I was looking at an issue of a kind of magazine/newsletter that the South Vietnamese Embassy in the US used to publish called Viet-Nam Bulletin. In 1969 there was an issue that focused on culture.
That issue talked about the cultural realms of theater, music and television, but I was particularly interested in what it had to say about movies. It noted, for instance, that in the late 1960s more than 24 million movie tickets were sold in South Vietnam each year, and that there were 94 theaters with a total capacity of 64,000 seats.
The article then provides the following information about the film industry and the films that were being viewed:
“The first silent film produced in Vietnam was, predictably, the Kim Van Kieu, and that was in 1921. The industry reached its peak in 1957 when 28 feature films were turned out by 14 commercial film producers. Today there are 18 producers authorized to make movies. . . Stories of spies and beautiful women are most popular, followed by variations on the Cai Luong type of drama and fictitious accounts of South Vietnamese soldiers invading North Vietnam.”
“To supplement this fare, 34 film importers distribute from 200 to 450 feature films throughout the country every year. Forty-five percent of these films come from the Republic of China and the rest from 12 other nations, principally the United States, Italy, India and Japan.”
What caught my attention here was the statement that 45% of the foreign films shown in South Vietnam came from the Republic of China. That 45% statistic may be true, but surely these films were coming from Hong Kong too, as that was the main center of film production in what I call the “Free Chinese World” at that time.
This idea of the Free Chinese World and its importance for Southeast Asia is one that I keep thinking about, and statements like this one make it even clearer to me how vibrant and important that cultural world was.
1969 was the height of the period “American influence” in South Vietnam and yet more films from the Free Chinese World were being viewed than films from Hollywood. So why doesn’t anyone talk about the 1960s as the height of the period of Free Chinese World cultural influence? Clearly it was, and not just in South Vietnam, but in many other places in Southeast Asia.
In the late 1960s, I think the population in South Vietnam was less than 24 millions. The reasonable number was from 14 to 17 millions.
Yea, I attempted to rephrase a sentence that made this point confusing – “More than 24 million Vietnamese annually see films in 94 theaters” – but my version clearly wasn’t much better. I think the clearest way to say it is something like “More than 24 million movie tickets are sold annually.” Someone might have gone to the movies every day, and someone never, etc. I’ll change it. Thanks for pointing it out.
Chinese (arguably still “Free Chinese,” i.e., Hong Kong) movies still making great inroads in the Vietnamese community. There was a theatre in Hanoi in 1995 where I watched dubbed Hong Kong movies. They were often on television. The video rental / sales stores for overseas Vietnamese have been predominantly Hong Kong fare for years, although South Korean films have probably overtaken them. It’s probably owing to the poverty (both quantity and financing) of the Vietnamese product that these films have done so well.
It would have been a real loss to the world’s culture if there had been no “free” China (or no “free” Vietnam, if you think of it).
Yea, so I guess the thing I’m trying to think about is this: We all assume/acknowledge that Hollywood films have affected other people’s ideas about how to live. So why don’t we think this about Hong Kong films? Ok, so Shaw Brothers martial art films might influence people’s daily lives all that much, but what about the “Joy of Spring”? http://leminhkhai.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/going-gay-in-the-free-chinese-world-in-the-1960s/
Wouldn’t that give a young Vietnamese/Thai/Indonesian some idea about how to dress, what kind of hairstyle to have, and what to do this Saturday night?
In the past 20 years 1st Japan and then Korea have had a huge influence throughout the rest of Asia on things like fashion and music in part (I think) because they somehow feel closer to people in the region. Wouldn’t the cultural production of the Free Chinese World in the 1950s-70s have been similar? That would be my guess.
Here is a contemporary take on the films of the hegemonic Chinese written by one of Vietnam’s more interesting and daring journalists:
http://www.nhipcauthegioi.hu/modules.php?name=News&op=viewst&sid=1895
The attraction of Chinese film remains strong, probably owing to the same factors that made the “free Chinese” product so popular. In this article it is viewed as a sinister product of scheming, hostile neighbor.
Of course Tam Quốc is probably going to be popular whoever is filming it.
Yea, this is an interesting article. It looks at interesting phenomena but then deals with them in a rather simplistic way.
So Chinese don’t realize that Maggie Q is a hapa (mixed ethnicity) girl from Hawaii? I’m sure that there are people in the US who don’t know that the lead guy in Hawaii 5-0 now is from Australia. That such details get “erased” is interesting. I don’t think that it’s a sinister plot. It probably just comes from a conservative sense of not caring much about other people and places. Is that something that is distinct to “big cultures/societies”? I’m not sure.
But yea, I think the things you said about entrepreneurs/translators in your other comment are right on target. I don’t think government-inspired cultural plans have much effect. It’s entrepreneurs/translators who do that.
It would be great to have more information about the entrepreneur / translators who helped to shape the situation that Đoan Trang laments in her article. I think it’s likely that there are political factors in addition to the business factors that determine what gets on to Vietnam’s airwaves.
I find it hard to put myself in the place of people who feel like their nation / society / way of live is in a position of being overwhelmed by larger hegemonic entities. For many countries the U.S.A. has been the cultural behemoth that was feared the most – the attractions of American film, TV, pop music, consumer lifestyles, etc… United States cultural hegemony has tended to be a commercial affair – and less a government policy, although the government could be complicit at times. I think the “sinister” edge that Đoan Trang imagines (and may perceive correctly to some degree) is whether there is a conscious policy on the part of Chinese government to try use their economic largesse to saturate smaller countries like Vietnam with goods (including cultural goods) that overwhelm domestic products.
But there is also a reflexive anti-Chinese sentiment among some Vietnamese intellectuals. Sharing a border with China is undoubtedly anxiety provoking.
-Many Chinese will tell you how great China is, and then in the next sentence they will ask you how they can get into a US university and get a job in the US.
-Many Vietnamese will talk about how they oppose the Chinese government’s efforts to use the soft power of Chinese culture to spread its influence, and then they will go home and read the Three Kingdoms for the 1,000th time while their kids play a Three Kingdoms video game.
I find that talking/worrying about culture in those settings to not be very productive.
This weekend I was watching some short videos that were made in Malaysia a while ago as part of a film project called 15Malaysia. The official site is slow (http://15malaysia.com/), fb is easier to access (https://www.facebook.com/15malaysia).
Some of the videos are funny, some are serious, but they are all cool in their own way and they all engage local culture. This seems to me like a productive way to deal with the “problem” of culture. Don’t like a “big” culture? Then do something with your “small” culture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKcHEJJ9Uy0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mJ9BBXQ7d8
More in the extreme Chinese xenophobia department:
http://xuandienhannom.blogspot.com/2013/10/vi-sao-vien-khong-tu-lai-gay-bat-cho.html
Maybe nobody talks about the tremendous effect Hong Kong movies had on the mind of people in SEA, because it maybe didn’t have such an effect? With the same liberty that you claim to assume that it must have had one, I – as agent provocateur – maintain that most of the movies were simply products of trashy, kitschy, sultry nature, made for recreational entertainment only. And unlike other, more durable factory made consumer goods like cars and refrigerators movies and music are highly volatile and subject to rapid changes of fashion.
Almost all movies I suppose probably even didn´t aspire to become pieces of art, to touch people deeply and powerfully, to make them ask profound questions about who they are and what they might become, and to channel peoples´ élan into the right direction towards meaningful purposes.
And one must not forget, all-over SEA existed large communities of overseas Chinese (usually middle or high income consumers) – maybe they consumed the Hong Kong stuff and went to the cinema every weekend; just like the Indians of SEA would probably prefer Bollywood epics.
Most of the Japanese and Korean wave phenomena that can be observed in the streets of e.g. Bangkok today are just superficial, just mimicry, just another fad, that will be buried under the surges of the next wave for sure. Under the surface people surprisingly remain the same as before.
Thank you agent provocateur!!!
I think that there are different levels of influence. And my point is simply that historians should pay attention to those different levels.
Yes, at the high level, I don’t think any Shaw Brothers films ever led any heads of state to change some kind of national policy, or any intelligent human beings to question their existence.
But “under the surface” as you say, people have remained surprisingly similar over the decades, and what has remained a constant has been the popularity (in some places) of Chinese “products of trashy, kitschy, sultry nature.”
How and why is that the case? Take Vietnam for instance. What would explain that? Well the simple answer would be that it is because of the historical cultural influence of China. Yes, that’s partly true, but I think it’s too simple.
As dustofthewest pointed out in a comment, “products of trashy, kitschy, sultry nature” spread and become popular in part because of the work of entrepreneurs.
The Free Chinese World had plenty of entrepreneurs, and they may have been trading in kitcsh and trash – from martial arts movies to cure-all tonics – but many people consumed that kitsh and trash.
Did it change their lives? I doubt it. But the Shaw Brothers movie that they went to on Friday night and the Green Oil that they rubbed on their temples when they had a headache at work, and the translations of Jin Yong novels that they read at home, and some of the gaudy buildings that they walked by every day, were all part of their lives, and they were all made part of their lives by entrepreneurs who were connected to entrepreneurs in other parts of the same world, and some of those entrepreneurs did probably have an influence on a government policy or two. . .
What got me thinking about all of this is a book I read recently – Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Identity in Java.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=11903
Description
A young couple poses before a painted backdrop depicting a modern building set in a volcanic landscape; a college student grabs his camera as he heads to a political demonstration; a man poses stiffly for his identity photograph; amateur photographers look for picturesque images in a rural village; an old woman leafs through a family album. In Refracted Visions, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices such as these have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals.
Oriented to projects of selfhood, memory, and social affiliation, popular photographs recast national iconographies in an intimate register. They convey the longings of Indonesian national modernity: nostalgia for rural idylls and “tradition,” desires for the trappings of modernity and affluence, dreams of historical agency, and hopes for political authenticity. Yet photography also brings people into contact with ideas and images that transcend and at times undermine a strictly national frame. Photography’s primary practitioners in the postcolonial era have been Chinese Indonesians. Acting as cultural brokers who translate global and colonial imageries into national idioms, these members of a transnational minority have helped shape the visual contours of Indonesian belonging even as their own place within the nation remains tenuous. Refracted Visions illuminates the ways that everyday photographic practices generate visual habits that in turn give rise to political subjects and communities.
About The Author(s)
Karen Strassler is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, City University of New York.