Abstract
As the most documented war, “Vietnam” established visualizing infrastructures of search and destroy — the imperative to look in order to gather information and thereby inflict violence. This article considers Hanoi‐based artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi's short film Landscape Series #1 (2013) as a response to search and destroy and a rejoinder to what is here called visual warfare, the staging or conduct of war in the visual realm. Ushered through the so‐called Vietnam War, visual warfare became the modus operandi for US military and media operations across Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam intent on closing the epistemological gap between vision and violence. After delineating this visual history and archive, the author analyzes Landscape Series #1 for its practices of refusal and its implication of the look that has served as the engine for search‐and‐destroy missions. Presenting a slideshow of Vietnamese press photographs featuring anonymous witnesses pointing to undescribed, unknown events in varied Southeast Asian landscapes, Nguyễn's five‐minute film renders the gaze a visible and felt presence through her staging of iterative and intensifying acts of witnessing against a quiet yet formidable landscape. Landscape Series #1 lays bare the infrastructures of search and destroy, elucidating the limitations of knowing through seeing inherent in our own acts of witnessing. By the end of the film, the viewer's seeking yet jilted gaze has been interpellated to recompense the imperceptible.
