Organizer and Chair: Lan P. Duong, University of California, Riverside
Discussant: Louis A. Schwartz, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
Since its first independently produced film in 1959
(Chung Mot Dong Song), the Vietnamese film industry has undergone many transformations,
particularly in the last ten years when the trend towards co-productions and
transnational filmmaking has become especially marked. Looking at a diverse
body of films through an array of different genres (action, comedy, melodrama,
social realism), this panel proposes to examine postwar Vietnamese films against
a backdrop of censorship control, cinema laws, and the social and economic
upheavals that followed the end of the war. Taking as its focus films produced
in Vietnam from 1984 to 2006, the papers touch upon issues related to commercial
filmmaking, audience, reception, and the divide between low and high culture.
With an eye towards the political economy of the films and the social context
that informs them, the panelists interrogate the current state of Vietnamese
filmmaking as well as the films’ representations of the gendered subject. The panel’s
objective is to explore the filmic construction of subjectivities produced within
contemporary Vietnamese cinema and trace this emergent cinema’s impact
on local audiences, their viewing practices, and their sense of themselves
as actors within recent Vietnamese history.
Tess Do, University of Melbourne
Since the phenomenal box-office success of Bargirls in 2003, Le Hoang has
attracted controversial critics drawn to issues of social vices such as,
sex, prostitution and drug use among young people, notably women. Examining
Hoang's three girl-focus blockbusters, namely Bargirls, Street Cinderella, and
Thieves of Heart, this study sets out to explore his construction and representation
of today's Vietnamese young women. Despite the rather contemptuous attitude
certain Vietnamese directors and leaders in the cinema industry hold vis-à-vis
commercial films and their dismissal of them as purely entertaining and thus
possessed of no great value, one cannot ignore that by means of the construction
of the plot, the characters, their dreams and fates, such hugely popular
films reveal and reflect, to a certain extent, the fantasies and the desires
of their audience. In this respect, the popularity of Hoang's films among local
young viewers is a clear indication that his films have responded well to many
of their needs and aspirations, not only those of the entertainment seekers
but perhaps also those of the young adults in search for new role models or
answers to life's pressing questions about sexuality, identity, love, and relationships.
Therefore, the study of Hoang's trilogy and its focused portrayal of the
Vietnamese young women, their dreams, desires and fantasies, will allow us to
probe into and understand issues of gender, sexuality, class, power, and women's
(new) identity in Vietnamese cultural discourse. Given the great influence of
film on our lives, one should be reminded that Hoang's cinematic representation
of women can play a significant role in refueling and shaping the desires and
fantasies of his young viewers, indirectly making an impact on those who will
hold in their hands the country's future. A close, against the grain reading
of this representation, which makes for a plurality of interpretations, therefore,
will be necessary if a new, non-conventional, non-conformist view of women and
their roles in society is to be achieved.
Lan P. Duong, University of California, Riverside
This presentation focuses on three recent films: Khi Dan Ong Co Bau (When
Men Get Pregnant, 2004), De Muon (Hired Birth, 2006), and Hon Truong Ba, Da
Hang Thit (Souls on Swings, 2006). All set in Ho Chi Minh City, these farcical
comedies deal with the reproductive functions of women and feature the thematic
of body switching, both imagined and real. Commercially popular within Viet
Nam, the films re-imagine gender relations and sexual identities within the
Doi Moi era, upending gender norms and parodying social conduct in their bawdy
humor about the malleable body. Recreated cinematically are the preoccupations
of middle class and working class urbanites, concerns that focus upon the viability
of their lives and livelihoods and more broadly, of social and cultural reproduction
during a time of globalization. Yet, if the films show a subversive bent, they
are also conservative in the ways that they ultimately fix gender roles in masculinist
and heterosexist ways.
My presentation argues that these films engage with the anxieties and fantasies
of their young audiences. It explores the representations of gender and sexuality
contained within the films, laying out the social and historical conditions
that helped to generate these types of images found on the Vietnamese screen.
Crucially related to the construction of gender and sexuality is the way
in which Ho Chi Minh City – as an integral part of the films’ backdrop
and the financial site of their productions – is imagined to be a place
of exciting possibility and promise. The bustling city is critical to my analysis,
as it remains the site whereupon Vietnamese southern directors declare most
clearly the city’s urbanity not only to the Vietnamese themselves but
also to overseas communities within which these films circulate. At stake
here is a way of seeing Viet Nam premised upon a sense of co-temporality with
the West. Part of the analysis will thus stress the different ways that modernity
and tradition encounter the other, particularly at the crossroads between
the country and the city.
Louis A. Schwartz, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania
This paper explores the absent, or lost, male hero in modern Vietnamese culture
by discussing the radical female subjectivity that dominates Dang Nhat Minh’s
1984 film, When the Tenth Month Comes. As exemplified in Tenth Month, this subjective
point of view comes to define the possibility for a radical, private, or strictly “interior” definition
of the individual self—a point of view on the self at odds with traditional
(Confucian) Vietnamese culture, the folk basis for Vietnamese village life,
the conservative role prescribed for women historically within the family, and
the collectivism of socialist ideology. Nevertheless, this search for a private,
entirely personal basis for the “I” of the heroine is part and parcel
of an equally difficult search for the audience, or public interlocutor, to
the same interiorized, meditative individual. Duyen, the film’s “central
consciousness”, decides to keep secret the death of her soldier husband
from her family and her village; this radical assertion of an interior, private
relation to the “other” is immediately countermanded by Duyen’s
request to Zhang, the village schoolteacher, asking him to write a series of
fictitious letters from the dead man to his family. Read communally, these letters
become the catalyst for a series of situations allowing Duyen to redefine the
nature of the public audience to her very private grief. Exploring Duyen’s
search for a different relationship to the audience surrounding her, Dang Nhat
Minh profoundly questions the nature of the public sphere in contemporary Vietnamese
society. This paper will read Dang’s Tenth Month as a gloss on the Vietnamese “calling
up of souls”. Dang’s film uses this folk concept as a metaphor for
a mode of discourse, a new system of signs. But of course, the “calling
up of souls” is a concept that historically relates to the social politics
of revolutionary action in Vietnam. Consequently, in Dang’s film, the “calling
up of souls” is an elaborate outline for a different relationship between
speaker and audience—a redefinition of the interiorized individual within
a new context for public address.
Kim Worthy, Wagner College
Starting in the early renovation period with entry into global trade and
outside capital investment, the state sought legitimacy through reinventing
the nation with new promises of modernization, part of this imagined role
was as guardian against threats to “cultural authenticity” (Jayne Werner,
Gender, Household and State in Post-Revolutionary Vietnam). Film and television
production is busy in an industry fully awake to its place internationally,
with private movie studios and newly accredited young filmmakers working steadily
within Vietnam, while expatriates and others (including Oliver Stone), return
to partner with them. The state regime continues to pursue political legitimacy
through feature films granting viewers a sense of inclusion, especially with
a gendered construction of community, just as it has in previous decades. My
paper uses as a case study of these conditions a recent comedy (When Men Get
Pregnant, 2005, a private studio production) and action movie (The Rebel, 2007,
written, directed by, and starring overseas Vietnamese and with a European director
of photography). I argue that at the same time as they raise domestic and diasporic
expectations of a cinema that will compete globally, thereby conferring prestige
and connection to larger projects, even transnationally produced Vietnamese
commercial films suggest a continuing scrutiny of “Vietnamese values” through
gendered discourses and the enactment of citizenship rooted in loyalty to
authority. Conversely, even films produced entirely by non-overseas Vietnamese
that display increasing sophistication about encoding through genre soften those
discourses, and their resulting power imbalances, with humor and other conventions.
Resisting the values driving unbridled markets and clinging to ideological hegemony,
yet serving to distance younger audiences from state discourses through gender
roles and relations as well as artistic ambition, these films are two sides
of a unique iteration of non-Western modernity arising from the paradoxes of
state control.
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