A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

they have acculturated themselves in varying degrees. Indeed, the Vietnamese experiences they have testified to are not even theirs: they are the reminiscences of other Vietnamese women translated first into French and subsequently into English for use in Trinh's film, which, we come to realize, has set us up to discover how fully our cultural (and film-cultural) training has led us to accept at face value simplistic renderings of the complex experiences of people in and from other cultures.

I spoke with Trinh while she was touring with

Surname Viêt Given Name Nam,

in Utica, in November 1989.

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Mac Donald:

You grew up in Vietnam during the American presence there. This may be a strange question to ask about that period, but I'm curious about whether you were a moviegoer and what films you saw in those years.

Trinh:

I was not at all a moviegoer. To go to the movies then was a real feast. A new film in town was always an overcrowded, exciting event. The number of films I got to see before coming to the States was rather limited, and I was barely introduced to TV before I left the country in 1970. Actually, it was only when the first television programs came to Vietnam that I learned to listen to English. Here also the experience was a collective one since you had to line up in the streets with everyone else to look at one of the TVs made available to the neighborhood. I had studied English at school, but to be able to follow the actual pace of spoken English was quite a different matter.

MacDonald:

Did you see French films in school?

Trinh:

No. A number of them were commercially shown, but during the last few years I was in Vietnam, there were more American than French films. My introduction to film culture is quite recent.

MacDonald: Reassemblage

seems to critique traditional ethnographic movies

Nanook of the North, Ax Fight, The Hunters

 . . . I assume you made a conscious decision to take on the whole male-centered history of ethnographic moviemaking. At what point did you become familiar with that tradition? Did you have specific films in mind when you made

Reassemblage

?

Trinh:

No, I didn't. You don't have to be a film connoisseur to be aware of the problems that permeate anthropology, although these problems do differ with the specific tools and the medium that one uses. The way one relates to the material that makes one a writer-anthropologist or an anthropological filmmaker needs to be radically questioned. A

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Zen proverb says "A grain of sand contains all land and sea," and I think that whether you look at a film, attend a slide show, listen to a lecture, witness the fieldwork by either an expert anthropologist or by any person subjected to the authority of anthropological discourse, the problems of subject and of power relationship are all there. They saturate the entire field of anthropological activity.

I made

Reassemblage

after having lived in Senegal for three years [197780] and taught music at the Institut National des Arts in Dakar; in other words, after having time and again been made aware of the hegemony of anthropological discourse in every attempt by both local outsiders and by insiders to identify the culture observed.

Reassemblage

was shot in 1981 well after my stay there. Although I had by then seen quite a number of films and was familiar with the history of Western cinema, I can't say this was a determining factor. I had done a number of Super-8 films on diverse subjects before, but

Reassemblage

was my first 16mm.

MacDonald:

You mentioned you were looking at films before you went to Senegal. Were you looking at the way in which Senegal or other African cultures were portrayed in film?

Trinh:

No, not at all. Despite my having been exposed to a number of nonmainstream films from Europe and the States at the time, I must say I was then one of the more passive consumers of the film industry. It was when I started making films myself that I really came to realize how obscene the question of power and production of meaning is in filmic representation. I don't really work in terms of influence. I've never been able to recognize anything in my background that would allow me neatly to traceeven momentarilymy itinerary back to a single point of origin. Influences in my life have always happened in the most odd, disorderly way. Everything I've done comes from all kinds of directions, certainly not just from film. It seems rather clear to me that

Reassemblage

did not come from the films I looked at, but from what I had learned in Senegal. The film was not realized as a reaction to anything in particular, but more I would now say, as a desire not to simply

mean