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6 TRINH T. MINH-HA ''An empowering notion of difference" BORN IN VIETNAM in 1953, Trinh T. Minh-ha came to the United States, studied music and comparative literature at the University of Illinois, and she studied ethnomusicology in France. Her later experience as a researcher in Senegal led directly to her first film work, Reassemblage (1982), a poetic transgressive film that transcends and revolutionizes cinema. Trinh T. Minh-ha's films are extraordinary examples of l'ecriture feminine that combine her unique talents as writer, composer, filmmaker, and theorist. The most exciting and, at the same time unnerving, distinguishing element of the oeuvre of Trinh T. Minh-ha is an uncanny mastery of those hybrid spaces or borders between csategories: between fiction and nonfiction, art and autobiography, between documentary and document, between subject and object , viewer and viewed and identity as subscribed, and identity as self-inscribed . In an interview with Judith Mayne, reprinted in Framer Framed (1992), Mayne and Trinh T. Minh-ha discuss borderlines; in particular the borderlines that are routinely subscribed or inscribed on the body of the "Third World" artist. As a writer, Trinh T. Minh-ha found that her nondiscursive text, Woman, Native, Other, was initially met with resistance from many publishers. Eager to "eat the other;' in the words of bell hooks, publishers were frankly interested in Trinh as an artist "from the Third World." Nevertheless her text was initially rejected. As Trinh put it, "attempts at introducing a break into the fixed norms of the master's confidant prevailing discourses are easily misread, dismissed, or obscured in the name of 'good writing; of 'theory; or of 'scholarly work.' " (Minh-ha 1992, 138). The space of the borderline, the taboo, the untranslatable, is the intersubjective space of Trinh's writing and films. The struggle to mark new space, reframe boundaries is one that women writers and filmmakers of color are remapping in a struggle to conjure and write the body in a way that is actively "articulating this always emerging-already-distorted place that remains so 95 96 .:. Trinh T. Minh-ha .:. difficult, on the one hand, for the First World to even recognize, and on the other, for our own communities to accept" (Minh-ha 1992, 139). In an effort to transform cinema into a means of "speaking nearby" her "subjects" (African women in Reassemblage, and Naked Spaces-Living Is Round [1985], Vietnamese women in Surname Viet Given Name Nam [1989], and Chinese women in Shoot for the Contents [1991]), Trinh T. Minh-ha restructures the postcolonial gaze and its manufacturing device that almost guarantees a limited subject/object relationship between viewer and viewed. Trinh's films have often been critically received (and reduced) as antiethnographies, antidocumentaries, and other reductionist categories. Ironically, the voice-over in Reassemblage criticizes "the habit of imposing a meaning to every single sign:' as if playfully to outwit the viewer's attempts to reduce the film to a limited Euroidentified category. Reassemblage embarks on a radical, ludic deconstruction of documentary form and ethnographic film practice (especially in its avoidance of the reduction of Third World "subjects" into flattened out figures of sublimated desire and lack) in terms of subjectivity, alterity, and identity. Most certainly Reassemblage speaks nearby documentary gesturing toward its colonialist objectification of African women. However, the critique of documentary and ethnography are only some examples of border crossings in Reassemblage. It would be reductionist for me to attempt to identify the "subjects" of this film. I can only speak nearby some of them, feeling all too aware of my habit of "imposing a meaning to every sign:' I can only say that, as a filmmaker and performance artist, I'm highly aware of the highly performative quality of the film's structure , with its use of abrupt jump cuts, black leader, silence on the track, noneyematches , bursts of repetitive voice-overs and disarming close-ups of the faces and bodies of African women. These experimental techniques are reminiscent of those used by New Wave filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and experimental women filmmakers, such as Maya Deren. Reassemblage is self-reflective in its voicing of self-questioning. ''A film about what? My friends ask:' Trinh, in the voice-over, interrupts, much in the manner of any number of selfreflective comments found in Jean-Luc Godard's films. This Godardian moment announces that Reassemblage is not so much a documentary as a document , a poetic essay-film that speaks nearby its subject: Senegalese women. In...

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