Ways of Seeing]]> Politics]]> 7 Jul 2017, Fri 07:30 PM - 09:00 PM
The Single Screen, Block 43 Malan Road

Reflecting on Mao’s famous saying, “Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend”, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film—whose title refers in part to a Chinese guessing game—is a unique excursion into the maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. The film ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, as refracted by Tiananmen Square events. It offers at the same time an inquiry into the creative process of filmmaking, intricately layering Chinese popular songs and classical music, the sayings of Mao and Confucius, women’s voices and the words of artists, philosophers, and other cultural workers. Video images emulate the gestures of calligraphy and contrast with film footage of rural China and stylised interviews. Like traditional Chinese opera, Trinh’s film unfolds through “bold omissions and minute depictions” to render “the real in the illusory and the illusory in the real.” Exploring color, rhythm and the changing relationship between ear and eye, this meditative documentary realises on screen the shifts of interpretation in contemporary Chinese culture and politics.

This Screening is part of the public programme of Ulrike Ottinger: China. The Arts ­– The People, Photographs and Films from the 1980s and 1990s.

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Identity]]> Cultural Heritage]]> NTU CCA Singapore is proud to have co-commissioned the winning film ’What about China’ for the solo show “Trinh T. Minh-ha. Films” (October 2020 - February 2021)our last exhibition in Block 43.

Shot in southern and eastern China in the early 1990s, ‘What about China’  is an essayistic reflection on the rich and complex history of the country and of the film medium. 

As a special treat for this occasion, we are happy to share this interview between Trinh T. Minh-ha and our director Ute Meta Bauer, presented by Ella Raidel, Ass. Assistant Professor, NTU ADM School of Art, Design and Media. 

With thanks to the editors of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings for granting us permission to share. 

“Trinh T. Minh-ha and Ute Meta Bauer in Conversation on What about China?” in Postcolonial Futures. Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, Vol 20 n. 2, pp. 145-152. Published by University of Leeds and Nanyang Technological University.

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Trinh T. Minh-ha]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Ella Raidel]]> Asia]]>
Ways of Seeing]]> Cultural Heritage]]>
With her remarkable and widely discussed first film, Trinh brings the conventions of the documentary to our attention and asks how films in the field of documentary and ethnographic tradition have consecutively established a power to manipulate the way in which we perceive different cultures. By gathering filmic means and techniques that reject the traditional narrative forms, Trinh constantly alerts us to our own process of perception, furthermore reminding us that watching a movie is not a passive, but an active process.]]>
Trinh T. Minh-ha]]> Video]]> South America]]>
Identity]]> Postcolonialism]]> Identity]]> Displacement]]>
Six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal) stand in the centre of this film. The work explores the life in the rural environments of these countries by taking a closer look at the everyday. With its nonlinear structure, the film steps away from the classical traditions of the documentary/ethnography tradition and offers a sensuous approach. It is a poetic journey to the African continent in which the interaction of the encountered people or the spaces in which they are living becomes relevant.
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Trinh T. Minh-ha]]> Marc Glöde]]> Marc Glode]]> Video]]> Africa]]>
Postcolonialism]]> Identity]]> Trinh T. Minh-ha]]> Digital Tour Video]]> Asia]]> Diaspora]]> Identity]]>
Books by Trinh T. Minh-ha

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Cinema Interval. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. D-passage: The Digital Way. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event. New York and London: Routledge, 2011.
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Framer Framed: Film Scripts and Interviews. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. The Digital Film Event. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. When the Moon Waxes Red. Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. New York and London: Routledge, 1991.
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Books by other authors

Dissanayake, Wimal. Rethinking Third Cinema. New York: Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2003.
Ferguson, Russell, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Cornel West. Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press Ltd, 1992.
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Women Filmmakers of the African & Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1997.
Guo, Xiaolu. Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China. New York: Grove Press, 2017.
Kaplan, F. and E. Ann. Feminism and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: essays and speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2014.
Pines, Jim, and Willemen, Paul. Questions of third cinema. London: BFI Pub, 1989.
Rhomberg, Kathrin, ed. Trinh T. Minh-Ha / Secession. Vienna: Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession, 2001.

ONLINE RESOURCES:

Van Dienderen, An. “Indirect Flow through Passages: Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Art Practice.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Inquiry 23 (Spring 2010): 90–97.  [Free access upon registration]

Duong, Lan, and Lila Sharif. “Displaced Subjects: Revolution, Film, and Women in Viet Nam and Palestine.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 6, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 168–97. [Free access upon registration]

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Forgetting Vietnam: Trinh T. Minh-ha with Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier.” By Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier. Radical Philosophy 2.03 (December 2018): 78–89. [Access PDF]

Fuser, Marina. “Nomadism in the Cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha.” PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2019. [Access PDF

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Shifting the Borders of the Other: An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha.” By Marina Grzinic. Telepolis. August 12, 1988. [View here]

Hill, Michael. “Abandoned to Difference: Identity, Opposition and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage.” Surfaces 3, no. 2 (1993): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.7202/1065095ar. [Access PDF]

Lawson, Jacqueline. “Gender and the War: Men, Women and Vietnam.” Vietnam Generation 1, no.3, Article 1 (1989). [Access PDF

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Documentary Is/Not a Name.” October 52 (Spring 1990): 76–98. doi:10.2307/778886. [Access PDF]

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Not You/Like You: Post-colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference.” Inscriptions 3 (1988): 71–77. [Access PDF

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning.” Theorizing Documentary 1 (1993): 90–107. [Access PDF

Trinh, T. Minh-ha. “Trinh T. Minh-ha with Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa and Patricia Alvarez.” By Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa and Patricia Alvarez. The Brooklyn Rail. October, 2016. [View here

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]]> Trinh T. Minh-ha]]> Asia]]> Southeast Asia]]> North America]]>
Feminism]]> Geopolitics]]> Ritual]]> Cultural Heritage]]> Body]]> Displacement]]> Race]]> Trinh T. Minh-ha’s approach to film has addressed a wide field of discussions—reaching from the ethics of representation in ethnographic film, to aspects of migration, debates on global socio-political developments, and different layers of feminist discourse. Her films are investigations into the question of the voice as well as the relationship between the visible and audible. This programme will present a selection of films that echo some of these discussions negotiated by Trinh in her filmic works as well as her writings, and create a dialogue with other filmmakers and scholars.

Co-curated by Dr Marc Glöde, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM, and Dr Ella Raidel, Assistant Professor, NTU ADM and WKWSCI.

1 – 14 November 2020
the time is now. (I+II), Heidrun Holzfeind, 2019
Colour, sound, 48 min
Rating: PG

Holzfeind is interested in architectural and social utopias that create an alternative living. She documents the shamanistic rituals of the Japanese improvisation/noise duo IRO, Toshio and Shizuko Orimo, in what they call “Punk Kagura”—in reference to Kagura, a ritual dance tradition and music for the gods. Holzfeind uses a visual language that adapts their mystical rituals: breaks in image; the colour and narrative corresponding with the soundscape; the modernist architecture of Takamasa Yosizaka; and the surrounding nature in which the duo performs a choreography for healing our damaged planet. The urgency is underlined in the title the time is now.

15 – 28 November 2020
Heaven’s Crossroad, Kimi Takesue, 2002
Video, colour, sound, 35 min
Rating: G

What does it mean to “look” cross-culturally? This film follows up on this question by creating a visual journey through Vietnam. Instead of following the established patterns of the classic documentary, Takesue creates an experimental experience that challenges the audience and invites us to reflect on what it means to “truly see another culture”. Within this beautiful visual travelogue, questions of desire, projection, and communication begin to appear, that are embedded in this idea of the cross-cultural encounter.

29 November – 10 December 2020
Naked Spaces—Living is Round, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1985
16mm transferred to digital file, colour, sound, 135 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some nudity)

Six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal) stand in the centre of this film. The work explores the life in the rural environments of these countries by taking a closer look at the everyday. With its nonlinear structure, the film steps away from the classical traditions of the documentary/ethnography tradition and offers a sensuous approach. It is a poetic journey to the African continent in which the interaction of the encountered people or the spaces in which they are living becomes relevant.

11 – 24 December 2020
A Song of Ceylon, Laleen Jayamanne, 1985
16mm film, colour, sound, 51 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains mature content and some nudity)

This film is an intense study of the body, gender and the multiple aspects of colonialism. It addresses theatrical conventions by recreating classic film stills and presenting the body in striking tableaux. A remarkable film on which Trinh T Minh-Ha, in Discourse (1989), commented: “The anthropological text is performed both like a musical score and a theatrical ritual….The film engages the viewer in the cinematic body as spectacle…”.

25 December 2020 – 5 January 2021
Surname Viet Given Name Nam, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989
16mm film transferred to digital, colour, sound, 108 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some disturbing scenes from the archival footage of the Vietnam War)

This film is Trinh’s complex deep dive into the difficulties of translation, as well as themes of exile or dislocation. By using historic material, dance, printed texts, folk poetry and combining it with anecdotal narratives, she examines the status of Vietnamese women since the Vietnam War, as well as the status of images as evidence. It is a complex approach that invites the audience to reflect on the modes of perception and encourages a profound critique of audio-visual strategies.

6 – 19 January 2021
Nervous Translation, Shireen Seno, 2018
Colour, sound, 90 min
Rating: PG

This film follows the inner voice and play of an eight-year-old girl who cooks perfect miniature dishes, mimicking the world of adults. The perception of the child is translated through fragmentation and sounds that are written into words, such as the ring of the telephone, and the sound of the aircon, all forming together, an orchestra of the everyday. Waiting, boredom, and dead time pave the temporality of her imagination, while she is listening to cassette tapes recorded by her father, a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia. The personal phantasmagoric vision encounters the political dimension echoing the times of the People Power Revolution in the Philippines.

20 – 31 January 2021
Reassemblage, Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982
16mm film transferred to digital, colour, sound, 40 min
Rating: PG13 (This film contains some nudity)

With her remarkable and widely discussed first film, Trinh brings the conventions of the documentary to our attention and asks how films in the field of documentary and ethnographic tradition have consecutively established a power to manipulate the way in which we perceive different cultures. By gathering filmic means and techniques that reject the traditional narrative forms, Trinh constantly alerts us to our own process of perception, furthermore reminding us that watching a movie is not a passive, but an active process.

1 – 14 February 2021
The Human Pyramid, Jean Rouch, 1961
DCP, colour, sound, 93 min
Rating: NC16 (This film contains mature content)

At the Lycée Français of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Rouch worked with students there who willingly enacted a story about the arrival of a new white girl, Nadine, and her effect on the interactions of and interracial relationships between the white colonial French and Black African classmates, all non-actors. Fomenting a dramatic situation instead of repeating one, Rouch extended the experiments he had undertaken in Chronicle of a Summer, including having on-camera student participants view rushes of the film midway through the story. The docu-drama shows how working together to make the film changes their attitude towards each other.—Icarus Film

15 – 28 February 2021
95 and 6 to Go, Kimi Takesue, 2016
Digital, colour, sound, 85 min
Rating: G

While visiting her grandfather, a recent widower in his 90s in Hawai’i, Takesue begins to follow his everyday routines. When he shows interest in his granddaughter’s stalled romantic screenplay, an interesting discussion about her work, family, memories, and identity unfolds. Shot over six years, this film shows how personal aspects intertwine with a critical reflection of the documentary genre.

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Marc Glöde]]> Marc Glode]]> Ella Raidel]]> Heidrun Holzfeind]]> Kimi Takesue]]> Trinh T. Minh-ha]]> Laleen Jayamanne]]> Shireen Seno]]> Jean Rouch]]> Southeast Asia]]> Africa]]> North America]]>
Trinh T. Minh-ha]]> Ute Meta Bauer]]> Asia]]> Identity]]> Displacement]]> Diaspora]]> 21 Feb 2014, Fri 7:30pm - 9:00pm

This talk will contextualise Trinh T. Minh-ha’s installation Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) within the larger picture of her own work and film practice.

Surname Viet Given Name Nam addresses notions of identity, popular memory and culture. While docusing on aspects of Vietnamese reality as seen through the lives and history of women's resistance in Vietnam and in the U.S., it raises questions on the politics of interviewing and documenting. A theoretically and formally complex work, Surname Viet Given Name Nam explores the difficulty of translation, and themes of dislocation and exile, critiquing both traditional society and life since the war. Jusxtaposing archival footage, proverbs, and poetry, voice-over narratives, and written text, the film festures interviews with five Vietnamese women. It becomes clear throughout the film that these interviews are restaged and the women portrayed are actually amatuer actresses living in the U.S. Taking a hybrid form, the film articulates the complex diversity of the lives and roles of Vietnamese women within culture, and confronts the essentialising Western paradigms. It challenges the traditions of documentary filmmaking through complex interconnections of sound and image, rejection of a single, omniscient voice and undermining of the authority of the camera itself.

A public programme of Paradise Lost.]]>
Trinh T. Minh-ha]]> Southeast Asia]]> North America]]>
Supernatural]]> 20 Feb 2014, Thu 6:30pm - 9:00pm

The workshop evolves around notions of the boundary event, the between realm, the impasses and the passages, form and formless. During the workshop, the artist will screen a few excerpts of the film Night Passage (2004).

A public programme of Paradise Lost.]]>
Trinh T. Minh-ha]]> Southeast Asia]]>