Streetwalking in the Cinema of the City: Capital Flows Through Saigon

Narkunas, J. Paul

doi:10.1002/9780470712948.ch12

Cited by 4 publications

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“…The film's unusual persistence in opening up and intercutting its nightmarish scenes with shots of everyday life in the street, particularly through the presence of open windows and balconies, underlines the city's vulnerability to the forces of vice and corruption. Furthermore, as Paul Narkunas (2001) argues, images of money being circulated, initially Vietnamese dong, ultimately American dollars, emphasize the development of the city's lawless underworld as a result of its opening up to westernization and global capitalism.…”

Section: Cyclo (1995)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Outsider and insider views of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City: The Lover/L'Amant, Cyclo/Xích lô, Collective Flat/Chung c and Bargirls/Gái nhy

Tarr

2008

Singap J Trop Geogr

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This article addresses representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City in four films made since d -ô i mo i, the opening up of Vietnam to western influences, initiated in 1986. The Lover/L'Amant (1992) is a Franco-British heritage film which reconstructs the city from a Eurocentric neocolonial perspective, while Cyclo/Xích lô (1995), a French-funded film made by a France-based Vietnamese filmmaker, is a contemporary poetic thriller which treats the city expressively as the site of present-day corruption and violence. The nostalgia evident in these two 'outsider' films is contrasted with the more complex views of the city in two state-funded low-budget 'insider' films by local Vietnamese filmmakers, Collective Flat/Chung cu (1999) and Bargirls/Gái nhay (2003); the first, an intellectual fable set in the decade or so following reunification/Independence in 1975 which recalls an attempt at collective living, the second, a hugely popular treatment of contemporary urban realities, both corrupt and progressive. Examining how the mise-en-scène and narratives of the city differ from film to film, the essay takes the representation of the city through changing historical, political, social and economic times, from colonial-orientalist Saigon to corrupt, capitalist Ho Chi Minh City via the slow degeneration of the postwar socialist/collectivist experiment. In so doing, it confirms the importance of the films' moments and contexts of production in the construction of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City as a cinematic 'city-text'.

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Section: Cyclo (1995)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Outsider and insider views of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City: The Lover/L'Amant, Cyclo/Xích lô, Collective Flat/Chung c and Bargirls/Gái nhy

Tarr

2008

Singap J Trop Geogr

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Béla Tarr: A Nostalgia for Modernism

Çağlayan

2018

Poetics of Slow Cinema

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Urban space in the French imperial past and the postcolonial present

Derderian

2003

Asia Europe Journal

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The essay begins with a discussion of some of the parallel forms of imagining urban space found in colonial French and postcolonial Franco-Vietnamese cultural expression. In both cases cities are perceived as dynamic sites of creative exchange and mutual enrichment between the former imperial center and periphery. We also find similar sentiments of regret and longing for an authentic ''indigenous'' space uncorrupted by Western intervention. The second part looks comparatively at how contemporary Franco-Algerian and Franco-Vietnamese cultural actors depict urban space in the postcolonial present. Here we see that aside from important socioeconomic differences and the more distant and largely absent memory of the French war in Indochina, military conflicts rooted in the colonial past continue to exert a powerful influence on the imagining of urban space. In the case of Franco-Algerians it is the legacy of the Algerian war that pits Algerian-youth against French authorities in urban periphery. For Franco-Vietnamese the memory of the Vietnam War continues to divide the Vietnamese community internally into pro and anti-Hanoi camps within the center of the French capital.

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Streetwalking in the Cinema of the City: Capital Flows Through Saigon

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Outsider and insider views of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City: The Lover/L'Amant, Cyclo/Xích lô, Collective Flat/Chung c and Bargirls/Gái nhy

Outsider and insider views of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City: The Lover/L'Amant, Cyclo/Xích lô, Collective Flat/Chung c and Bargirls/Gái nhy

Béla Tarr: A Nostalgia for Modernism

Urban space in the French imperial past and the postcolonial present

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