“What is Cinema?”
Cinema, to me, is a time capsule. With every exhibition of a film, you gather your neural connections, sense receptions, and engagement with the stimulus to be sealed within the film once the credits finish rolling. To watch a film is to unseal that time capsule, writing a new memory over while storing the original experience in a deeper pocket of your mind’s archive. I drew a garden; each plot represents an exhibition, and each flowering symbolizes the maturation of that experience. Revisiting a film is like digging up a time capsule, allowing you to remember who you once were, at the cost of diffusing that trace.
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Jenn Thảo Nguyễn (she/her)
I was born and raised in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Economics, I rediscovered my passion for cinema through several years of working at a dine-in movie theater in New York City. This inspired me to pursue a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies at NYU, where I aim to explore the dynamic relationship between spectatorship and exhibition venues, as well as delve into the history, distribution, and preservation of Vietnamese cinema within various archives.
Some of my favorite films include Vu Ngoc Dang’s Long Legged Girls, Jean-Jacques Beiniex’s Betty Blue, Abbas Kiarostami’s And Life Goes On, and George Lucas’ Revenge of the Sith. I am drawn to contemplative dramas, and my interests in film theory focus on the ways we encode and decode films, as well as the tenets of exhibition and filmmaking inspired and informed by such theories.
Throughout our course and program, I hope to challenge myself by examining how theories from alternative disciplines intersect with cinema beyond its traditional applications. I aim to acquire the tools to rework these theories, articulate and argue my processing of these matrices of thought, and synthesize my own understanding and perspective within, and in response to, existing canons.
Jenn Thảo Nguyễn 