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.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Vietnamese landscapes
• theoretical overview
• landscape criticism
• transcultural context

Introduction

There is a rich cultural and historical engagement with landscapes in Vietnamese literature, film, and art. This history deserves to be explored, researched, analysed and approached from a cross-cultural and globalized perspective. This has been the aim of the research from which the articles in this special issue ‘Vietnamese Landscapes in Literature and Cinema’ have been drawn. In organizing this introduction and the essays to follow, I have considered theoretical approaches that engage with, depart from, and enlarge the historical understanding of the landscape described above. First, I provide an overview of the history of landscape aesthetics in Vietnam, discovering and connecting the most modern and up-to-date studies and theories of landscapes in general and Vietnam’s landscapes, particularly in artistic works of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. The period after 1945 is analysed separately. Second, I examine these approaches in their relationship to landscape criticism. Finally, I offer an in-depth analysis of the various contributors to this special issue, and in a short conclusion look ahead to future research questions.

A History of Presenting the Landscapes of Vietnam through Literature and Cinema

Traditional Approaches

‘Cảnh quan,’ literally the scene or view of an area, or a vista, which might be translated as ‘landscape,’ was an essential subject for presentation in artistic works in Vietnam even before the country underwent an official modernization and Westernization process at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries (Hoang 2003, 111).

Premodern literary works [văn học Trung đại], heavily influenced by Confucian ideas, were profoundly interested in landscapes. Confucianism, with its a deep philosophical foundation based on the relationship between man and Heaven and the issue of human nature, is essentially a theory of moral cultivation aimed at creating ideal individuals and societies. In other words, it is a doctrine of social management through self-cultivation and adjustment, stabilizing human lives and spirituality among cosmic factors. From that starting point, the Confucian classics often refer to the essential characteristic of the Confucian worldview as ‘Heaven and Humankind as One’ [tianren heyi], where the Ch’i (Qi) or vital force infuses everything. The Confucian tradition advises people to cultivate their Ch’i through the practice of Li (ritual/propriety) and Yue (music), completing the cycle of cosmic resonance: ‘Rite is the order of Heaven and Earth; Music is the harmonization of Heaven and Earth’ (Kongzi 1999, 174). Human moral and emotional transformation both affect the universe, and vice versa, combined in an inseparable unity. When social order turns into chaos by the degeneration of morality, it will also cause disorder in the flow of Ch’i and result in disasters in the universe, according to a famous Han dynasty scholar named Dong Zhongshu (Dong 2016, 606).

Vietnamese literature primarily carries the original Vietnamized form of Confucianism, which combines indigenous beliefs, Taoism, and Buddhism. In explaining the uniqueness of Confucianism in today’s Vietnam, Nguyen Kim Son argues that:

‘the revival of Confucianism in the twenty-first century is not the rebirth of the general Confucianism, but the rebirth of a Confucian division which is profoundly Vietnamized, the rebirth of Vietnamese Confucianism with all the advantages and drawbacks that it has ever shown’ (Nguyen, K. S. 2003, 56),

and goes on to make an important observation:

‘The position of Confucianism and Confucius is also improving, but for the Vietnamese, it is still a process to honour Vietnamese tradition, but not to honour Confucianism and Confucius, although those two are closely related’ (Nguyen 2003, 56).

The ultimate goal is to praise the ‘plentiful cultural tradition‘ and nationalism in which the Vietnamese nation always presents itself as a righteous subject, protecting itself from the invasion of foreign powers.

In pre-modern literary notions of that time, scenes and landscapes were categories that alluded to reality. The process of composing was also one of ‘associating the scene with the mind’ because ‘literature aims to express not the real things but the spirit of a state where the mind and the scenery are integrated’ (Tran, D. H. 1998, 495–96). These authors, usually Confucian, saw the natural world as ‘no longer an engaging, objective reality, but merely a distinction that highlights the depth of the Way [Đạo]. Society now represents humanity, order, and the way of the world and humanity rather than life itself.’ (Tran, D. H. 1998, 28). The idea of ‘the mind’ which ‘rules the emotions and serves as a filter for scenes’, was at the core of literary writing (Tran, D. H. 1998, 441). In the crucial essay just quoted, ‘Reality, the Real and the Issue of Realism in Medieval Vietnamese Literature’, Tran Dinh Huou questioned a trend in Vietnamese social sciences and humanities in the 1990s: the efforts to modernize past cultural heritage, primarily through the search for ‘realism’ in the works of such authors as Nguyen Trai, Nguyen Binh Khiem, Nguyen Khuyen, and Tu Xuong. According to Tran Dinh Huou, since ‘all the beauty of the scenes’ had already been provided for in the writer’s heart, the ‘true’ objective of these authors’ ‘sceneries’ was not integrity with the scenery but instead with the mind’ (Tran, D. H. 1998, 442). The urge for political commentary concerning the people’s suffering remained a common impulse for all Confucians, even when the Confucians wrote about the ‘visible things’ (Tran 2008, 137). At a glance, the landscapes, details, and stories in the works in the late eighteenth century—early nineteenth century (when urban life began to appear) seemed to be vivid, realistic pictures (such as in Vũ trung tùy bút [Collection Written on Rainy Days] by Pham Dinh Ho, Hoàng Lê Nhất Thống Chí [Records of the Unification of Imperial Le] by the Writers of the Ng family, Thượng Kinh Ký sự [Travelog to Capital] by Le Huu Trac, and Truyện Kiều [The Tale of Kieu] by Nguyen Du). However, it can be argued that in many ways, the literary productions of this period still portrayed a formulaic, symbolic reality, which only served to ‘dispense compliments and criticism, and distinguish good from evil.’

It is clear that in premodern literary works, natural landscapes either took on the role of an abstract metaphysical conduit for moral ideas or of an exceptional being with boundless elasticity and circulation beyond human comprehension. The representation of a small person in the middle of rivers and mountains was a recurring motif in landscape paintings. It symbolized human respect, love, and enjoyment of nature’s protection and shelter, as well as the exaltation of the universe’s unfathomable beauty, the harmony between humans and the flow of the air and Earth, as well as humility and a lifelong sense of being small in comparison to the whole of creation (Sirén 1956, 62, 104, Dorothy 2013, 232). In this aspect, nature is a true home, a vast expanse of the cosmos. A form of common knowledge, a ‘truth’ repeatedly affirmed via poetry, music, and philosophy, indicated the consistency, integrity, and orderliness of the relationship between nature, humans, and culture in the native environment.

At the end of the nineteenth century, after the loss of ‘phong trào Duy Tân’ (‘the Aid the King Movement’—a reform campaign in Central Vietnam, launched by Phan Chau Trinh in 1906 until 1908, when it ended after being suppressed by the French colonialists), (Dinh et al. 2006) and with a new emphasis on cultural production and the modernization of Vietnamese education, arts became one of the most pressing demands. Along with the process of colonial exploitation, the French also introduced to Vietnam the French language, modes of transportation, urban lights, a textbook system, and works of literature and theatre in the Classical, Romantic, and Realistic genres, among other things. In their engagements with Western science, philosophy, and technology, Vietnamese writers entered a profoundly productive period that was ‘new and unprecedented’ in the country’s history (Tran. N. T. 2008, 634). Globes, photographs, electric lights, ships, railways, post offices, iron bridges, printers, newspapers, and other items from the industrial West gradually began to appear with increasing density in the poetry and literature of writers like Tan Da, Tran Tuan Khai, Tuong Pho, Xuan Dieu, Thach Lam and Nguyen Tuan, whose literary productions evoke speed, rationality, and secular life where humans were always at the centre of the world (Tran, N. T. 2008, 163).

The Vietnamese people’s ‘vision’ and position regarding the natural and social environments were altered by interaction with the West in the first half of the twentieth century. Instead of portraying a subject ‘looking at nature from the inside’ (Tran, N. T. 2008, 163) and immersing in the whole universe, literature and arts began to present a new type of individual, a less mystical and more secular or earthbound person, who occupies the centre of the literary frame. Here, the subject stands ‘alone’ in the world, distancing him or herself from everything else while simultaneously absorbing and internalizing the outside world. It can be claimed that the collision between Vietnamese writers and artists of the period and Western ‘material civilization’ and ‘spiritual civilization’ gave rise to an entirely new discourse of landscapes—an ‘alienated’ perception, production, and reality presentation. For the first time, the Vietnamese people saw a different world, a completely new model for life organization through the colonialists’ notes, recordings, videos, newspapers, novels, and other works. At the same time, it caused them to see their own world through the eyes of a stranger, an Other. Vietnamese intellectuals started to demonstrate their adaptability with works produced in French and English as well as translated works, learning from Western genre templates but adapting them to Vietnamese contexts and characters. For example, Ho Bieu Chanh wrote Chúa tàu Kim Quy [Lord of the Kim Quy Ship, 1923] based on Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) and Ngọn cỏ gió đùa [The Grasses under the Wind, 1926] based on Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Nguyen Trong Thuat based Quả dưa đỏ [Watermelon, 1925] on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). These authors used ‘unmistakable’ Vietnamese scenes and cultural practices (such as the villages and markets in Chúa tàu Kim Quy and the banquets in Ngọn cỏ gió đùa) to incorporate the vibrant life of the Vietnamese people and culture into Western stories. A process of active ‘localization’ of Western cultural environments lay behind this manipulation, organization, and imitation, with the local landscape serving as the primary source of the material.

Post-War New Approaches

If Vietnamese writers in the first half of the twentieth century were absorbing rich, new, and ‘modern’ experiences and modelling reality in new ways, authors writing after 1945 had to adjust to the general mechanisms of war and socialist construction. After 30 years of war (1945–1975) and ten post-war years (1975–1985), in 1986 Vietnam entered the period of Doi Moi reforms, the name given to the socio-economic changes initiated with the goal of creating a ‘socialist-oriented market economy.’ ‘Doi Moi’ itself is a general term with wide use in Vietnamese, meaning to ‘innovate’ or ‘renovate’, but in this context it refers specifically to the official policy that sought to transition Vietnam from a command economy to a socialist-oriented market economy. Economic innovation was carried out in parallel with other aspects such as administration, politics, culture and education (Beresford 1988, 10–20). During the Reform and era and since (1986–2023), literary works and state-sponsored war films have been continuously produced to commemorate historical days. To appeal to a younger audience, orthodox filmmakers tried to tell the current generation not to forget their fathers’ incredible feats and to send them ‘messages of humanitarianism and patriotism’ (Reporters 2018). The main content of these films is usually the fierce battlefield in the South and in Truong Son, the high mountains separating Vietnam and Laos where resources were transferred from the North to the Southern forces (Military History Institute of Vietnam 2002, 28).

In these governmental war narratives, writers and filmmakers often symbolized the battlefields and natural landscapes, which are turned into human monuments full of romance and epic deeds. We might call it the mainstream narrative of the war landscape, in which spatial elements are not considered independently, and the natural scenery is the frame that helps portray the heroes in the battle. In other words, the non-human world here is more metaphorical and symbolic than ontological. The natural beauty that no bomb or toxin can destroy seems to be born out of the people’s courageous, optimistic, and future-oriented souls. Its vitality is indicated in the famous verse of Pham Tien Duat, ‘The road to the battlefield this season is stunning,’ [‘Đường ra trận mùa này đẹp lắm’] or that of Nguyen Dinh Thi, ‘Seeing you on a high windy place /The red leaves fall in the strange forest’ [‘Gặp em trên cao lộng gió/ Rừng lạ ào ào lá đỏ.’] (Nguyen and Nguyen 2009, 297, 318) From this viewpoint, the environment always symbolizes perfect human Beauty, inscribing the image of soldiers onto the Truong Son landscape and immortalizing them. The lyrical Beauty of the natural landscapes also represents the ‘nation,’ homeland, country, and revolution.

Since the war's end in 1975, however, and mainly since the Reform period in the 1980s, a ‘tributary’ of different war narratives have emerged in Vietnam which tell the stories of forgotten or marginalized people, creatures and forests in the context of epic battles. In these ‘little stories,’ the relationship between man and nature in wartime is reviewed, re-evaluated, and questioned. It is portrayed as more profound, more painful, and more challenging. This is apparent in stories such as Người sót lại của Rừng Cười [The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, 1991], Cỏ Lau [Wild Reeds, 1993], Đời cát [Sand life, 1999], Truyền thuyết về Quán Tiên [The Legend of Quan Tien, 2020]. In these stories, the natural world is no longer associated with a stable idea or a fixed political position (‘us’, ‘the enemy’). Instead, it becomes immense, mysterious, and unpredictable, with its own identity and quality. Starting from Jean-François Lyotard’s idea of ‘petits récits,’ little and local narratives, I use ‘little landscape narratives’ to analyse narratives about nature in war—a different presence and story hidden by mainstream and popular narratives. This concept (petite narrative), in Lyotard’s words, describes a new mode of thinking that contradicts the idea of ‘grand narrative’, the great ideologies and philosophies which always have ‘the unifying and legitimating power’ of ‘speculation and emancipation’ (Lyotard 1984, 38).

As in recent years Vietnam has actively participated in globalization and developed a culture sector, a line of commercial films promoting tourism and beautifully framing local landscapes has blossomed. This is thanks to the assistance of the cultural management authorities and the film industry. On domestic screens, legendary Vietnamese landscapes have never been represented with such visual attractiveness and density. The landscapes of Vietnam become images that are always real, present, and inviolable. This is evident in such films as Chuyện của Pao [Story of Pao, 2006,] Cánh đồng bất tận [The Floating Lives, 2010,] Thiên mệnh anh hùng [Blood Letter, 2012,] Tôi thấy hoa vàng trên cỏ xanh [Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass, 2015,] and Mắt biếc [Dreamy Eyes, 2019]. Here, using the ‘picturesque’ element as a common denominator aids in attracting aesthetic appeal to both domestic and international audiences by isolating and embellishing rural Vietnam’s social and natural surroundings. This estrangement closely resembles the ethos of Western Romanticism, which sought a new, sterile country free of modern technology. In other words, these commercial films have ‘encoded the national identity’ through famous and clichéd landscapes—as if they were ‘postcards’ representing the national image—and then commercialized, mass-produced, and sold it to tourists from around the world (Thièsse 2003, 15). This is the most explicit expression of the so-called ‘culture industry’, whose techniques have been summed up by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in terms of ‘standardization’ and ‘mass’ production’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2012, 47).

In the meantime, Vietnam’s independent and avant-garde filmmakers have chosen a counter-current that is dialogical and sharply critical of mainstream films. They opt for dismantling famous culture-framed landscapes, veering toward dystopian, futuristic landscapes, and redefining the concept of ‘national identity in landscapes.’ In a broader sense, Vietnamese independent cinema is concerned with the ‘local natural landscapes’ of modern spirituality. However, this attention frequently questions, challenges and reorganizes existing filmmaking paradigms rather than attempting to standardize them. Films by independent filmmakers, such as Nguyen Vo Nghiem Minh’s Mùa len trâu [The Buffalo Boy, 2004,] Phan Dang Di’s Bi, đừng sợ! [Bi, do not be afraid, 2010,] Nguyen Hoang Diep’s Đập cánh giữa không trung [Flapping in the middle of nowhere, 2014,] Nuoc [Water, 2014] or 2030, and Siu Pham’s Con đường trên núi [On The Endless Road, 2017,] all demonstrate different aspects of ecological injustice in contemporary Vietnamese society. Instead of seeing a single, ideal ‘utopian’ world in those films, we only get to view various ‘dystopian’ settings. We behold thorny, gnarly fragments of a collapsing world, a degraded environment, and exhausted people, such as in the suburbs of Hanoi in Bi, đừng sợ! and of Ha Long in Đập cánh giữa không trung, the poor and lackluster northern mountains in Con đường trên núi, and the Southern rivers amid Nuoc/ 2030s global environmental crisis.

Independent films have perverted landscape aesthetics through such pictures, deviating from the physical limitations prescribed by the logic of the Hollywood visual viewpoint (the deep perspective with humans located at the centre). Independent filmmaker Siu Pham voices this trend, stating that she ‘stay[s] away from the conventional, common denominators of portraying sceneries and the often-accompanying situations’ (Reporters 2017). These works however have been criticized by many domestic journalists and critics via mainstream media/research channels as ‘distorting social reality’ and ‘being foreign and dark’ for not approaching reality from the point of view of Beauty precisely because of that drastic ‘deviation from conventional, common denominators’ of landscape presentations (Tieu 2011, Cam 2019). Although their work is not well received by the general public, these filmmakers have made independent efforts to raise powerful environmental warnings, as director Nguyen Vo Nghiem Minh did with 2030 and Siu Pham with Con đường trên núi, as did other writers with their ecologically inspired works like Nguyen Huy Thiep (Muối của rừng [Skogens Salt], 1986,) Nguyen Ngoc Tu (Cánh đồng bất tận [The Endless Field], 2005,) Nước như nước mắt ([Water Like Tears], 2010,) and Do Tien Thuy (Con chim Joong bay từ A đến Z [The Joong Bird Flying from A to Z], 2017.) These are glimmering signs of an impending shift in the Vietnamese audience, enabling them to gradually awaken and confront the severe environmental deterioration in landscapes in Vietnam’s post-human period.

The Implications of Modern Criticism of Landscapes: A Conversation with ‘the History of Vietnam’s Landscapes’

Since its inception, the study of landscape criticism has been profoundly interdisciplinary. The geo-cultural field sits at the nexus of the humanities and geographical sciences, environmental sciences and architecture, and social history and aesthetics. It is closely related to the study of space as a component of artistic poetry.

When defining ‘landscape’ as a geographical category, John Wylie in his extensive survey and reflection on landscapes titled Landscape: Key Ideas in Geography makes a straightforward statement that landscapes have often been thought to exist as objective realities:

‘Landscapes are the topographies we see and the terrains we travel through: the fields, the cities, and the mountains. They may be mapped and described factually and objectively’ (Wylie 2007, 6).

Here, Wylie impresses on the reader the conventional idea that ‘landscapes’ exist as passive, static, ahistorical, and unchangeable places that are always there for people to ‘pass by and look at,’ classify, and study in the vocabulary of geographic science. Going on, however, Wylie immediately qualifies such an understanding of landscape, saying,

‘the dictionaries state that a landscape is “scenery”—something viewed by an eye; that is, by one person. A landscape is thus not just the land itself but the land as seen from a particular point of view or perspective. (…) In other words, while being linked in one way to what are usually called objective facts, to the real world “out there,” the landscape is also found in the eye of the beholder. That is, the landscape takes shape within the realms of human perception and imagination,’ (Wylie 2007, 7), which is the position that was taken in the 1990s when the Landscape Convention of the Council of Europe was conceived and drafted.

With this in mind, Wylie states that we might think of landscape as the tension between ‘proximity and distance, body and mind, sensuous immersion and detached observation’ (Wylie 2007, 1). Furthermore, he asks: ‘Is landscape the world we are living in, or a scene we are looking at, from afar.’ From this perspective, through the analysis of Cezanne’s conception of the landscape, statement can be considered an interesting answer to Wylie’s question: ‘observer and observed self and landscape, are essentially enlaced and intertwined in a ‘being-in-the-world’ that precedes and preconditions rationality and objectivity’ (Wylie 2007, 3).

As such, the dual nature of the concept of ‘landscape’ is exemplified; it is both ontological and epistemological, both the phenomenon itself and our perception of it, both objective/rational and subjective/feeling-oriented, both real and imagined and a component of both ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ A landscape is no longer ‘it’ in the Kantian sense of a ‘thing in itself’ or a being in itself, after it has been refracted and represented on paper or on-screen and then interpreted again through the eyes of the observer, eyes which can never see outside of a cultural frame. Because ‘how we look at things is a cultural matter; we see the world from particular cultural perspectives, the ones into which we have been socialized and educated’ (Wylie 2007, 7). Therefore, studying landscape involves thinking about how our gaze, our way of looking at the world, ‘is already laden with particular cultural values, attitudes, ideologies, and expectations’ (Wylie 2007, 7). Suppose we shift our perspective from seeing the landscape as a single, static, fleeting thing to seeing it as a process of ‘construction’ or ‘creation’ of a new reality. In that case, we can take a more fascinating and contentious approach. As Cosgrove put it, ‘Landscape is not just the environment we view; it is our synthesis, a composition of that world’ (Cosgrove 1984, 13).

According to a contemporary viewpoint, landscapes have the potential to represent practically everything, as do spaces: land, gardens, memories, feelings, identities, nationalism, ecology, sustainability, utopia, anti-paradise, power, alienation, etc. From an ontological perspective, the landscape is always associated with ‘spatial experience’ (Tilley 1994, 11), ‘cultural image’ (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988, 11), and ‘time materializing’ (Bender 2002, 103). Landscapes can express emotions and create the identity and essence of individuals, communities, and nationalities locally and globally. More than simply a setting, a landscape often becomes one of the artwork’s protagonists, establishing the cultural ‘atmosphere’ and the potential and dynamics of the narrative. In this case, ‘the reader/viewer will have the opportunity to associate, compare and interpret parallel narratives: one from the landscape and other from work being viewed/reading’ (Nguyen, N. 2015, 306).

We can recognize as a contemporary feature of landscape criticism the placing of a high value on the subject’s emotions and mental state and on the author’s and the audience’s own agency in creating and destroying, mythologizing and de-mythologizing landscapes. This underlines the necessity of understanding the landscape as intrinsically reflected by internal drives rather than as something completely autonomous and objective that is ‘far out there where the crawdads sing’ (Owens 2018). Emphasizing the ‘imagination’ as an indispensable agent in the production of landscapes (in architecture as well as in literature), Gareth Doherty asserts that ‘Literature might be said to be a form of designed writing in the same way that landscape architecture is designed environment or designed space, where design is the act of imagining’ (Doherty 2015, 13). The subjectivity and inherent qualities of the writer or landscape designer are profoundly connected to the imagination.

According to Ingold, a landscape.

‘in short, is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand, taking up a point of view of our surroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive involvement in the landscape that the human imagination gets to work in fashioning ideas about it’ (Ingold 1993, 171).

Ingold also emphasizes that it is human interactions that create landscapes, and landscapes develop along with ‘taskscape’:

‘the forms of landscape arise alongside those of the taskscape, within the same current of activity. If we recognize a man’s gait in the pattern of his footprints, it is not because the gait preceded the footprints and was ‘inscribed’ in them, but because both the gait and the prints arose within the movement of the man’s walking’ (Ingold 1993, 162).

Thus de Certeau, Doherty and Ingold share a similar view: a place (like a street) is transformed into space thanks to the humans (like pedestrians) who continuously interact in it, similar to ‘an act of reading is the same as the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e. a place constituted by a system of signs’(Certeau 1984, 117).

While deeply interested in landscape as an ‘aspect of the environment,’ the American geographer J. B. Jackson argued that there are two ways of reading this exciting object: look for differences (like the professionals/academics) to mould them into concepts/categories or look for similarities between landscapes (like the amateurs), to perceive ‘the universal which presumably lies behind diversity’, which explains why Jackson was ‘interested in the history of the American landscape’ and suggests that ‘landscape represents the last and most grandiose attempt to create an earthly order in harmony with a cosmic order’ (Jackson 1979, 154). For him, perhaps landscape research is always a combination of the general and the particular, the similar and the different, the universal and the historical, because the landscape is not a scenic or ecological entity but a political or cultural entity, changing in the course of history. From this perspective, the landscapes recreated in film and literature are always closely related to the discourses of national and indigenous traditions and identities.

Anne Marie Thièsse provides valuable insights on this issue:

‘If we can immediately connect a landscape with land, we should thank those who made a massive deed of national coding identity in the nineteenth century. Painters, poets, and novelists stylized and valorised the symbolic landscapes of nations, which are thought to be their embodiments’ (Thièsse 2003, 35).

In this regard, which landscapes are ‘coded’ to ‘represent’ the Vietnamese national spirit in the works of Vietnamese and foreign authors? Commenting at the symbolic level, Thièsse observes: ‘Similar to historical icons, symbolic landscapes become the objects of fine arts and literature, and later are widely popularized in photographs, postcards, and billboards’ (Thièsse 2003, 15).

In a paper on the film Hạt mưa rơi bao lâu [Bride of Silence] by Vietnamese-German director Doan Minh Phuong, Nguyen Nam argues that the landscape ‘holds an important role in composing the narrative of a movie, yet at times it is scarcely studied by the scholars’ (Nguyen, N. 2015, 307). With an intertextual-intercultural approach to a cinematic work, he also asserts that:

‘When implanted into movies as an integral part of narratives, these landscapes become the artistic codes perceived by the audience, and also transform into socio-historical codes only definable and solvable by those familiar with them. Otherwise, the layers of cultural-historical meaning in the landscape will patiently wait in silence for a soulmate’ (Nguyen 2015, 307).

On the two aspects, he proposed—artistic and cultural-historical code—a ‘landscape’ can be understood as a system of special symbols that lay the basis for readers to decipher a work. From a more macro perspective, landscapes always come with stereotypes and imaginings of cultural customs, practices, and behaviours; to speak of landscapes is also to discuss how the authors ‘present’ different discourses about the so-called national tradition to the audience.

From an epistemological perspective, the perception of landscape in movies or stories as a form of text and of ‘reading’ landscape in artworks as an intertextual manipulation is a relatively flexible and modern perception. In a context where, as Julia Kristeva observes, ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (Kristeva 1986, 37), each reader must establish for himself or herself an intertextual network (more broadly, an ‘intercultural network’) to find a way to penetrate, deepen, and decipher the contextual grammar in the texts. Of course, one’s ability to utilize the cultural background to interpret various semantic levels in artistic creations depends on their cultural background. In essence, this is a basis rather than a method for analysing landscapes, allowing for realizing the intricate connections between one landscape (the text) and other landscapes (texts). In this way, the author and the reader are viewed as agents navigating the complex webs of meaning-making and spatial construction to associate, select, organize, and produce fresh perspective-driven texts. Readers and viewers are, therefore, given more weight in landscape criticism since they are the ones who develop new ways to understand the landscape system, enhancing its significance and ensuring that its vitality never wanes.

A place where literature or cinema is concerned with a particular landscape can immediately become an agent in preserving or presenting that landscape to the mass audience—people who know the landscape through reading stories or watching movies (Doherty 2015, 17). In other words, their ways of expressing and producing landscapes, literature, and cinema create reverse impacts on the ecological and social environment. Writing on East Asian literature, Karen Thornber pays particular attention to ‘ecological urbanism,’ suggesting that literature ‘has a poetic agency and the capability of changing collective consciousness’ as well as changing attitudes towards the built environment (quoted in Doherty 2015, 18).

From all the reflections on landscape in theoretical perspective mentioned above, it should come as no surprise that Landscape Criticism has proliferated in a variety of areas, critically engaging with (among others) literary/cinematic cartography, narratives of landscape systems; landscape and mindscape; landscape, trauma, and therapy; landscape ecology, urban landscape, sustainable development and landscape as a cultural (re)construction in the globalizing age, and gender studies. From landscape theory, we can also explore ideas about place, location, scale, and point of view and discuss the influence of landscape tectonic patterns that have influenced the centuries and many countries (e.g. plantation model, rural model) through literature and art. Investigating landscape experiences in literature and film in light of variations in class, gender, education, personality, power relations, and landscape designs is another crucial topic. A landscape can be viewed as a literary work from an architectural standpoint (its organization resembles a poem or a story, which has its grammar and overwrites other texts that remain as traces, evoking the idea of landscapes as palimpsests). Literature is occasionally used as a substitute for landscapes (a poem that resembles a tree, whose lines are branches, for example).

Unfolding the ‘Microhistories’ of Vietnam’s Landscapes in a Cross-cultural Context

We can see significant potential in this research direction through landscape theory in and with Vietnam. But while landscapes play an important role in artistic practices and academia in Vietnam, landscape criticism and human geography are still relatively new, and have yet to be given due attention in Vietnam.

The twenty-first century, the global century of colossal migration flows, continuing industrial-technological evolution (so-called ‘4.0’), climate change and the Covid pandemic, forces us to revisit and rethink geo-political and geo-cultural issues, the perception and construction of boundaries, and the positioning and repositioning of people in the world. When considering landscapes in relation to a nation’s identity and the cultural industry, we should understand that Vietnam is in an interesting cultural situation and position, where layers of ideologies and ‘traditions’ fuse with one another and where national narratives overlap and crisscross through the complicated history of colonization, decolonization and globalization. The geo-cultural challenges in Vietnam are presented more harshly than ever in the complicated set of a globalized era, which is situated at the complex confluence of capitalism, socialism, and long-standing Confucianism. This circumstance is important to artists and researchers because it offers opportunities for new understandings of human geography and the place of the arts in our conception of material spaces. The relationship between ‘discourses on the landscape’ and ‘national identity,’ from neo-historicist and cultural studies perspectives, touches on the current principal humanities and social sciences issues in Vietnam, going beyond the limits of post-colonial research or the approaches of cultural anthropology and aesthetics.

By acknowledging themes of modern landscape theory and human geography, and applying these to readings of literary and cinematic sources as well as to related data/texts, this special issue, titled Vietnamese Landscapes in Literature and Cinema, investigates how the Vietnam’s landscape is being presented/represented and interpreted/reinterpreted through modern and contemporary arts both inside and outside the country. Drawing on literature, cinema and visual arts, the issue explores the understanding of Vietnamese landscapes in their relationship to popular culture, gender studies, psychology, medicine, education, and urban planning. It also examines the ideological structures and historical positions underpinning these relationships.

Three articles by Nguyen Thi Thu Thuy, Le Nguyen Long, and Tran Thi Thuc discuss the formation and restoration of Vietnam’s landscapes from the perspectives of post-colonial theory and nationalism hold a significant position in this collection.

Among the many travelogues by foreign authors, especially the French, about Vietnam during feudal and colonial times there is an exciting but little-known material from Russian writers. Therefore in the same genre of travel literature, this collection includes ‘Looking East: Constructing an Image of Vietnam in Russian Travel Writings of the Later Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’. In this article, Nguyen Thi Thu Thuy analyses Vietnam’s landscapes from the perspective of Russian travellers and examines how Russian and Vietnamese identities are constructed in Russian travel writing on the French colony. These travelogues are analysed as somewhat different observations, mainly due to the positionality of the authors. Russian travelogues on Vietnam from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide a ‘version’ of Vietnam seen from the ‘outside,’ through which readers can simultaneously identify the personal and national identities of the travellers and the Vietnamese identity through their perspective in dialogue with each other. This dialogue process constitutes a spatial re-creation and identity recreation for Vietnam and the Russian writers themselves. Notably, the article also shows that these travellers became engaged in a dialogue that more or less transcended the power inequality in knowledge production about Vietnam in the colonial period.

While sharing the same interest in landscape in the travelogue genre, in ‘The Politics of Travel Writing: Pham Quynh’s National Project and the Landscape of the Imperial Capital at Hue, Vietnam’, Le Nguyen Long examines Pham Quynh’s early twentieth century travel chronicles in the Nam Phong Journal. These are not simply travel-writing, but also a component of nationalist Pham Quynh’s nation-state project. The landscapes in his essays subtly reveal a power dynamic in which the observer strives to combine elements from other settings to forge a single identity and create a united front against the ‘Other.’ At the same time, the observer fails to conceal his imperialist outlook by seeking to render silent and submissive those individuals under his supervision, as if they were waiting for him or her to conquer and own them. The settings in these travel pieces depict the intense contradictions between Pham Quynh and the many ideological currents of the time.

In the article ‘Cultural Landscapes of Vietnam and Japan from Young People's Viewpoints in Under the Same Sky,’ Tran Thi Thuc studies the representation of Vietnam’s landscapes in connection to the film’s suggestion that love is the discourse connecting memories and the present, war and peace, and past and future. This article shares the same concern about the perspective of an ‘outsider’ towards Vietnam. In the film, the rural North Vietnamese countryside and the urban Hanoi streets are brilliantly displayed against a modern backdrop using human senses and emotions. We meet a young foreign traveller, in this case Japanese, who has no prior knowledge of Vietnam’s country or population, and is utterly shut off from the two resistance wars of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and is unfamiliar with Vietnamese traditions and ways of life. From the joint viewpoint of both Japanese and Vietnamese filmmakers, this article approaches Vietnam’s landscapes in the 2017 film Under the Same Sky (directed by Vu Truong Khoa, Dao Duy Phuc, and Matsuda Ayato) as a multicultural entity in the process of reproduction. It identifies landscape representation in this international collaboration as an exciting strategy in cultural diplomacy.

In a different geographic context, author Nguyen Thi Nam Hoang focuses on monitoring and presenting/representing indigenous landscapes based on the cultural construction of regions and places. The article ‘Water in the Artistic Representation of the Landscape of Southwestern Vietnam—The Case of The Abandoned Field, The Buffalo Boy and The Floating Lives’ links and re-imagines the landscapes of the Southwest region through water. a geo-cultural element that has become a familiar theme of Vietnamese cinema. Analysing the water element in these films, the author shows the representation of southwestern Vietnam’s landscapes on several different levels. Water is shown to be used as a central element of the creative space, a regional cultural code, and a historical witness, and points out the similarities and individual contributions of each film to dissecting the landscape as a common element for establishing the artistic values of cinema.

Finally, with the same interest in geospatial landscapes and neo-historical approaches to landscapes, Tran Ngoc Hieu, in the article ‘The Red River’s Mid-Island: Sketching an Alternative Narrative History of Hanoi’s Identity,’ analyses recent films set in the Red River (Bi, đừng sợ [Bi, do not be afraid!]; Tâm hồn mẹ [Mother’s soul]); Đập cánh giữa không trung [Flapping in the middle of nowhere;] Đảo ngọc, Sông Hồng [Green Pearl Island,], along with several photographic and literary works, to understand ‘the middle island’ of the Red River as a discursive construct. The discourses that shape our conception of the island engender in some the desire to erase it and also anticipate the feelings of regret that will follow should that desire be fulfilled. The essay also explores gender expression norms and power dynamics in urban settings, drawing on Tran Ngoc Hieu’s research on the Three Gorges Dam in China.

Conclusion

The organization and publication of a special issue on Vietnamese landscape criticism is a significant turning point in studying and applying new comparative approaches to literature, cinema and arts in Vietnam. At the same time, these are the initial steps of a long process of developing a ‘landscape knowledge system,’ ‘landscape culture,’ and ‘landscape dialogues’ between Vietnam and the world in a cross-cultural and globalized context.

Through analyses and critical readings of aesthetic expressions and political discourses in literature, cinema and the visual arts by American, Russian, French and Vietnamese writers, filmmakers and artists, the articles in this collection pose questions regarding the ambiguous and de facto spatial awareness of the public, which is continuously and profoundly affected by the distribution of social power. Is it possible to recognize through arts and culture a ‘landscape history’ of Vietnam throughout modern times, running parallel to the history of colonization and decolonization? Which ‘national landscapes’ and ‘historical fragments’ have not been told/represented? ‘Absenteeism’ is sometimes an active state of non-existence, according to a rather unique ‘defence mechanism’ of Vietnamese arts in the post-socialist and globalization era, so it can be asked what has been absent from Vietnamese artistic life then and now? Moreover, after being ‘absent’ in one period yet present in another, how is a landscape, or more precisely, the narrative about a landscape, represented in artistic life? Where and how are the narratives about the landscapes of one’s ‘homeland’ represented during the creation of national identity in popular culture (compared to elite culture)? When does ‘national identity’ become a concept ‘commercialized’ and ‘mass-produced’ for the multi-purposes of contemporary art? Do narratives about national landscapes at the centre devour and traumatize holders of narratives at the periphery? As the discourses of ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘development’ have long been at the centre of landscape concerns, how does the post-trauma of groups affected by landscape change or destruction unfold over time?

Questions such as those include considerations of postwar traumas, feminism, the public sphere, mass consumption, social inequality, and political regimes concerning Vietnamese landscapes in the context of globalized cultural production. In the future, we would like to work more closely with domestic and foreign literature, films and art researchers to develop further and expand the ‘horizons of expectations’ and ‘horizons of creativity’ offered by interdisciplinary studies. In this manner, we hope these contributions to Vietnamese and landscape studies spur further and more diverse work in these exciting research areas.

Note

All translations of Vietnamese texts into English in this paper, if there is no specific notification, are the author’s own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was solely funded by VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi, under project number USSH-2023.21.

Notes on contributors

Hoang Cam Giang

Hoang Cam Giang is currently a tenured lecturer, Associate Professor and Head of the Arts Studies Department in the Faculty of Literature, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University (USSH-VNU), Ha Noi. She received her Ph.D. from VNU in 2013 majoring in theory of literature, and previously in 2010 gained a certificate of film writing from the Film Studies Program sponsored by Ford Foundation (USA). She was a Harvard-Yenching Institute‘s Visiting Scholar for 2018–2019 and a Harvard Asia Center’s Visiting Scholar for 2019–2020. In recent years, she has been interested in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches in cinema and literature, such as adaptation, translation studies, ecocriticism, and landscape studies. In these areas, domestically and internationally, she has published three monographs and more than 50 essays/articles on global cinema/arts,