Lan Duong - "The Archive’s Hold: On Memories and the Movies”

1975 marks the momentous end of the Vietnam War—when the U.S. military formally withdraws its troops and North Việt Nam begins to occupy its southern counterpart. Both events are memorialized in American visual memory, in which images of U.S. helicopters leaving scores of desperate people behind and a tank bulldozing through National Unification Palace in Sài Gòn are iconic mnemonics of the war and its close. In other words, much of our understanding of “Vietnam,” my own included, has been narrated through visuality and spectacle. In 2025, the war’s dénouement will mark its 50th year anniversary, and once again, the archive on Việt Nam will be full. Narratives of loss and glory authored by the U.S. and Việt Nam will abound. Embellished stories will continue to efface the memories of many others still grappling with the effects of the U.S.’ wars in Southeast Asia. These erasures and the structures of power that maintain them are the main axes upon which my book on film and the archive is based. Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory offers a retelling of these erasures, one that sutures my experiences of being in the film archive with close readings of a century’s worth of films. Using Critical Refugee Studies methodologies, I unpack what it means to be in the archive as refugee scholar and writer.

Bio:

Lan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines Vietnamese cinema and its history. Her book of poems, Nothing Follows, was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2023.