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the only thing we're going to find out about you personally is that you're interested in this place. Much hand-held camerawork is implicitly autobiographical, emotionally self-expressive. In your films camera movement is
not
autobiographical except in the sense that it reveals you were in this place with these people for a time.
Trinh:
There are many ways to treat the autobiographical. What is autobiographical can often be very political, but not everything is political in the autobiographical. One can do many things with elements of autobiography. However, I appreciate the distinction you make because in the realm of generalized media colonization, my films have too often been described as "personal film," as "personal documentary" or "subjective documentary." Although I accept these terms, I think they really need to be problematized, redefined, and expanded. Because personal in the context of my films does
not
mean an individual standpoint or the foregrounding of a self. I am not interested in using film to "express myself" but rather to expose the social self (and selves)that necessarily mediates the making as well as the viewing of the film.
MacDonald:
"Personal," "subjective" suggest that something else is impersonal and objective.
Trinh:
Right. As if anyone can produce objective documentary. There is nothing objective and truly impersonal in filmmaking, although there can be a formulaic, clichéd approach to film. What you often have is a mere abiding by the conventions of documentary practice, which is put forward as
the
"objective" way to document other cultures. It is as if the acknowledgement of the politics of the documentation and the documenting subject disturbs the interests of the guardians of norms.
MacDonald:
In
Naked Spaces
we're inside the dwellings as much as we're outside. In fact, the movement from outside to inside, and vice versa, seems central to the film.
Trinh:
Yes. When you walk from outside to the inside of most rural African houses, you come from a very bright sunlight to a very dark space where, for a moment, you are totally blind. It takes some time to get adjusted to the darkness inside. This experience is one of the conceptual bases of
Naked Spaces
. To move inside oneself, one has to be willing to go intermittently blind. Similarly, to move toward other people, one has to take the jump and move ahead blindly at certain moments of inquiry. If one is not even momentarily blind, if one remains as one is from the outside or from the inside, then it is unlikely that one can break through that moment where suddenly everything stops, one's luggage is emptied out, and one moves in a state of nonknowingness, where destabilizing encounters with the "unfamiliar" or "unknown" are multiplied and experienced anew.
MacDonald:
Since as a technology, film captures light, the traditional