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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
Reassemblage
(1982) and
Naked SpacesLiving Is Round
(1985)focus on West Africa; a third
Surname Viêt Given Name Nam
(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
Reassemblage
and
Naked SpacesLiving Is Round,
for example, is neither an expression of her emotions, as gestural camerawork is in such Brakhage films as
Window Water Baby Moving or Sirius Remembered
(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.
Reassemblage
is a cine-poem, or a suite, on the theme of Senegal, focusing particularly on the everyday activities of women. It is an im-