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From Trinh's
(1985).
of the conventional representations of particular indigenous societies,
focuses more fully on the issue of translation: the translation of experiences in one culture into the verbal and visual languages of other cultures, and the 'translation' of people from one nation to another. Again, Trinh refuses to participate in the conventional tendency to try to simplify and 'clarify' complex cultural experiences for the film audience. During the first half of
a series of women discuss what, at first, most viewers probably assume are the women's own experiences in postwar Communist Vietnam. They speak in heavily accented English that intermittently is translated into superimposed printed text. Rather than simply clarifying the speakers' comments, however, the superimposed words suggest how translations tend to impede our willingness to actually listen to accented spoken English: we read the translation and cease listening to the people. The implications of this tendency are confirmed by the frequent disparities between what we hear and what we read: the very act of 'translation,' Trinh demonstrates, subverts our willingness to develop an ability to hear the expressions of people whose cultural difference is encoded in their accents.
During the second half of
we discover that the women interviewed in the first half are not current residents of Vietnam, but have been translated to the United States where
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they have acculturated themselves in varying degrees. Indeed, the Vietnamese experiences they have testified to are not even theirs: they are the reminiscences of other Vietnamese women translated first into French and subsequently into English for use in Trinh's film, which, we come to realize, has set us up to discover how fully our cultural (and film-cultural) training has led us to accept at face value simplistic renderings of the complex experiences of people in and from other cultures.
I spoke with Trinh while she was touring with
in Utica, in November 1989.
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You grew up in Vietnam during the American presence there. This may be a strange question to ask about that period, but I'm curious about whether you were a moviegoer and what films you saw in those years.
I was not at all a moviegoer. To go to the movies then was a real feast. A new film in town was always an overcrowded, exciting event. The number of films I got to see before coming to the States was rather limited, and I was barely introduced to TV before I left the country in 1970. Actually, it was only when the first television programs came to Vietnam that I learned to listen to English. Here also the experience was a collective one since you had to line up in the streets with everyone else to look at one of the TVs made available to the neighborhood. I had studied English at school, but to be able to follow the actual pace of spoken English was quite a different matter.
Did you see French films in school?
No. A number of them were commercially shown, but during the last few years I was in Vietnam, there were more American than French films. My introduction to film culture is quite recent.
seems to critique traditional ethnographic movies
. . . I assume you made a conscious decision to take on the whole male-centered history of ethnographic moviemaking. At what point did you become familiar with that tradition? Did you have specific films in mind when you made
?
No, I didn't. You don't have to be a film connoisseur to be aware of the problems that permeate anthropology, although these problems do differ with the specific tools and the medium that one uses. The way one relates to the material that makes one a writer-anthropologist or an anthropological filmmaker needs to be radically questioned. A
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Zen proverb says 'A grain of sand contains all land and sea,' and I think that whether you look at a film, attend a slide show, listen to a lecture, witness the fieldwork by either an expert anthropologist or by any person subjected to the authority of anthropological discourse, the problems of subject and of power relationship are all there. They saturate the entire field of anthropological activity.
I made
after having lived in Senegal for three years [197780] and taught music at the Institut National des Arts in Dakar; in other words, after having time and again been made aware of the hegemony of anthropological discourse in every attempt by both local outsiders and by insiders to identify the culture observed.
