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.