Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Bruce Lockhart, Department of History, National University of Singapore.

ABSTRACT

The most famous of Vietnamese-born directors, Trần Anh Hùng is known for his films about Việt Nam (Scent of Green Papaya, Cyclo and Vertical Ray of the Sun) as well as his recent adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. This presentation is part of a book project on Trần’s films and the cultural landscapes in which they are produced. The book will be made up of film analyses, Trần’s own writings, and my interviews with the director. This talk at the Asia Research Institute situates his oeuvre in the context of the political, historical relations between Việt Nam and France and analyzes the gendered images of domesticity and violence that tether his work. Linking Trần’s aesthetic vision of spectacle and containment to the politics of minority filmmaking in France, this study delves into the director’s fascination with women’s work and masculine forms of ennui.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Lan Phuong Duong is Associate Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at University of California – Riverside, USA. She received her PhD and MA in Comparative Literature from University of California – Irvine, USA. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Temple University Press, 2012). The book explores the films and literature of the Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora through the cultural politics of collaboration. Assoc Prof Phuong Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas: Imagining Nationhood in a Globalized Era, examines Vietnamese cinema from its inception to the present-day. Her research interests include feminist film theory, postcolonial literature, and Asian/American film and literature. Lan’s critical works can be found in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Amerasia, Asian Cinema, Discourse, Velvet Light Trap, and the anthologies, Transnational Feminism in Film and Media and Southeast Asian Cinema. Her most recent work is a collaborative effort, an edited anthology called Troubling Borders: Literature and Art by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora (University of Washington Press, Dec 2013). She is also a poet and has been published in Watermark, Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Poetry, Tilting the Continent, and Crab Orchard Review.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Sharon via email at arios@nus.edu.sg