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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
Surname Viêt Given Name Nam,
in Utica, in November 1989.
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Mac Donald:
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.
Trinh:
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.
MacDonald:
Did you see French films in school?
Trinh:
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.
MacDonald: Reassemblage
seems to critique traditional ethnographic movies
Nanook of the North, Ax Fight, The Hunters
. . . 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
Reassemblage
?
Trinh:
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