Vietnamese Cinema

Vietnamese cinema was dated back to as early as 1896 with French colonial films. The earliest film record in Vietnam was made by Constant Girel, a Lumière operator who had traveled to Sài Gòn as he was making his way to Kyoto, Japan in the same year. At the time, the film images of Vietnam and the Vietnamese people by the French were mostly for consumption in the metropole and thus were paid little attention to by Vietnamese film history books. The country considers the birth of a nationalist Vietnamese cinema coincided with the birth of a postcolonial independent nation. After 1945, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) established several decrees that allowed for the making of state-sponsored films. One of the first film clips produced was of Hồ Chí Minh’s declaration at Ba Đình Square of the independence of the nation. Solidified by northern Vietnam’s victory over the French in 1954, the postcolonial state ensured that film would be a major culture industry in the years that followed. Hồ Chí Minh signed into law a piece of legislation that declared Vietnamese cinema had two tasks:

Apocalypse Now left a deep mark on me. My relationship to it over the years has been ambivalent. I respect it as a work of art, and in some ways The Sympathizer is a response to that, but it embodies a very typical Hollywood way of looking at people who are not white, not American. People are reduced to being extras or sidekicks, at best, for narratives that center on white people, especially men. For the Vietnamese in particular, that meant they were there to be killed or rescued—or to have sex with. And that is deeply problematic if you happen to be Vietnamese. Hollywood in many ways serves as the unofficial ministry of propaganda for the United States. It was important to take time in the novel to criticize Hollywood and its fantasies, because they are a part of the war machine.

By considering a variety of films, in chronological sequence, I tried to make understandable the representations of Asians, and especially Vietnamese, by European and American filmmakers. While the themes changed from general war movies, through the depiction  of blood-thirsty veterans and patriots towards the view of the victimized service men, the representation of the Vietnamese did not change dramatically. Vietnamese soldiers and civilians are portrayed as cunning, cruel, even sadistic, ambivalent, and irresponsible. These articulations of latent and manifest Orientalism in American movies about  the Vietnam War are clear manifestations of a discourse which had broader consequences for the way Asians, or for that sake, Vietnamese, have been depicted. Where earlier movies showed a worldview, in which the Asian participants are reduced to simple pawns in a chess game between the superpowers, the post-1975 ‘Vietnam syndrome’’ genre betrayed a stereotype, which reified the Vietnamese as devious and unchanging. Even the films, which are considered to picture the war in more realistic terms, the framing of the Vietnamese did not change substantially. What changed was a manifest Orientalism, symbolized by stereotypes of the ‘‘Yellow Peril’’, but the representation of latent Orientalism of the so-called anti-war movies remained. Current American and French cinematic production on Vietnam is not coming to terms with the past. The re-issued Apocalypse Now, Redux is part of a ‘‘cultural memorial’’ to remember the war in contradictory terms.

One of the most serious problems with works addressing films about the Vietnam War is that, to some degree, they will always participate in the reduction of Vietnam the country to Vietnam the war. Where Vietnam is spoken of, it is always in the context of America, as half of an uneasy but seemingly indissoluble historical couple. To reduce Vietnam to the war between that country and America (a war that is significantly referred to as the “American War” in Vietnam), or to any war for that matter, is obviously problematic. Nevertheless, films about war have a unique ability to reveal important historical and cultural aspects of a people as a result of the necessary intersections of nationalism, art, and history that they contain. Because Vietnam has endured many wars throughout its long history, not the least of which was the American conflict, studying Vietnamese films that treat issues of war might be seen as instructive. […] When the average American thinks of films about the Vietnam War they no doubt recall canonized classics such as The Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1978), Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987), and Platoon (Stone, 1986). However, the recognized corpus of American films about the conflict fails to offer a complete and balanced picture of the war, even in the rare instances where these films feature Vietnamese characters. While American fiction films about the war have been duly criticized in recent years for their often blatantly stereotypical or derogatory treatment of the Vietnamese, such criticism does not adequately redress the striking absence of Vietnamese subjectivity in these films. […] While war as loss is one of the major tropes of American films about the Vietnam War, loss in [Vietnamese war films] is figured on a more material level. It is also significant that these films figure loss through strong women characters, the likes of which are almost completely absent in the canonized American films about the war. Women, as survivors, become repositories for national memory and mourning. The focus in these films on home and loss is particularly relevant to the Vietnamese cinematic style, which often privileges the poetic in order to express a sense of mourning and humanity. […] At the 1988 premiere of the Vietnam Film Project, director Dinh Quang responded to a question about the fundamental differences between Vietnamese and American films concerning the war by saying, “We’ve lived through 30 years of war, so we don’t have to relive it on the screen. Our films show the impact of the war on people’s lives and thinking. As for entertainment, we lost many, many people in the war. To use that for entertainment would be unworthy.” Dinh Quang’s comment speaks to one of the central aspects of Vietnamese filmmaking, namely an intense focus on humanity. […] In their choices of characters, stories, and settings, Vietnamese films always stress the relationships between people (families, villages, etc) because these relationships are seen as the threads from which the country is woven.

From the perspective of Western genre conventions, Dang Nhat Minh’s films have been read as melodrama. Marchetti (1991) argues that Asian cinema, including postwar Vietnamese filmmakers have transformed the Hollywood melodrama into a form that presents a critical discussion of characters’ historical, political, or social roles. Like the Hollywood melodrama, Vietnamese films often privilege the domestic and women’s lives, and Marchetti says that emotional excesses both draw in and distance the audience from the characters, encouraging critical viewing. Marchetti specifically reads Dang’s film When the Tenth Month Comes as an example of Vietnamese melodrama. Dang himself has objected to that reading, saying that the film genre is realism, “emotional realism,” and that country audiences, particularly women, responded not with distance to emotional “excess” but with intense identification to screenings of the film. One culture’s emotional excess may be another culture’s realism.