Reassemblage

Trinh T. Minh-ha was born in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 1952. She is a filmmaker, writer, academic and compser, brought up in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. She studied piano and music composition at the National Conservatory of Music and Theater in Saigon. Trinh T. Minh-ha immigrated to the United States in 1970. Trinh studied music composition, ethnomusicology, and French literature at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where she received her M.F.A.s and Ph.D. degree. Trinh T. Minh-ha currently teaches in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley since 1994 and in the Department of Rhetoric since 1997. She has also taught at Harvard, Smith, Cornell, San Francisco State University, the University of Illinois, Ochanomizu University in Japan and the National Conservatory of Music in Senegal. She has been making films for over twenty years and may be best known for her first film Reassemblage, made in 1982. She has received several awards and grants, including the American Film Institute’s National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award, and Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Her films have been the subject of twenty retrospectives.

Reassemblage is Trinh T. Minha’s first film. It was filmed in Senegal and released in 1982. This film was part of a three year work on ethnographic field research in West Africa through the Research Expedition Program of the University of California, Berkeley. In Reassemblage Trinh explains that she intends “not to speak about/Just speak near by,” unlike more conventional ethnographic documentary film. The film is a montage of fleeting images from Senegal and includes no narration, although there are occasional statements by Trinh T. Minh-ha. None of the statements given by her assign meaning to the scenes. There is music, silence, sometimes Trinh views a movie, refusing to make the film “about” a “culture”. It points to the viewers expectation and the need for the assignment of meaning. The audience is left with a sense of disorientation.

In Naked Spaces: Living Is Round, Trinh T. Minh-ha elaborates on Reassemblage. She examines the themes of postcolonial identification and the geopolitical apparatus of disempowerment in Reassemblage to create an ethnographic essay-film on identity, the impossibility of translation, and space as a form of cultural representation. Trinh’s unique presentation of images serves as a language for the abstract, often exoticized representation of African Culture in Western countries. She re-frames the images in order to establish a figurative filter – a usurped privileged gaze. The montage of images point towards the economy of entertainment, which exoticizes images; exploited by the international community as justification for continued neocolonialism. Trinh’s images re-present struggle and resistance to the mystification and exoticization of African life. Her images suggest a process of interpretation as an explanation to resist prescribed assumptions and the perpetuation of stereotypes, as it is announced in the opening statement, “Not descriptive, not informative, not interesting.”

Surname Viet Given Name Nam, is not made in Vietnam. The film is composed of newsreel and archival footage as well as printed information. The film features interviews with five contemporary Vietnamese women. Trinh T. Min-ha intentionally leads the viewer to think that the Vietnamese women being interviewed are really the people they portray. After which it becomes clear that the interviews are re-enactments by immigrant-actors who live in the United States. Surname Viet Given Name Nam “allows the practice of interviews to enter into the play of the true and the false, and the real and the staged.” Trinh T. Minh-ha by showing both the staged and the “real” interviews it demarcates the differences of the two which addresses the invisibility of the politics of interviews, and further relations of representations. The film asks the viewer to consider issues such as plural identity, the fictions inherent in documentary techniques, and film as translation. Surname Viet Given Name Nam, has received much attention, including winning the Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film and Video festival.

Shoot for the Contents refers in part to a Chinese guessing game. It is a unique maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. The film ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, stemming from events at Tiananmen Square. The title juggles with documentary concepts of getting to the truth: “Shoot for the contents”. Simultaneously, it questions the film itself, “guess what’s in this film.” The film inquires into the process of film-making. The film is delicately layered with Chinese popular songs, classical music, sayings of Mao and Confucius, women’s voices, words of artists, philosophers, and other workers. The multifaceted layering of images and sounds once again touch on themes Trinh addresses in earlier film Surname Viet Given Name Nam on the multiplicity of identity, and the politics of representation, in this case, re-presentations of China. The film’s delicate balance between omission and depiction and its play with colors, rhythm, and the changing relationship between ear and eye suggest shifts of interpretation in contemporary Chinese culture and politics.

The Fourth Dimension is Trinh T. Minh-ha’s first digital video feature. It is an exploration of time through rituals of new technology, daily life and what is understood as conventional ritual, including festivals, religious rites, and theatrical performance. The film brings the viewers to a recognition that “in the end” “what is sensually brought on screen” is not “Japan, but the expansive reality of Japan as image and as time-light.” Here, travel through Japan is through a camera, a travelogue of images, where a visual machine ritualizes the journey. The images that come alive in time also frame time in the film; this is where the actual and virtual meet – The Fourth Dimension. In the process of ritualizing the images of “rituals of Japan” it is an encounter between self and other, human and machine, viewer and image, fact and fancy, the nexus at which the past and present are made possible. —Wikipedia