Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

After watching A Touch of Spice (Boulmetis, 2003) last week and The Skin I Live In (Almodovar, 2011) this week, we experienced two different filmmakers’ distinct relationships with national cinema and its evolution into the realm of transnational cinema. Eleftheriotis’ article provides an insightful case study on the former, demonstrating the punctuation available to a film, given its ability to command popular response. I particularly agreed with our discussions of subjective/speculative historiography being a necessary foundation for new national film theories. The Manakia brothers, positioned at the crossroads of lost ethnographic Greek cinema, create a gap that could be addressed by Boulmetis’ CGI exhibitionism — a dialogue that I felt pulled to locate in my own nation’s cinema.

I recently had the opportunity to screen a highly studied film within Vietnamese English-language scholarship. Despite its extensive discussion, the film has been rarely available due to its limited distribution and poor quality from piracy. It sits, however, at an intriguing crossroads between Vietnamese domestic popular cinema and the emerging trend of films made for export. The difficulty in locating this film within distinct categories demonstrates Crofts’ discussion of permeability between fields of national cinema. Three Seasons (Bùi, 1999) is seen as filling a gap in the representation of the post-war legacy from the Vietnamese perspective, that like Boulmetis’ film, answers a lacuna made evident by the American mediation of its own post-war legacy through films like Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick 1987) and Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979). In light of the Đổi Mới policy, Three Seasons serves as a Vietnamese-American response to its western depiction as “exotic”, offering a counter-voice to this mode of representation at a critical time when the nation was still recovering economically and politically from the war; a time when the task of representing itself in artistic dialogue with Hollywood was a near impossible one.

This demarcation of what a nation claims to be its own cinema, versus what the global reception imposes is pause for further personal research. In a sense, this film can be considered accented cinema (shot from a diasporic perspective), crisis cinema (responsive to the trauma of war), and, of course, national cinema as it captures both the culturally ethnographic and tourist gaze of Vietnam while simultaneously criticizing it. Taxonomies may not be as important as the theories that its imposed classification permits, and I hope to expand my understanding on the extent to which mutability of classification revises and informs a film’s historiography and critique.