In 1986, after decades of devastating wars and disastrous economic policies, the people of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam were starving, and inflation was climbing close to 500 per cent.Footnote 1 The ruling Vietnamese Communist Party's ideological blanket was suffocating the energy and creativity of the people. With the beginning of perestroika in the Soviet Union and the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe, Vietnam was looking for a way forward. By the end of 1986, the previously unchanged Politburo, the governing body of the Party and the state, which had led the country through revolution and war for 40 years, had lost all but one of its original members. In December 1986, the Sixth Party Congress launched đổi mới, a ‘renovation’ process, a counterpart of the Soviet perestroika that had started in 1985.
While the Soviet Union collapsed and European socialist countries were denouncing the ideology that had dominated their lives since the end of the Second World War in 1945, Vietnam embarked on a path of reforms that was more similar to that of China than that of the Soviet Union: liberalising its economy, but maintaining the Party's grip over the country. The Party remained in power, but gradually allowed significant liberalisation, not only in the economy but also in ideology. In the decade after the launch of renovation, literary works appeared, which instead of glorifying the Party, the government, and wartime austerity, for the first time started to question whether or not the results of unifying the country and building socialism justified the sacrifices that the people had had to make to achieve the goals promulgated by their leaders. It was then that the works of young people who had fought in or supported the war effort appeared: Bao Ninh's The sorrow of war (1987); Duong Thu Huong's Beyond illusions (1987) and Paradise of the blind (1988); Nguyen Huy Thiep's The General (1987), which was turned into a movie in 1988, and The winds of Hua Tat (1989).Footnote 2 These novels questioned the Party's ideological monopoly and depicted the wars and the socialist reality in dark and despondent tones. It was clear that the authorities were experiencing a crisis of legitimacy and they were trying to reinvent themselves, to adjust in order to maintain power.
Since the proclamation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945, Hồ Chí Minh has played a central role in creating an emotional community, tightly bound by sentiment rather than rationality.Footnote 3 His image has connected the largely apolitical and predominantly illiterate population of an agrarian country to the causes of the state, the government, and the Party. The cult of personality created by Hồ Chí Minh himself and by his collaborators was instrumental during and after the war in legitimising the leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party.Footnote 4 Out of his own volition and with great effort, he became the Uncle of the entire nation, devoid of a personal life and allegedly married only to the Revolution and to the country. Upon his death, instead of his own wish to be cremated, Hồ Chí Minh's corpse was embalmed and installed in a state mausoleum, where he still lies, as the symbol and the emotional core of the nation, in the vein of Lenin, Mao and some other communist leaders.
Until the end of the 1980s, all cultural productions were state-sponsored and focused on promoting ideology rather than on their attractiveness to audiences. Thus, Hồ Chí Minh's unidimensional and sanctified image was cozily nestled in the established orthodoxy.
However, the introduction of political changes and a market economy in the 1990s changed the cultural landscape. The situation became increasingly complicated—with the opening up of the country, many foreign cultural influences penetrated into Vietnam with a significant impact on the younger generation, tearing them away from the dominant state ideology. Moreover, the market-oriented economy encouraged people, especially the youth, to make money rather than pursue state employment. The younger generations saw that the Party's ideology was not essential for engaging in a market-oriented economy.
Moreover, people could see the discrepancies between Marxism-Leninism and the free market economy, between the propagated ideas of collectivism and the very real development of individualism. In the 1990s, Hồ Chí Minh's role as the glue for the national emotional community started to weaken, and the aesthetics of the cult of Hồ Chí Minh increasingly lost its appeal among Vietnamese. There was a need to reinvent the representation of Hồ Chí Minh to keep him relevant to the changes that were under way, to make him a more complex, more ‘normal’ leader-cum-human being, to bring the Olympus where he resided closer to the people in order to keep him as an effective glue emotionally connecting the people, especially youth, to the authorities. Moreover, unlike the previous ideologically-driven productions, cultural productions were now often expected to bring in profits or at least to minimise losses.
This article analyses feature films about Hồ Chí Minh which started to appear in 1990; so far, seven have been produced. As my goal is to discuss the perception of these films in Vietnam, the article is based on the films themselves as well as on discussions about them in the Vietnamese press and in my interviews with people working in cinema.Footnote 5 I argue that efforts to ‘normalise’ Hồ Chí Minh in film have so far failed to achieve the desired response, especially among the younger generation.
The need for Hồ Chí Minh
After the beginning of the renovation period in 1986, with the fresh winds of change and the crisis of Party legitimacy, movies with revolutionary themes were a hard sell. The revolution, wars, and Hồ Chí Minh were moving farther and farther from the young generation. Many young people were disinterested in the purist revolutionary morals propagated through Hồ Chí Minh's image. And they were indifferent to the ‘economy of the gift’Footnote 6—being eternally grateful to Hồ Chí Minh for devoting his life to the expulsion of the French and then the Americans, and for building the socialist state. Youth were not inclined to be grateful to a state that was failing them, and they were not grateful for the artificial discourse about Hồ Chí Minh not ever having had his own family in order to save his national family, which, in any case, was utterly untrue. Hồ Chí Minh was married more than once, had other liaisons, and fathered children, but this was and still is a taboo subject, even though Vietnamese can obtain information about it from abroad on the Internet. The Uncle story was increasingly seen as deceitful, abnormal, and/or irrelevant.
More and more people, including Hồ Chí Minh's staunch advocates, have begun to find this de-normalised or over-sanctified version of Hồ Chí Minh unnecessary and harmful, but the government continues to stand its ground, creating a spiritual mausoleum of his character, paired with his physical ‘mausoleumisation’, something that he himself was against, as seen in the earliest versions of his Testament. However, as a loyal Party member, he eventually relegated the decision on what to do with his body to the Party and for 45 years his relics have been hosting a great number of Vietnamese, most of whom come in organised groups from schools and organisations, to see and to venerate the founder of socialist Vietnam. Many find the display of his body, which also goes against Vietnamese tradition, abnormal.
The farther time moved on from Hồ Chí Minh's life, the more difficult and yet more important it was for the authorities to ‘reanimate’ him as the main emotional element propping up the power pyramid that was shaken by the Party's declining legitimacy. In order to do so, it was decided to open for discussion and display some facets of Hồ Chí Minh's life and death.
In the spirit of innovation, the Party endeavoured to modify some facets of the narrative about Hồ Chí Minh. And it started with the facts of his death. After Hồ Chí Minh's passing on 2 September 1969, during the Second Indochina War, the Party had concealed his death in order not to darken the national holiday, the celebration of the Proclamation of Independence that also occurs on 2 September. Thus, Hồ Chí Minh's death was proclaimed as having occurred on 3 September. Also in 1969, the Party published Hồ Chí Minh's Testament, which Vietnamese had to diligently study and follow, concealing that Hồ Chí Minh's wish was not to be put into a mausoleum but to be cremated and his ashes divided among the regions of the country. On 19 August 1989, the Politburo issued declaration 151-TB/TW: ‘On some issues connected to the testaments and the day of President Hồ Chí Minh's passing’. It announced the true date of his death and what had been only rumoured before—that Hồ Chí Minh's testament that was published and studied after his death was not the complete original testament. The new, supposedly original, testament was published in 1989 with 100,000 copies.Footnote 7 This impressive print run was nothing unusual—even in wartime Hồ Chí Minh's publications, government newspapers, and journals were published in the hundreds of thousands of copies—but the revised Testament seemed to be a breath of fresh air, and a signal from the Party that things were going to open up.
The state did its utmost to rejuvenate Hồ Chí Minh and to spread his fame around the world. Already in 1987, the government applied to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to join in the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of President Hồ Chí Minh in 1990 and to recognise him as ‘a Vietnamese hero of national liberation and a great man of culture’. Despite some reservations on account of such an early submission, UNESCO approved the resolution. It was only after that success in the international arena that it was decided to produce the first movie about Hồ Chí Minh as a contribution to the celebrations. This is when the first feature film on Hồ Chí Minh appeared: See you again, Saigon.
Pre-feature films era
The first Vietnamese documentary was on Hồ Chí Minh's visit to Paris in 1946,Footnote 8 prior to which there had been no local tradition of documentary filmmaking in French Indochina.Footnote 9 The equipment was donated by Vietnamese residing in France. It was the start of producing documentaries and, especially, footage about Hồ Chí Minh. But no feature films had been produced until 1990.Footnote 10
Post-1954 Vietnamese cinema, which had functioned as a form of political propaganda, could no longer meet the desires and expectations of viewers. The emerging market economy at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s forced the political production of culture that functioned as a propaganda machine to adapt to changing public tastes.Footnote 11 This affected the representation of Hồ Chí Minh. As art historians Nora Taylor and Pamela Corey observed, in the 1990s portraits of Hồ Chí Minh as well as the propaganda posters that had been ubiquitous and popular, became ‘signs of the old repressive and autocratic regime’.Footnote 12 There was clearly a need to improve Hồ Chí Minh's image and to reconnect him with the people, especially with the younger generation.
In the pre-1990s feature films, Ho Chi Min appeared only in historical footage or facing away from the camera—there were no frontal shots. When I asked filmmakers and people at the Institute of Film in Hanoi the reason for this, some suggested that it was because of Hồ Chí Minh's humility, his very essence, that he did not want to be portrayed on the silver screen.Footnote 13 This reason seems hardly plausible given Hồ Chí Minh's very active and prominent role in establishing his own cult through writing self-praising books and articles under various pen names.Footnote 14
Others suggested that in the past it had seemed unimaginable to make movies about Hồ Chí Minh with an actor playing the role of the great leader. In the Soviet Union, during Lenin's lifetime, no feature film was made about him. The first time he appeared in a feature film was in Sergei Eisenstein's silent black-and-white production October, which was screened in 1927. The production group received huge material and technical resources by the standards of the time: an unlimited amount of film; the largest set of lighting equipment; thousands of costumes and numerous weapons to stage the storming of the Winter Palace.Footnote 15 The film and the actor who played Lenin, even if he appeared only in several short episodes, were criticised for numerous flaws: there was not enough of Lenin on the screen but too much of Kerensky, the role of the Bolshevik Party not made prominent enough, and participants in the events were stereotypical. Lenin appeared in the famous two-part film Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918, covering the 1917 October Revolution and the Civil War. The two parts of the film, directed by Michael Romm, came out in 1937 and 1939. Notably, while the films presumably were focused on Lenin, in reality they depicted the increasingly important role of then leader Stalin. The film was redacted in 1956 and further in 1963 to eliminate any images or mentions of Stalin.
Unlike images of the Soviet leader in Soviet cinema, it was apparently a challenge and even undesirable to even make a feature film about Hồ Chí Minh; for one thing, there was the danger of an actor gaining fame for portraying Hồ Chí Minh. Furthermore, Vietnamese cinema was nascent and did not have either skilful directors or artists or sufficient means to create a work worthy of the great leader.
It might have been even less desirable from the point of view of the filmmakers. Given strong censorship, it was almost inevitable that a film about the leader of the Revolution, the state, and the Party would at some point fail some unforeseen ideological test, which could lead to punitive action against the filmmaker, as was frequently the case with intellectuals and artists. Moreover, the dominant, in fact the only, approach to art allowed was socialist realism, which treats historical figures as documentary props. Hồ Chí Minh and his retinue had avoided the details of his life, focusing instead upon his superior moral nature that transported him up to the proletarian Olympus. Creating such a film could be even more difficult from the artistic point of view than a straight historical film.Footnote 16 As a result, all that Vietnamese cinematographers had available about Hồ Chí Minh before the 1990s was newsreel footage and documentaries.
Hồ Chí Minh never provided biographical or historical information about his life, even though he created, under different pen names, several of his own ‘biographies’, which in fact were parables to educate people to love Hồ Chí Minh and to emulate his revolutionary morality. Since his death, the state has not changed this approach and tightly keeps as much information about Hồ Chí Minh as possible under wraps, something that additionally detracts from developing popular interest in Hồ Chí Minh. In the absence of new information, it became clear that such documentaries simply regurgitated themselves and could not attract much of an audience.
Feature films about Hồ Chí Minh
In the context of the renovation period, Hồ Chí Minh's centennial celebrations, and the need to ‘normalise’ the leader, seven feature films about him have been produced to date. The films seemed to open up possibilities of finding a new way to the hearts and minds of Vietnamese who felt less and less connected to the propaganda and traditional historical narrative about Hồ Chí Minh and his role in Vietnam's statehood.
As mentioned, the first feature film, See you again, Saigon, appeared in 1990. It focuses on the young Hồ Chí Minh shortly before his departure from Vietnam in 1911 to look for a way to save his country. The second film, Hanoi, Winter 1946 (1997), depicts Hồ Chí Minh during the events that led to the War of Resistance against the French that broke out in December 1946. The third, Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong (2003), takes the viewers to the years 1930–31, featuring Nguyễn Aí Quốc alias Hồ Chí Minh's arrest in Hong Kong and his subsequent release. The fourth, Crossing the Shanghai Wharf (2010), creates a version of events that transpired after his release from the Hong Kong prison, his move to Amoy, and eventually to Shanghai, from where he was planning to leave for the Soviet Union. The fifth, Looking at the sea (2010), focuses on Hồ Chí Minh's last years before leaving Vietnam in 1911, when he engaged in revolutionary activities and worked as a teacher. The sixth, Thầu Chín in Siam (2015), transports us to Thailand in 1927–29, portraying Thầu Chín alias Hồ Chí Minh's journey from Bangkok to Udon Thani, a province in northeastern Thailand, mobilising the Vietnamese diaspora in Thailand and deciding to create a Communist Party (this film was ordered by the Ministry of Culture). The last one, The Prophet (also created in 2015), portrays Hồ Chí Minh between 1947 and 1950, during the first half of the War of Resistance, when he was in the mountains of North Vietnam.Footnote 17
What all these films have in common is their attempt to ‘normalise’ Hồ Chí Minh. Some supplied him with a touch of romance, even if they would always remain rather unidirectional—while women fell in love with him, Hồ Chí Minh would always choose to leave them in order to save his country and his people. Some introduce spies and fictional chases. Still others bet on the filmmakers’ artistry to breathe new life into the image of Hồ Chí Minh's simplicity, a quality which supposedly radiates from the portraits and narratives, but has become tiresome to many, especially the youth. The normalisation of Hồ Chí Minh has yet to win them over.
Ways of normalisation
Love and adventure
Hồ Chí Minh's private life has always been a taboo subject in Vietnam. So, filmmakers wanted to engage viewers with images of Hồ Chí Minh's personal life. Four of the seven films included romantic elements: See you again, Saigon, Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong, Crossing the Shanghai Wharf, and Thầu Chín in Siam. The latter two also included elements of adventure and espionage that aimed to strengthen their cinematic appeal.
See you again, Saigon
See you again, Saigon was made in 1990 on the occasion of Hồ Chí Minh's 100th birthday. The film takes us back to 1910–11 when a twenty-year-old Hồ Chí Minh, then named Nguyễn Tất Thành, studied in the imperial capital of Hue and then moved to Phan Thiet, in what later became South Vietnam, to briefly teach at Duc Thanh school, which was part of a reform movement focused on modernisation and nationalism. Then the film takes Nguyễn Tất Thành to Saigon, the capital of colonial Cochinchina, part of French Indochina, and from there we witness Nguyễn Tất Thành's departure on a ship in search of a way to liberate his people and his country.
The film was revolutionary not only for being the first feature film about Hồ Chí Minh but also because, along with exalting his patriotism, it sought to ‘normalise’ him by portraying him in a romantic relationship with a young South Vietnamese woman. The creation of this film involved a thorny path. In 1979, the Feature Film Studio enlisted writer Bùi Sơn Tùng (pen name Sơn Tùng), who specialised in writing about Hồ Chí Minh, to create a script about the youth of Uncle Hồ up to the time he decided to leave Vietnam in 1911 to seek freedom for his country. Sơn Tùng wrote a script titled ‘The road of that year’ (Con đường năm ấy). It was never turned into a film. According to some sources, the script never entered production ‘for some objective reasons’, meaning it was not in accordance with the ‘scientific’ understanding that the Party wanted to propagate about Hồ Chí Minh as the paragon of revolutionary morality.Footnote 18 Other sources claim that it was produced but not approved by ‘the upper echelons’.Footnote 19 Certainly, the time to ‘normalise’ Hồ Chí Minh had not yet arrived.
Sơn Tùng was not discouraged by the failure and on the basis of the script wrote a novel titled Green lotus (Búp sen xanh), where he somewhat mitigated the love story between Nguyễn Tất Thành and a young southern girl named Lê Thị Huệ (or Út Huệ). Green lotus was published in 1981 by the Kim Đồng Publishing House, which specialises in children's and young adult literature. Initially criticised for the same reasons that the script was, it eventually proved to be a success as the artistic atmosphere began to change. In 1987, the government and the state started to prepare for the celebration of Hồ Chí Minh's centennial in Vietnam and throughout the world, which included UNESCO's special resolution in 1990 as mentioned. The Feature Film Studio then approached Sơn Tùng to write a script for a film. Sơn Tùng strengthened the romantic line of the film and suggested the title Parting at Dragon Wharf. It went into production in 1989 and was finished by March 1990. The director was Long Vân (b. 1935), most of whose films were produced by order of the state.Footnote 20
But this production was not all smooth sailing either. The film was almost cancelled again because of the romantic subplot. Portraying a sweetheart for Hồ Chí Minh was apparently still unacceptable. However, Sơn Tùng stood his ground and was determined to prove that it was not a fantasy of his, but historical truth. Director Long Vân said that while the film was in production a Saigon newspaper wrote an article about the film with an attention-grabbing headline to attract readers: ‘Uncle Hồ had a sweetheart’. That article was noticed by someone in ‘the upper echelon’ and the film-makers were instantly ordered to stop production. The director along with his team appealed to allow them to continue because they had to finish it by the centennial, and also because they had already spent almost the entire US$1 million budget, so it was impossible to stop. They were told by the ‘upper level’ that regardless of the amount spent on the project, whether one million or ten million, it had to be abandoned. The director gathered all his courage and went to the Ideological Department of the Central Party Committee and to the Ministry of Culture to present his case. He reported that Sơn Tùng had sold his house and, together with his wife, went to the South to find this woman. With great difficulty, he succeeded in finding her and could verify the story. When the ‘propaganda bosses’ heard about this, they were convinced and agreed to let the film be completed on condition that the romance would be portrayed as one-sided: the girl would fall in love with Nguyễn Tất Thành, but his love was only for Vietnam and its people. The two sweethearts were not to hug or hold hands on screen.Footnote 21 The film's title was changed from the plaintive Parting at Dragon Wharf to See you again, Saigon, which contained a promise akin to General Douglas MacArthur's famous words on abandoning the Philippines to the Japanese army: ‘I shall return!’
Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong and Crossing the Shanghai Wharf
The next time for love to be in the air was in the third film about Hồ Chí Minh, Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong, co-produced with a Chinese company in 2003. This film covers one of the most mysterious periods in Hồ Chí Minh's life. In 1930–31, Nguyễn Aí Quốc (Nguyen-the-Patriot), the pseudonym that he assumed while living in France in the late 1910s and early 1920s, came to the British colony of Hong Kong and was arrested by the Hong Kong police at the request of the French colonial authorities who had sentenced him to death in absentia. He was put on trial in Hong Kong. A British solicitor, Francis Loseby, defended him and he was released from prison. A beautiful young Chinese woman was sent by the Chinese Communist Party to protect Nguyễn Aí Quốc and to pose as his wife because in Hong Kong only married people could rent housing. She fell in love with him, but he departed for Shanghai, leaving her behind as he had earlier done with his Vietnamese sweetheart—kind but resolute.
There were high hopes for Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong to attract younger audiences as the first film to combine two factors: seriousness as demonstrated by Nguyễn Aí Quốc's determination to save his country and arrest, and a love story to make the film attractive to viewers.Footnote 22 However, it seems that Vietnamese youth did not respond as expected. Several months after the film was released, on 18 October 2003, Youth magazine published the results of a survey of 50 university students: 23 among them said that they would see the film in the coming weeks, but only 2 said that they had seen it. When the author of the article went to see the film, the majority of the audience was over fifty.Footnote 23
Nor was the film a significant draw in China, although the film was a Chinese co-production. There, in an apparent attempt to attract young viewers not by the name of the unfamiliar Nguyễn Aí Quốc (Hồ Chí Minh) but by the thrill of the chase in an action film, it was distributed under the title Escape in Hong Kong (Thoát hiểm ở Hồng Kông). It is evident that in China the focus was not on ‘normalising’ Hồ Chí Minh as, a priori, few young Chinese were raised on the example and sanctity of Hồ Chí Minh the way Vietnamese youth had been and any attraction had to be found elsewhere.
The somewhat timid romanticism of the previous two movies started to gain momentum in the next Hồ Chí Minh movie that appeared in 2010 as a sequel to Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong. Crossing the Shanghai Wharf covers the period from the end of 1933 to the beginning of 1934 when Nguyễn Aí Quốc, having been released from British prison, left Hong Kong for Xiamen in order to avoid a trap set by the French and the anti-communist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. Nguyễn Aí Quốc had lost contact with the Communist International, based in Moscow, for which he had been working for many years. His situation became extremely precarious. He temporarily took refuge in the residence of a Chinese businessman in Xiamen. From there he left for Shanghai to find a passage to the Soviet Union. This is another mysterious period in Hồ Chí Minh's life with practically no documents to corroborate what he was doing. The film's target audience was identified as young people. To reach them, the movie had to have a fascinating storyline with modern filmmaking methods that would help to make the dry political content watchable.Footnote 24
According to the scriptwriter Hà Phạm Phú, the absence of documents gave good ground for exploring the period cinematically, and that is what moved his colleagues to write a scenario.Footnote 25 The director, Triệu Tuấn, took a similar approach. He rejected the idea that the purpose of the film was to serve as a faithful representation of a historical period. In his eyes, it was precisely an imagined ‘loyalty’ to history that made many historical films dry and monotonous and turned the public away from watching them. For him, ‘history was just a nail for the director to hang a picture, meaning that when a director makes a movie about history, he is telling an engaging story to its viewers’.Footnote 26
Thus, Crossing the Shanghai Wharf introduced not only a nurse, who fell in love with Nguyễn Aí Quốc and cared for him when he was sick, but also a fictional spy-cum-assassin sent to kill him. The story then became ‘cheesy’, in one reviewer's opinion, when it turns out that the assassin is the nurse's long-lost brother and both of them were killed almost simultaneously in crossfire. Nguyễn Aí Quốc is portrayed as visibly shaken by the loss of the woman who loved him. Some reviewers found that the director was too absorbed in attracting viewers with the action scenes instead of depicting the struggle of wits, which would highlight the image of Nguyễn Aí Quốc as an astute leader.Footnote 27 Indeed, the film is thinly spread with many storylines, none of which were developed.
The film failed to pick up speed or to find a compelling rhythm, not being able to even make viewers care about the safety of Nguyễn Aí Quốc when he was being pursued by the Sino-French agent who wants to apprehend him. Even the action scenes, of which there are very few, are monotonous. The ease with which Nguyễn Aí Quốc evaded the spy made the spy look really stupid. Soong Ching-ling has a very limited range of expressions in the film, either joy at seeing Nguyễn Aí Quốc or sadness when he is beaten by Chinese Nationalist soldiers.Footnote 28
Thầu Chín in Siam
Finally, a fourth love story unfolded in the 2015 film Thầu Chín in Siam. It was the first film about Vietnam and Thailand. Đinh Thiên Phúc, a screenwriter of several historical films, wrote a script that won first prize for a literary and artistic work in an official campaign, ‘Learning and following Hồ Chí Minh's moral example’. The director, Bùi Tuấn Dũng, is a prolific artist who made his name not only by making patriotic movies but also creating reality shows on Vietnamese TV. The film portrays Hồ Chí Minh's stay in Thailand in 1928–29. One reviewer claimed that ‘it is almost completely historical’. It cannot be assessed as ‘almost completely historical’, however, as there is little reliable information on what Hồ Chí Minh was doing in Thailand during those years, but it is important to see that what for the reviewer separated the film from being completely historical are two fictional components: the presence of a young woman named O Hoàn who has romantic feelings for Thầu Chín, and a person who castrates pigs while working as a spy. The former was supposed to give the film a romantic aura while the latter was intended to inject some humour.
However, as was the case in the previous three movies, the romance remained wooden, one-sided, and completely overshadowed by Hồ Chí Minh's revolutionary zeal. As in the other movies, there was no physical interaction or even warmth depicted between Hồ Chí Minh and the female heroine. But her presence was supposed to soften Hồ Chí Minh's image and, what is perhaps even more important, to breach the decades-long disassociation of Hồ Chí Minh from any women.
The introduction of spies and assassins in the last two movies was not implemented successfully either. The chase, fighting, or killing scenes reveal poor acting skills and production deficiencies. The films try to appeal to young audiences by portraying Hồ Chí Minh's youth as a kind of a counterpart to their own lives. Yet while in the first film, See you again, Saigon, Hồ Chí Minh is in his twenties, he is in his late thirties in Thailand, and in his early to mid-forties in Hong Kong and China.Footnote 29 As is evident in Crossing the Shanghai Wharf and Hồ Chí Minh in Siam, the directors chose actors who were significantly younger than Hồ Chí Minh would have been at the time.
Despite the attempts to improve their storyline and cinematic effects, these films did not win significant audiences. For example, newspapers reported on screenings of Thầu Chín in Siam at high schools in the provinces, accompanied by images of young people in uniforms, suggestive of an obligatory round-up rather than an enjoyable movie outing. In fact, this film, as well as all the others, was mainly screened during the many revolutionary observances on the official calendar established to implement governmental decrees to promote Hồ Chí Minh's morals and ideology.
One article claimed, however, that the film left a strong impression on the audience with the image of a revolutionary leader who was humble, close to everyday life, but very strong and steadfast in the revolutionary struggle.Footnote 30
Looking at the sea
The script of Looking at the sea, written and produced by Nguyễn Thị Hồng Ngát, director of the Vietnamese Film Studio, received second prize in another official campaign, titled ‘To study and work according to the moral example of Hồ Chí Minh’, organised by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and the Department of Cinema.Footnote 31
The point of the movie was to show Hồ Chí Minh in his early twenties, of which we have no reliable account. It shows close relations between Hồ Chí Minh and some members of his family, something that he himself refused to discuss and is not reflected in any of his memoirs. Regardless of how feature films tried to normalise Hồ Chí Minh through showing him with some of his family members, which would be normal for anyone else, it was definitely not normal in terms of what was known or depicted about Hồ Chí Minh. Moreover, the film was about one of the least known periods of his life—his childhood—and it was done by showing him interacting with other children of twelve-to-fifteen years of age, which was also something new.
Since the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, Hồ Chí Minh often displayed images of himself among children, playing with them, dancing with them, hugging them. These images had become perhaps the best-known representations of the Vietnamese leader. He was never represented interacting with people of his own age and position. On the contrary, he was an uncle figure, the elder of the national family taking care of its youngest members. His care for children was also portrayed in several movies.
For example, Hồ Chí Minh, already president, appears with a child in the movie Hanoi, Winter 1946 as a symbol of raising the next generation to build the country. The film Crossing the Shanghai Wharf demonstrates Nguyễn Aí Quốc's love for children through his knowledge of the names of the children of the fighters in southern Vietnam who were at the time in China. Concerned about their health, Nguyễn Aí Quốc writes to Soong Ching-ling, the wife of the late Sun Yat-sen, the father of Chinese nationalism, asking her to take care of the children and then he jeopardised his own safety to visit the children to see how they were doing. But there, despite the effort to portray him as a young man, the film depicts a patronising relationship between a man in his mid-forties and children who lived in a foreign country without their parents or extended family. For them, he represented the fatherland. In Looking at the sea, Nguyễn Tất Thành (Hồ Chí Minh) is a very young teacher who had just finished being a student himself, and he interacts with students who are not much younger than himself. This was supposed to allow young viewers to identify with Nguyễn Tất Thành's students and thereby to feel a sense of closeness to the young Hồ Chí Minh.
Certainly it was difficult for filmmakers and actors to normalise Hồ Chí Minh when portraying his previously unknown youth while at the same time denying him a realistic youthfulness, including uncertainty, sexual longing and the like. He was expected to have been a born and bred revolutionary from the start to the finish of the movie, even when he departs for overseas leaving his students behind. As one of the reviewers noted, it is a paradox that feature films about Uncle are usually geared towards the image of Uncle in his youth but end up with little appeal to young people. Despite all the efforts of those who made the films, they are useable only for mobilisation campaigns to display the image of Uncle Hồ on festival days.Footnote 32
An example of the challenge of making films about Hồ Chí Minh in Vietnam is illustrated in the career of Trần Lực as an actor and director, which shows the contradiction between the ideological message of the films and the pull of entrepreneurship. In 2002, he was acting as Hồ Chí Minh in the film Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong, which came out in 2003. At the same time, in 2002, he founded a private company called Đông A Film Studio, which produced television programmes and also videogames. In 2009, he accepted the assignment of making a new movie about Hồ Chí Minh and was interviewed to be the director.Footnote 33 He even expressed his vision of the movie: in his opinion, it should be a different kind of film, one that would appeal to young people, portraying young Hồ Chí Minh as a strong young man who had also taught physical education.Footnote 34 Shortly after that, citing his preoccupation with his own studio, he withdrew from the project. In the same year, Trần Lực was also invited by the Studio of the Writers’ Union to again play the role of Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Crossing the Shanghai Wharf, the sequel to Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong, but he declined this too, saying it would require a lot of time that he did not have.Footnote 35
Gandhi, Confucius and the war leader
The third category of ‘normalising’ Hồ Chí Minh includes two films: Hanoi, Winter 1946 (1997) and The Prophet (2015). These were intended to attract viewers by the portrayal of Hồ Chí Minh's simplicity, closeness to the people, and love of peace. None of these approaches were new. This is exactly how Hồ Chí Minh had portrayed himself and how the Party and the government maintained his image after his death. However, these two movies brought this image to the silver screen to attract the attention of young people in a livelier way than was possible with dry propaganda materials, school lessons, and trips to Hồ Chí Minh's mausoleum.
Hanoi, Winter 1946
Hanoi, Winter 1946 brings us to a very important period in the decolonisation of Vietnam. After the August Revolution, the proclamation of independence of Vietnam, and many failed attempts to negotiate with the French, Hồ Chí Minh called for the War of Resistance that started on 19 December 1946. The North Vietnamese government left Hanoi and relocated to the mountainous area in the north called Viet Bac. From there, Hồ Chí Minh and his collaborators led the war. The movie depicts the period leading to the outbreak of the war.
The movie came out in 1997. It was the second feature film made about Hồ Chí Minh, after See you again, Saigon. Its director was Đặng Nhật Minh, one of the most famous Vietnamese directors at the time, and the head of the Vietnamese Filmmakers Association.Footnote 36 Đặng Nhật Minh refuted what he said a lot of people believed—that the film was ordered by the state to commemorate several big holidays in 1995, including Hồ Chí Minh's 105th birthday, the 50th anniversary of the August Revolution, and the 65th anniversary of the establishment of the Vietnamese Communist Party. The reality, according to him, was different. He said that his inspiration for the film was Richard Attenborough's iconic movie Gandhi (1982), which he saw in the Soviet Union in 1983. He was very moved by the film and decided to make one about Hồ Chí Minh—to show him as a leader, gentle, simple, dedicated to his country and people, somewhat akin to Attenborough's depiction of Gandhi. Another of his goals was to contribute to changing the world's image of the Vietnamese. When he travelled abroad, he saw that people admired the Vietnamese, but thought that they were prone to resolving conflicts militarily. He wanted to change this image—to demonstrate that the Vietnamese are peace-loving people and went to war only when all other ways to resolve the conflict were exhausted, to show that Vietnam did not want war, but only to win independence, the way India won independence from England.Footnote 37 After many months of failed negotiations, Hồ Chí Minh and the Vietnamese did not have any other choice. So Đặng Nhật Minh, in collaboration with the poet Hoàng Nhuận Cầm, wrote a script in 1988, according to him without anyone ordering or subsidising it.Footnote 38 In 1993, he submitted his script to a competition organised by the Department of Cinematography for projects to be subsidised by the state, but did not win, very possibly because his idea did not seem to fit with reimagining the country. It was only a year later that he met Minister of Culture Trần Hoàn and talked with him about his project, and a month later the minister directed him to start production in 1994.Footnote 39
This film had a turbulent production history. While the decision to start production was made in 1994 to be completed for the big holidays in 1995, it soon became apparent that the film would fail to meet the deadline and its launch was postponed to the end of 1996, but, in reality, it was only finished by mid-1997. While the script was approved, some of the scenes were cut, for example, one where a guard takes a letter from Hồ Chí Minh and puts it in a pocket low on his trouser leg—the censors said a letter from Hồ Chí Minh should not be treated like that.Footnote 40
With Đặng Nhật Minh's aspiration to produce an image of Hồ Chí Minh akin to Gandhi he focuses only on the leader: Hồ Chí Minh, sick with malaria, constantly sends messages to Leon Blum's government in France, trying to find a compromise; Hồ Chí Minh with a child—as a symbol of raising the next generation; Hồ Chí Minh with an artist who draws his portrait. Interestingly, a journalist from the People's Army newspaper praised Đặng Nhật Minh for creating an image of Hồ Chí Minh as a profound Confucianist and not a military leader.Footnote 41 In fact, Confucianising Hồ Chí Minh is now another way to keep him relevant by taking him from the Communist fold that has become less attractive to many. Another writer praised the film for portraying President Hồ Chí Minh as having the traits of a good politician and not only as a paragon of virtue. Moreover, the author suggested that Đặng Nhật Minh achieved his goal of showing the world that Vietnamese people are peace-loving, altruistic, and not aggressive.Footnote 42
A journalist from Women magazine argued that despite its Film Award, the movie did not live up to Đặng Nhật Minh's abilities. This journalist criticised the film for failing to re-create the atmosphere of Hanoi at the time, for lacking natural vitality, and for giving but brief glimpses of some characters.Footnote 43 The most critical review appeared in the magazine Youth of the Capital. The author of the review took the filmmakers to task for focusing exclusively on Hồ Chí Minh while disregarding the other Party leaders and intellectuals. The author wrote that viewers observed Hồ Chí Minh singlehandedly dealing with everything, from internal to external issues. The filmmakers led viewers to associate only Hồ Chí Minh with the attempt to find a peaceful compromise with France. According to the reviewer, this distorted the very nature of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam that differs from the Western bourgeois countries where a new president, a minister of foreign affairs, or a minister of defence can reverse all the state's policies. Meanwhile, in Vietnam the leaders and the people always blend together as one. The author concludes: ‘Only portraying “the fish” and not portraying “the water” does not reflect the historical situation.’Footnote 44
The same author also found fault with the lack of battle scenes in the movie. People wanted to witness fierce battles on the streets of Hanoi, the winning of house after house, street after street, alley after alley. Instead, the filmmaker treated the fighting in a blur. The street fights in the winter of 1946 in Hanoi had been spectacular and historically significant, but the film treats them cursorily: ‘The filmmaker was unable to evoke and touch that treasure. What a pity.’Footnote 45
This critical review raises several important points. First of all, the agendas of the director Đặng Nhật Minh and the review's author Hong Phuc differed drastically. Đặng Nhật Minh was very open about the source of his inspiration being Attenborough's movie about Gandhi, and thus his sole focus on Hồ Chí Minh is what he intended. Turning those who surrounded Hồ Chí Minh into Gandhi-like figures would diminish the appeal of Hồ Chí Minh. The creation of a Gandhian image also advanced his goal to demonstrate to the outside world that Vietnamese are peace-loving people. As a result, he intentionally did not dwell on the battles. As he explained, one never sees any generals in the film and there is no hatred of the French depicted, for in fact his generation was deeply connected to French culture.Footnote 46
The Prophet
The second film in this category, The Prophet, is somewhat similar to the concept of Hanoi, Winter 1946 and could be seen as a sequel to it. The Prophet takes viewers to the mountains of northern Vietnam where Hồ Chí Minh and his government relocated and from where they led the struggle against the French.
The film unfolds between 1947 and 1950 and is based on works written by Hồ Chí Minh himself under different names, among them, Ten-year sleep, Heroic North Vietnam, and Stories told on the road.Footnote 47 These three are revolutionary propaganda. The first two, written in the late 1940s, were designed to mobilise the Vietnamese for the war against the French. The third, like his Vignettes, the foundational narrative of the Hồ Chí Minh cult, was intended to mobilise Vietnamese to appreciate their leader's modesty and simplicity. In the view of Hoàng Nhuận Cầm, the scriptwriter of The Prophet and co-author of the script for Hanoi, Winter 1946, in these works Hồ Chí Minh foresaw future historical developments like a prophet.Footnote 48
If in Hanoi, Winter 1946 the purpose was to ‘Gandhicise’ Hồ Chí Minh to
demonstrate to the world his (and the Vietnamese) peace-loving nature, the goal in The Prophet was to make Hồ Chí Minh the archetypal elder of the Vietnamese people. As Hoàng Nhuận Cầm said: ‘Uncle's image in my script is the image of ong Ké, an appellation of an old man in the language of the Nung people, the minority living in the mountains in northern Vietnam, very much a villager, very simple, very down to earth.’ This simple image had appeared already in Hanoi, Winter 1946 and would continue in other works. According to him, the personal and the public became one. Hồ Chí Minh's compatriots were his family. Taking care of the fatherland, he was taking care of the family. Both films were intended not only for Vietnamese but also for international viewers.Footnote 49
To portray Hồ Chí Minh's simplicity, Hoàng Nhuận Cầm included in the film scenes of an emotional Hồ Chí Minh, of Hồ Chí Minh fishing alone, of his simple clothes, and of his sandals that became almost as famous as the man himself. He also included some jokes reportedly told by Hồ Chí Minh: ‘Không phải là Hồ Chủ tịch muôn năm, mà là Hồ Chủ tịch muốn nằm’. This joke is built on flipping the tones of words: ‘Not “Long Live President Hồ” but President Ho wants to sleep’.
The choice of the scriptwriter for these ‘simplifying Hồ Chí Minh’ movies is fascinating, to say the least. Hoàng Nhuận Cầm was born in 1952 and joined the army when he was 19. He became a poet known for his love poems, while he also wrote scripts for TV and cinema, including those for Hanoi, Winter 1946 and The Prophet. His own reputation is certainly very different from that of Hồ Chí Minh. Not only is the core of his poetry about love and not socialist realism, but he is also known as a womaniser and a callous heartbreaker. In an earlier poem, ‘Better yet, don't die’, he thanks all the girls whose boyfriend he had been and he asks them to buy him wine, if they have money.Footnote 50 Shortly after The Prophet came out, an article defined him as ‘a person who is often “wanted” by the beauties’ but one who at some point had been deeply depressed and drank all day long.Footnote 51 In fact, during the making of The Prophet, Hoàng Nhuận Cầm himself jokingly admitted his propensity for alcohol as, according to him, it was for the sake of his work on the script that he was willing to stay sober until the film was finished. Hoàng Nhuận Cầm was not the only one to make this sacrifice for the sake of the movie. The director of the film, Vương Đức, had quite a lot of experience. The Prophet was his fifth film. In an interview, Vương Đức admitted that he loved to drink even more than many of his colleagues who were heavy drinkers themselves, and that he, too, stayed sober to concentrate on making the movie. Moreover, according to him, his entire crew, who also loved to drink, was not allowed to drink during work. Those who drank on the set were fined up to VND3 million (US$1,300).Footnote 52 Bùi Bài Bình, the actor who played the role of Hồ Chí Minh in The Prophet, related that Hoàng Nhuận Cầm offered him this role while they were out drinking together. Bùi Bài Bình thought it was idle talk during a carouse and, in jest, responded in the affirmative.Footnote 53
Such admissions are very unusual. The bohemian lifestyle to which both the scriptwriter and the director refer goes against the grain of Hồ Chí Minh's teaching and his lifestyle. But what is even more remarkable is that these revelations were published. While it is definitely a sign of a more open approach to art in Vietnam, it is also an attempt to draw the attention of future viewers through ‘humanising’ the filmmakers of The Prophet to break the stigma of the Hồ Chí Minh films being made to order by the state by government loyalists. This becomes even more apparent when considered in the context of Vương Đức's statement that it is a grim challenge to achieve authenticity with topics of political, cultural, and social significance.Footnote 54
While the scriptwriter, the director, and the crew certainly wanted to make a movie that would be something more than an ‘instrument of worship’,Footnote 55 it seems that the film largely spoke to and elicited emotions from older people. Young Vietnamese remained, as with the other movies, largely uninterested. One journalist suggested that it might be because the younger generation who did not experience the war were not equipped with enough knowledge to understand Uncle Hồ, or to understand the war.Footnote 56
Actors who played Hồ Chí Minh
The first actor to play Hồ Chí Minh in Vietnam was Tiến Hợi in See you again, Saigon. His first appearance as Hồ Chí Minh was in 1987 in a theatrical performance of White nights in the military district where he served.
White nights, written by Lưu Quang Hà, an amateur playwright who was a general in the North Vietnamese Army shortly after the death of Hồ Chí Minh in 1969, has a very interesting life of its own. It focused on the corruption case of Trần Dụ Châu (in the play named Hoàng Trọng Vinh), a colonel in the Vietnam People's Army and the Head of the Military Supply Department during the First Indochina War. At a time when President Hồ and other patriots were depriving themselves of food, he used his position to enjoy life, consuming wine, fine food, and entertainment. He was convicted on the charge of embezzlement and sentenced to death. Hồ Chí Minh spent many ‘white nights’ pondering whether or not Trần Dụ Châu-Hoàng Trọng Vinh should be executed. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that the Party could not hide its drawbacks and the criminal should not be forgiven. The message ‘to punish in order to teach’ was to be made clear to all the people. The play stressed the purity and the ethics of President Hồ Chi Minh as juxtaposed against the corruption of one of their number who was supposed to be in charge of the people's welfare, but instead chose to abuse his position selfishly. Hồ Chí Minh was depicted not only as a firm defender of the people's interests and a staunch anti-corruption fighter, but also as a deeply compassionate person who is troubled and pained by the necessity of having to make this decision. Despite Lưu Quang Hà's best intentions, the play was not allowed to be performed until the 1980s due to the restrictions on depicting official corruption during the war, and it was not staged until 1987 by the Military Region II Theatre Group with Tiến Hợi starring as Hồ Chí Minh.Footnote 57
Hồ Chí Minh was 60 at the time of the events depicted in the play. In 1987, Tiến Hợi was 28 years old. Despite this 32-year-age difference, he was considered the best choice for the role, given his experience. In See you again, Saigon the age difference between Hồ Chí Minh and Tiến Hợi was significantly smaller, but now he was older than Hồ Chí Minh at the time. While there were many reviews that rated the film and his role highly, in general, the reviews of his acting were uneven. Regardless, when Đặng Nhật Minh decided to make his film Hanoi, Winter 1946, it was decided to not experiment but to go with the most experienced actor for the role. Tiến Hợi was invited to play Hồ Chí Minh again. This time, the 38-year-old Tiến Hợi played the 56-year-old leader. This certainly shows the reluctance to experiment with new actors and to go with someone proven, even if people saw deficiencies in the fit and in the performance. Since his first role of Hồ Chí Minh in 1987, Tiến Hợi had played Hồ Chí Minh over forty times.Footnote 58 In 2013, the Guinness Book of Records of Vietnam recorded Tiến Hợi as the person who performed Uncle Hồ's role ‘in the most genres’.Footnote 59
However, after Đặng Nhật Minh's film, for Nguyễn Ái Quốc in Hong Kong it was decided to go with another actor, Trần Lực. Trần Lực (b. 1963) in Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong (shot in 2002) was around the right age, being 39 while Hồ Chí Minh was 41 at the time of the events in the movie. Trần Lực was praised for his performance, but it was also mentioned that his linguistic skills were not on a par with what would be expected from an actor who played young Nguyễn Aí Quốc, young Hồ Chí Minh, and also, curiously, that he was too stylish compared to Hồ Chí Minh.Footnote 60 After Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong, Trần Lực founded his own film studio where he produces films that extend far beyond revolutionary topics. He does not often act in films anymore. His last performance was the role of Trịnh Công Sơn, perhaps the most famous Vietnamese songwriter whose songs were censored both in South Vietnam during the war and in the postwar Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
For the next movie, Crossing the Shanghai Wharf, both Tiến Hợi and Trần Lực declined to play Hồ Chí Minh, for personal reasons.Footnote 61 From that point on, we see much more adventurous choices of actors for the role of Hồ Chí Minh. Minh Hải (b. 1979), a very young actor who had previously only played supporting roles, was selected. In 2003, being in his early twenties, he auditioned for Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong but at the last moment the more senior Trần Lực got the part. Later, in 2009, he auditioned for Looking at the sea to play a 19-year-old Hồ Chí Minh in 1908–910, before his departure from Saigon. But a younger 21-year-old colleague, Nguyễn Minh Đức, got the part.
But another movie on Hồ Chí Minh had been in the works and Minh Hải got his wish to play Hồ Chí Minh's role in Crossing the Shanghai Wharf. Minh Hải was significantly younger than a 42 year old Hồ Chí Minh but the director Triệu Tuấn thought that the actor was the closest in appearance to Hồ Chí Minh among all the actors who had played the leader.Footnote 62 He certainly did his best, but some critics thought that his performance suffered from excessive modesty, that it was somewhat vague, and that he failed to transmit Hồ Chí Minh's charisma and to elicit the admiration the viewers were meant to feel.Footnote 63 Since then, Minh Hải has played Hồ Chí Minh more than fifty times in different productions, including in White nights, just as his esteemed predecessor Tiến Hợi.
Nguyễn Minh Đức, the young actor who got Minh Hải's coveted part of Nguyễn Tất Thành (young Hồ Chí Minh) in 1908–10 in Looking at the sea was perhaps indeed too young for the role. As is evident when one watches the film and as many viewers remarked, he did not demonstrate the determination and resoluteness of young Hồ Chí Minh that viewers expected to see.Footnote 64 As another reviewer observed:
Minh Đức's appearance with [his] bright eyes and scholarly appearance is really suitable for the character's requirements, but his acting does not exude the mettle of a patriotic young man with great will like Nguyễn Tất Thành. On the contrary, it is the image of a rather frail, weak young man who does not have the will and energy to ‘go to the sea’. … Looking at the sea once again extends the audience's disappointment with the movies ordered by the State.Footnote 65
While, in my opinion, Nguyễn Minh Đức's performance was rather weak, in fact, it might correspond quite well to the position of young Nguyễn Tất Thành: a young person still unsure of himself, who has weaknesses. This criticism of his performance reveals a different approach to the portrayal of Hồ Chí Minh compared with earlier films: an expectation for him to be a diehard revolutionary from the time of his childhood and youth with no second thoughts, even when leaving his country for unknown lands. Nguyễn Minh Đức's acting career has not developed since this film, for which he is largely known.
As in 2010, the 120th anniversary of Hồ Chí Minh's birthday, 2015 was significant for the celebration of Hồ Chí Minh's 125th birthday as well as the 40th anniversary of the unification of the country. Thus, 2015 was also marked by the launching of two movies about Hồ Chí Minh. In the first one, Thầu Chín in Siam (released 1 Feb. 2015), Nguyễn Mạnh Trường (b. 1985) played the role of Hồ Chí Minh in Siam. Initially, Nguyễn Mạnh Trường declined the director Bùi Tuấn Dũng's invitation to play the role because his appearance was so different from that of 38-year old Hồ Chí Minh. But the director insisted, explaining that it is the spirit, not the physical appearance, that is important.Footnote 66 Nguyễn Mạnh Trường was a decade younger than the Hồ Chí Minh he portrayed. At 182 cm he was a vigorous young man who was much taller than Hồ Chí Minh, who was around 165 cm. Perhaps even more to point was that in 2004, Nguyễn Mạnh Trường won the Vietnam Super Model competition. While this was far from the values propagated by and in the name of Hồ Chí Minh, it is evident that the filmmakers envisioned that the heartthrob of the Vietnamese podium and cinema starring as the revolutionary leader of the revolution and founder of Vietnam would be more relatable and attractive to young viewers. In some ways, the goal was achieved. Though still very schematic, the film got a lot of positive reviews. The Young Age newspaper mentioned that sometimes his acting demonstrated too much effort, ‘with a face that is too handsome and a figure that is too muscular, but with his bright eyes and determined gaze, he planted in the hearts of the viewers a rather fresh image of Hồ Chí Minh’.Footnote 67 Nguyễn Mạnh Trường's career since then has had a clear upward trajectory, as he has starred in numerous TV shows and in cinema in roles far removed from the revolutionary paragon.
In the second movie of that year (released on December 15), The Prophet, Bùi Bài Bình played Hồ Chí Minh during the First Indochina War. Like Nguyễn Mạnh Trường, Bùi Bài Bình, whose memories about getting the role during a bout of drunken carousing I mentioned earlier, can be considered as an unexpected choice for the role. Before this film, he had played villains in many movies. Bùi Bài Bình said that many people thought that he did not look like Uncle Hồ, that he should not have played the role, and that the stigma of his repertoire might hurt the film's reception. But he thought that appearance was only one and not the most important factor; the main thing was to show Hồ Chí Minh's charisma and his affection for soldiers and people. Thus, he forced himself to act.Footnote 68 He had to reduce his weight from 56 kg to 50 kg. He also had work done on his crooked teeth so that his face would look more like that of Hồ Chí Minh. Every day he would get up at five o'clock in the morning and for five hours would be made-up, sometimes only for one scene. But the make-up seemingly did not work that well as there are almost no close-up scenes in the film. Bùi Bài Bình said that it was the biggest honour to play Hồ Chí Minh's role but also the heaviest pressure to the point that sometimes he was about to withdraw but managed to overcome his doubts. He had to study Chinese, Russian, and French because these were the languages that Hồ Chí Minh used at the time. But his voice and accent were not anywhere close to that of Hồ Chí Minh. Thus, Tiến Hợi graciously accepted to dub for Bùi Bài Bình.Footnote 69 While the Party's newspaper, People (Nhân dân) hailed the film as ‘a poem in the cinematic language’, some criticised the film for its verbosity, sketchiness, lack of context, and cinematographic deficiencies, which are partially due to its limited finances. However, even the critics, by and large, characterised Bùi Bài Bình as a redeeming part of the film.Footnote 70 After the film, Bùi Bài Bình has been in many movies and on TV. He also plays a part in the very popular TV series The taste of friendship (Hương vị tình than) where Nguyễn Mạnh Trường stars.
This review of the actors presents a trajectory of the attempts to find the ‘right actor’ for the ‘right Hồ Chí Minh’—from established Hồ Chí Minh-focused actors to popular and attractive actors who could ‘normalise’ Hồ Chí Minh through their own recognisability, not necessarily being connected to the tradition of revolutionary movies about Hồ Chí Minh.
Funding in a market economy
An important factor contributing to the low appeal of these films about Hồ Chí Minh was their insufficient funding under the conditions of a market economy. Six of the films were directly ordered and sponsored by the state, while the seventh was ostensibly not ordered by but still paid for by the state. With tight state control over Hồ Chí Minh's image, in each film the filmmakers encountered censorship in their attempts to ‘normalise’ Hồ Chí Minh and to make their films more marketable, and in the end the state was unable to recover the money it had invested in the films.
At the time of the production of the first film See you again, Saigon, Vietnamese cinematography was not yet capable of making colour film on Kodak, so it was taken to Thailand to print. The film crew only made five copies and returned to Vietnam to screen the film for the Politburo's approval. After that, it was shown in some cities and provinces—Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Nghe An.
After the film was released, according to some sources, many countries expressed their interest in showing it. But Fafilm, the government's Movie Distribution Committee, did not agree to sell the rights. Since the film rights were not sold, the people participating in the film were not paid. Moreover, there was no money to get the original master copy from Thailand.Footnote 71 According to Sơn Tùng, the scriptwriter, the filmmakers were not paid for their work. The scriptwriter and the director were supposed to receive VND4 million (around US$900) each and the actors in starring roles were owed VND2 million (US$450) each. But, according to Sơn Tùng, ‘that remuneration is still just … an idea’. He explained that at the present time it was not too much, but in 1990 it was quite a significant sum. At some point, the people who made the movie decided to demand their rights. Then they all thought about this delicate situation: it would be undignified to make a film about Uncle Hồ and then sue for compensation. According to Sơn Tùng, people who played minor roles and extras were not paid at all, including the foreigners: several Soviet actors and an Indian couple. The latter were nevertheless very enthusiastic and honoured to participate in the movie about Uncle Hồ. According to one writer, they were touched that their contributions appear in the credits every time the film is shown.Footnote 72
The second film Hanoi, Winter 1946 cost US$300,000, a very limited budget. The technical production was very weak. There are only a few mass scenes and often battles are heard rather than seen, which was criticised by reviewers. There were also problems with its screening in Vietnam. Movies at that time were produced on 35 mm film that had a relatively short lifespan and only a handful of cinemas in the country were able to screen them.Footnote 73
The third film about Hồ Chí Minh, Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong, became the most expensive film in the history of Vietnamese cinema, but its budget was only around US$1,000,000. To cover part of the expense, the Vietnamese signed an agreement with a Chinese studio, making it the first foreign co-production.Footnote 74 Due to such unprecedented circumstances, the script was corrected and approved about fifteen times by the Vietnamese authorities before it was finalised. Moreover, the filmmakers needed to get the approval of the Chinese side, too.Footnote 75 Both parties agreed that Vietnam would pay 70 per cent and China 30 per cent of the costs, respectively. The Vietnamese state provided the Writers’ Union, whose studio handled production, with VND10 billion (around US$700,000), while the Pearl Studio of Guandong province in China provided VND5 billion (US$350,000).Footnote 76
However, attempts to make another co-produced film with China about Hồ Chí Minh, Crossing the Shanghai Wharf, fell through as the Chinese did not think that they could recover their investment. Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong and a 2007 film titled Hanoi, Hanoi, a love story between a Chinese man and a Vietnamese woman, showed the Chinese that it would be very hard for them to recover their investment. While initially it was considered that the Vietnamese would again fund two-thirds of the cost and the Chinese the remaining one-third, eventually the Vietnamese bore the full costs of production.Footnote 77 The producer, Nguyễn Xuân Hưng, acting director of the Writers’ Union Film Studio, said that the film's budget was VND16 billion (US$915,000), of which the state provided 70 per cent and the rest was raised by the Writers’ Union Studio.Footnote 78 However, it was still a very small budget, especially because the movie included foreign actors. In fact, they were a majority: besides Chinese actors, there were actors from eight other countries. But with the lack of funding, the Vietnamese could hire only very young, inexperienced, and often non-professional actors, who, moreover, often did not have any knowledge of Hồ Chí Minh beyond what one of the actors told me they had found on Wikipedia.Footnote 79 There were also other technical problems. Allegedly because of difficulties with voiceovers (for the many foreign actors) the premier of the film was postponed from the beginning of September 2010 to 15 January 2011 to open on the New Year and the Eleventh Party Congress, which took place between 12 and 19 January 2011.Footnote 80
The fifth film, Looking at the sea, produced in the same year, 2010, was fully focused on events that transpired in Vietnam, with a budget of only VND7.2 billion. Footnote 81 The sixth and the seventh movies were produced five years later. The sixth film, about Hồ Chí Minh in Thailand, had a budget of VND10 billion (around US$480,000). A ticket to see the film at a festival in 2017 was VND150,000 (around US$7).Footnote 82
Obviously, limited resources further circumscribed Vietnamese cinematography. With the availability of foreign films (officially, through the Internet, or pirated), Vietnamese find it very difficult to get interested in the relatively low-budget films produced in their country.
Conclusion
We can see the rise and decline of producing feature films on Hồ Chí Minh between 1990 and now. Starting with one film in 1990, the state produced another one in 1997, then another in 2003. After that the filmmaking seemed to accelerate by 2010, when two films were produced, and only five years later another two. But, apparently they did not have the expected appeal and value. Footnote 83 Since 2015 no new film has been produced, even for Hồ Chí Minh's 130th birthday in 2020. Instead the state is producing a monumental 90-part documentary series, Vietnam in the Ho Chi Minh era—Television Chronicle, which is to become a sweeping ideological history based on footage and documentaries from the archives of different countries. It covers the period from the creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1930 until the present day, and started to appear in 2020. It is a pet project of the Party's leadership. As the Communist Party's publications announced, ‘the Politburo and the Secretariat [of the Party Central Committee] take uttermost interest’ in the creation of this film.Footnote 84 At the end of October 2020, in preparation for the Thirteenth Party Congress in January 2021, White nights was ‘rejuvenated’ and performed by the Vietnam National Drama Theatre at the Hanoi Opera House with Minh Hải (from Crossing the Shanghai Wharf). It was awarded the Best Performance Prize by the Vietnam Theatre Artists’ Association. But there is no news about future movies about Hồ Chí Minh, despite some newspapers raising the issue. I was told that there are many reasons for this, one of them possibly being the lack of a new good script.
From the point of view of filmmakers and critics the situation is not satisfactory. Vũ Châu, director of Looking at the sea, suggested that young audiences do not pay attention to the historical films because they are not interesting. Film audiences pay money only when a product is entertaining, which apparently is not often the case for these Vietnamese history films. He compared these movies to how history is taught at schools—too scholastic, too dry, too focused on memorisation of dates, locations, and events. He recognised the complexity of making movies about Hồ Chí Minh and other leaders because usually they are ordered by the state and ‘thus require that the filmmakers fulfil state orders’.Footnote 85 A journalist pointed to the paradox that feature films about Uncle are usually geared towards the image of Uncle in his youth but have little appeal to young people. Despite all the efforts of those who made the movies, these films are valuable only for official events and purposes.Footnote 86 Trần Lực, who played Hồ Chí Minh in Nguyễn Aí Quốc in Hong Kong remarked that while Vietnamese cinema had significantly developed, it has not sufficiently developed to bring Uncle Hồ in his ‘entirety’ to the viewers. In his opinion, Uncle Hồ's image must be made closer to the people, so that ‘each child of the nation would feel the greatness but also extremely simple simplicity of Uncle Hồ’.Footnote 87
It is getting increasingly difficult to secure the loyalty of the new generation of more cosmopolitan Vietnamese who are concerned with their economic situation than with the Party's ideological tenets. Moreover, with the accessibility of foreign films, patriotic films, including those about Hồ Chí Minh, face stiff competition from the sophisticated big budget productions of Hollywood, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other countries. Despite all the state's endeavours to ‘normalise’ Hồ Chí Minh in film and elsewhere, in order to ‘reimagine’ and ‘reintroduce’ him, these films have failed to capture the imagination of the majority. This is a result of competition from global cinema and the relatively low quality and lack of appeal of state-subsidised and controlled Vietnamese films. Also, the demands of the market do not allow the enormous state subsidies that were poured into political productions before 1986.
Bui Long, a cultural historian of Vietnamese media, observed that despite the difficulties in Vietnamese cinema, it is ‘important to accept that Vietnamese films are nevertheless malleable and porous, capable of breaking out of binaries that are still influential in popular thinking (censored/uncensored, public/government, North/South, communism/capitalism, progress/ failure)’.Footnote 88 I suggest that films about Hồ Chí Minh have remained less malleable and porous than many others.
It seems obvious that normalising Hồ Chí Minh has not succeeded in the form with which it has been attempted. The effort to normalise took the form of fictionalising Hồ Chí Minh while maintaining his image as a flawless person. The state chose this fictionalising route instead of trying to document the numerous lacunae in Hồ Chí Minh's biography. Moreover, young people, if they take an interest in such films or in discussions of them, can see that even the filmmakers themselves do not necessarily follow the ethical code and lifestyle of Hồ Chí Minh. Furthermore, the films come across as hypocritical and sanctimonious, teaching young people morality, honesty, modesty, patriotism, and to struggle for the freedom of their country at a time when Vietnam, including its highest echelons, is plagued by corruption, human rights violations, and infringements on freedoms of speech and religion. The state-approved image of Hồ Chí Minh is deeply rooted in the perverse presentation of history established in the mid-twentieth century since the August Revolution and has remained virtually unchanged. The absence of interest in history by young Vietnamese stems from losing trust in the political ideology that is trumpeted by the government that does not allow young people to explore their past freely, in more complex and nuanced ways, and to connect it with their future.
Possibly as a reaction to these changes, in the recent decade, the ruling party's fear of losing ideological control led to a reversal of the openness of the renovation era in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Around a decade ago, the Party started the denunciation campaign against ‘self-evolution’ and ‘self-transformation’—nothing to do with ‘self’ is welcome in the system (with the exception of ‘self-sacrifice’). According to the denunciation campaign, the essence of ‘self-evolution’ and ‘self-transformation’ manifests itself in many ways, but the most important is the repudiation of Marxism-Leninism, of ‘Hồ Chí Minh thought’, and of building socialism under the continuing guidance of the Vietnamese Communist Party; furthermore, aspirations for personal advancement and enrichment lead to a rejection of the national community and to praising the capitalist ways of life.Footnote 89 While Hồ Chí Minh's presence as a pillar of Vietnamese ideology and the state remains assured by the regime for the time being, the possibility of ‘normalising’ Hồ Chí Minh and of maintaining through him the emotional community that his cult was supposed to create in the first place looks bleaker.
