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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
Reassemblage
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.
Reassemblage
was shot in 1981 well after my stay there. Although I had by then seen quite a number of films and was familiar with the history of Western cinema, I can't say this was a determining factor. I had done a number of Super-8 films on diverse subjects before, but
Reassemblage
was my first 16mm.
MacDonald:
You mentioned you were looking at films before you went to Senegal. Were you looking at the way in which Senegal or other African cultures were portrayed in film?
Trinh:
No, not at all. Despite my having been exposed to a number of nonmainstream films from Europe and the States at the time, I must say I was then one of the more passive consumers of the film industry. It was when I started making films myself that I really came to realize how obscene the question of power and production of meaning is in filmic representation. I don't really work in terms of influence. I've never been able to recognize anything in my background that would allow me neatly to traceeven momentarilymy itinerary back to a single point of origin. Influences in my life have always happened in the most odd, disorderly way. Everything I've done comes from all kinds of directions, certainly not just from film. It seems rather clear to me that
Reassemblage
did not come from the films I looked at, but from what I had learned in Senegal. The film was not realized as a reaction to anything in particular, but more I would now say, as a desire not to simply
mean
. What seemed most important to me was to expose the transformations that occurred with the attempt to materialize on film and between the frames the impossible experience of "what" constituted Senegalese cultures. The resistance to anthropology was not a motivation for the making of the film. It came alongside other strong feelings, such as the love that one has for one's subjects of inquiry.
MacDonald:
So the fact that you found a film form different from what has become conventional as a means of imaging culture was accidental . . .
Trinh:
Not quite accidental, because there were a number of things I did not want to reproduce in my work: the kind of omniscience that