gave me the sense you wanted to be asked, but I wasn't sure I'd have the nerve to ask you.
I'm glad you did. It's the beginningfor meof talking about it. Which means the beginning of fomenting a film.
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Trinh T. Minh-ha
For Trinh T. Minh-ha, filmmaking has been a way of responding to the multicultural perspective she has developed as a result of growing up in Vietnam during the American military presence there and her subsequent experiences as teacher, writer, and artist in France, the United States, and in a variety of West African societies. At the time this interview was recorded, Trinh had completed three films: two
(1982) and
(1985)focus on West Africa; a third
(1989)was made in the United States, about the experiences of Vietnamese women before, during, and after the recent war. Because Trinh uses a hand-held camera and a variety of other visual and auditory tactics familiar from North American and European independent cinema, her films can seem to be new instances of older critical approaches, but in fact, she accomplishes something relatively distinct. Her use of the hand-held camera in
and
for example, is neither an expression of her emotions, as gestural camerawork is in such Brakhage films as
(1959), nor an expression of her understanding of some essential dimension of what she films. Rather, her seemingly awkward camera movements, and other obvious formal devices, function as a cinematic staff (in the musical sense) on which is encoded the interface between Trinh (and the cultural practices she represents/enacts)and the cultures within which she records imagery and sound.
is a cine-poem, or a suite, on the theme of Senegal, focusing particularly on the everyday activities of women. It is an im-
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mense (forty minutes) montage of visuals and sounds within which particular, unexplained sights and activities become motifs. Though the film developed out of Trinh's frustration with the ways in which Senegal is exploited and patronized by Western cultures, the film's focus and structure provide a film critical response not only to the depiction of African societies in the commercial cinema, but to the history of ethnographic filmmaking, which has often been seen as a critical corrective to the absurdities of cultural ''representation' in mass-market entertainment. While we may appreciate the fact that such landmarks in the development of ethnographic cinema as Robert Flaherty's
(1922), John Marshall's
(1958), and Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon's
(1975) provide a more direct window on particular indigenous peoples than Hollywood film can even pretend to,
reminds us of how fully such films participate in the formal procedures of the commercial cinema (in particular, its focus on adventure narrative and on the resolution of ambiguity) and the ideology embedded in these procedures.
While
'reassembles' imagery in a particular society so that we see it from a less patronizing (and more feminist) perspective,
provides a cross-cultural lookor set of looksat living spaces and the people who inhabit them in a range of societies in West Africa: specifically, in Senegal, Mauritania, Togo, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Benin. The very breadth of Trinh's view in
which is evident both in the variety of societies and living spaces recorded and in her consistent use of long, halting pans as a means of revealing both the living spaces and their spatial contexts, can be seen as a critique of the narrow focus of the depiction of African societies in both commercial film and documentary, and as a way of demonstrating that the diversity, ingenuity, and beauty of these societies are as cinematically worthy as the varieties of European or North American cultural expression. Trinh's unusual soundtrack confirms these implications. Rather than provide a single perspective on the cultures represented visually, Trinh weaves the sounds of the various West African cultures, statements by three different female voicesas she explains in the introduction to the text of the sound track, reprinted in
No. 3 (1988), a 'low voice' remains 'close to the villagers' sayings and statements, and quotes African writers' works'; a 'high-range voice . . . informs according to Western logic and mainly quotes Western thinkers'; and a 'medium-range voice' speaks 'in the first person and relates personal feelings, and observations' (p. 65) and periods of silence into an auditory montage that intersects in various ways at various times with the geographically organized visuals.
While
and
can be understood as critiques
