Seen It:
Yes

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149565/usercomments

Daniel Yates (kamerad76@hotmail.com)
Montreal, Canada

Date: 9 April 2002
Summary: Dynamic, Disturbing

Taken by itself, "79 Springtimes", by Santiago Alvarez, is a brilliant film. Dynamic and clear in it's intentions, it is a concise biography/eulogy of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of Vietnam, who had recently died. The film paints a different picture of Ho Chi Minh than the one I had been used to seeing. When I was a child, I, always interested in learning what we weren't taught in schools, would spend hours looking through the World Book Encyclopedia, reading whatever I could. I read about the Vietnam War and Ho Chi Minh, and from what was implied, he was a tyrannical dictator who oppressed his people and made them miserable. Seeing 79 Springtimes for the first time a few years ago helped me understand just how much of what I read were lies, although I had already begun to realize that a few years before. Recently however, I've become disturbed, not by the film, but by some issues surrounding it.

The film itself, as I mentioned before, is great. It takes a radical, experimental format, but uses the experimentation in ways that do not confuse us. The first image we see is a time lapse shot of a flower blooming. This dissolves in to a special effects shot of bombs dropping on the Vietnamese countryside. With this we are launched into Ho Chi Minh's life story. In 25 minutes, we learn more about Ho Chi Minh than we could ever learn in any American published history book. Among many events, we see Ho Chi Minh as a young member of the French Communist Party, we see him fighting off the Japanese during World War II, and most hauntingly, we see his funeral, attended by thousands. Aside from the events of Ho Chi Minh's life, we also see events from an/or related to the Vietnam War. We see student protests in the States, footage of battle, and horrifying imagery of Vietnamese being tortured and/or killed by American troops.

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http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/23/cteq/79_springs.html

79 Springtimes
of Ho Chi Minh
by Travis Wilkerson

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Travis Wilkerson is a Michigan-based filmmaker. His films include Accelerated Development: In the Idiom of Santiago Alvarez (1999), and the ongoing series, National Archive.
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79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh (1969 Cuba 19 mins)

Source: ACMI/NLA Prod Co: Instituto Cubano del Arte Industria Cinematograficos Filmmaker: Santiago Alvarez



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As the director of the Cuban newsreel, Santiago Alvarez was asked to travel to Vietnam and to film the funeral of Ho Chi Minh.

It wasn't his first journey to that country during the war against the Americans. He had witnessed and filmed the first bombings of Hanoi. The result was one of his masterpieces: Hanoi, Tuesday the 13th (1967). The film was defined by its challenges. He would travel with a single cameraman, Ivan Napoles, and each would carry his own hand-wind camera. They had only fragments of film, leftovers from American news crews from before the revolution. And they had no sound recording equipment whatsoever. They had come to document the growing war drive, but couldn't imagine the Americans would dare target Hanoi itself, an open city crowded with several million civilian residents. And they quickly understood that B-52s possessed no capacity to distinguish the visiting Cubans from their actual Vietnamese targets. Moreover, the Vietnamese themselves sought to limit the movements of the tiny film crew. They despised being framed as victims. So while Alvarez would haggle with his Vietnamese hosts, Napoles would slip into the streets to record the devastation.

I asked Napoles, “But when do you believe Santiago transcended the simple newsreel, and turned himself into an artist?” He answered, “That film, that very film. Hanoi….” (1) Given little to work with, he was compelled to invent. And the invention was something remarkable. To paraphrase his own work, his anger was converted into energy.

Nor was it his second journey to that country during the war against the Americans. He had been granted rare access to the Vietnamese leader himself. As always, Napoles stood alongside him. Years later, he described the meeting held in the modest hut that Ho Chi Minh still occupied. And he recalled the outcome of the interview, also filmed by a Vietnamese journalist operating an obsolete Soviet camera. The noise of the camera had ruined the synchronous sound recording of the discussion. “I'll never forgive that man," he told us. He remembers that Ho Chi Minh told them beautiful and inspiring things. "But all you can hear are the noises of that awful camera.” (2)

During their flight to Hanoi, they were shadowed by American jets. As they neared their destination, they were ordered to turn back to Cuba or risk being shot down. Commandante Juan Almeida, who led the delegation, is said to have replied, “Then tell them to go ahead and shoot us down. We're not turning away from the funeral of our friend.” (3)

Even Alvarez, the inveterate opponent of Yanqui machinations, was unprepared for the punishment he saw meted against the north's capital city. What witnesses feared, history later confirmed: the American aggression would only be halted once the mutinous colony had been bombed to the very precipice of irretrievable ruin. Decades later, on the occasion of an altogether different American intervention, Alexander Cockburn would declare it concisely: “New war, old lesson. Don't fuck with U.S. Imperialism.” (4)

By the time Alvarez completed 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh, his shock at the savagery of the Americans had converted itself fully to rage. This is the true significance of the most famous sequence in the film, where images of the war move from the object of violence to its literal subject, as Alvarez brutalizes the strips of film themselves. This should not be confused with an ironic post-modern trope. He said, “My style is the style of hatred for Imperialism,” and for a dozen astonishing minutes he illustrates in precise cinematic language the full expressive dimensions of this style (5). Decades later it seems obvious that this sequence resides at the very epicenter of his creative achievements.

Elsewhere I wrote, addressing his films in general:

What is striking, even today, is the manner with which they successfully balance goals that we tend to regard as irreconcilable. They are at once highly experimental, yet completely accessible. They were produced by a state-financed collective, yet register an unmistakably personal vision. They were produced without regard to posterity, yet they reverberate with a timeless vitality. They used every means at their disposal. Frequently, this meant they were made with next to nothing at all. (6)
To this I would amend an almost unbelievable observation: 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh, was the single most radical document of Alvarez's most radical period. Even now, one is stunned by the ferocity of its visual onslaught, as well as the absolute freedom of its narrative organization. Deploying a battery of highly experimental tactics, it endures as a masterpiece of personal cinema. Yet it also represented an official state response to the death of Ho Chi Minh. A response that the commissioning regime found entirely satisfying. In the span of the history of cinema, can a single analogue to this be found?
Alvarez always insisted, “The revolution made me a filmmaker.” (7) Which is doubtless true. By war's end, he had returned to film in Vietnam more than a dozen times. And from these trips he created much of his most important work. Which affirms a striking irony: the war he despised also helped transform him into an artist.

It is the 20th of May 1998. Santiago Alvarez dies quite unexpectedly. Though he had been suffering from the intensifying consequences of Parkinson's disease, he succumbs instead to an infection unconnected to his illness. In a peculiar coincidence, his death comes in the final month of his 79th springtime.



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© Travis Wilkerson, November 2002
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Endnotes:

Ivan Napoles, from a conversation in 1995 in Havana with the author.


Napoles.


Napoles.


From a lecture in Minneapolis attended by the author. Cockburn was addressing the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The precise date has long been forgotten.


Miguel Orodea, “Alvarez and Vertov,” BFI Dossier Number 2: Santiago Alvarez (London: BFI, 1980) 25.


Travis Wilkerson, “He Who Hits First, Hits Twice,” Santiago Alvarez Retrospective http://www.cinematexas.org/2002-alvarez.html.


Michael Chanan, “Introduction (In the Style of Santiago Alvarez),” BFI Dossier Number 2: Santiago Alvarez (London: BFI, 1980) 2.

Alvarez keeps the film going at a hypnotic pace. There is no voice over, only the occasional title to show us what events in Ho Chi Minh's life we are being shown. The student demonstrations and war footage however, need no explanation. As I mentioned before, the style is experimental. Scenes like the student demonstrations are told primarily through still photographs. Towards the end, when we see battle footage, it is distorted not only visually (the image is made to look as if it is breaking, burning, and flickering), but aurally as well. The sound is an almost deafening collage of gunfire, explosions, and general noise. The music as well is used in a radical fashion. During the footage of Ho Chi Minh's funeral, we hear a brief section of Iron Butterfly's 17-minute song, "Inna Gadda Da Vida." This lends the funeral a surreal quality as we watch people look at Ho Chi Minh's corpse, while a dissonant organ blares on the soundtrack.

Alvarez doesn't use these techniques just to be fancy, however. He wisely believes that films on revolutionary subject matters should themselves' revolutionize the way films are seen and experienced. He doesn't want us to passively sit back and relax as the film plays, but become actively involved in the film. So, the still photos of the students help us see more clearly the contents of the frame. We can concentrate on the students' faces, seeing their anguish, pain, and hope. We can also see better how the police oppress them. Without camera movement, we are not distracted. However, with the war footage, we are meant to be distracted. Alvarez wants us to feel the confusion and chaos of battle, and he is successful in doing so. Likewise, he is successful in making us feel a bizarre sense of confusion during Ho Chi Minh's funeral. Were we to simply see footage of the funeral, with a dry commentary explaining what the people felt, we wouldn't be able to truly feel the confusion and angst they must have felt upon losing their beloved leader. The Iron Butterfly music gives us that feeling of disorientation.

All this helps to make 79 Springtimes not only a successful biography of Ho Chi Minh, but a good historical document of the feverish atmosphere of the time. But there was one thing that was left out of the film that has only recently begun to bother me. I've always known that the V.C. subjected the captured American troops to unspeakable torture. However in more recent years, I came to believe, through more left-wing sources, that Ho Chi Minh was not involved in ordering the tortures; that the V.C. acted independently of Ho Chi Minh's knowledge. A few weeks before re-seeing this film however, I saw a documentary on PBS that interviewed former Vietnam P.O.W's. The documentary itself was blindly patriotic and sentimental, and clearly stated that Ho Chi Minh ordered the tortures. Normally I would have dismissed this as propaganda, but one thing one of the soldiers said disturbed me.

The former soldier said that the tortures were only committed before Ho Chi Minh died. After his death, the treatment of the soldiers got much better. Was it simply a coincidence? Was the man lying? Or did Ho Chi Minh really order these disgusting tortures? Don't get me wrong, I will always feel that the war in Vietnam was not a "just" war. But no one deserves that kind of torture. It's hard to find a source of information that I can fully trust. The American sources say that Ho Chi Minh ordered the tortures, but they also say the war was fought for a good cause. The left wing and Communist sources only seems to focus on the evil deeds of the Americans and never mention the V.C. tortures. How do I find out what really happened? Am I doomed to never really know the full truth? This really bothers me.