Page 369
I am constantly questioning who I am, and making my films transform the way I see the world. You know, history is full of people who die for theory.
MacDonald:
Can we go back to
Naked Spaces
? How did you decide on the order of the sections? Until I went to the atlas, I thought perhaps you traveled in a circle.
Trinh:
Except for the end of the film, which leads us back to the opening sequences,
Naked Spaces
is organized in the geographical order of my itinerary: from one country, one region, to another. Each location is indicated by, having the names of the people and the country appear briefly on the screen, more as a footnote than as a name tag or a validating marker. The sound track is, however, more playful: a statement made by a member of a specific group may be repeated in geographical contexts that are different. Needless to say, this strategy has not failed to provoke hostility among "experts" on African cultures, "liberal" media specialists, and other cultural documentarians.
Apparently, some "professional" viewers cannot distinguish between a signpost, whose presence only tells you where you are, and an arrangement that suggests more than one function at work. Depending on how one uses them, letters on an image have many functions, and viewers who abide by media formulas are often insensitive to this. For me, the footnotes or the names that appear on screen allow precisely the non-expert viewer to recognize that a few selected statements issued by one source or heard in one group are repeated
across
borderlines of ethnic specificities. Thus, the names also function as acknowledgment of the strategical play of the film, my manipulations as filmmaker.
The deliberate act of taking, for example, a Dogon [Mali] statement on adornment and desire or on the house as a woman, and juxtaposing it with specific images of dwellings among the Kabye [Togo] and then again, among the Birifor [Burkina Faso] is a taboo among experts. What one ethnic group says can absolutely not be reproduced in the context of another group. This is also applicable in the film to quotes from Westerners, such as Paul Éluard's "The earth is blue like an orange," which is heard in a sequence on the Oualatans [Mauritania] as well as in a sequence on the Fon [Benin]. And I use a similar strategy in the music: in both
Naked Spaces
and
Reassemblage,
music from one group is first heard with that very group and then repeated with variations within other groups. The viewer is made aware of such "violations" of borders.
There is a very interesting issue involved here. The peoples of third-world countries used to be lumped together in their undifferentiated otherness. And this is reflected pervasively in Western media discoursesradio, books, photos, films, television. You might have a program on Vietnam, for example, but you hear persistent Chinese