A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

In the processes of emptying out positions of authority linked to knowledge, competence, and qualifications, it was important for me in the film to constantly keep alive the question people usually ask when someone sets out to write a book or in this case, to make a film: "A film about Senegal, but what in Senegal?" By "keeping alive" I mean, refusing to package a culture, hence not settling down with any single answer, even when you know that each work generates its own constraints and limits. So what you see in

Reassemblage

are people's daily activities: nothing out of the ordinary, nothing "exotic," and nothing that constitutes the usual focal points of observation for anthropology's

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fetishistic approach to culture, such as rites, figures of worship, and artifacts, or in the narrow sense of the terms, ritualistic events and religious practices.

While shooting

Reassemblage,

I was both moved by the richness of the villagers' living spaces, and made aware of the difficulty of bringing on screen the different attitudes about dwelling implied. This was how the idea of making another film first appealed to me.

Naked Spaces

was shot three years later across six countries of West Africa, while

Reassemblage

involved five regions across Senegal.

MacDonald: Reassemblage

takes individual subjectspeople, actions, objectsand provides various perspectives on them;

Naked Spaces

enlarges the scope. You deal with a general topicdomestic living spacesand explore its particular manifestations in one geographic area after another. And your view of particular spaces is enlarged too: you pan across a given space from different distances and angles (in

Reassemblage

the camera is generally still, though you filmed from different still positions). There's a tendency to move back and forth across the space in different directions to rediscover it over and over in new contexts.

Trinh:

That is very close to how I felt in making

Naked Spaces

. Although I would say that the procedure is somewhat adverse (even while keeping a multiplicity of perspectives) rather than analogous, the immediate perception is certainly that of an enlarged scope, physically speaking, not only because of the duration of the film and the variety of cultural terrains it traverses, but also, as you point out, because ot its visual treatment. In

Reassemblage

I avoided going from one precise point to another in the cinematography. I was not preoccupied with depicting space. But when you shoot architecture and the spaces involved, you are even more acutely aware of the limit of your camera and how inadequate the fleeting pans and fractured still images used in

Reassemblage

are, in terms of showing spatial relationships.

One of the choices I made was to have many pans, but

not

smooth pans, and none that could give you the illusion that you're not looking through a frame. Each pan sets into relief the rectangular delineation of the frame. It never moves obliquely, for example.

MacDonald:

It's always horizontal . . .

Trinh:

Or vertical.

MacDonald:

And it's always referring back to you as an individual filmmaker behind the camera. It never becomes this sort of Hitchcock motion through space that makes the camera feel so powerful.

Trinh:

In someone else's space I cannot just roam about as I may like to. Roaming about with the camera is not value-free; on the contrary, it tells us much about the ideology of such a technique.

MacDonald:

It's interesting too that the way you pan makes clear that

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the only thing we're going to find out about you personally is that you're interested in this place. Much hand-held camerawork is implicitly autobiographical, emotionally self-expressive. In your films camera movement is

not

autobiographical except in the sense that it reveals you were in this place with these people for a time.

Trinh:

There are many ways to treat the autobiographical. What is autobiographical can often be very political, but not everything is political in the autobiographical. One can do many things with elements of autobiography. However, I appreciate the distinction you make because in the realm of generalized media colonization, my films have too often been described as "personal film," as "personal documentary" or "subjective documentary." Although I accept these terms, I think they really need to be problematized, redefined, and expanded. Because personal in the context of my films does

not

mean an individual standpoint or the foregrounding of a self. I am not interested in using film to "express myself" but rather to expose the social self (and selves)that necessarily mediates the making as well as the viewing of the film.

MacDonald:

"Personal," "subjective" suggest that something else is impersonal and objective.

Trinh: