Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

Mayne’s theorization on negotiation was particularly compelling to me. I could not help but notice that with every polarity they articulate — heterogeneous versus homogeneous, resistance versus compliance, text versus reception, activity versus passivity — the ultimate goal of negotiation is to chart the capaciousness of non-dichotomous thinking. Mayne is ultimately negotiating their own mode of theorizing, specifically between approaching spectatorship studies from a “loose set of relations” and the search for “direct causal links or chains” (McRobbie) — two approaches that cannot be cleanly separated. In appraising this methodology, we see that Mayne seeks out fissures in absolute readings and rigid categorization that have long shaped spectatorship studies: the incompleteness and recursive logic that arise from the flawed model of apparatus and its psychoanalytical underpinnings within 1970s film theory.

Yoshimoto’s article, by contrast, is more overtly polemical. It incisively critiques misguided models of “cross-cultural exchange” that have sustained reductive relations between Western and non-Western scholarship. Yoshimoto interrogates the power dynamics between voluntary and involuntary cross-pollination, the gap between local practice and theoretical interpretation, and the utopian/dystopian framing of so-called “marginalized” or “third world” cinemas as they are absorbed into Western theoretical paradigms — a process permitted by the very construction of these categories. His discussion of the divide between history (area studies) and theory exposes two dominant strands of national cinema scholarship that ultimately replicate the same hierarchical relationship between local knowledges and high theory.

I found myself breathing a kind of sigh of relief while reading Yoshimoto. Classical Hollywood Cinema (CHC) is often theorized in film studies as a nucleus around which all other cinemas orbit. I agree with his argument that scholarship frequently constructs frameworks to measure this gravitational relationship — an effort that can be perceived as staying on the cutting edge of film studies while reinforcing alterity. I often feel drawn to learning about CHC as a reactionary impulse — a means of individuating Vietnamese cinema from Western subjectivity. But I worry that such efforts remain embedded within the same epistemological cosmology. As Judith Mayne suggests, one way forward is to commit ourselves to the text’s own constellation — to look to the local for its own “loose set of relations”. This might be why Bhabha’s theories on the location of culture emphasize locality: in pursuing national cinemas as “local”, rather than as “marginal” or “third”, we consider an object’s own ecosystem rather than reproducing the old, hierarchical mappings of center and periphery.