A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

mense (forty minutes) montage of visuals and sounds within which particular, unexplained sights and activities become motifs. Though the film developed out of Trinh's frustration with the ways in which Senegal is exploited and patronized by Western cultures, the film's focus and structure provide a film critical response not only to the depiction of African societies in the commercial cinema, but to the history of ethnographic filmmaking, which has often been seen as a critical corrective to the absurdities of cultural ''representation" in mass-market entertainment. While we may appreciate the fact that such landmarks in the development of ethnographic cinema as Robert Flaherty's

Nanook of the North

(1922), John Marshall's

The Hunters

(1958), and Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon's

Ax Fight

(1975) provide a more direct window on particular indigenous peoples than Hollywood film can even pretend to,

Reassemblage

reminds us of how fully such films participate in the formal procedures of the commercial cinema (in particular, its focus on adventure narrative and on the resolution of ambiguity) and the ideology embedded in these procedures.

While

Reassemblage

"reassembles" imagery in a particular society so that we see it from a less patronizing (and more feminist) perspective,

Naked SpacesLiving Is Round

provides a cross-cultural lookor set of looksat living spaces and the people who inhabit them in a range of societies in West Africa: specifically, in Senegal, Mauritania, Togo, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Benin. The very breadth of Trinh's view in

Naked Spaces,

which is evident both in the variety of societies and living spaces recorded and in her consistent use of long, halting pans as a means of revealing both the living spaces and their spatial contexts, can be seen as a critique of the narrow focus of the depiction of African societies in both commercial film and documentary, and as a way of demonstrating that the diversity, ingenuity, and beauty of these societies are as cinematically worthy as the varieties of European or North American cultural expression. Trinh's unusual soundtrack confirms these implications. Rather than provide a single perspective on the cultures represented visually, Trinh weaves the sounds of the various West African cultures, statements by three different female voicesas she explains in the introduction to the text of the sound track, reprinted in

Cinematograph,

No. 3 (1988), a "low voice" remains "close to the villagers' sayings and statements, and quotes African writers' works"; a "high-range voice . . . informs according to Western logic and mainly quotes Western thinkers"; and a "medium-range voice" speaks "in the first person and relates personal feelings, and observations" (p. 65) and periods of silence into an auditory montage that intersects in various ways at various times with the geographically organized visuals.

While

Reassemblage

and

Naked Spaces

can be understood as critiques

Page 357

From Trinh's

Naked SpacesLiving Is Round

 (1985).

of the conventional representations of particular indigenous societies,

Surname Viêt Given Name Nam

focuses more fully on the issue of translation: the translation of experiences in one culture into the verbal and visual languages of other cultures, and the "translation" of people from one nation to another. Again, Trinh refuses to participate in the conventional tendency to try to simplify and "clarify" complex cultural experiences for the film audience. During the first half of

Surname Viêt Given Name Nam,

a series of women discuss what, at first, most viewers probably assume are the women's own experiences in postwar Communist Vietnam. They speak in heavily accented English that intermittently is translated into superimposed printed text. Rather than simply clarifying the speakers' comments, however, the superimposed words suggest how translations tend to impede our willingness to actually listen to accented spoken English: we read the translation and cease listening to the people. The implications of this tendency are confirmed by the frequent disparities between what we hear and what we read: the very act of "translation," Trinh demonstrates, subverts our willingness to develop an ability to hear the expressions of people whose cultural difference is encoded in their accents.

During the second half of

Surname Viêt Given Name Nam,

we discover that the women interviewed in the first half are not current residents of Vietnam, but have been translated to the United States where

Page 358