For Viet Linh's bio- and filmography, see:
http://apt5.asiapacifictriennial.com/cinema/filmmakers/vit_linh
For an interview with the director, see:Thursday, March 27, 2008
Viet Linh's Ganh Xiec Rong: Synopsis
Set in Vietnam’s central highlands , Ganh Xiec Rong (Travelling Circus) (1988) is a story of famine-struck villagers who are duped into helping a travelling circus in its clandestine search for gold. Through the eyes of one of the village’s children, we witness how their naive hope has tragic consequences. The film was banned for two years in Vietnam because officials considered its themes potentially subversive, and even today is almost never shown. Before being given permission to release the film, the director Viet Linh was required to change the title of the film from The Conjurer’s Tricks to There Was Once a Man Who Was Greedy for Gold to its final title.
For Viet Linh's bio- and filmography, see:
For Viet Linh's bio- and filmography, see:
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The Traveling Circus is one of the most harrowing motion pictures I've ever viewed. The movie was made in black in white and came out in 1988 but I couldn't help but feel as if this movie took place in an older generation, a lost past.
With the villagers starving in these mountain regions the Traveling Circus distracts the villagers from what they really need to do, harvest crops. One can see the symbolism of the circus being used to describe the current Communist government, which distracted the farming peoples from what they really needed to do and completely changed the identity of their nation and culture. One of the most repeated images throughout the film is the monkey and its trainer. The monkey is the epitome of the good Communist Vietnamese, the trainer must beat the the monkey with a whip to get him to follow his rules and his instructions. After awhile the trainer doesn't have to beat the monkey, he already can perform and do what the master asks, in other words the Vietnamese government training its people to do what they ask.
The dream sequence of the little boy and younger sister performing the magic trick and feeding the village with rice is extremely beautiful and at the same very haunting. The boy sees himself as a hero and his younger sister is now being fed an no longer starving and crying herself to sleep at night from hunger pains. But as the dream progresses the basket that was magical and produced the rice for the villagers is blown away in the air, symbolizing the fleeting power and control the circus has on the imagination of the people and the few scraps of rice they give during their performances will soon be gone because they can't stay forever.
I would recommend this movie to anyone who wishes to see a truly beautiful piece of art. Throughout the film I was reminded constantly of De Sica's The Bicycle Thief and Fellini's early masterpiece La Strada. But as the movie progressed and the desperation of these villagers became more prominent I couldn't help but feel the same way I felt when I saw Satyajit Ray's Panther Panchali and Aparajito. The people are struggling to feed themselves and experience death and sadness but the resolve and the determination to move forward is what binds these different movies together.
I would recommend this movie to anyone who's interested in film as an art form and anyone who wishes to see and almost experience the desperation and trying times of Vietnam after the war with the United States and the South.
Other sources to view:
http://www.salemstate.edu/imc/vietnam/minorities.html
This details some of the ethnic minorities in Vietnam just like the people of the village displayed in The Traveling Circus.
It takes a bit of deep thinking to fully understand the meaning behind "The Traveling Circus," however it makes complete sense because of the state that Vietnam was in at the time. During the communist revolution that "The Traveling Circus" was supposed to take place in, the communist party was looking to give citizens of Vietnam small portions of material things to keep the people happy; furthermore, this scheme distracted the people of Vietnam by keeping them happy so they would not go work for what they need. The old man in the story displayed this by telling the children that there are no such things as miracles and that you have to work for what you not, it's not just going to come to you. I feel that the female in the circus was stuck in the middle because she wanted to make it in the circus business (the communist party) but at the same time she understood the common people and how they lived their lives. The little boy in the movie was an example of someone who is caught up in all of the things that the circus or communist party was handing him and he was immediately taken back by it. That satire in this film did a great job representing how the circus and the communist movement were deceiving in the way they attracted their followers.
The traveling circus was an interesting film about a group of traveling nomads/ entertainers who stumble onto a troubled village struggling for survival. The little boy and girl, who I felt bad for, showed a broken family and how it is sad when the mother has passed away and the other parent is the town drunk. The little boy then becomes attached to the female entertainer and gives her all the attention she wants, brings her gifts, and shows her how things are done in the village. The female entertainers sole purpose is to perform and be appreciated for her performance. Another sad topic that came to my attention is the traveling circus manipulates the village when the village is looking for food and they are giving those bubbles or other worthless things instead of food. It represents the communist way of tricking less educated people into doing as they please. The ring leader is the one who knows and realizes everything that he is doing. It makes reference to the Vietnamese government in that time period because they would come into villages and say we are going to totally revamp the society you live into a better one that the government thinks will be better, when they actually make things extremely worse. This poor village is just looking for food and the ring leader wants the villagers to pay him for the acts, but the only way to pay him is the gold that are in the mines. So these villagers would head up to bring back gold to give this ring leaders when they could have taken that gold to get food; another great example of manipulation. These villagers did not realize this or the value of the gold. This movie showed a great deal of satire that I enjoyed with the circus group being the communist party and the village is society that is being taken advantage of when they could self better themselves with the resources around them.
The film The Traveling Circus depicts the Communist movement in Vietnam in a different light than the previous films have. The film portrays the Communist party as displaying the proverbial “smoke and mirrors” over its people by providing them just enough food to survive, while distracting them from their real problems. In the film, the head of the circus only allots a certain amount of rice to the villagers during each show. Viet is portraying the Communist party is like the ringmaster, and that the party only provides the bare minimum for the people and keeps the peasants occupied with party rallying cries and anti-capitalist propaganda instead of letting them farm their own land. Viet does not seem loathe the Communist party; he is only analyzing the party in trying to get them to focus on the peasants providing for themselves instead of the party putting on a show.
The Traveling Circus could be a critique of many other types of governments as well. One could argue that even many democratic societies exude these similar traits. When many politicians in the United States are not fairing well in an election they may use similar tactics to help their wavering support. For example, during the 2004 United States Presidential campaign a popular commercial was “swift boatman for truth.” This group tried to attack John Kerry’s Vietnam War record. This was used to make him look unpatriotic and divert the fact that his opponent George W. Bush never even served overseas.
Hey lets all have fun at the circus. We can watch the elephants do tricks, the midget clowns jump around, the trampeez artists fly, the fat lady with the beard, or even the clown with funny looking hat to go with his oversized blue nose. But first, lets ignore what we have to do first, we have to live, or at least we have to try and live. The circus will not help us, but they will entertain us. I mean, it is enough for the circus to enterain, just like sports is supposed to do, isn't it? If the circus entertains, we will forget how to live and we will be free, won't we? "Golly gee willickers, Mr. Circus Boss I did not know that magic could kill evil spirits." "That is right little boy, magic can cure all that is fowl." Can it?
The Traveling Circus thinks it is something special. The village people are special in this tragic movie. My favorite character is the little child who cries constantly. The only person who cares is the child's brother. The people watch the shows, the traveling circus wonders about worrying about its next show and how good they will perform. The child's dad is drunk, its brother befriends a woman in the traveling circus, the chief knows the truth about magic, the traveling circus' fat guy is fat, people are wondering what the traveling circus will bring and then we turn to the little child crying.
The little child is Vietnam. Vietnam wants some attention and Vietnam only gets an apparition, an illusion of what they really need. Of course, the circus is the insanity of communist reform after the Vietnam War. The communist government wanted to build an utopia, well it got one mixed with dead people and a crisis.
The acting in this movie was good and the dialogue was well written. I like the black and white color; it adds to the meaning.
The village people do not ignore what they need to survive, the circus provide a distraction while the villagers die. Watch and learn the truth behind the communist utopia, or at least the attempts at a communist utopia after 1975 in Vietnam. A must watch I say. :)
I thought this was a beautiful satire of the communist movement in Vietnam. The party wanted to create a utopia in Vietnam , but always failed to do so. They committed numerous errors in trying to achieve their goal. This movie highlights the poor conditions of a farming village in Vietnam. They are very poor and they have exhausted the land around them. This causes them to travel very far to find land that will be suitable for farming. They are barely surviving. The circus comes to town and deceives the people. The villagers actually think the circus can make rice appear at will. They actually go out and search for gold to pay for the show instead of farming for their own rice.
The little boy in the film is a representation of the people. He is poor and has to take care of his little sister. His father beats him constantly and is a drunk. All of this adversity is present without the circus present. Once the circus comes to town they try to bring you in with propaganda, but they always fail to live up to what they say. That is the majority of people were in Vietnam. They were barely surviving and the communist movement came in and made promises that they never were able to make true.
This film, banned in Vietnam, shows another perspective on communism and its effects within Vietnam. This film provides a glimpse of life for the ethnic minorities that are so often glanced over in Vietnamese history and society. This allegory shows how the promises of communism brought little for the actual needs of the people living in the remote countryside. Like many other programs that had failed this communist reform sought to disrupt a system that was already working to keep these people sustaining themselves. With the new system hunger and rioting would ensue, much like the film where the promises of magic are revealed to be a fraud and the performers are chased out of town. Throughout the film you are able to get a feel for rural life and its many hardships. The village's chief provides an excellent example of the hardwork and perserverence that these people often embodied. The chief provides the diametrically opposed view from the performers and thus the communist government. A line that stands out from the chief goes something to the effect of 'you can't get something for nothing you have to work hard'. This shows that the people needed to keep to their traditional occupations and traditional farming patterns if they wanted to sustain themselves, and that any change could prove disasterous to their fragile system of life.
Im torn between whether or not Im saddened or frustrated by this movie because it blatantly shows how the Communisits treated the villagers. I guess it frustrates me because this trickery is portrayed in a pleasant and almost humorous tone. The use of magic, something that is normally used to entertain and bring people happiness was the very thing that brought troubles to the people of the village.
On the other hand I like this movie for the same reason that it outwardly expresses what the Communist did.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about "The Traveling Circus" is that the government of Vietnam ever allowed it to be filmed in the first place, let alone released. Of course, the film had only a limited release before it was withdrawn, but the fact that things ever got that far reflects a remarkably lax approach on the part of Vietnam.
The film itself is an allegorical commentary on the nature of the communist collectivization of agriculture in the countryside, illustrated through the use of a group of traveling performers who manage to take in a group of peasant farmers by pretending to produce rice through a painfully transparent magic trick. Taken in by the prospect of being able to feed themselves without the back-breaking labor rice agriculture demands, the farmers begin to neglect their crops to watch the performers, and in due course food shortages produce tragic results.
The filming style of this project seems to borrow from the low-budget "Spaghetti Westerns" of the late 1960's and early 1970's, but the tone of the films is more reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's early work than anything the Italian directors were producing. Despite the obviously limited budget, the film is strikingly moving, and potentially quite subversive in a society still ostensibly governed by communists. It probably deserves a much more prominent location in the lexicon of anti-communist film. Highly recommended.
The traveling circus was a very interesting film. One of the things I found most interesting about this film was how a well off traveling circus takes advantage of a struggling, poor village. The village doesn’t have anything, but once they see the circus perform their rice trick, they stop working in the fields. It was sad to see the little boy get pulled in by their tricks because he wanted so badly to be able to do the rice trick to feed his starving sister. He gave up a lot of his things to learn how to do their tricks. The circus where after the gold in the area and took everything the villagers had as well. What I don’t understand is that the villagers knew there was gold in the area, but choose to work in the fields when they clearly seen that working in the fields wasn’t improving their village. I don’t understand why they didn’t hunt for gold a few days, and switch on other days to work in the field. I think this would have benefited them a whole lot more. In the end I was glad that the villagers finally ran the circus out, but it was sad that the little girl drank the bubbles and died. All in all it wasn’t a happy ending.
I was surprised to learn that Viet Linh, the director of Ganh Xiec Rong, is a female Vietnamese director. However, after reading a little on her background—she studied at the National Cinematography School in Moscow and is influenced by both Soviet cinema and Fellini—the subtleties of the film began to make more sense. The Soviet Union during the 1980s was a fairly bleak period—the images that were shown in the west during this time were of drab and dreary people full of despair who were lacking food and basic commodities. These types of images run parallel to what is being portrayed in Ganh Xiec Rong, however while the settings in the Soviet Union were typically urban, the setting in Ganh Xiec Rong is the hinterlands of the Central Plains in Vietnam.
A question that was left unanswered about the film was the time period in which the film was supposed to take place. While Ganh Xiec Rong was filmed during 1988, the film itself seemed to be a period piece of a much earlier time—maybe 40-50 years prior but we do not see or hear of any French presence, then again we do not hear of a Communist presence either.
Personally I do not read as much symbolism into the film as some of the other viewers have. Rather than exhibit how the Communist Party treated the Vietnamese people, I think this film is more representative of how ethnic minorities were viewed by ethnic Vietnamese—as the villagers depicted in the film are from an ethnic minority and the traveling circus is comprised of ethnic Vietnamese. Ethnic minorities were and in some cases still are not considered to be full-fledged participants of the Vietnamese nation. According to Ronald Cima, “The living conditions of highlanders continued to lag behind those of lowlanders. In remote areas, ‘backward customs and practices’ remained unchanged, minority groups were insufficiently represented among cadres, and sorely needed resources for material improvements were lacking” (Cima, "Vietnam: A Country Study"). This is represented by how impoverished the villagers are, despite being located in such a wealthy area because of gold deposits. The villagers are forced to focus all of their labor on tending the failing crops in fields that are far from home due to poor soil quality in the lands directly surrounding the village. This village is in dire need of irrigation and land rejuvenation projects—if the latter is even possible. Typically the type of agriculture practiced in the highlands is slash-and-burn, which at times has a tendency to deplete the soil of necessary nutrients—this appeared to be the case in this film as the landscape looked like scrub land lacking any trees or forest land.
Sources:
Ronald Cima, "Vietnam: A Country Study," http://countrystudies.us/vietnam/36.htm
One well planned attribute of The Traveling Circus was Viet Linh's decision to use a minority group rather than Vietnamese from either the north or south. Although it probably made it easier than having to tie any of the specific differences in views on communism, and also helped it be produced and originally distributed under the communist party, it primarily shows how no matter what your view was on the war and new government, you were going to be affected. Heavily affected. Not only is most of the population badly hurt by the communist take-over, but under the false pretense that things will be much better. The movie symbolizes this with the villagers' belief that the miracle of rice will provide them with a better life, as long as they suffer first to take care of the group propagandizing such. In the end I think its relatively easy to see the parallels in this movie, so its banning I'm sure didn't come as a shock to many. Its a good film to show how many people surely felt after the end of the war: with the same or less hope than before and wondering if who really won what.
Another site that discusses Vietnamese minorities, with some specifics during the time just after the Vietnam war ended:
http://countrystudies.us/vietnam/36.htm
The traveling circus had an obvious message about the communist party, that they weren't actually helping anything. The circus leader was a man that was only out
for himself. This was shown by his willingness to give rice to the community as part of his magic act, but in no other way did he offer anything to the villagers. He chastised the girl circus performer when she was showing the little boy how the rice trick operated, saying it is a secret of the trade. He had no intention of doing anything lasting and good for the community.
One thing I found interesting about the movie was the state that the people were in when the circus arrived. I believe this is a reflection of just how impoverished the Vietnam economy was and how willing they'd be to accept something new even if it is nothing but false magic. When the circus arrived they could not even find the village and found the two main children sitting by their mother's grave in utter despair. If the circus was an upright business, they would have turned around recognizing that the town had nothing to offer, but the opportunistic leader of the circus kept insisting he could convince
the people to go to his circus and he wanted to find gold in the surrounding hills. The old man who automatically denounced all claims of the circus' miracles seemed to represent the older, and wiser Vietnam that had seen this before.
He had the tradition and tenacity of Vietnam that did not give in and saw the corruption that was happening in the communist party. I think he would have rather died of starvation than buy into the fleeting happiness that
the circus offered.
The circus girl in the movie irritated me. She was so naive to what she was a part of. The little boy obviously really believed she could teach him to tap rice into existence with a covered basket and a stick, any one with a head on their shoulders would have put
together the facts that the boy and his sister are starving and he actually needs rice. Instead of her realizing this, she accepts all of his gifts and when all he asks for in return is to learn how to make rice, she agrees. That is the point where she should have told the young boy it was all fake, but instead she takes it all lightly and was just going to show him how they perform the trick. It made me mad every time she accepted a gift from the impoverished little boy. She seemed to feel sympathy for the little boy , but she treated him as a cute little, pitiful pet of hers, similar to how she reacted when seeing the monkey. She seemed out only out for herself or a little slow. She stayed with the circus
leader because he was her benefactor and she craved fame, as shown by a dream she had where she was covered in glittering gold clothes performing. She did not
seem to actually be as nice as she appeared, unless she was really that naive as to what she was doing. The worst part was when she accepted the boy's little sister's monkey. The sister loved that monkey and cried when it was gone while the circus girl dressed it up in clothes and used it as part of the show. Another gift she accepted was the little boy's mother's old clothes, a tunic I think. It was so self-serving and a shame that the last thing the boy had of his
mother's was given to her. He seemed to be searching for a mother figure and simply by the girl being the boy's senior, she should have been the one to realize the corruption of her actions. She seemed to represent a corrupt official that sometimes empathized with the people, but overall was in it for herself. Perhaps another reason why she was depicted as so naive and superficial could have been sexism, or maybe a stereotype of Vietnam is that women in entertainment like her are all dumb and flighty. Another possibility is that the movie was trying to say that the corrupt officials similar to her were dumb and didn't know what they were really doing. Overall it was a great, and insightful film with obvious metaphors that really pissed of the communist party.
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