My father abandoned my family when I was three days old. There were no visits, no summer vacations, no holidays. He simply disappeared from our lives. The only connection I had with him growing up was the Super-8 films he left behind. These films, documenting his military service during the Vietnam War, sat in our basement in a brown cardboard box, waiting to be discovered.
Projecting the films onto our living room wall, my sisters and I discovered aspects of a war that seemed more like a vacation getaway to a tropical locale: swaying green palm trees, white sandy beaches, and fighter jets—dozens of them, grey and ominous—taking off and disappearing into a sweeping blue sky. The films became artifacts of my father’s past, offering clues about a man who was a stranger to us. My father appears only sporadically in the films, wearing aviator sunglasses and a fitted grey uniform. His presence is revealed only when an aircraft passes by on the tarmac, reflecting his image in the plane’s window as he holds his film camera like a budding filmmaker, only to disappear from the frame seconds later, just as he had disappeared from our lives.
Movies do not just mirror the culture of any given time," bell hooks observes in No Love In The Wild, "they also create it." Take the last reel of film from my father’s movies: jump cuts of makeshift wooden barracks surrounded by swaying palm trees, on the periphery of what appears to be a makeshift refugee camp for children. Encircling the camp is a barbed-wire fence, and pressed against its sharp edges are the brown faces of dozens of Vietnamese children, eight and nine years old, looking terrified, dressed in tattered clothes and barefoot. Their eyes plead with the viewer to save them from this dreadful place they are now forced to call home.
The images of these terrified faces haunted me then, leaving me with more questions than answers about my father: Why had he filmed these children? Why were they imprisoned? Why didn’t he help save them? And why had he left this for me to discover? Was this a form of confession? And if it was a confession, what exactly were his crimes?
Sonic memories are auditory riddles that use a complex language to transfer sensory knowledge to the listener. Lullaby to my father is presented as a lilting soundscape where memory splinters and mythology forms. It is, thus, a sonic memory of a missing father who left behind fragments of his past for his son to discover—fragments bound by dreams and unified at the center by the paradox of absence.
Authors Note: Introductory remarks to the film Lullaby To My Father at the San Francisco Art Institute Art Talk, Osher Lecture Hall, December 2019.
Lullaby To My Father has been screened & exhibited numerous film festivals and museums, including The Fotogenia Film Festival in Mexico City, (2019) The Center For New Music in San Francisco (2019), The San Francisco Art Institute (2019), the de Young Museum of Art in San Francisco (2020), The Interrobang Film Festival, Des Moines (2022), The Retro Avant-garde Film Festival, Venice (2022), The Darkroom Film Festival, London (2023), and The Northern California Museum of Art, Chico (2024).
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