The underground seen: moving images, heterotopias, and the postsocialist bearing witness

Abstract

ABSTRACT For seven nights in October 2016 an underground film festival took place in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam skirting existing structures of official media censorship. The festival brought together independent films and video arts from Southeast Asia that touch upon the subject of Western colonialism and its lingering traumas. The festival also redefined the meaning of audience engagement. Hosted at various obscure locations across the dense metropolis, the festival’s organizers required audience members to navigate traffic jams, endure inclement weather, check for real-time updates, potentially lose their ways, and rediscover agency in the process. This experience of intentional alterity with regards to authorization, obfuscation, and misdirection reflects the condition of state domination over collective memories, movements, and maladies. Michel Foucault posits the concept of heterotopia as a counter to authoritarianism and oppression. By heterotopias, literally ‘other places’, he identifies physical places, neither good nor bad, that are outside society's space and time, at once isolated and accessible. This essay examines the sights, scenes, and sounds of the Out of Frame Film Festival, whereby the strategic use of subaltern spaces for film screenings merges present lived experiences with previous dispossessions. I argue that the geography of movement and the out-of-way places intrinsic to the audience experience bear witness to the socialist past leaking into the present through the blurring of filmic narratives and lived environments. The underground is seen as the nexus where the confluence of ‘others’ and the process of ‘self-othering’ in ‘other places’ become an emergent political event.