tal entitled "Hanoi, beautiful and not too beautiful" opened a new chapter in the history of photography in communist Vietnam. For the first time prosaic real life snapshots were publicly shown. Instead of a Potemkin-stage show, one saw scenes of traffic violations, or a man taking a bath in the garden cistern of a respectable Confucian temple 87
The movies had to wait a little longer to escape the grasp of censorship. 1988 saw the eventual release of film makers Tran Van Thuy's documentary, "Hanoi trong mat ai". Produced in 1983 and forbidden until 1987, it provoked an immediate reaction and was acclaimed by a dozen laudatory articles in the official press. If "Hanoi in someone's eyes" seemed a reconstruction of an idealistic past to implicitly condemning the anomaly and degradation of the present, Thuy's next production, "Chuyen tu te" (Living correctly) documented the human environment of today's Vietnam, denouncing the humiliating chasm between the privileged caste of high officiais and the people who exist in conditions of misery, disease, suffering, and death m

The field of social sciences also experienced a radical transformation of consciousness when scholars took heart and re-examined the conventional postulates concerning the national mentality and history. First-rate historians like Tran Quoc Vuong and Nguyen Hong Phong, offered a lucid analysis of the country's liabilities stemming from its long feudal past and backward agrarian mode of production 89 Another authority in this domain, Ha Van Tan, did not hesitate to criticize the demagogic stand of many of his colleagues who, apart from rudimentary errors in method and critical judgment, have presented a distorted vision of the village community which, according to those learned minds, had been the cradle of democracy a la Vietnamienne.90 Likewise experts in the field of behavior and mentality and psychology have reconsidered the taken for granted "good nature" of their folks 91 All in all, the intelligentsia is becoming more conscious and sophisticated in its awareness of the multi-faceted truth.
However, the crucial revolution in consciousness was undoubtedly the intellectuals' confrontation with the ideological apparatus, for the basic reason that the intellectuals were unable to bypass the thought control institutions in their efforts to promote a renewed view of the national situation. Those institutions, on the other hand, began waging a critical battle to retain their earlier unalterable and self-evident status against the intelligentsia's new awareness, which questioned the very reason for their existence.
C. Ideology and Renewal of Thinking
As has already been fflustrated, the reformera' new policy of information and culture has met staunch opposition from the conservative ranks, including the ideological apparatus. This is understandable because they did not want social change. The alliance between upholders of the status quo and dogmatic ideologists was a natural, as observed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.
... a profound af finity exists between those with an interest in maintaining established power positions and the personnel administering monopolistic traditions o f universe-maintenance 9x
Also ... those who occupy the decisive power positions are ready to use their power to impose the traditional definitions of reality on the population under
their authority.93
The Vietnamese intelligentsias real battle was against the thought control apparatus of the state.
Oct-Dec 1990	Indochina Report 15