A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Nothing is happening!"

). On the other hand, it was also critical to bring about a different way of experiencing film.

Some of the objections to

Naked Spaces

also have to do with the fact that certain viewers prefer the overt politics of

Reassemblage

.

Naked Spaces

seems to appeal to people who are aware of the predicament of dwelling in modern society and are tuned to the inseparable questions of aesthetics, spirituality, sociality, and environment. I have had, for example, intense and exalted feedback from a few native-American viewers. I could never have anticipated this when I made the film.

For a while, I didn't quite know how to locate some of the hostilities toward

Surname Viêt Given Name Nam,

although in making it, I was well aware of the risks that it was taking and the kind of difficulties it might encounter. Now that I have participated in more public debates on the film than I could ever have wished, I can identify two kinds of viewers who have problems with it. Actually, the problems are fundamentally related. These are the viewers who either feel antagonistic toward the feminist struggle, or are simply unaware of its complexities in relation to other struggles of liberation. Many of these viewers may think of themselves as pro-feminist, but they are not really into the feminist struggle, and this slips out in the questions they raise, in the lack of concern they show for any earnest inquiry into gender politics.

There are other viewers who identify themselves as belonging to the antiwar movement and who do not really see

women in Surname Viêt

(just as many male radicals in the sixties could not take seriously their female

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co-workers and the feminist struggle that was burgeoning independently right in the midst of their struggle for freedom of speech). These viewers tend to deny, or worseto

obscure

entirelythe question of gender by constantly casting the Vietnam reality back into the binary mold of communism and anticommunism. They also seem to be preoccupied with what they militated for, eager to preserve an idealized image of a Vietnam they supported, and unwilling to look at the actual situation of postrevolutionary Vietnam. As with many libertarian movements, there are people who are genuinely fighting for change and remain sensitive to the complexities of the feminist struggle, and there are those who only work to consolidate a position of authority and feel threatened by any form of resistance other than the one they are familiar with. Right now in Vietnam, the leaders are acknowledging some of the failures of the system and are raising questions pertaining to the transformation of socialist society. But even when the people who are directly involved see the necessity for change, you have people from the outside still holding fast to a past image of Vietnam, where for example, all the women involved in the revolution are upheld as "heroines." The work of critical inquiry cannot be content with fixed anti-positions, which were, in their own time, necessary in regard to the war in Vietnam but need to be problematized in the context of contemporary histories of political migration.

The struggle will never end, and we women still have a long way to go. The more I discuss these questions, the more I realize how little is known of the historical debates within the feminist struggle, not to mention the Sisyphean efforts of women of color across nations to expose the politics of gender within revolutionary movements.

After this long detour, let me end by responding to the point that

Surname Viêt

is as much about the process of translating as it is about Vietnam. To unravel the "name" of Vietnam in the context of translation is to confront the much debated politics of identityfemale identity, ethnic identity, national identity. For translation, as I suggested earlier, implies questions of language, power, and meaning, or more precisely in this film, of women's resistance vis-à-vis the sociosymbolic contractas mothers, wives, prostitutes, nurses, doctors, state employees, official cadres, heroines of the revolution. In the politics of constructing identity and meaning, language as translation and/or film as translation is necessarily a process whereby the self loses its fixed boundariesa disturbing yet potentially empowering practice of difference. For me, it is precisely in fighting on more than one front at a time, that is, in fighting not only against forms of domination and exploitation but also against less easily locatable forms of subjection or of binarist subjectivity, that the feminist struggle and other protest movements can continue to resist falling back into the consolidation of conformism.

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Godfrey Reggio

At the time of our interview, Godfrey Reggio had made only two films

Koyaanisqatsi

(1983) and

Powaqqatsi