The Twofold Commitment

A film turned back into a book: Trinh T. Minh-ha's script for Forgetting Vietnam printed alongside its images and a decade of conversation about what the work was trying to hold.

The 2015 feature at the center of the volume marks the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam and takes its structure from the creation myth of two dragons whose intertwined bodies fell into the South China Sea to form the country's S-shaped coast, a legend the film uses to stage an ongoing conversation between land and water as a third space for historical and cultural re-memory. The book reproduces the film's lyrical script with stills distributed rhythmically through the text, then gathers conversations conducted between 2016 and 2022 with film and sound scholars including Erika Balsom, Patricia Alvarez Astacio and Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa, Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier and Stefan Östersjö, closing with an index of key concepts. 208 pages, paperback, published by Primary Information in 2023.

Born in Vietnam and long based in California, Trinh (b. 1952) is a filmmaker, writer and composer whose films include Reassemblage (1982) and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), and the author of twelve books, among them Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989), D-Passage: The Digital Way (2013) and Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared (2016).