ABSTRACT
When we speak of hybridized national cinemas in postcolonial “Indochina,” we invoke multiple war histories and resonant tensions between a French colonial past, a recent American imperial present, and a global cultural capitalist future. Understanding cultural production in the contemporary period also requires a postcolonial refashioning of approaches centered upon older formulations of “national cinema” and “Third Cinema,” both internally fraught movements always already in contestation with one another. Most film scholarship on postcolonial Southeast Asia privileges the history of the French colonial period of L’union indochinoise – the French-governed “Indochinese Union” of the three nation-states of Việt Nam, Cambodia, and Laos. Today, provocative cultural production is taking shape in both France and peninsular Southeast Asia. How do younger, often colonial educated auteurs negotiate the currents of anti-colonial politics and state policing tendencies using their formal colonial aesthetic training and calling upon diverse cultural influences? How do current post-socialist and neoliberal circumstances both constrain cinematic activity and propel it into international waters and onto distant shores? What kinds of theoretical and methodological approaches are needed for analyzing the postcolonial lives and aesthetic layers embedded in these productions?
