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realm of "experimental" filmmaking. This does not mean that one can no longer use it, but rather that the challenge in using it is more critical.
I still think that in
Reassemblage
repetition functions very differently than in many of the films I have seen. For me, it's not just a technique that one introduces for fragmenting or emphasizing effects. Very often people tend to repeat mechanically three or four times something said on the sound track. This technique of looping is also very common in experimental music. But looping is not of particular interest to me. What interests me is the way certain rhythms came back to me while I was traveling and filming across Senegal, and how the intonation and inflection of each of the diverse local languages informed me of where I was. For example, the film brought out the musical quality of the Serer language through untranslated snatches of a conversation among villagers and the varying repetition of certain sentences. Each language has its own music and its practice need not be reduced to the mere function of communicating meaning. The repetition I made use of has, accordingly, nuances and differences built within it, so that repetition here is not just the automatic reproduction of the same but rather the production of the same within differences.
MacDonald:
When I had seen
Reassemblage
enough to see it in detail, rather than just letting it flow by, I noticed something that strikes me as very unusual. When you focus on a subject, you don't see it from a single plane. Instead, you move to different positions near and far and from side to side. You don't try to choose a view of the subject; you explore various ways of seeing it.
Trinh:
This is a great description of what is happening with the
look
in
Reassemblage,
but I'll have to expand on it a little more. It is common practice among filmmakers and photographers to shoot the same thing more than once and to select only one shotthe "best" onein the editing process. Otherwise, to show the subject from a more varied view, the favored formula is that of utilizing the all-powerful zoom or curvilinear traveling shot, whose totalizing effect is assured by the smooth operation of the camera.
Whereas in my case, the limits of the looker and of the camera are clearly exposed, not only through the repeated inclusion of a plurality of shots of the same subject from very slightly different distances or angles (hence the numerous jump-cut effects), but also through a visibly hesitant, or as you mentioned earlier, incomplete, sudden, and unstable camera work. (The zoom is avoided in both
Reassemblage
and
Naked Spaces,
and diversely acknowledged in the more recent films I have been making.) The exploratory movements of the cameraor structurally speaking, of the film itselfwhich some viewers have qualified as "disquieting," and others as "sloppy," is neither intentional nor unconscious.