Film Studies MA Student Jess Stewart-Lee to present at the 2021 Archives Association of Ontario Conference
We are pleased to share that first year Film Studies MA student, Jess Stewart-Lee will be presenting her paper Blending Truths: A study of archival footage as shared memory in Oh, Saigon at the 2021 Archives Association of Ontario Conference.
CONFERENCE PAPER ABSTRACT
Oh, Saigon (Hoang, 2007) explores the ways in which the separation of Hoang’s family, resulting from the Vietnam War, continues to impact their familial dynamics. She blends archival materials with her shot footage, weaving together contrasting narratives of war, history, and family, to speak on how truth can be made malleable by memory. The rapid transitions between archival material and shot footage remakes time as fluid and re-emergent in its treatment of Hoang’s family as embodying the perils of war. This remaking forefronts questions of truth within her family by exploring their differing memories of that era. The expert use of archival imagery seeks to suture her family’s accounts with that of the shifting histories of Vietnam, allowing her family and their intermingled memories to voice Hoang’s reinterpreted understanding of the war. Hoang blurs time by both utilising transitions that match archival imagery with shot footage and employing the archival image in moments of recall. She blends her parents’ memories with her half-sister’s, effectively linking their disparate recollections through unifying archival footage. Hoang’s mother retells the story of how Hoang’s half-sister survived the ordeals of being a refugee “as if it happened to [her]”, invoking the collective memory of trauma as a means of bridging the divide between her daughter and herself (Hoang). The archival image becomes memory, losing its status as a marker of truth. By revisiting the archive through her family’s experiences, Hoang merges time and memory so as to question whose stories are uplifted into historical canon.
