A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

The relationship I worked on between color and light was also the link I drew between architecture, music, and film. The connections that determine the structure of the film are those that I have experienced in the living spaces of the different peoples involved. The roundness of life is not only literally manifested in the round shape of many of the houses. It is also recognizable in all spheres of sociocultural activity, such as the various dances shown or even the way women work together. "The house opens onto the sky in a perfect circle." a voice states in

Naked Spaces,

and the subtitle of the film is "Living Is Round."

MacDonald:

You were talking about music and architecture. Certainly one of the things that's unusual about both African films is the sound tracks: the movement back and forth between music, other everyday sounds, the various narrators, and silence. I assume this interweaving of different strands of sound and silence derives from your interest in music.

Trinh:

I guess now I can come back to your earlier question about the film background I don't really have, by relating the way I work with film to my musical background. I fare with ease in the world of experimental music, perhaps because of the cultural hybridity of both its instrumentation and its deterritorialized spacethe way it questions the boundaries of what is music and what is not. I really admired, for example, John Cage, whose Zen-inspired compositions and readings have effected radical change in all fields of the arts. I was very attracted to his work because it touched on something I was similarly groping for but had not articulated. The fact that Cage brought silence and the sounds of life into the consecrated realm of concert halls and out into the domain of public debate, was very liberating. "Experimental music" in this context is a constant exploration of sound as sound, rather than as a substitute

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for something else: a personal feeling or a psychological state. Narrative music is thus exposed in its ideology, its closures, and its link with power and knowledge.

Many viewers have, indeed, thought of my films as operating more like a musical score than like any traditional film structure. And I also tend to think of film montage and music composition as being very much alike (with the understanding that montage is not reduced to the editing stage, but can occur in the conception and shooting stages of the film as well). One can also argue that in poetry a very similar process happens in the play of words. For me, the exploration of new, complex subjectivity and the problematizing of the subject in contemporary theory can be best carried out through poetical languageas long as poetical language is not equated with a mere estheticizing tool or practiced as a place to consolidate a "subjective" self. In poetry, the "I" can

never

be said to simply personify an individual. It's amusing that the feedback I often get from my relatives or close friends on my book of poems tends to be something like: "We never suspected you could be what you are in your poetry!" For them all the feelings and situations depicted in poetry are

personally

true. They immediately associate me with the ''I" who speaks in my poetry and assume it's "real," which is not wrong, but it's not accurate either. In poetical language, there is no "I" that just stands for

myself

. The "I" is there; it has to be there, but it is there as the site where all other "I's" can enter and cut across one another. This is an example of the strength and vitality of poetical language and of how it can radically contribute to the questioning of the relationship of subjects to power, language, and meaning in theory. Theory, as practiced by many, is often caught in a positioning where the theorist continues to stand in a "safe place" to theorize about others.

MacDonald:

I've often felt that way about the little I know of theoretical film writing. Part of the reason I write articles is to consolidate a position for myself within an institution, to give myself a certain amount of economic and psychic security. Theorists talk about how the artist is situated within an economic system, but I rarely hear discussion of writing theory as a marketable activity.

Trinh:

Exactly.

MacDonald:

On the other hand, if I show

Nanook

and

Ax Fight

and then show

Reassemblage,

it's like film theory in action. Language has such a hard time grasping what's on the screen that it's just easier to put the films next to one another and let the audience discover what the juxtapositions reveal.

Trinh:

There is a tendency in theorizing

about

film to see theorizing as one activity and filmmaking as another, which you can discuss with theory. This is an important question for me because I teach theory

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