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There are a number of direct statements on color and color timing in the text of
Naked Spaces
[''Color is life /
Light becoming music
"; "
Orange and blue; warmer or colder; more luminosity, / more presence. Timing acts as a link between natural/and artificial light
"]. The look of a film and how people are represented depends so vitally on color timing. For me, it has always been crucial to work closely with the color timer, especially in
Naked Spaces
. Very often, when films shot in Africa reach the lab, they are treated the same way as films shot in Western cultures; that is, they are timed more on the blue side of the color chart for people with fair skin. Hence, the African people often come out with a skin color that is dull charcoal black. This is not the vibrant skin color that I saw and remembered, so I devoted much of my energy at the lab learning from and cooperating with the timer on "color correcting," insisting whenever appropriate, on the orange and warmer colors to obtain the usually missing vibrant quality of African skin tones.
The relationship I worked on between color and light was also the link I drew between architecture, music, and film. The connections that determine the structure of the film are those that I have experienced in the living spaces of the different peoples involved. The roundness of life is not only literally manifested in the round shape of many of the houses. It is also recognizable in all spheres of sociocultural activity, such as the various dances shown or even the way women work together. "The house opens onto the sky in a perfect circle." a voice states in
Naked Spaces,
and the subtitle of the film is "Living Is Round."
MacDonald:
You were talking about music and architecture. Certainly one of the things that's unusual about both African films is the sound tracks: the movement back and forth between music, other everyday sounds, the various narrators, and silence. I assume this interweaving of different strands of sound and silence derives from your interest in music.
Trinh:
I guess now I can come back to your earlier question about the film background I don't really have, by relating the way I work with film to my musical background. I fare with ease in the world of experimental music, perhaps because of the cultural hybridity of both its instrumentation and its deterritorialized spacethe way it questions the boundaries of what is music and what is not. I really admired, for example, John Cage, whose Zen-inspired compositions and readings have effected radical change in all fields of the arts. I was very attracted to his work because it touched on something I was similarly groping for but had not articulated. The fact that Cage brought silence and the sounds of life into the consecrated realm of concert halls and out into the domain of public debate, was very liberating. "Experimental music" in this context is a constant exploration of sound as sound, rather than as a substitute