The Propeller Group. The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music.

A collective, a ritual

The Propeller Group is an artist collective founded in 2006 in Ho Chi Minh City. It has three members: Phunam Thuc Ha, born 1974 in Vietnam; Matt Lucero, born 1976 in the United States; and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, born 1976 in Vietnam. They make films, videos and installations, often where art meets popular culture.

The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music is a film they made for Prospect.3: Notes for Now, a large exhibition in New Orleans, in 2014. It was shot partly in the studio and partly on location in the Mekong Delta.

The subject is funerals. Not solemn, quiet ones. The funerals of southern Vietnam, with brass bands, spirit mediums, professional mourners, and street performers.

In these funerals, grief and joy are not kept apart. There is weeping, then lively music. Someone kneels, then someone dances. The film does not choose between them. It lets both be present.

Real scenes and staged ones

The film weaves on location footage with staged scenes. Viewers cannot always tell which is which. A band walking through rice fields might be a real funeral, or a scene that was arranged.

The blur is not meant to deceive. It shows that the ritual is already a performance. The hired mourner performs. The medium performs. The brass band performs. A funeral is a stage, where a community shows itself how to see someone off.

This is also how The Propeller Group tends to look at culture: not standing outside to explain, but stepping inside existing forms and borrowing their language. Here that language is horns, drums, paid lament, and slow footsteps behind a coffin.

The images were shot in very high resolution. Colours are deep, light is vivid. Costumes, lamps and wreaths appear as sharp as in a musical. The collective does not dull that brilliance to make it look like a serious documentary.

The result is a film both close and strange. Vietnamese viewers recognise familiar sounds. Others see a rite unlike anything they know of funerals.

From the Mekong to New Orleans

The film includes Một Cõi Đi Về, a song by Trịnh Công Sơn, the songwriter who died in 2001. It is often heard at funerals in Vietnam. For many, the first notes are enough to recall past farewells.

The film also carries a familiar New Orleans tune. That city has its own funeral tradition with brass bands walking through the streets, starting slow and sad, then turning joyful. Making a film for an exhibition in New Orleans, The Propeller Group placed two traditions from opposite sides of the ocean in the same frame, and let the music form the bridge.

In 2015 and 2016 the film was shown in the Forum Gallery of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, organised by Amanda Donnan. In an American museum, far from both the Mekong and New Orleans, it still held the noise of a southern Vietnamese funeral.

One of the three members, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, went on to work with memory and farewells across continents, as in The Specter of Ancestors Becoming. But here everything is still music. The living need light. The dead need music. The title says enough.