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“The first cinematographic screenings of the Lumière brothers in Paris awarded France with the glory of being the cradle of the cinema in 1895. In the meantime in Vietnam, the colonialists were employing all the energies in the organization of a system of exploitation of their colony. After the annexation of the whole of Indochina, brought about by the force of arms, they “permitted” us to work in the mines as from 1884: between 1896 and 1914, this allowed them to put together enough money almost entirely to finance the construction of a railway line running right down the coastline. This facilitated the transportation of the wealth which they had plundered to the colonial metropolis. In another aspect, the colonialists were using culture as an instrument of selection, applying the “politics of ignorance” as Paul Giran cynically wrote in his book, Psychologie du Peuple Annamite: “It is therefore necessary that each of our military successes is followed by the victory of the progress of intelligence over the unconsciousness of the Orientals”. This explains the attitude of the French colonialists towards the cinema, then in its early stages, which they considered as an instrument of “intellectual progress” of which they should hold the monopoly so that they could use it to their advantage. […] The cinema in Vietnam was also a source of profit; in fact the film industry in France prospered with Charles Pathé who had taken place of the Lumière brothers in 1897, and who had built the film studios of Vincennes, near Paris, coming in this way to dominate the international film market. With a production and sales capacity of 80,000 metres of film per day, in the period between 1902 and 1909, and with the control of 80% of the world market, thanks to its projectors, the Pathé company had established branches throughout the world, replacing the sale of films with film hire. French film capitalism invaded, little by little, all the colonies including Vietnam. […] As far as cinema production was concerned, the French government produced a type of newsreel, the contents and objectives of which can be easily understood today, as president Ho Chi Minh said: “In the time of the silent movies, the French colonialists used the cinema to discredit our people. At the Fair of Marseilles, they showed officials who prostrated themselves like servants in front of the officers, or men who pulled carriages, or old women who chewed betel nut between blackened teeth, or peasants dressed in rags or a simple loin cloth, … and all this was called “Images of Annam”. It was the type of film that the colonialists used to “civilize” the colonies.”

— Pham Ngoc Truong, Vietnamese Cinema: From its Origins to 1945, Dien Anh, vol. 28, April 1982.

vietnamese-cinema

“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.”

— Toward a New Canon: The Vietnam Conflict through Vietnamese Lenses by Laurel Westup.

vietnamese-cinema

“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.”

— Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Viet Thanh Nguyen (x)