mother has PTSD, which manifests as fits of shaking and freezing in place; her cousin, Lai, has been terribly maimed from a childhood accident with a bomb that unexpectedly detonated, and which killed Nguyệt’s younger brother. Played by an actor who is himself disabled, Lai requires prosthetics for both legs and an arm; he works at an educational center, where he teaches schoolchildren about the dangers of disturbing unexploded munitions. In a scene of Lai preparing for work, dressing and putting on his prosthetics, his movements are depicted at the speed of life, without cuts or jumps in time, rendering visible the care and labor needed for him to go about his day.
The film is as non-narrative as a narrative film can possibly be. Each scene is given ample space, the cinematography (by Andrew Yuyi Truong) slightly grainy, the colors lush and greenish-gold. In her journey to understand who she is and where she may have come from, Nguyệt speaks to her aunt, Lai’s mother; visits a medium; and treks to a Buddhist temple where she meets a monk who speaks of metaphysics. He tells Nguyệt of a bomb that hit the temple but did not explode, saving the lives of the residents. The bomb, instead of being sold as scrap metal or otherwise disposed of, has been repurposed as a temple bell, tuned to a frequency said to help those suffering from PTSD.
As I type this, a red-bellied woodpecker has landed on the tree outside the window of my study. I wait. Now it’s gone. It knocked at the tree—once, twice—then flew away.
The monk asks Nguyệt to sit in front of the bell. Then he strikes it. The sound fills the air, which means that it filled the room I was in.
The sound of a bell is profoundly different from the sound of a bomb.
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