Vietnamese Cinema Research Articles

Serial and palimpsest: landscape in Vietnamese cinema

This essay is a study of how landscapes are represented and what they signify in the work of three cutting-edge Vietnamese filmmakers: Siu Pham (1946-); Nguyễn Trinh Thi (1973-)’ and Phan Đăng Di (1976-). Although diverse in their methods and foci, their works share a thematic and politico-aesthetic concern for the Vietnamese landscape as an interface between historical trauma and expressive resistance. Through close readings of these experimental films, I distil a theory from their respective radical practices. Conversely, because of the significant interest in Japanese landscape theory (fūkeiron) among both Vietnamese filmmakers and scholars, I briefly review the major Japanese advocates of fūkeiron, not to ‘apply’ it to the Vietnamese case, but to expose fūkeiron’s internal inconsistencies and thereby further illuminate what the Vietnamese filmmakers have accomplished.

Personal freedom and societal expectations towards LGBTQ+: Audience insights into Vietnamese cinema's “Goodbye Mother”

AbstractThis study examines the cinematic masterpiece “Thưa mẹ con đi” (Goodbye Mother) by Trinh Dinh Le Minh, with a specific focus on its representation of LGBTQ+ themes, love, and identity. Utilizing a multifaceted research approach, which includes an in‐depth plot overview analysis, a substantial survey involving over 300 participants, and enlightening semi‐structured interviews, the study offers profound insights into the perspectives of its audience. The findings uncover intricate perceptions regarding family expectations, acceptance, and personal freedom, illuminating the film's capacity to challenge and reshape societal norms. Ultimately, this research highlights the influential role of cinema in cultivating greater comprehension and acceptance of diverse expressions of love and identity within the context of contemporary Vietnamese society, presenting significant contributions to both LGBTQ+ and media studies.

Transcultural Narratives of Vietnamese Landscapes in Literature and Cinema

ABSTRACT This paper establishes the theoretical basis for a special issue called ‘Vietnam Landscapes in Literature and Cinema,’ comprising five articles studying Vietnamese cinema and literature through the lens of landscape. This Introduction provides a historical overview of how landscapes were presented and utilized in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century and of the changes since 1945. It also describes the general framework of landscape criticism and reviews how the five articles fit within that frame. The Introduction also examines the (post)modernized, globalized, and transcultural contexts in which Vietnamese landscapes are represented and reconstructed in literature, cinema, and artworks.

Normalising Hồ Chí Minh in Vietnamese cinema, 1990–2020: Ideology, popular appeal, and the market economy

The article discusses the representation of Hồ Chí Minh in modern Vietnamese cinema from 1990 to the present. The first feature film on Hồ Chí Minh's life was produced only in 1990, 31 years after his death. Since then, 6 more films have appeared. I explore the reasons why there were no feature films about Hồ Chí Minh before 1990 and why they eventually began to appear. I address the filmmakers’ attempts to reintroduce Hồ Chí Minh, especially to younger generations who know of him only through propaganda depicting him as a celibate paragon of virtue and through viewing his embalmed body in the Mausoleum he had objected to. I argue that these cinematographic projects to promote Hồ Chí Minh to younger Vietnamese have done very little to develop, or even maintain, his personal cult, a cult that the state endeavours to exploit to (re)establish its connection to the people, to overcome a prolonged crisis of legitimacy, and to garner popular support for the continuing leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party. The market economy and openness to the world have inevitably undermined the Hồ Chí Minh cult and ideological constructs supporting it.

Assess the Roles of Film Development Policy in the Field of Vietnamese Cinema

Film development policy as well as other public policies are identified as tools for social management and administration of each country and each local. This policy covers a wide range of contents in many specialized fields of activity and plays a variety of roles in the country's social development administration. In this study, the author focuses on analyzing the role of film development policy through the two most basic contents of each public policy, and in this case: Directing and development regulating the role of cinema; Attracting subjects' participation role for cinematography. The research objective is to analyze and properly evaluate the actual situation and the role of cinema development policy in the development of Vietnamese cinema in the current period. By qualitative research method (through the synthesis of secondary documents) combined with quantitative research method (through surveying opinions of 170 managers of 21 film organizations in Vietnam). The author draws this research conclusion: Vietnam's film development policy has not yet promoted its role in attracting subjects' participation to develop cinema. These research findings are not only meaningful for the author in professional activities but also provide more scientific information for policy-making activities in the field of cinema in Vietnam.

The Roles and Representations of Women in Post-Doi Moi Vietnamese Cinema

<p class="p1">Depictions of women have long been employed in various visual media as a form of synecdoche for social concerns, such as the nation. Filmmakers in Viet Nam have been using this kind of shorthand for decades, for example through the retelling of the legend of the Trung Sisters, or in the ubiquitous tourist image of a young woman wearing the traditional Vietnamese costume (<em>áo dài</em>). Viet Nam is an interesting case in that the Confucian kinship model, which foregrounds the values of filial piety and the importance of male children, would seem to suggest that women are not important. In this paper, I will use film examples from the late 1990s (the period immediately after <em>doi moi</em>, or economic renovation, was introduced) to illustrate how women came to represent Vietnamese resilience and tenacity in a time of rapid social and economic change.

Rural - Urban Boundaries in Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema: A Look from Phan Dang Di's Films

Rural - Urban Boundaries in Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema: A Look from Phan Dang Di's Films

The Return of the Repressed: Uncanny Spaces of Nostalgia and Loss in Tracircgraven Anh Hung's Cyclo

Trần Anh Hùng is best known for three films: The Scent of the Green Papaya (1993), Cyclo (1995), and Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000), known as his Vietnam Trilogy. In this article I propose the notion of the return of a repressed, painful, and violent wartime past, which takes form narratively through a meditation on uncanny spaces—spaces of wandering, longing, anxiety, and loss.I argue that Hùng's Cyclo represents the return of themes that have been repressed in Vietnamese cinema and literature and in everyday life in general in Vietnam, until recently. Nostalgia and loss can now be expressed in film and literature, which was not possible until the 1990s. This stems from a reevaluation of wartime suffering occurring now, a generation after the end of war in Vietnam in 1975. This also results from a gradual easing of state controls on arts and media in Vietnam in the 1990s. Recent Vietnamese films and literature have begun to focus on the massive human costs and painful aftermath of the war. These are articulated through tropes of mourning, silences, and loss. My hypothesis is that the uncanny occupies a privileged place in contemporary Vietnamese visual and written narratives because of this “return” of themes that had been repressed for political reasons since the end of the war.Trần Anh Hùng was born in Vietnam in 1962. He and his family left as refugees at the end of the war in 1975. Cyclo, filmed on location in the first large-scale foreign production in Vietnam, marked his return to his birthplace. Hùng reembodies his torn Vietnamese identity through montage of spaces of poverty, crime, and loss. The chain-smoking poet, played by Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai, drifts silently through interiors that seemingly bear no relationship to the dangerous, grimy streets outside. I examine the spatial opposition between streets and interiors, and why Hùng focuses so strongly on abjection, silences, and failed articulation of desires. The figure of the poor, beautiful woman forced into prostitution to save her family is almost a cliché in Vietnamese fiction—and so is that of her poor young brother, who struggles for survival in a threatening urban underworld. I query whether these familiar narrative tropes of abjection provide new spaces for understanding the shift away from a war-torn society, or whether they replicate a persistent, romantic self-Orientalizing thread in modern Vietnamese fiction.

Vietnamese Cinema on the Move

“Where can I see this Vietnamese movie?” Try sitting on board a Vietnamese Airlines jet to Hanoi. In Vietnam, movie theaters have been replaced by multiplexes showing the latest American blockbusters. Foreigners are most likely to encounter Vietnamese cinema for the first time on the move, as they travel to the country, by selecting the World Cinema category of their in-flight entertainment system. Watching a Vietnamese movie will both distract them from the long-haul and give them a taste of their destination culture as they make their way there. Twice the displacement, experiencing Vietnamese cinema has become a vehicle for representations of mobility and an integral part of contemporary travel practices. This review will consider a variety of ways the mutual relationship between cinematic figurations of movement and processes of mobility have shaped Vietnamese cinema.

Review: Le cinéma vietnamien, by Philippe Dumont and Kirstie Gormley and Modernity and Nationality in Vietnamese Cinema, by Ngo Phuong Lan, Aruna Vasudev, Philip Cheah, Dang Viet Vinh, and Nguyen Xuan Hong

Review: <i>Le cinéma vietnamien</i>, by Philippe Dumont and Kirstie Gormley and <i>Modernity and Nationality in Vietnamese Cinema</i>, by Ngo Phuong Lan, Aruna Vasudev, Philip Cheah, Dang Viet Vinh, and Nguyen Xuan Hong

From Triumph to Tragedy: Visualizing War in Vietnamese Film and Fiction

This article explores ways in which post-war Vietnamese cinema and literature visualize the conflict and trauma of the American War in Vietnam. As Vietnamese writers and directors search for new creative forms to capture adequately the complexity of war experiences, they increasingly remove the conflict from the paradigms of triumph and victory to explore it instead within the paradigms of loss, suffering and trauma. By exposing and validating multifaceted individual war memories, they mount an effective challenge to the established official canon of war literature and cinema in Vietnam and serve as a powerful means of dissent. This article gives special consideration to the Vietnamese film Sống trong số hãi [Living in Fear], released in 2005, which attempts to reconstruct the genre of war film in Vietnam by accentuating humanism and downplaying nationalism and ideology.

Renovated: Gender and Cinema in Contemporary Vietnam

This article discusses the changes in Vietnamese cinema from the Socialist to the contemporary period from the viewpoint of gender representation. Under socialist conditions of cultural production, films were made by state-funded studios, with a clear mandate to provide the population with film material appropriate to the state's ideals. Since Doi moi (“Renovation”) in the late 1980s, Vietnam was opened up to market forces and cinematic practices have responded. Issues of gender have come into focus, and films exploring these themes have emerged from both state studios and private investors. Nevertheless conservative social values remain strong, and gender remains an area of dynamic uncertainty.

Laments of Warriors’ Wives

This article considers the representation of war in Vietnamese cinema by engaging in a gendered exploration of the legacy of war. By taking gender as an analytical category and cinema as a form of representation, the article examines the largely unexplored issue of the impact of war on female identity in Vietnam. Through the discussion of two recent Vietnamese films, Dòi cát (Sandy Lives) and Bên không chông (Wharf of Widows), the article draws attention to the contradiction between wartime empowerment and post-war disempowerment of women in Vietnam. It argues that, while representation of the de-feminized woman/soldier received much imaginative attention because it fitted well with state-sanctioned interpretations of the war as a collective patriotic sacrifice, the representation of the impact on female identity, on the other hand, was given little consideration since it conflicted with traditional gender configurations in Vietnamese society.

The Country of Memory: Remaking the past in Late Socialist Vietnam

Acknowledgments Illustrations Foreword John Bodnar Introduction: Situating Memory Hue-Tam Ho Tai Part One: Constructing Memory 1. Reading Revolutionary Prison Memoirs Peter Zinoman 2. Motherland Remembers Your Sacrifice: Commemorating War Dead in Northern Vietnam Shaun Kingsley Malarney 3. Museum-Shrine: Revolution and Its Tutelary Spirit in the Village of My Hoa Hung Christoph Giebel Part Two: Repackaging the Past 4. Framing the National Spirit: Viewing and Reviewing Painting under the Revolution Nora A. Taylor 5. The Past Without the Pain: The Manufacture of Nostalgia in Vietnam's Tourism Industry Laurel B. Kennedy & Mary Rose Williams Part Three: Gendered Memory 6. Faces of Remembrance and Forgetting Hue-Tam Ho Tai 7. Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema Mark Philip Bradley Afterword: Commemoration and Community Hue-Tam Ho Tai Glossary Bibliography List of Contributors Index

Vietnamese Cinema: First Views

Vietnamese cinema has only recently become known outside of the East Bloc countries. The first public showing of a Vietnamese feature film in the United States was that ofWhen the Tenth Month Comesat the 1985 Hawai'i International Film Festival in Honolulu. At the 1987 Festival, a consortium of American film institutions was formed with Nguyen Thu, General Director of the Vietnam Cinema Department, to organize the Vietnam Film Project — the first attempt to introduce an entire new film industry to America. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief description of Vietnamese cinema along with an appreciation of its major characteristics and themes. I base my views on my two visits to the Vietnam Cinema Department in Hanoi — for one week in 1987 and two in 1988 — on behalf of the Hawai'i International Film Festival. During those visits, I was able to view a large number of documentaries and feature films and to discuss Vietnamese cinema with a number of department staff members. I was able to obtain more interviews during the visits of Vietnamese to the Hawai'i International Film Festival in Honolulu. This article cannot claim to be an adequate introduction to the history of Vietnamese cinema, a task I hope will be undertaken with the aid of my informants and the sources I list as completely as possible.

Vietnamese Cinema: The Power of the Past

IN 1985 the Hawai'i International Film Festival showed Dang Nhat Minh's When the Tenth Month Comes (1984), the first Vietnamese feature to be shown at a U.S. film festival. A great success with both the critics and the public, it was nominated for the East-West Center Award for the film that best promotes understanding among the peoples of Asia, the Pacific, and the United States, and received a special honorable mention from the jury. The Vietnam Cinema Department sent the Festival staff a lacquer painting and let us know through our intermediaries on the U.S. Committee for Scientific Cooperation with Vietnam-Professors Judith Ladinsky and Stephen O'Harrow-that they were pleased with the experience. The next year, we were sent an earlier, less interesting film, Vu Dai Village in Those Days (1982). The HIFF Selection Committee felt it would be valuable to have some personal contact with the Vietnam Cinema Department and to view a large selection of features and documentaries for possible future screening. With the help of that department, the U.S. Committee, and the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok, I was granted a visa to visit Hanoi from July 7 to 13, 1987. Stepping from the plane into Vietnam seemed to me like a dream. Images of that country and its people have imbedded themselves deeply into our American minds and joined themselves with a mix of strong emotions. Here then were the men in their green pith helmets and uniforms and the women in their black pants suits and white conical hats, all moving gracefully in three dimensions and in a curious quiet. The grace and silence remain among my strongest impressions. Two young men from the Cinema Department-Nguyen Van Tinh and Duong Manh Hien-picked me up and whisked me into a car. Throughout