The History of Trinh T. Minh-ha - Essay Example

Trinh T. Minh-ha: criticisms in light of Sur Viet, Given Nam Trinh T. Minh-ha is an acclaimed filmmaker, writer, feminist, academic and composer. She was born in Vietnam in 1952 but immigrated to the US when she was 18. She has studied French literature and music, and has taught in many colleges including Harvard and Smith. One of her most acknowledged films is the Surname Viet, Given Name Nam. The movie was made in 1989 and manifests Minh-ha’s talents and exceptional grasp on cultural politics and critical theory. Most of her works circulate around the theme of the ‘other’, which challenges the normative and conformist views of cultural theorists or subjected duality (Pallister and Hottell 217). Surname Viet, Given Name Nam is 108 minutes long and was directed, edited and written by Minh-ha. The film, although based on Vietnamese women, has not been made in Vietnam; the motive behind which accentuates the issues that Minh-ha raises. The essence of notion behind the film is the about the nature of documentaries and interviews. The film raises some hard-core questions about the issues reverberating behind the curtain of what is apparent. It addresses cultural values in the light of identity and popular memory. The film explores the Vietnamese woman and the role she has played in the historical context of the Vietnam War and the role she continues to play in the modern society. It attempts to bring to surface the nexus of how real and enacted characters blur the reality, and how drastically different can documentaries be from real life. She has intricately portrayed the nuances of fictional elements that become imbued in documentaries featuring actors instead of the real people. The end result is a sensual melodrama of courage and perseverance of the Vietnamese women embedded in a beautifully crafted multilayered depiction of interviews and documentaries. In her films, Minh-ha frames a richly ambiguous connection with ethnography, while highlighting the cultures of suppressed groups by digressing from the typical traditional techniques of ethnographic film (Petrolle and Wexman 178). Surname Viet, Given Name Nam has been shot in both black and white and in color and it contains printed information as well. The film makes use of many dramatic conventions like freeze frames. Stop-motion footage has been used extensively in the start of the film. The director uses techniques that focus the audience’s attention to one part of the screen. At many times in the movie, the camera is shaky and focuses on the hands of the interviewees, stressing upon the point that Minh-ha is trying to make. The main characters in the film are five modern women who are portrayed as Vietnamese. The delivery of dialogues by these women does not have a professional touch to it- an intentional maneuver to build up the story. The inexperienced touch given to the actors by Minh-ha is aimed to dilute the gravity of the situation and to intentionally detract the attention of the audience from the stress and plethora of emotions such as anxiety and nervousness associated with it in real life. Minh-ha crafts a setting where the portrayal of the war and the problems faced by women in Vietnam are presented in toned down emotions and played down by lack of zeal and unprofessional acting. The audience is alienated from the emotional aspect of the reality and gets the impression that Minh-ha finds the performance of the actors blasé. When analyzing Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, the characters are the foremost aspect to address. The characters are shown as susceptible and vulnerable. The women are weakened and attenuated by the hardships and sufferings of the war. These Vietnamese women are shown to have accepted the circumstances they find themselves in- living in a foreign land, away from the land of their forefathers, and from the hub of their identity and cultural values. In the first half of the film, Minh-ha presents the image of these Vietnamese as meek women who have come to a compromise with their circumstances and still continue to practice their traditions. In sharp contrast to that, when the true identities of these women are revealed in the second part of the film, a new more assertive and boisterous side of their personality surfaces. Moreover the women are shown to be more opinionated and dogmatic, advocating strong political beliefs, with hints of western influence. The identity clash and the two different aspects of characters that Minh-ha conjures up compels the audience to deliberate of how easily the viewer can be trapped into what the director wants them to believe and how promptly the viewers tend to be easily prejudiced by what they view and criticize it in the same reference as presented in the film. Another issue that the dual personality of the characters raises is our inability to pick the faults and misconceptions of the media. Since the media feeds into our consciousness details of gory, bloodshed, political grievances and economic and social depravity on a daily basis, we have become desensitized to these issues and fail to recognize any discrepancy in the ‘reality’ being presented. It has become a common perception that whatever the media presents in documentary form is real and true. Minh-ha raises this inconsistency in the so-called reality portrayed by the media not only in Surname Viet, Given Name Nam but it also appears as a common theme in her other works. By encouraging the possibility, in fact by promoting the viewer to integrate his personal opinion into the film, Minh-ha attracts the possibility of an assortment of criticisms. Surname Viet is largely seen as Minh-ha’s commitment to the feminist cause (Maver 168). Minh-ha has been criticized for upstaging the concept of the film, with her filmmaking techniques domineering and overshadowing the theme instead. For Minh-ha it is significant that she asserts herself as little as possible throughout the film. Her only perceptible presence that she wants her audience to be aware of is limited to her holding the camera. Many of the critics argue that because of this domination of filmmaking over the theme, her film fails to play an authorized objective role in the international arena. However, Minh-ha counter-argues her critics by a standpoint that is both personal and public, not only in terms of feminist filmmaking but generally as well; she is of the viewpoint that a film or a documentary can never be objective. Her strong and different views are one of the reasons why she has risen to the altars of a successful independent filmmaker. Minh-ha uses many untraditional methods in her works, digressing from specific categories. As a result, it becomes cumbersome for critics to question her work since the critic has to accept and familiarize with her ways and find unconventional types of criticism too. As Minh-ha herself says in her work The Framer Framed, “I am always working at the borderlines of several shifting categories, stretching out to the limits of things, learning about my own limits and how to modify them” (Gazetas 315). In her interview with Judith Mayne titled From a Hybrid Place, Minh-ha asserts that there is a correct way to write theoretical work or produce a film. When these conventional boundaries are crossed, and the producer or the writer treads in between the borderlines of different styles, there arises a need to alter typical criticisms and to level them from a different vantage point that incorporates the digressions. This also links to the idea of producing an authorized voice in the erudite field of work. Minh-ha relates how her work does not fall into any particular category, due to which she faced many problems when she wanted to get her work published initially. Her book, Woman, Native, Other was rejected by more than thirty publishers on the basis that it did not have any marketable category. These traditionalist limitations cause the juxtaposition of myriad modes of writing to fall insipid since such writing does not rise to the publisher’s standards of good and effective writing; it is also dismissed by critics and theorists for not falling on their normative mode. Minh-ha particularly experienced this resistance to her work when she decided to go public with her first work Reassemblage. The work was a complex interface between the viewer and the character, and deliberated on documentary filmmaking and cultures. Critiquing both the characteristics of a typical documentary and science being taught in the far West, Reassemblage failed to rise to the expectations of the critics since it did not encompass conformist elements of film production. As a rebuttal to such critics, there are many instances in the film where Minh-ha has used traditional techniques such as reiteration of both audio and visual terms. Minh-ha is unique in her ability to base films and her writings around flexible boundaries. Her first book, Un Art sans Oeuvre, was on contemporary arts and compared the works of Jacques Derrida and Antonin Artaud to the likes of Zen Buddhism. Instead of using the typical language that tends to produce identities that are unclear and implicit in their details, Minh-ha adopts a language that focuses back on itself and can be a very pivotal part of the subject without dominating it. Her adept use of language in dialogues is exemplified by the nuanced detail that dialogues end with flashes of change, with each change paving way for subsequent changes. As in Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, one can appreciate how the dialogues were intricately woven together and delivered with such art, along with the gradual build-up of the story, to link one transition to the next. Minh-ha observes that when portraying hybridity or cultural differences, she does not think of limiting herself to borders; rather in her view, borders are continually broken down and re-enacted, with many being ephemeral. However, she stresses that these borders should not circumscribe the filmmaking or writing horizons and one has to push as far one can go (Dowd, Strong, and Davidson 85). One should adopt a more nomadic approach in these matters since the identity is continually being put out of place and displaced; hence, more flexible borders help to incorporate the shifting trends of identity. Minh-ha asserts that borders should be present, and she does not bend them. In fact, she only shifts them farther when they start to confine her imagination (Bourdier and Krischanitz). Minh-ha has made use of poetic language in her works. Her poetic language, along with the music and poetry, captivates the audience such that the spectator loses sight of the message being given, no matter how political or dogmatic it is. In her works, Minh-ha is attributed to developing her particular and unique style of critique since in her view, it is only through the lens of a unique and personalized critique that one can accomplish a specific goal. In Surname Viet, Minh-ha uses both re-enacted interviews in US and interviews by genuine Vietnamese who suffered from the war and stresses upon their differences. This in turn shows the spectator a side of politics of documentary making that was previously hidden. Minh-ha holds the view that the best documentaries are those that know of their fictional aspects, while the best fictions are those works that promulgate the truth of their own fictions (Pearce and McLaughlin 106). In Roland Barthes essay Lesson in Writing, the writer highlights the differences existing between the theatres of the East and the West; these differences are the origin of an interesting set of identities, interspersed with relevant dialogues, that generates differences in the characters and leaves an impact on the audience. Min-ha applies the same technique in her Surname Viet, Given Name Nam. Although Barthes has used Japanese theatrical concepts, Minh-ha has used a group of individuals to deliver the contrasting differences in the identities of the characters. Using the Western style of acting for one individual to portray the story, she has concurrently delivered a different version of the story through another character that uses poetry, singing and narration to enhance the effects of the story. In the first half of the film, the audience gets the feeling that the women being depicted in the film like Anh, Thu Van etc. are relating their experiences of living in a divided Vietnam. However, towards the end of the film, the awakening dawns on the audience that the women portrayed are actually US immigrants who were saying the lines and delivering the role of another woman’s life. The dogmatic and strong views of the women also come into light. When reading Surname Viet, there are a couple of main points that arise in relation to the similarity in the works on Minh-ha and Barthes. Barthes, like Minh-ha advocates the view that Western form of theatre performance is farce whereas Eastern application of theatre and poetry helps give a sensual and substantial touch to the characters, drawing the attention of the audience. Another factor that Barthes and Minh-ha share in their works is their use of speech and written language. In Surname Viet in particular, Minh-ha orchestrates a timed version of speech and language, ensuring that one does not dominate the other. Barthes contends to the same view. Writers, Intellectual, Teachers accommodates this viewpoint where Barthes says that writing starts at that point where speech ends. Likewise, the same philosophy can be found in Surname Viet; at some places in the film, the scene is overshadowed by bold white text that gives an account of what the character is saying. This emphasizes the fact that when text appears, the audience has to shift its attention from listening to the accounts of stories to reading them; this shift does not let the audio aspect of the film dominate over the comprehension of the audience. Since the film Surname Viet is targeted for the West, it becomes important to understand the meaning and role of language. The writer makes this point by accommodating the various takes of cultural understanding of the authority role of the narrator, and by addressing the issue of facilitating the audience to accept and understand these cultural issues such that there is trust of authority given to the characters. This issue gains impetus in the first half of the film, where most part has been based on scripted writing. In Minh-ha’s own words, her films can be viewed as “different attempts to deal creatively with cultural difference, to enhance our understanding of the heterogeneous societies in which we live, and to invite viewers to engage with films and the arts in diverging and enriching ways” (University of California). According to Barthes, building certain amount of trust and command over speech is governed by a set of laws; these laws need to be addressed when delivering dialogues. The relation between Minh-ha’s interviewing techniques and Barthes mis en scenesett inn saann fransk strek over e I scenne is clear. Minh-ha adopts the techniques on exactly the same principles as out forward by Barthes. At all places in the film, the speech is eloquent and clear. It is delivered with an articulate and behavioral continuity which parallels the laws of effective speech as proposed by Barthes. As a result, Minh-ha is successfully able to foster and strengthen the bond between the film and the audience. The significance of this bond has also been highlighted by Barthes, with the response of the audience impacting the understanding of the play. The audience permits the characters to assume their role as masters by giving appropriate responses to the speech. Therefore, Barthes and Minh-ha both ratify and endorse the idea that the law shows itself not in what is being mouthed verbally but in the very fact of speech (Carney 106). Minh-ha’s assembled variety of performed voices help to generate an interesting quandary of the core truth of the speech. The audience is left in a dilemma about the credibility of the truth of the work. By playing with the forged and genuine in her work, Minh-ha, in the later part of the film, shatters the perception that the audience has built in over the passage of the film. In her interviews with Judith Mayne, Minh-ha says that a film can be a “constant discovery process” (Gazetas 311). Filmmaking mostly requires the producer to be adept at presenting the information in such a way that the suspense is maintained and the brunt if the message is fully delivered to the audience. Minh-ha has accomplished this feat quite effectively in her works. In Surname Viet for instance, Minh-ha has delayed the reenactment of interviews and the authentic Vietnamese women till the end of the film. This leaves the audience shell-shocked when they suddenly find their perceptions being questioned towards the end of the film. Minh-ha uses still photographs of wartime throughout the film. In the initial part of the film, the exhibition of such photographs seems premature and amateur. However throughout the course of the film Minh-ha has used war time photography to illustrate her point. I will aim to explain the way such visual depictions can cause the audience to make up their own perception alongside the story of the film. I will use Barthes Camera Lucida expound upon the relation between the photographer and the photographed. Minh-ha has intentionally shown the unreliability of the images by focusing and zooming into one part of the picture, and encouraging the audience to formulate their take on the occurrence behind the image. As Minh-ha zooms out, the viewer gets to see the rest of the image and compare how distanced his or her freshly formed assumption was from the reality. By these untraditional styles of imagery, Minh-ha immunizes herself from any critique owing primarily due to the uncertain condition of the film. There is no principally correct way of presenting a critique of a visual subject. As Barthes writes in The Photographic Message that there is a strong relation between the photograph and its way and timing of appearance, along with any contextual data like the text that it appears with etc; this relation becomes a part of the sociological mindset of the spectator. Barthes moreover believes that the text and the photograph must be understood both structurally and individually in order to gain a better understanding of the whole idea behind using such technique. Surname Viet has been filmed in such a way that this theme of texts and photographs appears time and time again at various instances in the film. Only when the film has ended, and in fact been watched over and over again, can one truly fathom the complexity of the issues involved. Taking in to notice Barthes idea of autobiographical criticism, one can understand the path that Minh-ha is taking. Minh-ha promotes such criticism by inviting the viewer to juxtapose his or her personal autobiography in the criticism. In this regard, Barthes differs since he emphasizes on the degree that criticism can address those effects that can not be explained by language and visuals like photography. Thus in conclusion, Minh-ha has used printed text, poetry and native traditions in her works, especially Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, to demarcate differences between the staged and the real. Her unconventional techniques and independent thought has placed her works in a delicate framework of poignant confidence and rational spirit. Surname Viet, Given Name Nam raises questions on the very nature of documentaries and uses the testimony of poetry- a heartening polemic (Gabrenya). Works Cited Bourdier, Jean-Paul, and Adolf Krischanitz. Secession. Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession, 2001. Web. 2 June 2010. Carney, Sean. Brecht and critical theory: dialectics and contemporary aesthetics. Oxon: Taylor & Francis, 2005. Print. Dowd, Garin, Jeremy Strong, and Lesley Stevenson. Genre matters: essays in theory and criticism. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2006. Print. Gabrenya, Gabriel. Trinh T. Minh-ha. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 June 2010. Gazetas, Aristides. An introduction to world cinema. 2nd ed. North Carolina: McFarland, 2008. Print. Maver, Igor. Critics and writers speak: revisioning post-colonial studies. Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006. Print. Pallister, Janis L., and Ruth A. Hottell. Francophone women film directors: a guide. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. Print. Pearce, Gail, and Cahal McLaughlin. Truth or dare: art & documentary. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007. Print. Petrolle, Jean, and Virginia Wright Wexman. Women and experimental filmmaking. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Print. University of California. Berkeley. The Regents of the University of California, 2000. Web. 2 June 2010. Read More