Ethnic minorities in the national body and in film

In 1971, Decision 121 was officially promulgated, listing all the country's ethnic minorities, thereby formally declaring that Vietnam had 53 minority populations, and that the Kinh formed the majority. Decision 121 was significant because it concluded the debates that had occurred in postcolonial Vietnam about the country's multiethnic identity.Footnote ⁹ As Charles Keyes notes, this modern system of classification was influenced by European theories of race and ‘predicated on the assumption that the observable world consisted of discrete elements whose essential characteristics could be identified and then used for systematic classifications'.Footnote ¹⁰ Keyes argues that with the formation of the postcolonial nation-state, its classificatory method of theorising difference between ethnic groups was more a ‘technology of power’ than of scientific design.Footnote ¹¹

As a ‘technology of power’, the project of assigning otherness to minority populations still resonates in Vietnam today. In the Vietnamese national imaginary, ethnic minorities constitute a homogeneous group of people whose backward way of life contributes to their marginalisation in contemporary society. From the latter half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, ethnic minorities are rendered exotic and ‘palatably foreign’ in Vietnamese cinema, often representing primitiveness in contrast to the Kinh, who stand in for civilisation.Footnote ¹² Operating within the dynamics of power, Vietnamese films assert the primacy of the Vietnamese Kinh majority when aiming their gaze at the ethnic Other, bespeaking an economy of seeing that reflects how the Kinh majority — of which these directors are part — perceives the 53 ethnic minorities of Vietnam. Extending this argument to film, I underscore here that Vietnam's indigenous groups are constructed in official discourses via colonial and neocolonial ideologies, and that Kinh films about ethnic minorities are a projection of these ideologies. What follows is a tracing of this lineage from discourse to film.

With the advent of French colonialism in 1868, the French colonised both Kinh and ethnic minorities, extracting forced (corvée) labour, and imposing heavy taxes on these populations. As Jean Michaud asserts, subject to colonial control, ‘large portions of Vietnam's highlanders were placed under military administration, separate from the civilian system in place in the rest of the country’.Footnote ¹³ The French colonial system identified these highly diverse populations as sauvage and derogatorily named them Montagnards, an appellation that the US military would later use during the Second Indochina War for the same communities. The colonial segregation of ethnic minorities and the Kinh majority was based on the ideology of colonial self-preservation in response to the ways that Vietnamese nationalist and communist factions were fomenting anticolonial resistance.

During the war with the Americans, ethnic minority hostility toward the Kinh was further enflamed by the Republic of Vietnam and its policy of placing peasants into strategic hamlets in the central and southern regions of the country. Meanwhile the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the North tried to maintain minority–majority relations by assuring ethnic autonomy once national sovereignty was won. This resulted in the successful recruitment of some minority groups that fought in the northern regime's attacks on the American and South Vietnamese armies. US Army Special Forces also enlisted many minorities in the central highlands to gather intelligence about North Vietnamese infiltration.Footnote ¹⁴ The US military also regarded the minority groups as strategically important because the Ho Chi Minh Trail (used by the North Vietnamese Army and its southern allies) traversed the regions in which they lived.Footnote ¹⁵

After the war ended, national reunification between North and South Vietnam was achieved in 1975, but pledges of equality for ethnic minorities were forgotten for those who fought alongside the North Vietnamese. Instead, government officials launched programmes to settle some into New Economic Zones (NEZs) within the highlands, while relocating others to the valleys to grow rice and industrial crops. These policies of sedentarisation ‘increased in size and scope throughout the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the movement of millions of people from the lowlands to the highlands by the close of the 20th century’.Footnote ¹⁶ Highland ethnic minorities were encouraged by the state to discontinue their ‘unstable nomadic life’.Footnote ¹⁷ Under the socialist regime, moreover, those who collaborated with the US military were sent to re-education camps. In the postwar years, socialist discourse firmly re-established the notion that highlanders were inferior and in need of assistance. In contrast the Kinh majority was constructed as an enlightened group of liberators. State rhetoric was entrenched with the idea that the ‘least “socialist man” could do for “traditional man” … was to help him relinquish his simplicity and reach the superior levels of lowland civilisation as quickly as possible’.Footnote ¹⁸

In the post-Đổi Mới era, the notion of a unified nationhood has been imagined differently, but remains fixed on ideologies of ethnicity and class. As Oscar Salemink observes, the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) has revived, for example, religious rituals to ‘shore up its legitimacy, which suffered from the unpopularity of failed socialist experiments and from the credibility gap created by its embrace of a capitalist road to development in postsocialist Vietnam’.Footnote ¹⁹ The Ministry of Culture and Information (MOCI) has also created a repertoire of cultural and spiritual practices that assumes a ‘national character’, and which plays an important role in nationalist propaganda and the promotion of domestic and international tourism. In so doing, the government stresses that the ethnic minorities need to integrate into the dominant Kinh culture.

As an expansion of such hegemonic views, Vietnamese films, ranging from the canonical Mr and Mrs A Phu (1961) and Travelling Circus (1988) to The Deserted Valley (2002) and Story of Pao (2006), all underline the sense of temporal, spatial and cultural otherness that ethnic minorities represent within the national body. These films reconstruct the relations between the ‘national majority and its internal Others'Footnote ²⁰ as deeply hierarchical in nature, giving credence to Johannes Fabian's arguments about the denial of coevalness to the Other.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, ethnic cultures in this body of work are fossilised within a mythic past or shown to be resistant to change in a globalising present. The films directed by Mai Lọc (Mr and Mrs A Phu) and Ngô Quang Hải (Story of Pao), are exemplary of this ideology and draw on a repertoire of colonial stereotypes that resonate in the postcolonial era.

Mai Lọc's classic 1961 Vợ Chồng Á Phủ (Mr and Mrs A Phu) is a product of socialist Vietnamese cinema, exemplifying the objectives of national cinema at the time, defined as reunifying the country and celebrating socialism.Footnote ²² Based on nationalist writer Tố Hoài's short story of the same name, the film testifies to the anticolonial and anti-imperial sentiment predominant during this period. Mr and Mrs A Phu is an integral part of the country's film canon, and director Mai Lọc is venerated by the state as being part of a generation of veteran filmmakers who contributed to the naissance of the film industry.Footnote ²³ Lọc's film is also historically significant as it followed closely on the heels of several legislative acts that bolstered film production and a film discourse in the country. As president of the DRV, in 1953 Hồ Chí Minh signed a decree that established the Vietnam Movie and Photography Enterprise, marking the official birth of Vietnamese cinema as it was conceived in North Vietnam. Four years later the state-sponsored Điện Ảnh (Cinema) newspaper was founded, and in 1959, Chung Một Dòng Sông (Along the Same River) premiered, a film considered to be the country's first independent narrative film.Footnote ²⁴

Shortly after these historic events, Mr and Mrs A Phu was made and constituted one of several movies that featured the theme of revolutionary heroism. In particular, films like Chị Tư Hậu (Sister Hau, 1963) and Chim Vành Khuyên (Passerine Bird, 1961) centred on the heroism of young girls and women. Such films heightened the magnitude of the wars that were being fought in the country and stressed the inclusiveness of the war effort, one that was importantly being waged by both genders. Produced in the same era were powerful documentaries that also served this purpose. Armed with guns and cameras, soldiers-turned-filmmakers produced such documentary classics as Du Kích Cũ Chi (The Cu Chi Guerrillas, 1967) and Lũy Thép Vĩnh Linh (Heroic Vinh Linh, 1970). For viewers, these films helped to visualise the hardships and triumphs of war in a period of great political turmoil.

Different from this body of work, however, Lọc's Mr and Mrs A Phu presents the female ethnic minority as both a primary protagonist and revolutionary figure in the struggles to overthrow the French. Set before the First Indochina War, the film features a story about ethnic Hmong who are subject to colonial rule in Vietnam. While the film overtly critiques French colonialism, its hostility is mostly directed at the chief villains of the film: those who facilitated the machinery of colonialism by working with them. Pitted against these indigenous men is the main character, Mỵ, an ethnic Hmong woman who emancipates herself through revolution and resistance by the film's end.

At the film's outset, we are afforded a visualisation of Mỵ's victimhood. The camera's gaze sweeps across the country's rugged terrain to settle on Mỵ, who is shown in the first frames lamenting her fate. We are also introduced to her character through a male voice-over that tells viewers of her acute suffering at the hands of a patriarchal colonialism that would force her to become a slave for a tribal leader. As the story relays, Mỵ finds individual and political salvation in the form of a love affair with a Hmong warrior. With his encouragement, Mỵ frees herself from servitude and stages a revolution with him against the French and colonial collaborators. The narrative arc emphasises a trajectory of individual persecution giving way to collective revolution. The film cements this notion through both its narrative and images. The film's most dramatic images consist of the ways that the different Hmong tribes work together — with the help of the Việt Minh — to overthrow the French. Further, much of the imagery surrounding Mỵ's victimisation provides a justification for the violent revolt that occurs at the end.

Bringing together anticolonial resistance with ethnonationalism, the film mythologises the militancy of the Hmong in the war effort against the French. Consonant with other propagandistic films of this period, the narrative sublimates heterosexual desire in favour of a supraethnic nationalism that desexualises its ethnic and national subjects. The desexualisation occurs as a lingering (homo)eroticism limns the scenes surrounding the bodies of male and female natives as they are enslaved by French colonists and ethnic collaborators, their bondage and sexual subordination visually fetishised in some sequences. Disavowing these erotic currents, the film pays homage instead to the supposed revolutionary spirit of the Hmong, who were widely understood to be ‘fierce fighters' on the battlefield. That some Hmong tribes also fought against the North Vietnamese army is banished from the narrative text. Instead the film's imagery presents us with the notion that the struggle for national independence was a unified effort among both the majority and minority populations of Vietnam. In particular it imagines the revolutionary couple — Mr and Mrs A Phu of the film's title — in heroic terms, as Mỵ and her lover triumph over their enemies, who are both the French and fellow Hmong traitors. Accompanied by a musical crescendo, the final shot is of their embrace amid the destruction of a French colonial fortress. At this dramatic moment, the camera slowly pans in to show how Mỵ's tear-stained face becomes brighter and more joyful before the film fades to black.

Forty-five years later, Chuyện của Pao (Story of Pao, 2006) appeared in the midst of a number of legislative reforms designed to spur filmmaking and the film industry. Starting in the early 2000s, the state recognised that highly popular commercial films (phim thị trường) outpaced artistic (phim nghệ thuật) works in terms of box office receipts and popularity abroad. In 2002, the state authorised the establishment of private film companies within the country, thus bringing about two important developments.Footnote ²⁵ Films are now privately funded and often transnationally produced. Authorities have also abolished pre-film script censorship; the state presently reviews only the final cut of the film. This has led the way to many co-productions with other countries like Korea and involving Vietnamese in the diaspora.

While Story of Pao marks these changes in the industry, the film also dovetails well with Vietnam's current embrace of multiculturalism and the ‘flourishing discourses on cultural diversity’ that mark official culture.Footnote ²⁶ Offering a touristic view of the Hmong, the film hews closely to a highly aestheticised melodramatic narrative, at the centre of which lies a domestic drama between mother and daughter. The film was the directorial debut of Vietnamese actor Ngô Quang Hải, after he starred in films like Cyclo (1995) and Vertical ray of the sun (2000). In this contemporary portrait of the ethnic Hmong, shot in colour as opposed to the stark black-and-white of Mr and Mrs A Phu, the bright textiles of the Hmong dress downplay their ‘warrior-like’ qualities and are integral to the film's picturesque quality. As Hjorleifur Jonsson and Nora Taylor argue, when ethnic modes of dress are displayed in socialist Vietnamese imagery, the ethnic minority becomes gendered and read in the national imaginary as the traditional Other who stands in contrast to the figure of the modern Kinh.Footnote ²⁷ The interplay between tradition and modernity reverberates in the film's narrative, which centres upon a young girl (played by popular actor, Đổ Hải Yến, who, at the time of filming, was Ngô's wife) and the secrets surrounding her biological and adopted mothers. Different from the male voice-over that began Mr and Mrs A Phu, Đổ's feminine voice initiates viewers to the ways the film is framed by a young woman's point of view.

Emphasising its access to Hmong culture, Story of Pao conflates culture and femininity vis-à-vis its camera techniques and ethnographic framing. Situated against the mountains of Sa Pa, the camera highlights the visual spectacle of the landscape, continually panning the lush mountains and valleys in which the story takes place. The film also draws on the ethnographic in its inclusion of Pao's real family in its final frames. Story of Pao is based on a true account, a point made at the end of the film when it features a short sequence about Pao and her family. Discussing their personal history, the women in Pao's family speak to the camera in a plain frontal shot that locates them against a bucolic backdrop and in an interviewing mode that accents their status as native subjects of the film. More than Mr and Mrs A Phu, Story of Pao draws its cultural authority from this authenticating gesture, which grafts itself onto the voices of ethnic women and their bodies.

While the film captures the landscape in wide-angle shots, its close-ups bring together the registers of the feminine and the ethnographic through the picturing of Pao herself. Almost all of the film's frames feature her angelic face and colourful clothing. Pao's own voice-over, moreover, dominates the narrative and as such, cannot be extricated from the actress who plays Pao and her mode of enunciation. Cultural critic Shu-mei Shih shows that the use of Chinese dialects, or the Sinophone, opens an important avenue of critical inquiry. For Shih, the Sinophone can be read in two ways: it is a signifier of Chinese dominance and a sign of resistance to Chinese hegemony, especially in Sinitic-language communities in many parts of the world. Shih argues that an attention to the prevalence of dialects and languages in film can thus activate a critical reading of a text's representational politics.Footnote ²⁸ It is this tonal particularity serving as hegemonic difference that I emphasise in my reading of Pao. At the level of both sight and sound, audiences are reminded that the actor is not from an ethnic minority but rather part of the Kinh majority. (This is also true for the actress who played Mỵ in Mr and Mrs A Phu, Đức Hoàn.) The main language spoken in the film is Vietnamese; however, the dominant dialect used by Đổ and other performers in the film, such as veteran actor, Như Quỳnh, is northern. The northern accent predominates in Hanoi, the country's capital, and is understood to be Vietnam's official dialect. Because of the star presence of Đổ and Như, their familiar faces and accents, the film underscores the dominance of the Kinh and speaks to a Kinh audience through these visible and audible cues.

Inflected in the ways that Pao was produced and distributed, the film's casting, high production values, and touristic view of the Hmong underline its appeal to national and international audiences. Partially financed by a tourism company, the film was made as the film industry has become more transnationalised and privatised. Upon its release, the film has circulated along international film festival circuits and draws on the star performance of Đổ, who is best known for her role as Phương in Philip Noyce's 2002 The Quiet American. As film critics note, the function of the international film festival is to simultaneously address national and international publics, an aspect that Pao achieves. Media scholar Tom O'Regan argues that such sites are ‘distribution mechanisms', that ‘allow for the recognition of the uniqueness of different cultures and specific filmmakers while affirming the underlying qualities of international cinema’.Footnote ²⁹ In the context of the film's funding and global travels, its idealisation of the Hmong comes together with the government's efforts to support films that are uniquely Vietnamese and yet also enunciate in an international cinematic code of spectacle and difference. The film's multiculturalism also accommodates a booming tourist industry, one that continually cites Sa Pa as a beautiful place to visit for both Kinh and international tourists.Footnote ³⁰

Offering exotic ways of looking at these characters and the native cultures they represent, Mr and Mrs. A Phu and Story of Pao feature female ethnic minorities who are at once revolutionary and refined; these characters are simultaneously a part of the nation and yet stand apart from it. These differences pivot on the characters' revolutionary turn as well as their colourful costumes. I now turn to the films directed by women. I contend that unlike the films discussed, Linh's and Phạm's work importantly clears a space for a desiring female gaze; however, both films extend an ethnocentric view of the Other and sideline the notion of ethnic and female solidarity in different ways. Vietnamese women's films about ethnic minorities, moreover, are distinct in the ways in which they speak to how the Other is looked at by the woman director.

Spectacle and visuality: Travelling Circus

Two years after Đổi Mới was introduced in 1986, Việt Linh's Travelling Circus was made. The historical context in which the film was made is critical. In the spirit of Đổi Mới, the Politburo of the Central Committee issued Resolution No. 5, which stipulated that ‘freedom of creativity [was] a vital condition for creating true values in culture, literature and the arts'.Footnote ³¹ Within all realms of culture, including those of film and literature, there appeared to be a relaxation in censorship policies. Critical works by Nguyễn Huy Thiệp, Bảo Ninh, and Dương Thu HươngFootnote ³² that previously had been banned by the state were more freely published and circulated more readily within the country than ever before.Footnote ³³ Đổi Mới was thus crucial for the revitalisation of overtly political Vietnamese cultural output. However, this cultural renaissance lasted only for a short time. By August 1989, Politburo members had reined in these cultural expressions and disallowed any critiques against the state to appear in print. The crackdowns against writers and journalists persist to the present day.

Against a backdrop in which ‘state sponsorship [of about US$60,000] guaranteed [the] promotion and distribution [of films] among the nation's theaters and broadcast television’,Footnote ³⁴ Linh made a number of films that helped to establish herself as a major director.Footnote ³⁵ She was born in Saigon in 1952, went to school in the Soviet Union, and upon her return, started making films in 1985 for Giải Phóng Film Studio in Ho Chi Minh City. Her third film, Travelling Circus (1988), was initially ‘banned for two years' by the state because its themes were considered too subversive.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, the film is saturated with images of magic and fantasy, ethnic primitivism, and the destructive forces of capitalism during a time when the country was beginning to open its doors to globalisation. The movie's controversial nature is due to its dual emphases on the magical and the primitive, two aspects of Vietnamese culture that an independent communist Vietnam wanted to eliminate in the latter half of the twentieth century. To promote secularism, in 1945, the state banned a number of superstitious beliefs, or mê tín di đoạn, and practices that were considered degenerate and backwards.Footnote ³⁷

Set in southern Vietnam in the Phan Rang region, this Fellini-esque film, in its spare 76-minute time frame, critiques patriarchy and capitalism and shows the devastation of an occupying force on a minority population, the ethnic group known as the Raglai.Footnote ³⁸Travelling Circus also functions as a metacinematic critique of the illusory nature of cinema and performance. For if magic is a spectacle in the frames of the film, Linh's camera also comments on the ways that filmmaking is a construction made up of spectacles. Importantly it is through this gaze that the points of view of the Kinh woman and ethnic minority boy are made prominent. The film centres on the perspectives of a woman named Lan and a young ethnic boy named Đác, and as the story relays, the figure of the absent father haunts both. Đác's father is an alcoholic and presented in the film as derelict in providing for Đác and his sister, Poupon. (Poupon, ‘doll’ in French, points to the legacy of French colonialism and prefigures the ways that she becomes an object of exchange in the film's problematisation of capitalist relations.) Lan's biological father is absent, but her symbolic father is the ringmaster named Boss, who tries to remake her as his Pygmalion creation.

The film makes clear that Lan and Đác's twin tragedies lie with the patriarchal figure of the Boss. He exploits Lan's emotional commitment to him by forcing her to perform in his show. Conjuring magic tricks for the villagers and performing what he calls ‘fun for the eyes', or vui mắt, the circus Boss also demands the villagers' gold, which they use to pay for the shows. Attending the performances rather than working to feed themselves, the villagers eventually begin to starve. After Đác reveals that the magic show is based on illusion and deception, Đác stages a revolt against the Boss and his troupe. The film culminates with scenes of an expulsion, as the villagers chase out the circus performers from the village. Travelling Circus ends not only with Poupon's death by poison, a potion she drinks to appease her hunger, but also with the rupturing of Đác's illusions and Lan's desires. With an emphasis on narrative parallels and parallel dream states, Linh sets up the similarities between the two characters and their subjugation by patriarchy.

Travelling Circus establishes the linkages between Đác and Lan through the visualisation of their desires. With Lan, in particular, we understand her character through her gaze; thus, the way that she looks signals her objectified appearance as an object ‘to be looked at’ and indicates that she is active in her mode of looking.Footnote ³⁹ This duality is pertinent because as a circus performer, Lan performs fetishism and femininity as an object of desire not only for the villagers but also for the film's viewers. The film comments, then, on the issue of spectatorship through this metacinematic frame. Travelling Circus begins with shots of Lan and the Boss, as they travel through the mountains to look for a place to encamp. Framed in close-ups, Lan's looks of curiosity and delight are registered on screen, all of which cue her naivete and emotional vulnerability from the outset. In fact, throughout the film, Lan's character is defined by her misunderstanding of what is real and illusory; she tragically misreads Đác's acts of gift giving as acts of generosity. Đác continually gifts her with simple objects like his sister's pet monkey and flowers. When he gives Lan his dead mother's clothing, however, this is an important narrative moment. Đác does this, knowing that he and Poupon will not eat as a result because he will not be able to sell these items in exchange for food. Lan accepts the gifts without realising the full import of Đác's actions. When forced by the Boss to wear the dead mother's clothing on stage and to masquerade as an ethnic woman, she is finally aware of the extent to which her performance is complicit in the villagers' exploitation.

Đác's point of view is also clouded by his inability to distinguish between what is true and false. In return for his gifts, Đác demands that Lan explain to him how she is able to make rice out of nothing, a magic trick she nightly performs in the show. He wants to know how to perform this trick in order to feed his family and village. Viewers are keyed into Đác's desires, as such desires are rendered through a dream sequence. We witness his dream of being the village hero, conveyed as part of the film's highly poignant and emotional climax. With equal importance, we also see how Lan dreams, for cast alongside the boy's dreams are the fantasies of stardom that she harbours. Her desires are incited by the Boss, who promises her fame in exchange for her participation in his show and devotion to him. In this way, we are privy to both the boy's dreams and Lan's aspirations.

Privileging their subjectivities and dream states, the film directs our looking to the ways in which these two characters desire. It aligns the two characters as victims of capitalistic greed and situates their precarious positions similarly. Like the other villagers, Đác is bewitched by the magic show, but he is particularly seduced by the spectacle and performance of it. Throughout the film, he trades his belongings in order to be a part of the show's retinue. A crucial turning point in the film is when he gives away his bow and arrow (his only means to hunt for food) in return for a potion that makes bubbles, which he uses in order to entertain and distract his sister from being hungry. Linh shows the devastation of Đác's decision to do this when Poupon accidentally drinks the solution and dies from it. Within a similar affective register, Lan is enthralled by the possibility of fame and becomes easily manipulated by the Boss as a result. Along the way, she sacrifices her friendship with Đác in order to comply with his demands. At the centre of these characters' vulnerabilities is the Boss, who represents the engineering of capitalism through patriarchal control. By the film's conclusion, Lan and Đác comprehend the failings of capitalist desire and the fantasy of agency that it engenders. The film ends with the characters' discovery of their subordination to the oppressive structures surrounding them.

While equal in some respects, Đác's and Lan's tragic finales contain different material and symbolic valences, however. It is here that Linh's critique of patriarchy and capitalism becomes more muted in rendering Đác's victimisation through the lens of primitivism. In a violent ending that demonstrates the villagers' barbarity, Đác leads them in expelling the circus performers from the village. Embittered, he stays in his village to mourn the loss of his family, but more symbolically, he remains in the space of the traditional and the pre-modern, electing to stay by the side of the village leader who now serves as his substitute father. Meanwhile Lan flees the village, presumably towards civilisation, with the Boss. By the film's final frames, she mourns the loss of her innocence. Similar to the way it begins, Travelling Circus concludes with Lan's acts of looking. This time, however, she looks away from the village in fear and shame. The film's finale emphasises the fact that both characters have been shattered by their encounter with the Other, and that neither character is left whole by this collision between tradition and modernity.

In Deserted Valley, director Phạm Nhuệ Giang gestures toward the same conflict between tradition and modernity, but does so within a different context. Where Travelling Circus provides a grim black-and-white portrait of the clash between the villagers and circus performers, in Phạm's film, the colourful emotionalism of women's relationships is part of the film's melodramatic address and constitutes the heart of the film. In this way, her film is more akin to Story of Pao, as it is awash with the colour and beauty of the Sa Pa region. Unlike Travelling Circus, moreover, Deserted Valley offers less an analogy about the unravelling of capitalist relations and more of a humanistic portrait of Kinh teachers as they work with and alongside ethnic minorities.

Love and desire in The Deserted Valley

Phạm Nhuệ Giang's Deserted Valley is unique in that it was made in 2002 at the moment when the state allows for the privatisation of film production in the country. Even so, Phạm's film evidences the state's formative role in the making and celebration of ‘artistic’ films such as The Deserted Valley. It was produced by the Vietnam Feature Film Studio, one of the oldest government-run studios in Hanoi, and was awarded a Silver Lotus Award by the state for Best Feature Film. Phạm's connections to the state are reinforced by the fact that her family holds a distinctive position in the film industry. She is the daughter of Phạm Văn Khoa (1913–92), the director of films such as Chị Dậu (Sister Dau, 1981) and considered to be one of the founding fathers of revolutionary cinema.Footnote ⁴⁰ Phạm is married to Nguyễn Thanh Văn, the director of Đời Cát (Lives of Sand, 2001), which won the Golden Lotus Award in 2001. Phạm's father-in-law is Hải Ninh, a distinguished filmmaker who made his mark with such classic films as Vì Tuyễn 17 Ngày Và Đêm (17th Parallel Day and Night, 1974), and Em Bé Hà Nội (The Little Girl from Hanoi, 1975). While Phạm is firmly ensconced in this network of state relations, this does not necessarily translate into funding for her films; she has had to work in television for several years in order to pursue her filmmaking ambitions and make her second feature film, Tâm Hồn Mẹ (A Mother's Soul, 2011).Footnote ⁴¹

The institutional context for the film's making is threaded in its storyline about how the state is imbricated in the lives of everyday people. The Deserted Valley takes as its subject the implementation of compulsory Kinh education in the highlands and its effects on Kinh characters like principal Tanh and teachers Giao and Minh, all of whom struggle within a system of state management and bureaucracy. In her analysis, Chương-Đài Võ examines the different domains of tradition and modernity that cleave the film; the forest, which is riven with animism and remains the site of desire, represents the primitive and mystical, while the school grounds symbolises modernity, even in its failed incarnations (as represented by the impotent male school principal, Tanh).Footnote ⁴² I supplement Võ's reading by placing in relief the currents of erotic desire and modes of female looking that mark these realms, for the film is premised on the execution of a heterosexual female gaze that draws the characters together. The film's simple narrative about the lives and loves of teachers belies the complicated ways that this gaze asserts itself. The Deserted Valley converges on Giao (played by popular actress Hồng Anh), a young teacher living in the school commune who has an affair with a city man named Hùng. She is abandoned by him and then ostracised for her indiscretion by her colleagues and pupils.

Though the film dwells on the tragedy of the teachers' solitary existence, the sexual relationship between Hùng and Giao propels the film's narrative and animates much of the film's energy. The ways that key characters witness their lovemaking, moreover, remain critical for the film's affective and dramatic tempo. As seen through the eyes of Mị, a young ethnic minority woman who watches the couple have sex near a rushing waterfall, the acts of sex and of looking constitute the twinning of voyeurism and fetishisation to which the film continually returns. Director Phạm orchestrates Mị's gaze as critical to her character's psychosexual development. Through a series of oscillating shots that emphasise Mị's looking and her libidinal pleasure at seeing Hùng's body for the first time, we see how her gaze is infused with curiosity and sexual desire. This desire is cathected onto objects that he leaves behind and which she appropriates, for example his cigarettes and lighter. Ignited in this scene is the visualisation of Mị's budding sexuality as she covets these phallic objects and initiates her desiring gaze. Having watched Hùng bathe in the water, Mị emits a loud scream and jumps into the stream. In this instance, she looks down at her own reflection in the water and then at her breasts. At the denotative level, this scene clearly demonstrates that she sees herself as a maturing woman.

At another level, director Phạm engineers a moment in which an ethnic minority woman is active in her looking and participates in the enjoyment of it. Moreover, this character initiates a gendered and classed reversal of the classic male gaze, since the object of her gaze is the male body, constructed as the locus of desire and framed as a visual spectacle. This is made more emphatic because the camera gaze returns to her. Rather than render woman as the sign of visual pleasure, Phạm constructs Hùng as the site of heterosexual desire, offering a critique of the ways in which a male gaze has conventionally objectified the female form. In his mobility, which is figured in his classed and gendered privilege, Hùng also offers a commentary on the structures that surround Mị and Giao. He symbolises what the women cannot do — that is, escape from their milieu. Mị and Giao are equal in these respects; they are both tied to their families, whether they are real or symbolic. The women must stay within these confines because of familial and national obligations. At the same time, their class and ethnic differences configure their positioning within this order differently. While one woman (Giao) is ultimately welcomed back into the fold of the (national) family, the other (Mỵ) must accept her place within a ethnic position within a gendered structure of power and therefore look the other way, a point I will return to later.

In the film, women's looks are active, but the act of looking is also cause for discipline. Besides Mị, another character caught in the webs of desire structuring the film is Minh. She loves Tanh, the school principal, while he pines for Giao. Love for Minh, as it is for Mị, is unreciprocated. She desires to look and is punished for it. On a night when Giao is out with Hùng, Minh and Tanh drink together in a scene that shows Phạm's keen investment in visualising female desire. After the two characters stumble into bed with one another, Minh drunkenly undresses Tanh and looks at him with naked desire. As she takes in his body and face, Phạm's camera takes Minh's perspective with a shot/reverse shot that sutures the viewer to her gaze and also translates her pleasure in looking. However, Minh's pleasure is short-lived, as Tanh is roused from his stupor and rejects her immediately. Humiliated, Minh leaves for the city soon after but returns to the school because she — as does Giao — feels obligated to the symbolic family. Tragically, Minh resumes her place within it without regard for her own future.

For the women, the act of looking results in both pleasure and shame. Though Mị and Minh are equivalent in this regard, how they are imaged in the film's ending is telling of the ways that the director envisions women's relations with one another, according to class and ethnicity. The film's last sequence provides a solemn portrait of female solidarity: a pregnant Giao and Minh help each other trek through the mountainous region; their retreating figures are shadowed in dim lighting in a faraway shot that accents their solitude as well as their resilient bond. By the film's third act, Mị, on the other hand, has been twice chastened by men, chiefly because of her desire for Hùng. This is because after Mị discovers that Giao is Hùng's lover, she gossips about her teacher and instigates a revolt against her at school. Immediately after, the father reprimands Mị for this, while her friend attacks her for spreading the rumour. Only when Mị reconciles with Giao is she allowed back into the symbolic realm of the Father; in the final frames of the film, we see her smiling and looking askance (the camera captures her face in profile), as she takes part in a happy procession that returns Giao to the teacher's commune. To the end, Mị remains fixed in the hierarchy in which she is placed because of her class and ethnicity. Most importantly, she is occluded from the director's vision of homosocial bonding among Kinh women.

Alert to the problem that women and ethnic minorities pose in the space of the national, Phạm's film critiques the Vietnamese government for the abandonment of its female and ethnic subject-citizens. But like Travelling Circus, The Deserted Valley relies on the alterity of non-Kinh cultures to render this critique forcefully. Preserved in their cultural otherness, ethnic minority characters are out of line with the country's national subjects and out of step with the state's march of economic progress. Made during the 1980s to the early 2000s, Linh's and Phạm's films are products of a state-funded apparatus and in representing the ethnic minority as a figure of regression, they ally themselves with a statist perspective. This is to say that their films are shaped by a national culture that has historically articulated difference in homogenising terms. As anthropologist Bich Hanh Duong contends, ‘much of what Kinh people learn about the country's ethnic minority population comes from national public media’,Footnote ⁴³ in which the dominant perception of these groups is that they are ‘poor, underdeveloped and helpless, on the one hand, and on the other, colorful and exotic’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Identifying the strains of ethnic chauvinism in Linh's and Phạm's films, we recognise, too, how structures of viewing — even by minority women filmmakers themselves — are informed by a hegemonic culture and colonial history. This recognition on the part of the critic gestures toward the limitations of gaze theory, since it cannot account for the kinds of national, cultural and historical specificities in the ways that people look in and at film.

Instead of faulting the films for their ethnocentricism, however, I have argued in this section that Linh's and Phạm's films should be contextualised within Vietnamese film history and against the backdrop of the country's recent economic and political upheavals. Doing so facilitates an appreciation for the gendered perspectives that women directors provide with their filmmaking, but also demarcates the films' limitations. I stress here the critical productivity of their films for what they do say about power relations in Vietnam's past and present.

Vietnamese cinema and the nation-state

In the context of Vietnam's participation in the global economy, Vietnamese women's bodies remain powerful signifiers for the nation and its glorious past, often imagined by the state as the bearers of tradition against the contaminating influences of the West. Since the economic reforms of Đổi Mới, women's private lives have been shaped by the changes in gender roles in the family and the workplace that have been formed in the postwar era. Meanwhile their public presence pivots on the maintenance of a proper appearance in a country that upholds constructs of femininity as vehicles to express national and cultural pride. Further, women's bodies are increasingly commodified in the media, film and tourism industries to buttress the country's globalising image.Footnote ⁴⁵ As others have noted, the bodies of ethnic peoples service the nation in this fashion as well. Embodying difference, ethnic minorities and their inclusion in the national imaginary represent Vietnam's project to celebrate cultural diversity. Horim Choi argues that the ubiquitous presence of ethnic minorities in museums, festivals and tourist spots adds a ‘positive value in the national project naming Vietnam as a multi-ethnic and multicultural country’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Nonetheless, Choi also points out the paradox that ethnic minorities are perceived by the Kinh to be inferiors who threaten the nation's march towards economic progress as a result.Footnote ⁴⁷

Conjoined in this way, women and ethnic minorities similarly serve official narratives of national unity and cohesion. Both groups were differentially promised equality during the country's wars for independence and have yet to be granted equal access to culture and politics. Vietnamese women thus possess a kind of otherness akin to that of the ethnic minorities in postsocialist Vietnam; directors Linh and Phạm construct an alignment between women and ethnic minorities that makes this shared history of marginalisation clear. The otherness of women filmmakers is also manifested in the dearth of female directors working in the industry: there is little discourse about women's cinema and no state initiative seeking to remedy this gender divide. But neither has there been state support for ethnic minority filmmakers to make films about themselves — whether in front of or behind the camera, women have greater visibility in Vietnamese films and are more privileged than ethnic minorities in the realms of cultural production.

Marginalising the perspective of the ethnic Other but privileging the female gaze, Phạm's and Linh's texts reflect this hierarchy, one that is predicated on gender, ethnicity and class. This study has pointed to the imbalance of power underlying representations of ethnic minorities in Vietnamese cinema; in so doing, it also gestures toward a mode of feminist analysis that enables an intersectional analysis of class, race, gender and sexuality in the study of film. It argues that the feminist critic should be alert to how the gaze is powered in Vietnamese film and that it remains an inheritance bestowed by a colonial legacy. An analytic frame that includes an understanding of power also allows us to move beyond the lenses of humanism and authenticity that are usually used to contextualise Vietnamese films.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this we must examine films as they are produced and received through a transnational lens. The paucity of Vietnamese films available for film scholars to watch — as well as what gets selectively chosen to be subtitled, translated, and disseminated — alert us to the problems of the uneven cultural exchanges in the consumption of global South texts within the global North. In addition, the process of subtitling films is a costly endeavour, and for an impoverished film industry, this means that film production companies often have to consider carefully which films are translated, subtitled, and finally, exported.

In advancing this position, I am in line with Negar Mottahedeh's assertions for a transnational feminist film analysis that moves us beyond the question of authenticity, one that is ‘alert to the materiality of culture and to the power differentials informed by the intervention of colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism in national cultures'. She asks, ‘How does one move beyond the visual impulse to read representations as signs of “realism” or “authenticity” in the historically sedimented terrain of a global medium such as film?’Footnote ⁴⁹ Mottahedeh's mode of questioning underlines that films directed by ‘third world’ women should be contextualised against the transnational conditions of production and the networks of distribution that buttress their filmmaking at home and abroad. While specific to Iranian cinema, Mottahedeh's assertions are critical in the reading of Vietnamese films today, as they open a space for contextualising this body of work outside the paradigms of war and revolution, the traditional terms by which film scholars usually study films from Vietnam.

For scholars in the West, film studies about Vietnam largely rest on Western representations of the Vietnam War.Footnote ⁵⁰ Film scholars rarely investigate Vietnamese films (war films or otherwise), its history and cultural emergence within the Pacific Rim today. Meanwhile, state-sponsored Vietnamese film scholarship, which has become a burgeoning niche market in the country, reproduces an emphasis on revolutionary Vietnam and postcolonial filmmaking. As a result Vietnamese film history is narrated in these terms: the birth of Vietnamese cinema coincides with the birth of a postcolonial nation, one that is often sited in the North.Footnote ⁵¹ Such a narrative omits the films of South Vietnam, particularly when it collaborated with the United States during the war, the work of diasporic Vietnamese directors, and recent popular movies that do not address a nationalistic history. Film and feminist scholars are urged to see Vietnam differently in considering the cultural work the country's cinema performs for its transnational audiences, especially when it purports to demarcate national and cultural boundaries for those at home and abroad in a distinctly gendered and ethnocentric fashion.

Vietnamese films are increasingly travelling and circulating outside of the country. Studying Vietnamese cinema means to look at the country's culture industries vis-à-vis the national and to contextualise the boundaries of culture that have been established — often through nationalistic rhetoric that discounts women, sexual minorities, ethnic minority populations, and diasporic communities in the country's surge towards capitalism. A project such as this entails not only a resistance to interpretations based on native authority, but is also predicated on the viability of the state as a unit of analysis. For Vietnam and its film industry, the role of the state has historically been interwoven with the production of culture. In respect to its history, the country has emerged from the postwar era triumphant in the wars against colonialism and imperialism and yet remains highly fractured and fractious. Nonetheless, the Vietnamese state has tried and continues to govern, produce and distribute culture as though such fissures do not exist. In this we recognise that the gaze in films by Vietnamese women directors impinges on difference, but may also be congruent with state objectives to erase difference.