The Cold War and Asian Cinemas

Poshek Fu, Man-Fung Yip

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429757297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book offers an interdisciplinary, historically grounded study of Asian cinemas' complex responses to the Cold War conflict. It situates the global ideological rivalry within regional and local political, social, and cultural processes, while offering a transnational and cross-regional focus.

This volume makes a major contribution to constructing a cultural and popular cinema history of the global Cold War. Its geographical focus is set on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. In adopting such an inclusive approach, it draws attention to the different manifestations and meanings of the connections between the Cold War and cinema across Asian borders. Many essays in the volume have a transnational and cross-regional focus, one that sheds light on Cold War-influenced networks (such as the circulation of socialist films across communist countries) and on the efforts of American agencies (such as the United States Information Service and the Asia Foundation) to establish a transregional infrastructure of "free cinema" to contain the communist influences in Asia.

With its interdisciplinary orientation and broad geographical focus, the book will appeal to scholars and students from a wide variety of fields, including film studies, history (especially the burgeoning field of cultural Cold War studies), Asian studies, and US-Asian cultural relations.

Part I
Transnational Connections

1 Art in Propaganda

The Poetics and Politics of Vietnamese Revolutionary Cinema

Man-Fung Yip

With few exceptions, Vietnamese revolutionary cinema has received virtually no attention in English-language scholarly literature. This dearth of interest is due in part to lack of access: with the exception of a few art-house hits by Tran Anh Hung or by overseas Vietnamese such as Tony Bui and Nguyễn Võ Nghiêm Minh, Vietnamese films, and those from the 1960s and 1970s in particular, have not been widely available outside of Vietnam and thus have been ignored by historians and film scholars alike.

But there are perhaps deeper reasons for the critical disregard for the films. For many people, Vietnamese revolutionary cinema, operating under the control of a socialist regime and identifying closely with its policies and ideologies, is mere propaganda not worthy of study. More broadly, there is also a lack of interest in Vietnam as a sovereign nation with its own history and cultural distinctiveness. For a long time, Vietnam had been taken simply as a mirror to the international threat of communism and/or American failure. It is true that in the United States, copious films have been made about the Vietnam War—or the American War rather, as the conflict is known in Vietnam—and much has been written and discussed about these films. Yet this seeming attention to the conflict has never been much about Vietnam or about the war per se. Instead, it is first and foremost about the United States, specifically its Cold War fantasy of American exceptionalism or, contrarily, its ideological crisis following a long and traumatic war experience. In this context, the “Vietnam” represented in the films, often reduced to a dense primitive jungle and to a set of stereotypical Vietnamese characters (vicious soldiers, beautiful prostitutes, hapless villagers, etc.), figures not as a subject but as an imagined construct that serves as a ploy for America’s self-reflection. And with the apparent end of the Cold War and the fading away of the Vietnam conflict from the American and global consciousness, even this deceptive interest has started to disappear.

My goal in this essay is to provide a preliminary study of Vietnamese revolutionary cinema (with special emphasis on the period of the 1960s and 1970s) and to make a case for its historical and aesthetic significance. Such an endeavor is important for a number of reasons, not least to restore Vietnamese subjectivity by drawing attention to and exploring narratives and images that present Vietnamese people and life from a local perspective. Moreover, a better understanding of the revolutionary films of Vietnam, not just at a politico-ideological level but at the level of aesthetics, also helps bring a more nuanced view of socialist cinema beyond its alleged status as mere propaganda. Widespread as it is, the notion of propaganda as aesthetically banal and uninteresting seems to me fundamentally flawed. The binary opposition between propaganda and art is too facile and fails to recognize the creative energy that can be found in even some of the most ideologically invested films—including, as will be clear, Vietnam’s revolutionary cinema, which developed novel techniques of communication and engagement as filmmakers drew on their national cultures as well as a host of different cinematic traditions (socialist realism, yes, but also the Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s and the cinema of the Thaw, among others) and inventively deployed narratives, styles, and genres to assert their ideological positions.

Before developing the aforementioned and other points further, I would like to point out some caveats in this study. First, due to the issue of access mentioned earlier but also to lack of space in this essay, my discussion focuses only on fictional films and leaves aside documentaries, even though the latter had played a major role in Vietnamese cinema and were produced in much greater quantity than any other types of film (save for newsreels) throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Second, and more importantly, I am not a Vietnamese studies scholar, nor do I speak or read the Vietnamese language. This definitely puts some limits to this study. Still, in concentrating my discussion on issues of form and style and illuminating in the process the unique aesthetics of Vietnam’s revolutionary cinema, I believe that I can contribute something to our knowledge and understanding of this long-neglected film tradition.

Vietnamese Cinema: A Brief Historical Review

Cinema was introduced to Vietnam at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the next few decades, film production and exhibition were almost exclusively under French control—by the colonial authorities who commissioned films to propagate images of the colony in France, instituted censorship law to impose restrictions on film content, and legislated controls that espoused protections for French film imports; and by French businessmen who owned most of the distribution companies and movie theaters in Vietnam (Wilson 2007). But despite this monopolization, the 1920s and 1930s did see a number of indigenous attempts to make films with Vietnamese actors/actresses and, with the advent of sound film, in Vietnamese. These films, however, were hampered by inadequate material and technical resources, and none of them was able to compete with the foreign imports from France, the United States, and Hong Kong, which dominated movie theaters (mostly in Saigon, Hanoi, and other urban areas) throughout the interwar years (Phạm 2001, 60–1).

Not surprisingly perhaps, little emphasis is placed on the colonial era in state-sanctioned narratives of Vietnamese film history. In official accounts, the first important films—that is, important to the development of a free revolutionary cinema in socialist Vietnam—are traced to the documentaries made by guerrilla filmmakers during the resistance war against the French from 1946 to 1954, including The Battle of Moc Hoa (Trận Mộc Hóa, 1948) and The Battle of Dong (Khe Trận Đông Khê, 1950). According to Thong Win (2017), these documentaries, shot in combat zones and shown in clandestine screenings across rural areas along the Mekong Delta, served as a way to mobilize support from disparate, and largely neglected, rural communities and bind them into a resistant political body under a new communist Vietnamese nationalism. Later on, as Việt Minh, the national independence coalition set up by the Indochinese Communist Party in 1941, consolidated power and began to anticipate victory in the anti-French struggle, the state monopolization of culture started to take shape. It can be observed, for instance, in the attempts to structure the artists and intellectuals into a more vertical, top-down arrangement through the development of professional creative organizations under a state umbrella. In the case of cinema, Hồ Chí Minh, then president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) or North Vietnam, signed decree 147/SL in 1953 to establish the State Enterprise of Cinematography and Photography, thereby marking the official nationalization of the Vietnamese film industry. Following this was the establishment of the Vietnam Cinema Department, placed under the Ministry of Culture, in 1956, while the Vietnam Cinema School was founded three years later in 1959 (Phạm 2001, 64–5).¹

From the focus on newsreels and documentaries in the late 1940s and much of the 1950s, the DRV moved on to make its first fictional feature—Nguyễn Hồng Nghi and Phạm Hiếu Dân (Phạm Kỳ Nam)’s Along the Same River (Chung một dòng sông)—in 1959, followed by the same directors’ The Memento (Vật kỷ niệm) in 1960 and Mai Lộc’s A-Phu Couple (Vợ chồng A Phủ) in 1961. But with the country getting into another long and fierce military conflict (with the United States) while still recovering from the anti-French resistance war,² the conditions of filmmaking were extremely difficult at the time, and only a few feature films were able to be made each year. In fact, the newsreel and documentary format continued to form the bulk of film production in communist-controlled areas of Vietnam. According to one researcher, 463 newsreels and 307 documentaries were produced in the DRV between 1965 and 1973, compared to just 36 fictional films made in the same period (Nguyen 2014).

One major feature of Vietnamese revolutionary cinema in the 1960s and 1970s is its persistent focus on the subject of war, specifically the anti-French and anti-American resistance as well as the conditions of life in wartime in general. Given the country’s constant military struggle for independence and later unification, this choice of emphasis is no surprise. Indeed, it is in the war film genre that we can find some of the most acclaimed Vietnamese movies of the period, from Nguyễn Văn Thông and Trần Vũ’s The Passerine Bird (Con chim vành khuyên, 1962) and Phạm Kỳ Nam’s Mrs. Tu Hau (Chị Tư Hậu, 1963) to Hải Ninh’s Little Girl of Hanoi (Em bé Hà Noi, 1974). In addition to the war theme, another key area of attention pertained to the construction of a new society and the new woman/man under socialism. Examples in this category include Trần Vũ’s Floating Village (Làng nổi, 1964), which extols a woman’s efforts in bringing the peasants together to maintain the dike and protect the village from floods, and Nguyễn Đỗ Ngọc’s The Echo of the River (Dòng sông âm vang, 1974), a film about the collective work involved in building a hydroelectric plant.

With the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1975, Vietnamese cinema entered a new stage of development. For one thing, film production saw a dramatic increase, with the annual number of fictional features skyrocketing from three to five during wartime to an average of 15 to 20 in the late 1970s and early 1980s. War as a subject continued to inform numerous films, albeit often in new and different ways. A good case in point is Đặng Nhật Minh’s When the Tenth Month Comes (Bao giờ cho đến tháng Mười, 1984): in telling the story of a widow who asks a teacher to write letters in her late soldier husband’s name so that her frail father-in-law will find the strength to live, the film eschews the simplistic glorification of soldiers found in earlier films, offering instead a nuanced picture of the sufferings and losses of war while also affirming the resilience of the people. Other films looked into the new social reality of peacetime, such as the problems encountered by soldiers returning from war to civilian life (e.g., Trần Vũ’s The People We Met [Những người đã gặp, 1979]) and the wounds incurred to families by years of war separation (e.g., Huy Thành’s Back to the Sand Village [Về nơi gió cát, 1981] and Far and Near [Xa và gần, 1983]). The film industry was confronted with new challenges from the late 1980s onward, after it had shifted from a state subsidy system to a market-oriented one in keeping with the country’s economic reform policy known as đốt mọi. The result was an influx of private capital into the film industry and an explosion in low-budget and often sloppily made commercial films (especially video films), although the relatively liberal climate also facilitated works—by Đặng Nhật Minh, Lưu Trọng Ninh, and Lê Hoàng, among others—with innovative content and daring viewpoints (Phạm 2001, 76–80; Ngo 1998, 93–6). Entering into the twenty-first century, as Vietnam further opened up and became economically more buoyant, the trend toward privatization and commercialization intensified while attempts were also made to modernize the outdated filming equipment and poorly equipped film theaters. International cooperation has also been on the rise. Despite its many problems, then, Vietnamese cinema has been growing over the last decade or so, albeit in a markedly different direction from its revolutionary past.

Between Propaganda and Art

As can be seen from above, Vietnamese revolutionary cinema was born and developed in an era when the country was continually at war fighting for liberation, independence, and national unification. It was also an exclusively state-run enterprise, constituting part of a national cultural front that advocated the mobilization of all art forms in the service of the revolution and the socialist state. Such a politicized conception of the arts was spelled out clearly in two important documents—“Theses on Culture” from 1943 and the more substantial “Marxism and Vietnamese Culture” from 1948—written by Trường Chinh, the chief theoretician among the communist leaders in Vietnam. For Trường Chinh, artistic and cultural work in a free socialist Vietnam was to be based on three guiding principles: nationalization, popularization, and scientific orientation. The first principle, nationalization, entailed the search for a new Vietnamese identity, one that eschewed not only centuries of Sinicized classical culture privileging a literati elite, but also a modern Vietnamese culture tainted by French and Chinese influences. Going beyond this nationalist focus, popularization, the second principle, embraced a class standpoint in its emphasis on the people, insisting that artists must create for and serve the interests of the masses, that is, workers, peasants, and soldiers. Lastly, scientific orientation was marked by a rejection of traditional practices and stressed a sense of progress through rational thought and discussion (Ninh 2002, 28–34; 39–45). What we see in Trường Chinh’s recommendations for a cultural front, then, is a prescriptive account of a new Vietnamese culture defined in the context of a mass-based, rational, and progressive national identity, which could only be achieved after a victorious national liberation. And this liberation, in turn, would only be possible under the guidance of the political party with the strongest organizational capacity and the most scientific vision about the direction of the country’s future—that is, the Vietnamese Communist Party.

According to this framework proposed by Trường Chinh, a revolutionary cinema in socialist Vietnam was to be a “mass cinema” that would not only appeal to the people and reflect their daily lives, but also gain and galvanize their support for the state’s social, political, and economic objectives (e.g., the anti-colonial/anti-imperialist struggle against France and the United States; the building of a new socialist society). This was precisely the direction in which the emergent revolutionary cinema of Vietnam would be heading; when the State Enterprise of Cinematography and Photography was founded in 1953, for example, it was tasked with four major goals:

• 1 Propagating the policies and guide-lines of the Government;
• 2 Highlighting the feats of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Transnational Connections
• PART II Global Conflicts, Local Formations
• PART III Struggle for Hearts and Minds
• List of Contributors
• Index