After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, Communist Vietnamese film critics in the newly unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) widely cited the 1972 South Vietnamese film, The Faceless Lover, as an example of neo-colonialist psychological warfare. In response to their critiques, this paper raises several questions: What role did the state play in constructing Southern Vietnamese war cinema? If the Communist film critics’ suggestions are inaccurate, how can we account for the emotion-laden pathos of the film? Using Vietnamese-language archival resources, the essay argues that the critical and commercial success of The Faceless Lover results from the rise of privatized cinema supported by cinema policy renewals in the early 1970s and mainstream reception of melodrama during the Second Republic of Vietnam, instead of serving any neo-imperialist agenda. Informed by melodrama theory, this essay argues that the film’s melodrama mode and ambiguous anti-war semiotics constitute an undercurrent of nationalism. It systematically rejects postwar Communist critics’ arguments while expanding the South Vietnamese film industry’s historical agents and contemporary scholars’ more objective and nuanced perspectives. This study is significant because it nuances the relationship between state apparatuses and the production of a national cinema unique to nations whose “land, government and cultural imaginary” have been divided by Cold War politics of Vietnam.[1] The special issue addressed in this paper regarding Vietnamese cinema concerns its lack of film studies scholarship on the cinema of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) after 1975, which stems from a systematic erasure of RVN films under the Communist SRV.

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