The Postcolonial Cinema Of Lam Le: Screens,the Sacred,and the Unhomely In Poussière D’Empire

Abstract

“I always considered the screen, the projected image as a border. To be on the border is richer than to be at the center, in the middle” (Guislain, “Entretien,” 30).¹ “To come back to Journey to the Occident, in the first two parts of the trilogy, I worked on the border, the outward bounds of things, the non-said, the off” (Lardeau and Philippon 20). These words, spoken by the Vietnamese filmmaker Lam Le in 1983, to describe both the liminal space and intellectual location from which he conceived his film, Poussière d’Empire (Dust of Empire), and the type of conceptual images he was imagining, seem to announce the seminal (if at times hermetic) work of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, who made the concept of border fashionable and “uncircumventable” in literary and cultural studies. But how do Lam Le’s formal preoccupations converge with the concerns of postcolonial theory and inscribe themselves on the filmic image? Is the border an intervening space that can be inhabited? And if so, is it a space of intervention? How can a screen, a projected image be a type of boundary? What would this boundary separate, mediate, or translate? What is the “in-between” site from which he writes and directs? This essay will attempt to address these issues using as a critical intertext, Lam Le’s first and only feature-length film, Poussière d’Empire.