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Abstract
Examining two Vietnamese films, one made in the North in 1959, and another produced in the South during the American War in 1971, this article contends that Vietnam's landscape serves as an affective site for a gendered construction of nationalism within key moments in Vietnamese history. In analyzing the attachments that the Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora feel towards their country, I explore a topic rarely discussed in US film scholarship and historicize these filmmaking efforts to demarcate a different way of viewing Vietnam in film. This study demonstrates the importance of understanding how gender and affect are projected onto landscapes in a national cinema like Vietnam's. More exactingly, it emphasizes that affects underlying Vietnamese nationhood and war are undergirded by the political economy of film and filmmaking. My arguments point to the modes of production and circulation of film, which shape the making of affect in Vietnam War discourse. My analyses are framed by the questions: how is affect inscribed in Vietnamese film, and what are its effects on notions of belonging and nationhood? In what ways has affect traveled about Vietnam in the past and present moment? Who is able to access such representations, and why does this matter?
Notes
1. Trinh T. Minh-ha (Citation1989, 201) discusses how with the advent of the Vietnam War film, “every spectator owns a Vietnam of his or her own.”
2. The gendering of Vietnam has been discussed by many scholars, particularly in relation to a literary character from the nineteenth century epic poem, Truyện Kiều, or The Tale of Kieu, by Nguyễn Du. The protagonist of this classic text is a self-sacrificing woman, who endures many ordeals and hardships in order to get her father out of prison and return to her family. Kiều is lionized for her filial piety and chastity for generations of Vietnamese, symbolic of how much a woman will and can endure for the (national) family. A Vietnamese national classic that can be recited by different classes in Vietnamese society and is still taught in schools today, the poem is an allegory for the story of Vietnam and its struggles with colonialism. On this point, see Bradley (Citation2001), Boudarel (Citation1999), Pelley (Citation2002) and Marchetti (Citation1991).
3. Robert Brigham (Citation2006, 50) speaks of the low morale of the South Vietnamese soldier caused by “inadequate leave, pay, food, housing, and medical care.”
4. I am inspired by José Esteban Muñoz's call to de-universalize the theorization of affect in the consideration of how affects are shaped by issues of race and class. Muñoz proposes something other than identity politics, however, in looking at ethnic minorities and affect. He writes, “What unites and consolidates oppositional groups is not identity but the way in which they perform affect, especially in relation to an official ‘national affect’ that is aligned with a hegemonic class” (Muñoz Citation2007, 68).
5. See Lịch Sị Điện Ảnh Việt Nam: Tập 1 (The History of Vietnamese Cinema: Volume 1) (Thanh et al. Citation2003) published by the Department of Cinema, in which the history of Vietnamese cinema largely begins with the founding of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRV).
6. See also Trinh (Citation1983).
7. John Charlot's essay on Vietnamese cinema has influenced my thinking on this point. He writes of the major characteristics of this cinema, which include a poetic sensibility in the ways that images and symbols are used (Charlot Citation1991, 47).
8. Here I refer to a body of work by third world and transnational feminists that looks at how a woman often stands in for the nation, particularly during moments of national crises in the global South. See anthologies edited by Alarcón, Kaplan, and Moallem (Citation1999); Grewal and Kaplan (Citation1994); Yuval-Davis and Anthias (Citation1989).
9. Films made about southern Vietnam during the war depicted ARVN soldiers as decadent and corrupt. In such films as Chị Tự Hậu (Sister Hau) (1963), they are to blame for the region's downfall. See also Charles Levy (Citation1992) and Brian J. Woodman (Citation2003).
10. Examining Việt Nam's visual culture in its representations of ethnic minorities, for example, Jonsson and Taylor (Citation2003, 163) argue that women's dress is bound to images of the nation. Within a hierarchical visual order, wherein ethnic minority women and their form of dress are marked as non-modern and outmoded, the áo dài on the Vietnamese woman represents nationhood and “often used to portray the modernity of the ethnic Kinh [the dominant majority].”
11. Carol Vernallis (Citation2004, 112) asserts that with the musical video, “the image's materiality assist in drawing the viewer to the soundtrack and encourages the viewer to follow the music as well as forge a visual path.”
12. In my interview with Chinh, she reveals that luck and her trilingualism—English, French, and Vietnamese—powered her own star power. Having acted in films in India and Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia, she was able to produce this film with some capital and be able to promote it outside of the country when it was released. This film garnered her an award for Best Leading Actress Award by the Asian Film Festival in 1973 when the film came out. Soon after the film's release, she left for the US where she starred in TV shows such as M*A*S*H, and became a leading actress in films such as The Joy Luck Club and Face but also in Vietnamese American films such as Journey from the Fall and Sad Fish.
13. “Pre-1975” DVDs featuring popular actresses such as Kim Cương and Thanh Nga are being re-packaged for the Vietnamese diaspora and currently sell for about $4.99 each.
Additional information
Lan Duong is Associate Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at UC Riverside, USA. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Temple University Press, 2012). Dr Duong's second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas: Imagining Nationhood in a Globalized Era, examines the history of Vietnamese cinema. Duong's essays can be found in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Asian Cinema, Discourse, and Transnational Feminism in Film and Media. Her most recent work is an edited anthology called Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders in Literature and Art (University of Washington Press, December 2013).