A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

The deliberate act of taking, for example, a Dogon [Mali] statement on adornment and desire or on the house as a woman, and juxtaposing it with specific images of dwellings among the Kabye [Togo] and then again, among the Birifor [Burkina Faso] is a taboo among experts. What one ethnic group says can absolutely not be reproduced in the context of another group. This is also applicable in the film to quotes from Westerners, such as Paul Éluard's "The earth is blue like an orange," which is heard in a sequence on the Oualatans [Mauritania] as well as in a sequence on the Fon [Benin]. And I use a similar strategy in the music: in both

Naked Spaces

and

Reassemblage,

music from one group is first heard with that very group and then repeated with variations within other groups. The viewer is made aware of such "violations" of borders.

There is a very interesting issue involved here. The peoples of third-world countries used to be lumped together in their undifferentiated otherness. And this is reflected pervasively in Western media discoursesradio, books, photos, films, television. You might have a program on Vietnam, for example, but you hear persistent Chinese

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music in the background. Even today, in many mainstream films on the Vietnam experience, the people cast in the Vietnamese roles are neighboring Southeast Asians who can hardly speak a word of Vietnamese. Of course, for many American viewers, it doesn't matter. Asians are Asians, and you can even take someone from the Philippines or from Korea to fill in the roles. Well, it's certainly the perpetuation of such attitudes that the cultural experts and anthropologists work against. And they should. But to rectify the master's colonialist mistakes, they have come up with disciplinarian guidelines and rules. One of them, for example, is that you always show the source of the music heard, and the music of one group must not be erroneously used in the context of another group. However, such rationalization also connotes a preoccupation with authenticity that supposes culture can be objectified and reified through "data" and "evidence." The use of synch sound becomes binding and its validation as the most truthful way of documenting is taken for granted.

It is fine for me if the master's heirs are now correcting his errors to raise their own consciousness of other cultures. But when circumstantial and history-bound methods and techniques become validated as the norms for

all

films, then they prove to be very dangerous: once more an established frame of thinking, a prevailing system of presentation, is naturalized and seen as the only truthful and "correct" way. Surely enough, these "rules" are particularly binding when it is a question of third-world people: films made on white American culture, for example, can use classical music from any European source, and this hardly bothers any viewer. In

Naked Spaces,

I neither reproduce the master's mistakes nor abide by disciplinarian criteria of correct representation; hence the importance of the naming of the peoples to acknowledge the deliberate gesture of carrying certain cultural statements across ethnic boundaries.

MacDonald:

So the imagery is a kind of grid against which the spectator can consider your manipulations of sound.

Trinh:

Yes. One could certainly have a more restrained sound track, and let the images move back and forth across transcultural signs, but the choice here was to have that transgressive fluidity in the sound. The visuals, as we discussed earlier, have their own critical strategies. After all, boundaries are extremely arbitrary. Boundaries between nations are a recent phenomenon. The village people themselves refer to kinship boundaries, which are usually also the boundaries between different ethnic groups. And ethnic grouping cuts across geopolitical borderlines.

MacDonald:

One activity that certainly confirms this idea is the pounding of grain, which we see in culture after culture.

Trinh:

At five o'clock in the morning, I would wake up and listen to

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that sound in most villages, and it would go on late into the evening. The day begins and ends with women pounding to prepare the meals. And yes, it is a collective background sound that you'll recognize in villages across Africa.

MacDonald:

At times you can't tell whether what you're hearing is daily labor or music.

Trinh:

More than the music of labor, you also have the body rhythm of collective work. In the film, the way women bodily relate to each other while working is very rhythmic and musical. In other words, daily interactions among the people

are