Trinh T. Minh-ha

An interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha and Genevieve Shiffrar

June 26, 2002

Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, of the Rhetoric and Women's StudiesDepartments, is known around the world as a cutting-edge filmmaker whose work challenges the boundaries of the medium. In the words of one critic, "Trinh T. Minh-ha in her unique and beautifully composed films is a lyricist of the first order, an imaginative see-er and thinker whose art radically remakes narrative modes of filmmaking by invoking then reinventing the tools of the anthropologist, the poet and political witness, the visual artist and the musical composer" (Steve Dickison, the Poetry Center).

Indeed, she has received numerous prestigious awards and grants and has been given over 27 retrospectives nationally and internationally for her six films:

Trinh Minh-ha filming A Tale of Love

• The Fourth Dimension, "on the 'rituals' of Japanese culture and on time as explored and experienced in digital video imaging," 2001
• A Tale of Love, "an experimental narrative," 1995
• Shoot for the Contents, "on culture, arts, and politics in China," 1991
• Surname Viet Given Name Nam," on identity and culture through the struggle of Vietnamese women," 1989
• Naked Spaces - Living is Round, "on the relation between women, houses, and cosmos in West Africa," 1985
• Reassemblage, "on filming in rural Senegal and a critique of the anthropological I/eye," 1982

Trinh Minh-ha is not only a filmmaker. She is also a prolific writer, a poet, a critic, a composer, and a much loved teacher at Berkeley. She has written five books and nearly 100 journal articles, co-authored or co-edited three more books, composed musical pieces for percussion and electronic instruments, and has collaborated in the creation of multimedia installation art.

From June 8 to September 15, 2002, Dr. Trinh's films will be included in one of the most important contemporary art events in Europe, Documenta11. Documenta is a series of art events that takes place only once every five years in Kassel, Germany. Documenta11 consists of a constellation of five events (or "platforms") realized in four continents in the span of eighteen months (March 2001 to September 2002). Each of the first four platforms are devised as symposia. They gather scholars, artists and activists to explore the problematics of art, politics, and society around a theme: Democracy Unrealized (in Vienna); Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation (in New Delhi); Cr�olit� and Creolization (in St. Lucia); Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos (in Lagos). The exhibition in Kassel, also known as the "Museum of the 100 Days," takes place from June 8 to September 15. It represents the fifth platform and gives concrete form to the principal pursuit of Documenta 11. In Platform 5, four of Trinh Minh-ha's films are showing alongside the work of over 100 international artists.

Genevieve Shiffrar spoke with Professor Trinh in her office about Documenta11, filmmaking, and teaching at UC Berkeley.

G S: You've been included in film festivals all over the world. But this one will be different—it is the "art world" and there will be all kinds of art forms, not just films. And it's a big deal. Here's a quote from the Documenta11 website: "Every five years the discussion within the international art community is comprised in Kassel's 'Museum of 100 Days.'" That's saying for the next five years, discourse within the art community is influenced by what goes on there and possibly by your own work. Will you comment on these differences of the Documenta exhibition compared to the traditional film festival?

T Mh: Yes, Documenta is unique partly because it happens only every five years. Not every two years as with the Biennale nor every year as with the old Salon-type of event. Its importance lies in its worldwide stature both as a discursive intervention and as an art exhibition. In a way, we can thank the first four Documentas for the shift in focus of the international community from the art scene in old Europe to the one in America via Germany; or more specifically, from Paris to New York via Kassel. It's a colossal cultural manifestation—significantly held in a small, remote town of the German countryside. Documenta can then be said to be initially conceived as a break with a whole tradition of art exhibition, as well as a challenge to the art establishment of the Nazi totalitarian regime. However Documenta has been much criticized since then. The last one, Documenta 10, was blamed for example, for having widely ignored Eastern Europe and other parts of the world, and hence for failing to question the domineering role Western art assumes for itself, despite the director's proclaimed emphasis on the political context of aesthetic production. And so Documenta11, presently curated by Okwui Enwezor, seems to be the first to act on that imperial framework, to insist on the processes of cultural mixing around the world (including Latin America and Africa), and to address questions of transcultural and transdiasporic practices. I am happy to be part of this.

G S: I imagine that in film festivals, a film of yours is shown and you're there to talk to the audience about it. But in Documenta11, your films are going to be shown continuously, and you won't be there. Will that be significant for you?

T Mh: You mentioned earlier that this exhibition places my work in an art circuit quite different from the film-festival circuit I am used to. That's very true. Film's inclusion as one of the "arts" (or "fields of cultural production," as they are now called) to be presented at Documenta is only a recent phenomenon. And yes, the film world is very different from the art world. The film industry, the Hollywood-ish film world as well as the PBS world of information like to speak contemptuously of everything they categorize as "art film." To the marketing mind that dominates media production, any film that is non-commercial by nature is not really a film. An "art film" immediately means failure at the box office. So usually, the film world does not really want to be associated with the art world. And filmmakers whose works shuttle across these boundaries are very few. There is a tradition of experimental filmmaking that situates itself in the art context, but that body of work does not cross the line.

I myself have no stake in the "art film"—a category, which, like any other film category (the documentary, the feature narrative, the avant-garde), is sometimes used to include my films, other times to exclude them, and often to their disadvantage. Thus, mainly because while my films deal with the creative tools and the unique properties of cinema, they do so with a social and political view of both form and content. Furthermore, the form my films arrive at—which is also their content, and vice-versa—cannot be consumed merely as form, since what it addresses is its own fragile becoming, its nothingness and hence, infiniteness. With such a defiance of categories, the body of work I produce meets with a lot of rejection while it also gets to show widely, in very diverse and controversial contexts. But even when it is given exposure, it tends to be marginalized within the very category it is given, or worse, within its own areas of strength.

G S: One of the things you're really good at is playing a major role in the dialogue about your own work. You publish the scripts of your films and you publish conversations about your films, and you have interviews like this so that your thoughts about them are really significant, as equally significant as the works themselves.

T Mh: I'm glad you come back to this point which I've forgotten in my answer. Since my films are widely exhibited and internationally distributed, obviously, the instances when these films are shown without me far exceed the instances when I get to speak at their screenings. The publication of scripts and interviews is a different although related matter. On the one hand, these represent only a very tiny part of the discussions that my films have generated, and most people involved have no previous knowledge of the published material. On the other hand, nothing I've said or written in relation to my films—even when I address them directly—is really "about" the films. That part is always readily filled in by the viewers. One cannot speak or write "about" one's work or anyone else's without killing it. You don't need (to make) the film if you can just talk about it. What I can do and have been doing, however, is to write, speak, theorize "with" film—a critical distinction I have always maintained in my work. The verbal and the visual are different activities and realities that offer different experiences. They stand on their own and they co-exist. In that sense, the interviews are as important as the works themselves, but they are what their name says: inter-views—the talk or the event between.

And, since I'm also a writer—as committed to writing as to filmmaking—the world of words is just as exciting and demanding as the world of images and music. The traditional approach to film has mostly been either to make the words serve the images or to make the images illustrate the words. Or else, words relegated to the realm of the "impure" mundane are downright excluded from the uncorrupted "visionary" world of certain experimental filmmakers. This is a very narrow way of conceiving verbal language. Instead of subjecting words to the visual or of denying their importance as symbolic universe and social contract, one can approach them creatively, the way poets do. A commentary, for example, is not necessarily there to explain, narrate, dissect or duplicate what the image is already doing in its own way, but rather, it can be a textual presence whose poetic power expands and propels the image in an unexpected direction. This is the way I work with words.

So it doesn't matter, really, that I am there with my film. When I am there, I am offering something else altogether—a companionship to the film. Or else, I am a guest: speaking, not of "what the film is all about," but of specific processes and circumstances of filmmaking while building, through the spectators' own feedback, a number of possible readings with my film. Here, even though intentions are important, ultimately any viewer can do that if they invest in the terms of the film to create verbally with it, and in ways I do not always expect. I love that. It's what my work actually solicits. With the kind of film I make, it does happen that people come back four or five times to watch it again, and each time they have a different reception of it, depending on their state of mind, the mood of the day, the collective experience, the condition and context of screening. They said they never came out of the film the same way. Such a multiplicity and creativity of input is ideal. And hence, if I'm with the film, it is fine. If I'm not, it is also fine. A lot of rich, heated, constructive and controversial discussions at screenings have happened in my absence. The film has its own life.

G S: Yesterday, I went to the Moffitt Library on campus to seeNaked Spaces - Living is Round. At one point, a voice in the film said something to the effect that if a person has music, they have strength. ["'Even if you have eaten and you are full,' a man said, 'you have no sustaining strength to plough the land vigorously and endure the hard work if no music flows in you.'"] And the music was so powerful in the film; it made me value within myself the importance of music. Seeing people in western Africa conduct their daily lives in music as they plow the fields or prepare a meal made me think, "wow, they really know how to live." When I walked out of the library and for the whole day, I had this beat with me. It moved me all across campus that day. It was really great, and I had that thought, "oh I have to go back and see it again."

A still from Trinh Minh-ha's digital video,  The Fourth Dimension

T Mh: You touch on a dimension that is very important to me in filmmaking. I was actually trained as a music composer. Although I usually prefer to work with the local people's music for the sound track, my films are conceived musically—as light, rhythm and voice. Viewers have compared Naked Spaces for example, to an Indian raga or "musical mode." What seems most striking in the performances of music from India is the way they create an emotional climate and bring forth in the audience a specific emotional state. Here, the "alap" or "prelude" is just as important as the piece itself because the prelude is really the challenging moment when the musician improvises freely to go toward his or her audience and to literally tune in together. And that moment of both introduction and encounter between performer, listener and music can be as long as needed before it feels right for the piece to start. The raga can go on for hours and hours until dawn, and this is what my films have evoked—especially Naked Spaces because of its pace and length. But what I also get in that film, in terms of time and rhythm, is the sound of drumming, since you mention it. Percussion is certainly one area in music that remains very dear to me, and you've recognized that. In my last digital film, The Fourth Dimension, I can say, for example, that the two most powerful "characters" are: the train, that regulates time (the time of traveling and of viewing); and the drum, that is the beat of your life. And drums in this film are mostly played by women. I really love the multi-dimension of music in film.

G S: I want to try to talk about teaching, but I can't seem to make the segue right now…

T Mh: …since you mention something very beautiful in relation to what African villagers say on the power of music to give strength. The way you felt this also ... is a beautiful reception because that's what music should convey in people. Their "know(ing) how to live" as you put it, is not a mere question of aesthetics or of having a so-called musical ear. Despite the background in music composition (classical, electronic and percussive), it was not through the trained ear that I taught music in the past. Music education in the West emphasizes the need to train your ear in order to listen very precisely to the frequency of the notes. You have to recognize the different notes in a scale and tune it according to a standard A. In other parts of the world, including Africa, what is more important is the precision of the intervals. When you tune your instrument, it is the intervals that you focus on. A note can be adjusted lower in one instance, and higher in another instance, but what needs exact tuning is the interval. In other words, one listens to shifting relations rather than to fixed individual locations. Intervals are important because in performances, one is always playing in relation to. Often fundamental to this music is the human voice, which is a most precise musical instrument, and musicians would have to tune their instruments first and foremost to the singer's voice, while conversing with other instruments. This is all about relationships.

The same applies to my teaching. I encourage my students to return to the untrained ear in order to draw new relationships in all spheres of their activities. For me, to teach film, for example, is really to work with relationships—between elements of cinema; between filmmaker, filmed subject and film viewer; as well as between components of the cinematic apparatus. Relationships are not simply given. They are constantly in formation—undone and redone as in a net whose links are indefinite. So when you work on relationships, you are actually working with rhythm. With the rhythm that determines people's interactions; the dynamics between sound and silence; or the way an image, a voice, a music relates to one another and acts upon the viewer's reception of the film. Rhythm is a way of marking and framing relationships. In the film you mentioned, Naked Spaces, you can see and hear with precision the relationship between two women pounding corn or millet for example. That opens to another form of rhythm—the rhythm of our daily life, the physical, social and existential rhythms. With music, we can learn to listen to the richness of silence, and hence to ourselves, to our body, to the language of a whole people, to the vast rhythm of life.

G S: I really got this sense in your film Reassemblage…and now I am thinking of how you may be bringing this "rhythm of life" to its potential in the classroom at Berkeley. For one, there may be a reciprocity: you benefit from your relationships with people in the classroom; just as they learn as well.

T Mh: Yes, very much. Whether I teach in Women's Studies, in Rhetoric, or in Film (I'm now only teaching in Rhetoric and Women's Studies), the focus is always strongly on theory. But theory here is not taught as something that one merely consumes. For me, the challenge in teaching is not that of providing or transmitting knowledge, but that of introducing a substantial difference in the students' relation to knowledge. I work at honing students to their own singular potentials. I provide them with tools of analysis and of creativity—tools that allow them to situate their experiences across contexts, to define their intellectual itineraries on their terms, and to find a voice, so to speak. But rather than putting emphasis on mere acquisition and accumulation of knowledge in research, I stress the role knowledge plays in the constitution of self and other, or in the students' daily lives and practices.

And this is a real challenge for students because they are used to just reading about theory, whereas what I solicit from them is the theory that arises from their own contexts and interactions. Of great importance is the ability to break the circular relation of supplier and consumer between student and teacher, and to gain theoretical dimension and scope in the way we conceive of our social and ethical everyday. Through lectures, readings and discussions, students are invited to expand their views by drawing unfamiliar, unexpected relationships in what they have learned. They are encouraged, on the one hand, to participate directly in the collective process of making theory so as to relate more intimately to the body of works with which they are engaged, and on the other hand, to develop, independently and creatively, the ability to think through relational possibilities.

I've been doing this even in large classes in Women's Studies and in Rhetoric. Students can be at first very troubled because they are being put in an uncomfortable place where suddenly everything discussed in class turns around and calls for a questioning of themselves. But without this, criticism tends to be reduced to a mere matter of judging (what is right or wrong, good or evil), and we keep our finger pointed at the "other." Questions of racism, sexism, homo- and xeno-phobia or whatever additional phobias we have in our society, all have to do with the way we conceive of relationships. And this remains basic to my courses, no matter what the subject and the discipline are.

G S: You are at home with so many disciplines, not simply those of departments where you are faculty. You probably could just as easily teach in Music, French, Ethnic Studies, Art Practice, South and Southeast Asian Studies, and Anthropology. It has historically been very hard for other people in academics and other creative people to make those kinds of leaps, to straddle different worlds. Although I think you answered my next question already, I wanted to ask what kind of advice you would have for young scholars and young creative people to find their own way. Perhaps the answer would be to see oneself in relation to others.

T Mh: Well, this is quite necessary, although let me put it slightly differently. There's a difference between seeing oneself as a link in the net and being subjected to comparisons of oneself to others. In my films for example, there are always at least three textual layers or three voices: the visual text, the musical text, and the verbal text. But within the verbal text itself, there are already at least two texts: one relating to the subject that is being visualized (like West Africa, Viet Nam, China or Japan), and one speaking to the unfolding process of producing images and meanings. In other words, the commentary has a direct relation with the culture visualized, but it always tells us something about the tools of creativity—here cinema, or more recently, digital technology. And by doing so, it positions the filmmaker. I'm constantly exposing where I stand. With such a critical exposure, I am bound to loose power (it's just a trick; an illusion; an image; a film, after all…); because exposure of the making process is exposure of the limit of a medium and a form of mediation. Media people usually do everything to make the story or the message they present appear seamless so as to bypass their own subjectivity. They are afraid the exposure will impoverish what they have to say, but actually it can really enrich it. Vulnerability can enhance our receptivity, and as we situate and position ourselves in what we do, there is no need for conflict. Rather than having to wage war in a relation of dominance and submission (of who's to remain on top) or of complementarity (the way one gender is expected to complement the other, for example), we can thrive and grow in a relation of multiplicity. To be an other among others can be a profoundly transformative experience.

Let's take for example the notion of interdisciplinarity, which is being widely promoted in university contexts. The most common approach tends to be accumulative in its practice: one specialized knowledge is juxtaposed with another; members from different fields come together to converse happily within their expertise. What gets glossed over in such an approach is the inter- itself. In adding, one has to learn to subtract, to let the holes speak and to work on the gap. The question is not that of putting two disciplines together or of putting one next to the other. What is at stake in this inter-creation is the very notion of the specialist and the expert. To cut across disciplines and borders is to live aloud the malaise of categories and expertise. These would have to be thoroughly questioned and pushed to their limits so as to resist the comfort of belonging and of fixed classification.

The boundary zone then takes on its full function as the zone of transformation. Where, for example, does the boundary of history, of art, of anthropology, or of architecture lie? When work is carried out across and in between disciplines, on that very boundary zone, the latter inevitably undergoes change. The encounter should lead to a transformation. This is a challenge most of us prefer not to take up because it is so much easier to continue to be an expert in our own field and consult another expert. It's difficult to let go of the barriers and let the challenge transform us. But for those of us who fare in a multiplicity of fields, working in an inter-terrain that potentially belongs to everyone can be very enriching. It's a way of making links, of connecting, rather than simply of asserting or reifying boundaries.

G S: What you are saying seems applicable to your films as well. Common themes in your films seem to be this relationship of oneself to those around you, working with these boundaries, and how that defines what you are doing in some way. . . And, you have made so many distinctly different kinds of films.

T Mh:We also need people who stay in one place and do just one thing. I'm thinking here in the tradition of Asian arts. For example, certain artists may decide to devote themselves to painting only bamboos, only birds, or horses, or persimmons during their entire lifetime. This, however, is very different from the notion of expertise as we know it today. If they paint mountains all their lives, it's not because they want to become an expert in mountains. Rather, I would say, it's because they receive the world through mountains. Even if one comes exactly to the same place and looks from the same point of view everyday, the mountain is never the same. It would change every single second. In other words there is no such thing as "dead nature" or what in the tradition of Western arts is considered as "still." If you paint for example a vase of flowers or...

G S: Like a still life?

T Mh: Yes, a still life. There is no concept of nature morte in ancient Eastern Art. Nature is alive, always shifting. It should be shown in its course. So you can draw thousands of mountains and you can devote your life to painting this single subject, and yet each painting shows a unique mountain-instance. Painting here is inscribing the ever-changing processes of nature—that are also one's own. Painter and painted are, in a way, both caught on canvas in the act of painting. To paint nature is to paint one's self-portrait. (Although the tradition of Western arts tend to be anthropocentric, Francis Bacon's self-portraits can be said to be similar in spirit.) So this is one way of taking in the world: being so intimately in touch with oneself that every time one returns deep inside, one opens wide to the outside world.

The other approach, which my work may seem at first to exemplify, is to work with multiplicity in an outward traveling mode. But such a distinction is temporary, because ultimately, the two approaches do meet and merge as in my case. I travel from one culture to another—Senegalese, West African, Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese— in making my films. This may fit well with today's transnational economy, in which the crossing of geophysical boundaries is of wide occurrence, whether by choice or by political circumstances. But for the notion of the transversal and the transcultural to take on a life in one's work, traveling would have to happen in one place, or inward. Home and abroad are not opposites when traveling is not set against dwelling and staying home. In a creative context, coming and going can happen in the same move and traveling is where I am. Where you are is where your identity is; that's your place and that's your home...

G S: That's your now.

T Mh: Yes, exactly. Going from one place to another is here returning home.