At the age of 21 I had run away from college to San Francisco. Ok, not run away exactly, but one of many-more-to-come depressive episodes propelled me into taking a semester off and moving out west. I got a job, a couple internships, took some great experimental filmmaking classes, and lived in an unheated, unfinished garage with no plumbing just behind the house of some family friends. Because there was no bathroom in the cabin, I learned not to drink tea before bed. A huge redwood tree looming above the garage sang a creaking lullaby all night as the fog rolled in around us.
One of the internships I had was at SF Cinematheque, run, at that time, by film curator Steve Anker. The screenings took place at the now defunct San Francisco Art Institute. I don’t know how I came to the Cinematheque, it must have been through Film Arts Foundation and Craig Baldwin and the small but dynamic experimental film scene.
I took tickets at the screenings, sometimes many, sometimes only a couple, and watched everything, wide-eyed. I got to preview films in the SF Cinematheque space too. Not incidentally, my supervisor for the internship was Laura Poitras, with whom I became friends.
The best part of the job besides seeing the movies was writing program notes. And one program I was charged with was the 1991 retrospective of films by Trinh T. Minh-ha.
Watching Trinh Minh-ha’s films changed the course of my life. Since I saw them, particularly her first film Reassemblage, I gained a sense of freedom in my own work.
Reassemblage has been a lodestone, a north star, a way for me to gather courage and strength when I feel I don’t know what I am doing, to restore a sense of wonder and humility when I feel I know too much about what I am doing. It’s a film that comes to mind when I am editing and don’t know which voices to follow, the story voice, the rhythm voice, the music voice. All the voices.
Reassemblage’s internal rhythms, the critical eye, the voice, the generous spirit and the openness reminds me that after all these years of being frustrated—with film, filmmaking, the so-called “film world” and the so-called “art world,”—what I still want to believe in and what I aspire towards.
Reassemblage was Trinh T. Minh-ha’s first film in 16mm. Rather than rehashing her bio here I will link to it so you can read more if you want.
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I had not read these program notes until now, and I didn’t even remember what I wrote because I hadn’t looked for them on the internet. Happily, the SF Cinematheque has now digitzed their program notes and are doing a great job archiving their historic work and that of the experi ental film world.
So here are my program notes from 1991. You can, of course see the (deadly) influence of early 90s semiotics jargon in my writing and some cheesy attempts at dramatic flourish. But there’s something there, and something I have carried with me all these years since.
TRINH T. MINH-HA: A RETROSPECTIVE
Reassemblage and Surname Viet Given Name Nam
Artist in person
Saturday, October 26, 1991
Reassemblage (1982); 16mm, color, sound, 40 minutes.
Fragments of cinematic tradition: a tracking shot that cuts off, a camera that moves, flickers, and turns back on itself like the eye does — this is Reassemblage, not just a glimpse into Senegal, but a glimpse into the way we watch, how our gaze is coded and shrouded in layers of culture. Our eye does not pan smoothly across the surface of an African landscape, nor does it gaze gently in soft focus upon a mother and child under a tree. If we were watching there, our eyes would flit and stop, turn back and refocus. Our minds would connect disconnected pieces of our voyage, bits of poetry would resurface; we would be aware of our simultaneous presence and non-presence in the landscape and of our non-place in the foreign culture.
A "traditional documentary" seeks to explain, to define and to categorize the "curious," the"savage," the "ethnic" from the start. Explanations of on-screen activities, "expert testimony" and cliched cinematic technique tend to lull the audience into a feeling that what they are watching and hearing is the truth about a faraway and exotic 'tribe.' Trinh's Reassemblage begins with the comment, "I do not want to speak about; just speak nearby." She does not presume that just by rejecting the standard ethnographic film technique that she will gain entry into the culture. She remains a woman with a movie camera, a woman with a selective eye and a critical vision.
Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989); 16mm, color, sound, 108 minutes.
Surname Viet Given Name Nam is like the magician's trick of pulling off the tablecloth while leaving the dishes and crystal on it undisturbed. The film yanks the authority of the interview— the ultimate truth-telling device — out from under the film, yet leaves the stories of Vietnamese women's strength behind. Even in a format as traditional and weary as the interview, Trinh raises questions of truth-telling and authenticity. She questions the truth in what you are seeing, moving the camera away from the speaker's face to frame her hands or the window.
She questions the truth in what you are hearing or reading, using subtitles or accented speech. When the first series of interviews are revealed to have been staged, yet another layer of meaning is added to this film: Who are these women? By what experiences do we define them? Through what means do they define themselves? Trinh mentions at one point "the impossibility of a single truth in witnessing, remembering, recording, forgetting." As we partake of the images and sound, culled from memory, tradition, "objective" newsreels. legend, and text, we are made aware of our subjective presence as viewers. Trinh 's films are designed to "awaken. ..reflective and critical ability." (TT.M.)
Surname Viet Given Name Nam wakes us gently, beautifully, and determinedly.
Naked Spaces: Living is Round
Thursday, October 24, 1991
Naked Spaces: Living is Round (1985); 16mm, color, sound, 135 minutes.
Spaces: interstices. Silence. What it is not. Naked Spaces: Living is Round is not strident, not didactic, not narrative, not linear, not "telling the truth." Naked Spaces… is Trinh T. Minh-ha's version of a text, of a documentary. It is a scathing critique of traditional ethnographic filmmaking. It is a lyrical, beautiful, engrossing and provocative film.
"A film is like a piece of paper which I offer the viewer. I am responsible for what is within the boundary of the paper but I do not control and do not wish to control its folding. The viewer can fold it horizontally, obliquely, vertically, they can weave the elements to their liking and background. This interfolding and interweaving is what I consider to be most exciting in making films." (TTM.)
It is shot in West Africa. It is Trinh's second film, completed in 1985.
Start folding your paper.
Trinh T Minh-ha was born in Vietnam and has lived in France, Senegal and the United States. She is a filmmaker, writer and composer. Presently, she is teaching as the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and as Associate Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Her most recent book is When The Moon Waxes Red (Routledge, 1991), on film, gender, and cultural politics.
— Notes by Jenny Perlin.
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I wrote my program notes.
A few years later, after my time in the Czech Republic, I returned to San Francisco. Another major depressive episode had flattened me in Prage and I was unable to do anything else besides go home to Ohio and then drag myself back to SF, a familar place that had once cobbled me back together. I lived again in the unfinished unplumbed garage. I worked for photo curators and patched together other gigs. I joined a choir. San Francisco had already changed, but the film culture was still vibrant.
I decided I had to apply for a PhD, but would also secretly apply for art schools. (Long, not interesting story). There was no such thing as a PhD program in the U.S. that would let you read books and make art at the same time. I applied a lot of places, one of which was the Rhetoric program at Berkeley, where Trinh T. Minh-ha was teaching. I didn’t want to do a PhD in Rhetoric. But I wanted to talk with Trinh Minh-ha. So I called the department and asked when she held office hours. Then I called her and asked if I could come by, even though I was not a student. She was surprised, I think, but said yes.
The bright Berkeley sun warmed my shoulders and top of my then-dark head as I walked into the small building housing Dr. Trinh’s office. I sat for a while and then went in. I do not remember what we talked about. I remember she was encouraging and gentle and kind. Maybe she told me that art was ok and I didn’t have to follow a traditional path. Maybe we sat there and said nothing. Whatever happened, I left feeling less jagged-edged and slightly more hopeful.
I was rejected from all the PhD programs and accepted to all the MFA programs I applied to. It was a relief.
***
I have been teaching Trinh’s writings and films since 1999 when I got my first adjunct teaching job. Reassemblage never ceases to move students, no matter what letter of the alphabet the generation is called. I remember being very surprised and flattered that Dr. Trinh used a quote from my near-adolescent writings in her own blurbs. I wondered if that meant that what I wrote was meaningful to her too in some way.
When I started The Hoosac Institute in 2018, it gave me a sense of independence, autonomy from the academic institutions that had always rejected my desperate advances. I felt that with the backing of my very own platform, I could reach out to people I had always admired and ask them to be part of the project. I’ve been beyond moved and surprised that people whose work I have loved for decades have agreed and sent me things. One of those people was Trinh Minh-ha, who is in Journal 1. You can see her contribution here.
I was also thrilled to see her work in this year’s Whitney Biennial and felt a kind of warmth and gratitude knowing someone who deserves to be celebrated in every context is having the power and grace of her productions brought into a different sort of view.
This year, as I have mentioned in previous posts, I started a PhD in artistic practice at the National Academy of Art in Oslo. Times have changed. I got an email out this summer asking for volunteers in the PhD program to give a public talk at the school this fall. I thought what the hell, it will be good for me to try to cohere what it is I am trying to do. So I said yes.
Imagine my surprise and emotion when I saw that this fall’s lecture series poster includes my lecture on September 26 (soon!) and, you guessed it, a talk on November 1 by Trinh T. Minh-ha.
I’ll be there.
You can see Reassemblage in not a very good copy (it looks gorgeous on 16mm) here.
Thanks for reading.