A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Right. As if anyone can produce objective documentary. There is nothing objective and truly impersonal in filmmaking, although there can be a formulaic, clichéd approach to film. What you often have is a mere abiding by the conventions of documentary practice, which is put forward as

the

"objective" way to document other cultures. It is as if the acknowledgement of the politics of the documentation and the documenting subject disturbs the interests of the guardians of norms.

MacDonald:

In

Naked Spaces

we're inside the dwellings as much as we're outside. In fact, the movement from outside to inside, and vice versa, seems central to the film.

Trinh:

Yes. When you walk from outside to the inside of most rural African houses, you come from a very bright sunlight to a very dark space where, for a moment, you are totally blind. It takes some time to get adjusted to the darkness inside. This experience is one of the conceptual bases of

Naked Spaces

. To move inside oneself, one has to be willing to go intermittently blind. Similarly, to move toward other people, one has to take the jump and move ahead blindly at certain moments of inquiry. If one is not even momentarily blind, if one remains as one is from the outside or from the inside, then it is unlikely that one can break through that moment where suddenly everything stops, one's luggage is emptied out, and one moves in a state of nonknowingness, where destabilizing encounters with the "unfamiliar" or "unknown" are multiplied and experienced anew.

MacDonald:

Since as a technology, film captures light, the traditional

Page 365

From

Naked SpacesLiving Is Round

 (1985).

assumption has been that anything that's dark is not worth looking at. At most, darkness is a context for romance and for danger. Even in a documentary, we'd either never see the types of dimly lit spaces you reveal, or they'd be lit artificially, which would allow the technology to record them, but in a way that would distort the real experience of such spaces. The technology determines what one can see about other cultures. You depart from this not only by recording indoor spaces in their own natural low-light conditions, but by revealing the beauty of these spaces.

Trinh:

You can imagine these houses being shot with a light inside. The quality of solid darkness and the shafts of light that penetrate the inside spaces would totally be damaged.

MacDonald:

Instead of intimateif that's the right wordthe spaces would become bare, empty.

Trinh:

Yes, yes. The question of cinema and light is pivotal in

Naked Spaces

. Dwelling is both material and immaterial; it invites volume and shape, and it reflects a cosmology and a way of living creatively. In other words, to deal with architecture is to deal with the notion of light in space. To deal with the notion of light in space is to deal with color, and to deal with color is to deal with music, because the question of light in film is also a question of timing and rhythm. Such mutual accord of elements of daily existence is particularly striking in the built environments filmed and the way these materialize the multiple oneness of life.

Page 366

There are a number of direct statements on color and color timing in the text of

Naked Spaces

[''Color is life /

Light becoming music

"; "

Orange and blue; warmer or colder; more luminosity, / more presence. Timing acts as a link between natural/and artificial light

"]. The look of a film and how people are represented depends so vitally on color timing. For me, it has always been crucial to work closely with the color timer, especially in

Naked Spaces

. Very often, when films shot in Africa reach the lab, they are treated the same way as films shot in Western cultures; that is, they are timed more on the blue side of the color chart for people with fair skin. Hence, the African people often come out with a skin color that is dull charcoal black. This is not the vibrant skin color that I saw and remembered, so I devoted much of my energy at the lab learning from and cooperating with the timer on "color correcting," insisting whenever appropriate, on the orange and warmer colors to obtain the usually missing vibrant quality of African skin tones.