D-Passage: The Digital Way 9780822377320

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D -­P ASSAGE

other books by trinh t. minh-ha Elsewhere, within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event, 2011 Vernacular Architecture of West Africa: A World in Dwelling In collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, 2011 Habiter un monde: Architectures de l’Afrique de l’Ouest In collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, 2006 The Digital Film Event, 2005 Cinema Interval, 1999 Drawn from African Dwellings In collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, 1996 Framer Framed, 1992 When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 1991 Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, 1989 En minuscules. Book of poems, 1987 African Spaces: Designs for Living in Upper Volta In collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, 1985 Un Art sans oeuvre, 1981

D-PASSAGE the digital way Trinh T. Minh-ha

Duk e Univ er sit y Pr ess  |  Dur h am and London  |  2013

© 2013 Trinh T. Minh-ha or Moongift Films All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Bea Jackson Typeset in Palatino by Copperline Book Services, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trinh, T. Minh-Ha (Thi Minh-Ha) D-passage : the digital way / Trinh T. Minh-ha. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5525-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5540-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Trinh, T. Minh-Ha (Thi Minh-Ha), 1952– —Themes, motives. 2. Trinh, T. Minh-Ha (Thi Minh-Ha), 1952– —Interviews. 3. Night passage (Motion picture) 4. Digital cinematography. I. Title. pn1998.3.t76a5 2013 777 — dc23 2013013828

Contents

vii Acknowledgments

i | prelude

3 Lotus Eye (Reading Miyazawa Kenji and Making Night Passage)

D-Story, D-Film 3 Miyazawa’s Spirit 5 Forces and Forms: “Where the Road Is Alive” 7 The Transcultural 7 Time Passage 11 Ship and Train of Death 12

ii | script 21 Night Passage (Film Script)

iii | conversations 65 A Sound Print in the Human Archive with Sidsel Nelund Affinities and Alliances 65 Research: The Multiplicity of Now 68 Work: The Movement of Exteriority and the Teacher as Hypertext 76 A Multicellular, Multi-Art Event 80

89 The Depth of Time with Alison Rowley Somewhere from the Middle 89 Cinematic, Industrial, Digital 91 Cinema Screen, Strip of Celluloid, and Electronic Train Windows 94 Going into Darkness 97 The Body and Technology 101

Not So Cool: Eye Hears, Ear Sees 104 Continuity in the Digital Passage 110 Man Passenger in Women’s Time 114

121 What’s Eons New? with Rosa Reitsamer A Drop of Ink: Resistance and Representation 121 “Red” and “Gray” and “Inappropriate/d Other” 123 The Sap That Matters 126 The Labeling of . . . 131 More Underdog Than the Underdog 132 New Feminism? 134

141 The Politics of Forms and Forces with Eva Hohenberger Prologue 141 The Aesthetics of Documentary 144 The Ethics of Documentary 156 The Politics of Documentary 159 The Technologies of Documentary 163

iv | installation 171 L’Autre marche (The Other Walk) 183 L’Entre-musée: The World, with Each Step with Elvan Zabunyan Site of Controversies: The Museum 183 The Flower Step 188 Light: The Other-into-Self Passage 191 A Hybrid Space 193 The Double Movement of Interiority and Exteriority 194 The Walk Between 196 Liquid Screen 197 Human, Vegetal, Animal, and Mineral 198

205 Illustrations, Filmography, and Distribution 207 Index

Acknowledgments

My heartfelt thanks to the artists and performers, as well as to all members of the film crew, who have generously contributed their talents and their time to the making of Night Passage. I also wish to thank the interviewers involved and the editors who first published the interviews. Special thanks are due to Celsa Dockstader for her assistance in the layout and Photoshop work on the photographs. Last but not least, this book owes its look and rhythms to Jean-­Paul Bourdier’s gifted insights.

Lotus Eye (Reading Miyazawa Kenji and Making Night Passage)

d-­s tory, d-­film The name calls for mourning, sowing fear and panic in the hearts of mortals. It begins with a D in English, and in its realm time makes no sense. What is it that we call Death? Heavily lugged around, it is a name we need when the urge to draw a limit to the unknown arises. Die, Dissolve, Disappear: the three D’s.1 D changes its face, passing from metamorphosis to metamorphosis, almost never failing to surprise the one who dies. We tell stories in the dark to avert it, and we do everything else we can to forget, ignore, or deny it. Whether we hide it from sight or we provocatively display it for view, D remains elusively at once invisible and all-­too-­visible. No amount of corpses, spilled blood, or skulls and skeletons can represent the everyday death that accompanies a life from crib to grave. By trying to show it and solve this problem of the end, we end up arresting the infinitely Al-­ready-­, Al-­ways-­There — the immortal in the mortal. Night Passage (98 minutes, color film, 2004, directed by Trinh T. Minh-­ha and Jean-­Paul Bourdier) is a D-­film on friendship and death. Made in homage to Miyazawa Kenji’s classic novel Night Train to the Stars, the story revolves around the spiritual journey of a young woman (Kyra), in the company of her best friend (Nabi) and a little boy (Shin), into a world of rich in-­between realities.2 Their journey into the land of “awakened dream” and out is experienced as a passage of appearances, from a death to a return in life that occurs during a long ride on a night train. At each stop of the train, the travelers set out in the dark and come across an inner space of longing, in which their ears and eyes meet with people and events at once too familiar and oddly strange. Every encounter opens a door into the transcultural, and every intervention offers an experience of nonillusory, two-­dimensional time-­space spectacles. The film

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itself unfolds in the sequential rhythm of a train of window images. With magnetic intensity, each place features a gesture of the sensual world or a means of reception and communication of our times.

miyazawa’s spirit “Off you go now, birds of passage! Now’s the time to go,” says a character in Miyazawa’s Night Train to the Stars. During the railroad trip to the Milky Way, characters appear and disappear. They move in seemingly precise time: they want to get off the train but can’t because “it’s too late,” and they leave the locations of their visits to get back on the train when “it’s time.” Some must part midway with their train companions, because “this is where you get off to go to heaven.” Hopping on Miyazawa’s night train is to step into a universe of sentient cyborgs in which the mineral, the vegetal, the animal, and the human worlds happily mingle. As the journey into the fourth dimension expands in time and space, earthly and celestial beings, the living and the departed, the easterner and the westerner, the poet and the scientist, the child and the adult are brought together in a quasi-­hallucinatory vision. Although driven at its core by the dark boundaries of life and death, such a vision offers neither somber picture nor mere drama. On the contrary, the glowing images strewn on the Milky Way are presented in light, subtle touches on the shimmering surface of the sky canvas. Although the sense of loss poignantly runs through the entire story like an underlining thread, tears and laughter are fluidly woven into the scenes of magical encounters, and only now and then does an alarming note of sadness erupt into the space of narration. In conceiving Night Passage, there was no desire to imitate or illustrate Miyazawa’s tale. As with my previous films, I prefer to work with transformation in encounters, retaining what I see as the spirit of Miyazawa’s narrative while riding a night train of my own. I stumbled onto his stark and intense poetry (A Future of Ice is an example)3 well before I read his stories and became acquainted with the man’s personal tale. Death always seems near and can be felt lurking in every spring of joy or innocent youth that gives his writing its magical freshness. What strikes me the most, like a lingering fragrance, is the

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“blue illumination” (a term he uses to define “I”) that his sister’s death left as a gift on every page. The eye that weeps while laughing speaks through the haunting, absent presence of Toshiko, the young woman who died at the age of twenty-­five, while in her springtime. Night Train to the Stars reminds me in many ways of Antoine Saint-­Exupéry’s The Little Prince — although, for reasons likely to reflect the power imbalance between East and West, the latter is far more universally known than the former. The two so-­called children’s tales offer a luminous tapestry of poetic, scientific, and spiritual imagery capable of speaking to an unusual readership that ranges from the very young to the very old, not excluding the majority of impatient “grown-­ups.” Saint-­Exupéry and Miyazawa are both consummate stargazers and adventurous skydivers, the first being an aviator by profession. That said, their novels differ markedly in the location of their voice. Of significance here is that Miyazawa, who also died at a young age, thirty-­seven, having ruined his health with an ascetic food regimen, is a man of many selves and many talents — an aspect that accounts for the sheer expansive quality of his work. Poet, novelist, farmer agronomist, amateur astronomer, geologist, teacher, musician, and composer, he was a most misunderstood literary figure in Japan until the media decided to deify him sixty-­three years after his death. A dilettante at heart, he loved Western classical music and had a strong fascination for foreign languages, including English, German, and Esperanto. Relevantly, aside from his gift of speaking from an experience of death and dying, what appeals to me as unique to Miyazawa are the quirky elements of transculturalism that traverse his novel and the social consciousness that grounds his spiritual practice. While freely crossing borders and pushing boundaries, Miyazawa’s voice is firmly rooted in local realities and the Buddhist sutras. The vividly depicted backdrop of his creative work is generally that of his own town and region, Iwate — known for its exceedingly harsh climate and soil and regarded as the “Tibet of Japan.” His hardship in volunteer work, his personal commitment to the discriminated-­against minorities, and his self-­sacrificing struggle for the welfare of the regional peasants who survive on the fringes of subsistence have all been well documented and repeatedly praised as a model to emulate in Japanese media and literary circles.

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In the first version I read of his novel Milky Way Railroad, the translators had taken the liberty of changing the characters’ names into Japanese names, under the pretext that it would “eliminate any confusion caused by Japanese characters in a Japanese setting having European names.”4 Since I usually prefer (at first) to enter a text directly and to follow the writer’s thought process afresh, without the mediation of an introduction, at the end of the book I was deceptively left with a feeling of wonder for what I considered to be a harmlessly charming story of coming to terms with death, a story “typically Japanese,” as my prejudices dictated. It was only a year later, when a Japanese friend offered me another translated version of the novel, Night Train to the Stars, that I realized with awe and utter excitement the scope of Miyazawa’s experimental and cosmopolitan mind. In this translation, not only do the main characters’ names, Giovanni (Jovanni) and Campanella (Kanpanera), appear as originally intended, but a whole complex tapestry of foreign-­sounding names of people and places emerges from the story, as if by magic. Suppressed in the first adapted version I read, these Italian, French, English, and American names, coexisting with Japanese names, make all the difference. Here the politics of naming takes on an inventive role of its own.

forces and forms: “where the road is alive” The Transcultural Toshiko was the name I first gave to the young woman who dies in Night Passage. But as the script I wrote evolved with the actors and artists who participated in the film, Toshiko disappeared to leave room for Nabi (“butterfly” in Korean), a name chosen by the actress herself, Denice Lee. Shin, the name of the little boy, was the one Japanese name I had decided to keep, despite the fact that the actor for that role is not Japanese. (This small detail did not fail to disturb some discerning viewers when the film was released.) On my night train, rather than focusing on the two boys, I set out to explore the journey of two young women accompanied by a little boy. With this shift of gender, everything changes. Miyazawa’s original story recedes, leaving here and there a few pertinent traces in its inspirational role. For me, in order to remain loyal to his spirit, only the glow and the bare minimum of the narrative are

lotus eye  7

kept: the beginning, the ending, and a couple of small core incidences on the train. As with Miyazawa’s stories, which, to his credit, continually raised questions concerning their true nature (Is it a novel? A children’s story? A poem in prose? A Dharma lesson?), Night Passage offers a journey that cuts across cinema, painting, and theater. Spectators coming into the film with expectations of what a narrative on screen should be have been disquieted by what they have seen. The comments they made revolved consciously or unconsciously around the boundaries they’d set up for cinema. As is known from analyses of the film world, there are two distinct Western avant-­gardes: one based on the tradition of the visual arts and the other on the tradition of theater and literature. Working at hiding the stage, mainstream narratives are all theater, and it is with the power of money (in buying locations and expertise) that they naturalize their artifices. (It suffices to listen to these narratives without looking at the pictures to realize how much they remain entrenched in “acting” and theatrical delivery.) In contrast, experimental films borrow so heavily from painting and plastic arts that they’re often conceived in negative reaction against anything considered to be impure to their vision, such as the verbal dimension and other nonvisual concerns. As with my previous films, Night Passage continues to raise questions about the politics of form (which includes but is not reduced to the politics of representation). Not only is it at odds with classifications such as documentary and fiction, but it also explicitly plays with both traditions of the avant-­garde. I’ve often been asked whether my making feature narratives is a shift in my itinerary as a filmmaker, but the one luxury that independent filmmaking offers is precisely the ability to shuttle, not necessarily from one category to another but between categories. Created with a mood, rhythm, structure, and poetry that are at once light and intensive, Night Passage stays away from heavy drama and from the action-­driven scenario. It invites viewers to experience the magic of film and video anew, to enter and exit the screen by the door of their own mediation, sensually or spiritually, or both, according to their own realities and background. At the first screening of Night Passage in Berkeley, a viewer (the poet and painter Etel Adnan) described the film to me as a “journey across appearances” and “a story of humanity with all five races.” She went on to specify that, yes, she agrees, “the world today is not occidental.” Other

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viewers noted that the film is “vast in its subject, but very local in the coloring” and made remarks on how distinctly Californian the film’s backdrop is in its landscape and art activities. As one of them put it, “I have been there and I know the place, and yet . . . I don’t quite recognize it. It looks gorgeous, but it’s as if I’ve never seen it before.” Certainly it is not by mere accident that the cast is highly diverse. The actors selected to play the roles of the main characters are Chinese American for Kyra (Yuan Li-­chi); Korean American for Nabi (Denice Lee); Jewish American for Shin (Joshua Miller); Irish for one of the storytellers on the train (Howard Dillon); African American for the other storyteller on the train (Vernon Bush), as well as for the drummers and Black scientists (Sherman Kennedy and Yesufu Shangoshola); Chicano for the man of wisdom in the street (Luis Saguar); French for his companion, the flutist (Viviane Lemaigre Dubreuil); Japanese for Nabi’s father (Atsushi Kanbayashi, who is actually the art director Brent Kanbayashi’s father); and the list goes on. However, if diversity was important in the process of building cast and crew, as well as of visualizing the film, it was obviously not upheld for its own sake. Although gender, sexual, and racial diversities are easily recognizable by the eye and ear, their visibility is often used to tame all disturbing differences, to give these a fixed, familiar face, and hence to turn them into consumable commodities. What I find infinitely more challenging is to work on and from multiplicity. The term, as used here, should be neither equated with liberal pluralism nor confused with multiculturalism as touted by the mainstream media. In normalizing diversity, multiculturalism remains deceptively color-­blind and utterly divisive. Its bland melting-­pot logic denies the racism and sexism that lie at the core of biopower and biopolitics. Since the film features a transition from one state to another, the focus is on the interaction of passages. Rather than treating difference as mere conflict, in Night Passage difference comes with the art of spacing and is creatively transcultural. Here trans-­ is not merely a movement across separate entities and rigid boundaries but one in which the traveling is the very place of dwelling (and vice versa), and leaving is a way of returning home — to one’s most intimate self. Cultural difference is not a matter of accumulating or juxtaposing several cultures whose boundaries remain intact. The crossing required in the transcultural undermines fixed notions

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of identity and border and questions “culture” in its specificity and its very formation. As a character in the film says, “Life’s a net, made up of so many roads. Dirt roads, asphalt roads, virtual roads. Sometimes you go in a straight line; sometimes you just go round and around in circles. . . . Drives us crazy but there’s nothing to do about it. And sometimes you find yourself at the crossroads. Then what?” Well, you get stuck, or else take the risk and “go with the wind — where the road is alive,” as Nabi urges Kyra to follow her inner voice.5 The crossroads are where the dynamics of the film lie. They are empty centers thanks to which an indefinite number of paths can converge and part in a new direction. Inter-­, multi-­, post-­, and trans-­: these are the prefixes of our times. They define the before, after, during, and between of social and ethical consciousness. Each has a history and a seemingly precise moment of appearance, disappearance, and reappearance. Although bound to specifics, they are, in fact, all related as trans-­events.

Time Passage At twelve, I found myself in sinister water: I drowned. Not in the sea but in the chlorine depths of a fire station’s swimming pool. My brother pulled me out in time. Since then I have had to live with the ordeal of the liquid descent. Every now and then, the experience of drowning arises again from nowhere, and the encounter with death in water returns with ever-­changing faces. Never twice the same, and yet always It. From one nightmare to another, I slowly learn to pull myself out in time, to wake up just as I am being swallowed in a wall of water — usually a tidal wave. Now, as if by magic, sometimes I die not and emerge laughing in the fall, letting the drowning settle. Like vapor on seawater, the fear vanishes. I awake, feeling light in radiant darkness. The nightmare has turned into a dream. A passage involves both time and timing. For me, the advent of digital cinema, or D-­cinema, as the tech community calls it, is a timely event. Its technology seems most compatible with Miyazawa’s inventive spirit and is very apt to capture his poetic world of beings and events — at once eccentric and oh so boringly ordinary. In view of the potentials and unparalleled impact of this new technology on the film culture, the elusive story of Death can also take on

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a new lease on life. The unknown, like the fantastic, is never merely out there; it is always already in here, there (in the ordinary, legible image) where one neglects to look with eyes wide shut. Already, in our previous feature, A Tale of Love (35mm, 108 mins, 1996, directed by Trinh T. Minh-­ha and Jean-­Paul Bourdier), a character notes that in the realm of photography and representation, the two impossibles are Love and Death. Love stories are often stories made without love, and showing an image of death is primarily showing time passing. No matter how imaginative one is, capturing these two on screen is literally impossible. The best one can do is to circle around them without falling into the clichés abundantly supplied by the media and its repertoire of ready-­made images. To question our consumption of these images is to touch the core of a whole system of narrative cinema that determines the way we sell and buy love-­a nd-­death stories. As in Miyazawa’s novel, the voyage portrayed in Night Passage happens in a framework that is at once timed and timeless. When the call is made, the “birds of passage” that we are would have to go because “it’s time to go.” Time prevails as a crucial element in filmmaking and film exhibiting. But if a film always ends at a definite time, its unfolding can stretch our sense of time indefinitely. Its closure, rather than merely closing off, can lead to a new opening. Thus, in Night Passage the passing of time is made tangible in the viewer’s experience of film; comings and goings go hand in hand; death happens with a return in life; and stillness can be found in every movement. There’s no opposition between time and timelessness. For me, the night train ride, the last trip taken together by the two friends, raises the following question: What happens in this moment between life and death? How would one spend this time span with one’s best friend — that two-­hour flash just before she disappears from one’s life?

Ship and Train of Death The Last Act is here a creative act for, as a character in the film says, “Everyone is Nabi. Everyone you meet, they’re all people you’ve danced with or ridden on trains with so many times before. Where the path ends, the novel begins.”6 Struck by the spiritual process and by the extensive work of colors and light in the film, some perceptive viewers have given a name to this Passage, by link-

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ing it to the bardo, the “between-­state” in the Tibetan art of dying. As it is well known among Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, the time of the between, the transition from death to new rebirth is the best time to affect the karmic evolution for the better. In its inevitability, death makes everything in our tightest grasp dissolve — especially what we hold on to as solid matter in the waking world of the five senses. What remains and can live on is what we can’t put our hand on. So it goes also for cinema and the work of composing with light in creating images. Screen life, like body life, has no solid reference, no enduring substance, no binding essence, and it can be exposed as such in the very course of the film. Night Passage begins with what may first appear to the viewer as a shot of a passing train, in which passengers appear, disappear, and reappear with no apparent continuity, except for the continuity of the movement of the images themselves. As the camera slowly zooms in, what may become more apparent to viewers is the fact that what they see are not “natural” images of a passing train but the collage of a repeated series of window images taken from outside a train and reanimated to reproduce the movement of a train passing across the screen. Right from the outset, the film displays its aesthetic and structural constitution. The opening sequence not only encapsulates the spirit and rhythm of the digital journey; it also plays on the movement both of the train outside and inside and between train rider and video viewer. Thereby a reflexive and performative relation is maintained between the images of the train within the story space and the train of images that moves linearly in finite sequences across the screen. What is set forth is the zone of infinite shades onto which the double train opens. In this D-­passage unwinding at the speed of light, death is not only part of life; it is the constant zero ground from which life emerges. The mortal and the immortal meet on the light canvas as realities contain one another ad infinitum. “You appeared from nowhere. . . . Who are you?” “Where are we now?” “Where have you come from?” “Where are we going?” “Do you know where this leads us?” These are some of the recurring questions that persistently punctuate the story space in Night Passage. And these are also the questions that may be expected, as the film unfolds, from viewers for whom “just going” makes no sense. Being attuned to the normative concept of cinema, in which all

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actions serve a central story, some of us easily get stuck unless we know ahead of time where to go, and what that means . . . In the process of going, one is constantly in a state of transition. Similarly the digital video image is an image constantly in formation. Emerging and vanishing via a scanning mechanism, it continually morphs into another image. In the editing of my previous films, the cut is always a straight cut, one that assumes unashamedly its nature as a cut and may sometimes even jar the viewer in its radical rupture (as with the many jump-­cuts in the films Reassemblage and Naked Spaces). In Night Passage, however, the choices and constraints in the creative process differ markedly. As digital technology made it possible, the image is worked on accordingly so as to assume a double look: the film look for the scenes and the video look for the transitions. Since the journey is visualized primarily as a passage, great attention is given to “the time of the between” and the “crossroads” — that is, to transformation and transition as time-­spaces of their own. Thus, rather than the cut, it was the dissolve (and the cross-­dissolve) that I chose as an aesthetic principle for the transitions. It is here, in the very intervals that link the scenes, the places and the encounters that the magic of video technology prevails. The time implied in the experience of the film is at once explicitly linear in the frontal sequencing of two-­dimensional images and nonlinear in the multiplicity of ordering of events and performance spaces. If, in Miyazawa’s novel, the train trip leads to Heaven and its Silver River (the Japanese term for the Milky Way), in Night Passage, rather than ascending to the sky, the two young women enter the night to meet their own earthly dreams. The focus is primarily on the river below and on the witnessing of one’s own voyage in the dying process — here Nabi’s death in drowning. When the two young women get off the train to walk out into darkness, the other vehicles of the between they embark on are the ship and the boat. Again it is inside the ship, in the folds of water, or else outside, by the side of the river, that the young women enter the world of the eccentric and the departed. There they watch as observer-­observed, spectator-­witness, the mysterious dances of water and fire — the dance of Nabi’s death. In their conception and choreography, the dances form another instance of the transcultural. The singular image that emerges from the passage between

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Eastern and Western traditions is a trajectory of fire that turns into light calligraphy. With the light writing on the night sky, I see, near and far and in between, Miyazawa’s blue illumination. For him, death is a passing from one state to another. To come to terms with his sister’s death, he followed her in her passage. He crossed land-­water borders and took a ship to Sakhalin a year after she had left. Viewers paddle up the river of Night Passage, not knowing where exactly it may lead, and find the lit energy of bodies in performance. The fire, the light. The song of the flame tells us that when extinguished, the flame does not die out; instead it enters another state and goes on burning. Among the story sources that fire Miyazawa’s imagination are stories set in India, in the very birthplace of Shakyamuni, the Buddha. For example, a story titled “A Stem of Lilies” opens with lines best read while in the vastness, with eyes wide shut: “ ‘At seven tomorrow morning, they say, the Lord Buddha will cross the Himukya River and enter the town.’ What would the Buddha’s countenance be like, they wondered, and what color were his eyes? Would he have the dark blue eyes like lotus petals, as it was rumored?”7 “The world today is not occidental” (E. Adnan). The painter-­poet’s statement still rings with acuity. For as the birds of passage that we are, it is still difficult to accept when it’s time to go and when it’s not. We can’t seem to be able to resolve the problem of the end, or what we see as Death’s untimeliness, with our eyes wide open. We yearn for immortality and resurrection with no spiritual investment. With the new technology’s assistance, we want both a timely ending and an immediate attainment of immortality. The question that remains, however, is whether our bodies will be resuscitated with our old defective eye, though it leads us, makers, to fear to create anything that no one can see, just as it limits what we create to everything that everyone can see. In film this means abiding by the normative system of “predatory cinema” (Raoul Ruiz), in which not only all stories are action-­and-­conflict-­driven, but all conflicts are also reduced to one enslaving central conflict. Such a practice of cinema sees the world as a grand war zone. The relationships between people are no more than the sum of constant hostilities that require all participants to take sides (“You’re either for us or against us”). Differing views of the world are filtered through the eye of the central conflict, and all conflicts are subsumed under the one spectacular conflict that matters to the most powerful nation of

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the West. The globalization of this system, both in its economical and its political connotations, makes it all the more necessary for us to continue to ask the question: Which eye? What gives life to the image dies in the image. If death is untimely, then it seems that one can’t help but be untimely. It may thus be said that in living the present, one is always slightly ahead or slightly behind. In today’s world of terror against terror, in which globalization fights globalization, it may be particularly relevant that D-­cinema be a way of intimately addressing our mortality, with filmmaking as a way of assuming our insecure path of freedom.

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Notes 1. Quoted from the script of the film Night Passage. 2. The book is also translated as Milky Way Railroad, The Night of the Milky Way Train, and The Night When the Galaxy Train Leaves. The version used here for all quotes is Kenji Miyazawa, Night Train to the Stars and Other Stories, translated by John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987). The original Japanese text, Ginga Tetsudo no Yoru, was published in 1927. 3. Kenji Miyazawa, A Future of Ice, translated by Hiroaki Sato (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989). 4. Kenji Miyazawa, Milky Way Railroad, translated and adapted by J. Sigrist and D. M. Stroud (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1996), 11. 5. From the script of Night Passage. 6. From the script of Night Passage. 7. Kenji Miyazawa, “A Stem of Lilies,” in Once and Forever, translated by J. Bester (1993; Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1997), 109.

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Night Passage (Film Script) Written in homage to Kenji Miyazawa’s Ginga Tetsudo no Yoru. USA, 2004. 98-minute digital color film Directed and produced by Trinh T. Minh-ha and Jean-Paul Bourdier Written and edited by Trinh T. Minh-ha Production design and lighting design by Jean-Paul Bourdier Director of photography: Kathleen Beeler Associate producer: Minh Thai Tran; Line producer: Erica Marcus Production manager: Rony Gerzberg; Art director: Brent Kanbayashi Music: The Construction of Ruins, with Greg Goodman,  George Cremaschi, and Dave Slusser

performers Kyra (young woman) Nabi (young woman) Shin (little boy) Kyra’s father Nabi’s father Storyteller 1 / Man of the Night Storyteller 2 / Man of the Night Flutist Man of Wisdom Drummer 1 / Dr. Kennedy Drummer 2 / Dr. Kennedy’s Collaborator Dr. Kennedy’s 2nd Collaborator Mrs. Wolf / Researcher Sculptor with his own sculptures Uncle Borges with his own robot drawings Masked Dancer and his choreography 21

Yuan Li-chi Denice Lee Joshua Miller Voice of Witold Wolfe Atsushi Kanbayashi Howard Dillon Vernon Bush Viviane Lemaigre Dubreuil Luis Saguar Sherman Kennedy Yesufu Shangoshola Kevin Hogan Alexis Lezin Joe Slusky Thomas Zummer John Michael Doyle

Masked Dancer and her choreography Dancer and her choreography Twin Dancers and their choreography Fire Performers

Leigh Evans Maria Mastroyannis Swati Agarde and Jyoti Agarde Chris Sia Andres Amador Marco Landin Amy Ornoski Jeremy Parant Marisa Scirocco Sean Von Stade Sarah Wheeler Patricia Zura

Note: The two translations of Kenji Miyazawa’s Ginga Tetsudo no Yoru that I’ve used are Milky Way Railroad, translated by Joseph Sigrist and D. M. Stroud (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 1996) and Night Train to the Stars and Other Stories, translated by John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1987). Quotes from various authors are indicated in italicized passages.

1. int | kyra’s workplace | kyra and boss | day/afternoon Kyra finishes her tasks at a carpentry workshop and is ready to leave. She waits silently next to the boss who continues to work. boss

(mumbling numbers, lost in calculations, and without looking at Kyra) I suppose you want your check. The boss goes over her job and silently points out the “mistakes” before saying with an exhausted tone What about this mess? Kyra, I wish you’d be more careful. Didn’t your mother teach you anything? Kyra’s face immediately clouds over. She finishes tidying up in utter silence, and looks very hurt. She crumples the check, but stops in the midst of her action. She glances up at a coworker, puts the check in her pocket, and leaves. The coworker stares sympathetically at her.

22  s c r i p t

2. e xt | kyra’s workplace / street | kyra, flutist, man of wisdom | day / late afternoon Kyra is seen coming out from her workplace. A man sits by the entrance with a flutist. As she passes, he calls out to her. luis

Hey Kyra! Kyra, come here. Check this out. Look at this. It’s cool huh? Kyra silently goes over to him. He unrolls a rug to show her. When he sees her face (she looks hurt), he stops for a few seconds and stares at her. luis

(nodding his head) Yeah, there’s a wound inside there that has not been healed over. Don’t go on scratching that wound. Don’t cover it up either. It’s okay girl. Just let it come. Witness it. (pause) We all have our dreams, don’t we? kyra

And our troubles too. Kyra makes a few reluctant movements with the rope (that Luis had loosened when unfolding the rug) to express her wounded feelings. The flutist, whom Kyra often looks at while talking with Luis, punctuates their conversation with her music. luis

(looking at Kyra and nodding) What’s going on with you today? C’mon, tell me about it. Oh, it’s like that, huh? Yeah. Life’s a net, made up of so many roads. Dirt roads, asphalt roads, virtual roads. (playing with the rope as he speaks) Sometimes you go in a straight line; sometimes you just go round and around in circles. Drives us crazy, but there’s nothing to do about it. And sometimes you find yourself at the crossroads. Then what?

24  s c r i p t

kyra

You get stuck again. No matter which way you go, you can’t win. luis

Only if you forget who you are.  There’s nowhere else but here. Go inside your house. What are we? Listen to your music; there’s a strange world of words and images just waiting for you. Confront the night until you see the light in there. kyra

(smiling back) I better go now. See you tomorrow, Luis. luis

Bye Kyra. Keep on walking.

3. int | father’s house | kyra and father | late afternoon Catching her breath, Kyra steps into the house, making as little noise as possible. Her father calls out to her. He is not visible to the camera. father

(coughing) Kyra, is that you? kyra

Yes, Father. Are you feeling all right? father

I’m feeling better. But I’ve still got a bit of a temperature. How was work today? kyra

(looking in the refrigerator) I’m going to make some rice and eggplant for you. father

No, I’m not hungry yet. Later on I can eat the bean soup left over from yesterday.

n i g h t p a s s a g e   25

kyra

(going into her father’s room to open a window and to arrange his bed) You know what, Father? . . .  (pause) I have a feeling that Mother is going to be coming back soon. father

(silence) kyra

I dreamt about her yesterday. She looked so happy. I’m sure she’ll be back. father

She said she’ll bring you a flute, didn’t she? kyra

That’s what the others always say whenever they see me, to make fun of me. father

They make fun of you, really? kyra

Yes, but Nabi never joins in. Whenever the others say things like that she just stands there looking sorry for me. father

When I think that her father and I, we’ve been together since we were teenagers, just like you and Nabi. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to see him lately because of my illness. kyra

Everyone is going to set lanterns afloat with candles on them tonight. I’m sure she’ll be there with Shin. You remember him? Mrs. Bloom’s son. father

Of course. And yes, tonight’s the Festival of Light. kyra

I don’t have a lantern, but I’m just going to go and watch.

26  s c r i p t

father

Yes, go and enjoy yourself. As long as you are with Nabi, I’m not worried. Only stay out of the water. kyra

(happily heading toward the door) I’m just going to stand by the shore and watch. I won’t be long at all. father

The current can be quite strong there.

4. ext | street | kyra, nabi, shin, teenagers | sunset On her way to her friend’s place, Kyra passes by a group of noisy teenagers. They immediately spot her and start teasing her. teenager

1 (man)

Hey! Ow! Well, if isn’t our little Lady Shanghai! teenager

2 (man)

Hey, baby, we have your flute right here. The group noisily whistle and hoot. teenager

1

(making obscene gesture) Yep. Tell your mom, if she’s looking for her flute we’ve got one right here, you know what I’m saying? The girls in the group start throwing pebbles at the first teenager, who exclaims in protest, making more obscene sounds.  As Kyra’s face swells up with anger, she realizes her friend Nabi is silently standing with little Shin among them. Disappointed, Kyra lowers her head and quickly passes the group, while Shin calls out to Nabi. shin

Nabi, don’t go. You promised to float lanterns with us tonight. nabi

Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere. n i g h t p a s s a g e   27

5. ext | marsh | kyra | sunset long shot. Kyra bicycling out to a clearing/an open space in the country side, until we see her stopping by a small cabin. sound of a train passing.

6. ext/int | little cabin | kyra | sunset After having done a few movements to release her frustration, she steps into the cabin and lets herself fall on the wooden seat. As she sits looking out sadly at the landscape in front of her, she seems to listen to something intensely and closes her eyes.

7. int | train | kyra, nabi, shin, storytellers Kyra is sitting inside a train all by herself. She looks around at the empty seats and looks out from her window to the dark sky. When she turns back she is startled to suddenly see someone sitting against the window on the other side. The person’s head is turned toward the window, and it is not until this person turns around that she recognizes her friend Nabi. Kyra goes over to sit in front of Nabi, whose hair looks wet. kyra

Nabi! You were here all along! nabi

(blurting out whispers, as if to herself) The water was too strong, Shin couldn’t help it. I couldn’t help it. By the time I got a hold of him, I couldn’t find my way up. (now seeing Kyra and sadly) I’m sorry, Kyra, I know, I shouldn’t have gone with them. They were so mean for having made fun of you, but don’t let that bother you. kyra

(hurt) It’s strange, Nabi. Mother left us seven years ago; she just walked out of the house at sunset without telling us where she was going. But I know she always keeps her promise. I’m sure she’ll be back with a flute for my birthday. Father thinks so too.

28  s c r i p t

nabi

We often speak of her at home as if she had just left yesterday. But since she disappeared, nobody, not even mother, who was her closest friend, has received any news from her. Shin suddenly appears with wet-­looking hair and with a terrified face as if he were looking for Nabi. He jumps into her lap, relieved as he sees her. (We hear, in the background, sounds of footsteps coming along the train as Shin appears.) kyra

Shin! Where did you come from? shin

(with his head against Nabi) It was so dark, so dark. . . . My light got carried away. I couldn’t run fast enough to catch it. Nabi holds Shin against her and sadly pats his head, lost in reverie. Kyra moves to sit next to Nabi and Shin. She touches Nabi’s hair. Kyra opens her mouth as if to say something, but remains silent; she just stares at them.  Long moment of silent looking, during which Kyra’s look at her friend shifts from being casual to being subtly scared — as if a thought has suddenly crossed her mind and she wonders briefly whether the Nabi she sees is real. shin

(rises from seat to look out window) This train is weird. kyra

What does it run on? (turns to look out the window) Not on steam . . .  nabi

Probably on electricity. (They jump in surprise and turn as they hear a booming voice from the back say)

n i g h t p a s s a g e   29

storyteller

1

This train doesn’t run on stream or electricity. It just runs, because that’s what it is supposed to do. You may think you hear its clatter, but that’s only because you’re used to trains that make noise.—(Miyazawa) storyteller

2

(making train sounds) Chug-­chug-­chug-­chug. Hear that sound inside? Listen more often To things than to beings Listen to the voice of fire The call of water Listen in the wind To the bush sobbing It is our ancestors breathing those who are dead who are never gone they are in the shadow that lightens in the shadow that deepens the dead are not under the ground —(Birago Diop) kyra

(puzzled) You appeared from nowhere. I didn’t hear you coming in. Who are you? storyteller

1

(matter-­of-­factly) We are Men of the Night and Masters of Words.  We come in with the night train. We exist in transfinite numbers and words, and you may rely on us to tell you stories that emerge when you are silent. storyteller

2

(addressing Nabi) What did they call you, young woman? nabi

Nabi. 30  s c r i p t

shin

It means “butterfly” in Korean. kyra

This is Shin, and I’m Kyra. storyteller

2

(looking at the three) And you are friends, aren’t you? (They all nod, Kyra glancing at Nabi) storyteller

1

(laughing heartily) The night is long. You’ll all love the journey. Ahhh! Hold, if you can, the river in place, try to fix a picture in your mind. (Pause) Why not? Try to pin a butterfly. The husk may be captured, but the flying is gone. storyteller

2

(smiling radiantly and changing as he turns toward Kyra, slowly and quietly) Hear the sound It is unlike any other The ears are in constant pain From the sound Of blood dripping from a wound Centuries long Each drop of blood crashes into time Quickly dries and waits for another drop of agony —(Charles Patterson) storyteller

1

Tonight, you will discover again the great power of communication. Say river, say mud, say fire, say light. Walk and you’ll be made damp with moondews. You’ll be wet again and again, and all the waters will be yours.

n i g h t p a s s a g e   31

storyteller

2

What is mine? A man alone in the sea of white sand, dreaming aloud . . . the agony of his race (sound fades off). —(According to Aimé Césaire) sound of train stopping. shin

Where are we now? storyteller

1

We are at the Sound and Word Station. Twenty-­minute rest. nabi

(looking at her watch, then at Kyra) Let’s get out here. We’ll be back in time.

8. ext | train | kyra, nabi, shin | night The three get off (the storytellers stay on the train). They walk out in the night and slowly disappear into the darkness.

9. ext | narrow beach / color lines | kyra, nabi, shin | night Shadows of the three walking on a narrow beach. nabi

Shin, see the color line? If you cross it, it makes these strange noises. The magenta and green lines make noises when they step on them and play with them. kyra

(amid laughter) Look, we’re all blue people now.

32  s c r i p t

10. e xt | open space / colored circles | kyra, nabi, shin | night The three climb up a wall from the beach and are seen playing with three colored circles. Each circle bears motifs that each makes its own sound when the three play with it. They walk on, following the strident whistle of a green line.

11. e xt/int | loading dock | drummers, kyra, nabi, shin | night Two drummers (Dr. Kennedy and his co-­drummer) perform outdoors. Kyra approaches the first drummer and picks up a ball and dances to the rhythms of the drums. Nabi is skating in graceful lines and curves in contrast to the drumbeat. Shin is busy playing with the light projected by the reflections of a mirror that he has found. Then the trio slowly move away from the drummers and we see lit candles laid out in the shape of a body. They gather around the lit candles. shin

(pointing and whispering to Nabi) Nabi, one of these lights is mine. Yours is somewhere here too. nabi

Yeah, let’s follow them. I’m sure they can take us to where our friends are. Kyra, remember the dinner we were invited to? kyra

(suddenly remembering) Let’s go! We’re late. How do we get there? nabi

If you really want to go there, we shall be there. Let’s all wish it in our heart, and let’s count all together until three. The three count in chorus “One, two, three” and disappear as they jump into the shape of the lit body.

n i g h t p a s s a g e   33

12. int | center for new music | kyra, nabi, shin | night From a dark and colorful corridor, the three appear in a room where three former friends are already seated at a dining table. In the background, we see three electronic musicians (Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, with John Bischoff) at their equipment, composing simultaneously as they “put to sound” the actions unfolding in front of them at the dinner table. friend

1

Oh look, they’re here! Finally. friend

2

Hi! Welcome. We’re so glad to see you. (hugs Nabi) We’ve got this special treat for you tonight. (attaches device to Nabi’s arm and forehead) It just slips right up here, and then this goes right here. As they take their seats, the third friend suddenly holds up a gleaming, brightly colored apple from a small pile of apples on a dish. friend

3

(taps on the apple, and a series of sounds is heard) nabi

(wide-­eyed) Where did they come from? Do they grow apples like those around here? friend

2

Of course, people work really hard. But good things just grow here on their own too. friend

1

(hands a durian to nabi) Look, Nabi, it’s your favorite fruit. shin

(excitedly) What’s that? I’ve never seen a fruit like that before!

34  s c r i p t

Nabi passes the fruit to Shin, who caresses the spiky casing. As he lowers his head to smell it, he immediately pulls back in disgust. friend

1

It’s called a durian. shin

Yuk! It smells like cat poo. Get it out of here! friend

1

(laughing) Some people just don’t know what’s truuuuly good! nabi

— and stinky. Yeah, my mom loves that smell so much that at home she would put a ripe durian underneath her bed when she went to sleep. We could smell it all over the house. friend

3

In any case, just help yourself to anything you like on this table. They all start eating. The biting, munching, swallowing, and drinking are heard selectively in solos (amplified as “obscene” sounds). As they react hysterically to each sound, bursting out in peals of laughter, the sounds build on top of one another into a musical piece. (At this stage, camera will be focusing on Nabi, who suddenly stops dead in her laughter, as if she has just realized something terrible) nabi

Where’s Shin? She turns toward where Shin had been sitting and sees that he has already disappeared. Both Nabi and Kyra spring from their seats and follow Shin. They disappear into the corridor.

13–14. int | ship | corridors and kitchen | kyra, nabi, shin | night Three scenes of the three wandering in the ship, exploring, with the sound echoing in the different spaces, and emerging in a long corridor. Shin is n i g h t p a s s a g e   35

seen entering a room equipped with three large cooking pots. He slides into one of them and remains hidden while the two others inquire as to his whereabouts. kyra

Shin? nabi

Where did he go? shin

(emerges from a large cooking pot) I’m here!

15. int | ship | mrs. wolf / researcher, 2 assts, kyra, nabi, shin | night The three come into the three-­level space, climbing down a ladder as they follow a man working there. kyra

So that’s where you want to take us, Nabi? nabi

Yes, let’s go visit Aunt Wolf. She’s a very good friend of my mother’s. They say she’s a great researcher. She even speaks eleven languages! kyra

(trying to remember) Mrs. Wolf? I remember her. . . . We haven’t seen her in a long time, but I thought . . . (whispering) she was no longer with us! (suddenly, as if realizing the strangeness of it all) Is she really here? nabi

(addressing Kyra and Shin) Shhhhhh! Don’t disturb her until she talks to us. When the trio slip in, the researcher is immersed in several thick, dictionary-­ like books, while her three assistants work silently: one types, the others are 36  s c r i p t

busy sorting papers and putting the surroundings in order. Very absorbed in her task, the researcher unconsciously goes through a number of routine gestures and is totally oblivious to the people around her. (The gestures are done with no rush and often in silence, as if she’s talking to herself and hearing echoes of words that float out of her control.) mrs. wolf  / researcher

(following a line in the book) “Leopard. A member of the cat family, he lives in Africa and Asia. He is a clever hunter.” (closing the book, standing up from her seat with a loose bundle of papers, and speaking to herself) He (in echo)? He — the hunter. Of course, only ladybugs, cows, hens, and mother animals with their young are called “she” (in echo). The researcher paces around, drops a few sheets of paper as she walks, sporadically injecting a fragment of thought or of an internal conversation out loud (in different languages). Her soliloquy, small gestures, and tics are part of her word environment. mrs. wolf  / researcher

(speaking up, addressing the typist) Write this down, Lucy . . .  The one you see here is not a woman (in echo). (then relaxing, looking up to the sky, savoring the words with wonder and becoming inquisitive) (in swelling and dwindling echoes) nuire . . . nuit . . . nuitée. Nacht, Nachtarbeit. Nachtigall (imitates a nightingale) Nightly. Nightmare. Night . . . Night? (speaking softly to herself) Nights are not made for the masses Night separates you from your neighbor . . .  And if you do light your room at night (as she turns toward the camera, her face partially lit) So you can see the faces of people You have to think: “who is it?” —(Rainer Maria Rilke) 38  s c r i p t

Is the world as immense as a word growing in silence? (She looks blankly toward where Nabi, Kyra, and Shin are and finally sees the trio.) Nabi, you’re here with us. (looking severely at Kyra) Do you know who you are? (vulnerable) Me, I don’t know who I am really. . . . A raccoon . . . becoming a wolf? A b52? (nodding her head) A map? A river? (picking up a pack of filing cards and clothespins and distributing these to the three) You can help Nabi help me. Pin these cards there, will you? I have lots of them, and I can’t remember my lines unless they are spread out in front of me. The three proceed to pin the cards on the clothesline, and their interaction with words in different languages is swift while they work. mrs. wolf  / researcher

(looking blankly at a card put up, and effortlessly, as if continuing her thought) The word is a seed, always seeking for a heart it says nothing still it says Nabi, you have always loved language. Let’s start with the Double. nabi

The Double? mrs. wolf  / researcher

(turning her head very slowly until she finds the camera and looks straight into it) A friend is another self. (confiding to the camera) Know thyself. Ka. Beware of your ka.

n i g h t p a s s a g e   39

nabi

(immediately interjecting) Twins. (And says same word in Korean) kyra

Gemeli. (And says “twins” in Mandarin and Russian) As in a contest, Nabi and Kyra happily join in and compete as they quickly exchange lines in different languages. The researcher continues in chorus with them — a brief and crazy outburst. mrs. wolf  / researcher

(breaking in abruptly) Don’t say things you don’t mean to say words never die once said, they roll on like pebbles thrown in the water they are the ties that bind (glancing at cards and effortlessly, as in a stream of thought) right now something said in Washington, in Beijing, in Brasilia, in Delhi, is passing online around the world instantly transmitted in the global village words, endless words the sound people make, even in the past, can be caught hold of since each person has a different vibe . . .  The researcher looks up, and while she speaks, Kyra motions the two others to come with her. The three leave Mrs. Wolf and climb up the metal ladder.

16. int | ship | multilevel stairs | kyra, nabi, shin | night camera looks up to an infinite space of multilevel metallic staircases, where the three are seen climbing and exclaiming. (Intercut with the Researcher’s delivery — last paragraph on indeterminate duration of sound prints.)

40  s c r i p t

mrs. wolf  / researcher

(off screen) even the dead can speak to us now what we say can be caught ten thousand years from now sound prints are like fingerprints and soon we’ll exist digitally, we’ll be able to hear sermons and lectures made a thousand years ago no sound ever dies

17. int | ship | engine room | kyra, nabi, shin | night The three climb down a metal ladder into a dark space. Subterranean sound of waves against the ship. cut to 18.

18. int | artship | hatch | kyra, nabi, shin | night Shot begins in darkness. The three are seen frontally, in silhouettes, as they open a hatch. Shin throws an object down into the dark space below him. sound of object falling in water.

19. ext | train | kyra, nabi, shin | night Frontal shot of the three passing by a shiny train with enormous, surreal wheels.

20. ext | train | kyra, nabi, shin | night Frontal shot of the three looking out from the window of a shiny train and then climbing down the train.

21. | int | atelier | sculptor, kyra, nabi, shin | night The three reappear, pushing ahead of them a cart on tracks. Sculptor is welding. Kyra and Nabi unload a heavy sculpture from the cart. They carry it in and place it on a stand not far from where the sculptor is working.  Sculptor puts down blowtorch and approaches the trio.

n i g h t p a s s a g e   41

sculptor

(as improvised by Joe Slusky) Steel — like, well, it’s the imagination, fossilized. It’s kind of like a fossil, the imagination. Hardened, this thing that goes on beyond the flesh and the bone. A fluid. It’s kind of . . . enigmatic. Effigy. Yeah, that’s looking good there. When I think about urban — this was urban crawl. LA roots. Automotive paint. This is the first one when I broke through into the whole idea of color and form. It was about the tactility. The whole ballistic thing of the touching, the inviting to touch it, that’s what was going on here. It became urban. Urban undersea with all this kind of blue. Of course in rendezvous also . . . The interesting thing was cutting up this spring, chopping up this spring like a prosciutto. And the whole thing, kind of, sort of putting it back together and then it exploded out.  Um, you know each piece is kind of like a journey. Sort of an unknown. That’s the whole trip, the unknown, finding these structures going upriver, excavating, what the thing that drives it, go back again. What else is there to be unloosed? To be found.  Good, that’s good. Good job.  Here each piece kind of presents conundrums. Kind of how to solve the piece in the round. I mean, that’s always the challenge. Three hundred sixty degrees. In this case also how does this space-­frame integrate in this — integrate into the form. Melding it together, and then what does it become? This kind of metaphorical yap. Cartoonish, with its constructivist roots. All the twentieth-­ century movements gobbled up here into some kind of bouillabaisse. Hopefully it comes out with its own kind of idiom. Let’s get a little bit more oxidation here. Breath. That’s what it is. Just breath. That’s what’s gonna cut through this thing. That’s what the cutting process is, it’s just oxidation. Sculptor goes back to welding when we hear Nabi say “Careful!” sound of a blast.

22. int | train | storytellers, conductor, kyra, nabi, shin | night Kyra, Nabi, and Shin return to the train to find the two men of the night already there. They take the seats they had before.

42  s c r i p t

storyteller

2

(smiling at them kindly) Now, do you know where you’re going? kyra

On and on to the end. storyteller

1

That’s nice. This train does go to the end. nabi

Where are you two going? The two men smile without answering. sound of footsteps. train conductor

Tickets, please! Tickets! The two men show their brown tickets. The conductor glances at them, and turning to the three, he holds his hand out toward Kyra. Kyra searches her pockets, looking embarrassed, while Nabi simply pulls out from her jacket two brown tickets, saying, while nodding toward Shin, “That’s for him too.” The conductor’s hand is still extended in front of Kyra, who now looks very confused. In panic, she searches again in her pockets, and with great surprise, she feels a piece of folded paper, which she pulls out without even looking at it and hands to the conductor.  The conductor shoots up straight, and opening the (green) paper respect­ fully, he examines it with care. Perplexed, Kyra wonders what awaits her. train conductor

Young lady, did you come on here from the Third Dimension? Kyra looks up at him and giggles nervously. train conductor

It’s all in good order. (Bowing slightly) Enjoy the rest of your trip. The conductor returns the paper to Kyra and leaves. Nabi immediately takes it from Kyra’s hand and opens it impatiently. While she silently looks at it, the men exclaim,

n i g h t p a s s a g e   43

storyteller

1

Wow! That’s quite some ticket. With that you can go anywhere. Not just one place or another. storyteller

2

It’s green. It’s a free pass to space! storyteller

1

I see, with this pass you can go on and on forever in this Fourth Dimension Railroad. You have my respect! kyra

(putting the ticket back in her pocket, pleased and confused) I don’t know anything about this! Storyteller 2 starts singing. A couple of passengers come in while he sings. When he stops singing, his face suddenly changes to a fierce look. storyteller

2

They cut out my voice I have two voices. I pour out my songs in two different tongues. They stripped me of the sun: two new suns like two resplendent drums I am playing. They isolated me from my people and today my twin song is returning like an echo to my people. —(Alicia Partnoy) The inside of the train is suddenly lit up with a red flare. shin

(going to the window and looking out) It looks like a huge fire!

44  s c r i p t

kyra

(looking out her window, excitedly) What kind of fire is that? What makes it glow red like that? storyteller

1

It’s the Scorpion’s fire. shin

What’s a scorpion? nabi

It’s an insect, a good insect. storyteller

1

(addressing Shin) Yes, she knows what she’s saying. It’s a good insect. Of course it can kill you if you get stung by it, but like all of us, it can be a good bug!  The story goes that “long ago in a field in India, there was a scorpion who lived by killing little bugs and eating them. Then one day, a weasel came and found the scorpion and was about to eat him up. The scorpion ran away as fast as he could, but the weasel kept after him until he had him trapped, he thought, because the scorpion fell into a well and he couldn’t escape from the well, no matter how he struggled. So then the scorpion began to pray: ‘I have taken the lives of I don’t know how many insects in my life, but look how hard I struggle when my own life is in danger. And yet, I end up here. Why could I not have given myself over to my fate and let the weasel eat me so he could have lived for another day? Oh God, look into my heart! I don’t want my life to be wasted like this. Use my body for the benefit of others!’ So the scorpion’s body broke into beautiful crimson flames, that lit the darkness of the night. . . . And they go on burning forever.” —(improvised around story related by Kenji Miyazawa) The red flare comes and goes and is fading toward the end of the story. Shin, who listens to the story with fascination at the beginning, has now already fallen asleep. kyra

Tonight is the Festival of Light, Nabi, isn’t it?

46  s c r i p t

nabi

(looks troubled, avoids Kyra’s eyes and looks out the window) Do you still see the Scorpion, Kyra? kyra

Can you? I can’t see it anymore. It seems to have disappeared. Fade out to black and fade up. storyteller

2

(emphatically) Die, Dissolve, Disappear: the three D’s. The train comes to a stop. storyteller

1

This is the Dance and Light Station. It’s the last twenty-­minute rest. After this, there are no more stops. kyra

(excited) Let’s get off, Nabi. nabi

(looking at Shin asleep) What about Shin? storyteller

2

Don’t wake him. He’s having his own trip. You two should complete yours. The two are already heading out while Storyteller 1 continues. storyteller

1

Remember the rules of night passage. Don’t stop in the dark or you’ll be lost. Move to the rhythm of your senses. Go where the road is alive.

23. ext | tall grass field | nabi, kyra | night Nabi and Kyra walk in the dark among the tall grass.

n i g h t p a s s a g e   47

kyra

Where are we going? nabi

We’re just going. kyra

Isn’t there a place you want to go to? nabi

No, we’re going for a walk. Let’s just feel where the wind is blowing. We’ll go with the wind — where the road is alive. kyra

(excited) Well then, I can already feel where . . . Yes, I know where.

24. int | water room | kyra, nabi | night Kyra and Nabi walk up a stairs in the dark that leads to a room filled with water. They joyfully play with the water. Kyra lets herself go in the water while Nabi walks carefully on the stone steps dispersed along the wall. In the room, there is a video monitor set up that is switched on but has no image, only white light and white noise.

25. ext | salt pond | man of light, kyra, nabi | night A man with a light burning on top of his head is seen in double by the water of a lake: swirling in a loose dress, laughing and playing with his own mirror image, he magically disappears and reappears. Kyra and Nabi giggle joyfully with him.

26. | int | dance studio | twin dancers, nabi | night Nabi is seen walking into a mysteriously lit space. As she descends a curving staircase, she calls Kyra and signals to her to come her way. Nabi disappears behind a black wall panel, and we see her reappearing farther away behind a curtain. 48  s c r i p t

 A pair of twin dancers (Swati and Jyoti, who are twin sisters) clad in silver outfits perform a classical Indian dance that is adapted to depict water — or the flow of life, the struggle with the double and with death.

27. ext | tall grass field | kyra, nabi walking | night With her arm outstretched, Nabi reaches for Kyra, who walks ahead. The two grope their way in the dark. kyra

It’s awfully dark. nabi

Don’t expect anything, just go. kyra

Do you know where this leads us? nabi

No, just concentrate on walking as far as it leads. kyra

Nabi —  nabi

Don’t worry, just let it tell you the way. Remember not to turn around.

28. ext | seashore/boat | butoh dancer, kyra, nabi | night Kyra and Nabi appear by the side of a large boat. As if responding to a call, Nabi walks around the boat and discovers a Wind mask, which she puts on. Pulled into this space of the mask, she meets a Water spirit with whom she engages in an intense dance-­struggle. As the two seem to lock into an embrace, Kyra intervenes by unfurling a red ribbon — the red thread of life — and proceeds to break them away from each other. The spirit climbs up the boat, but before he disappears, he hands a bright yellow umbrella — Light — to Nabi, who reaches for it and carries it away as she disappears into darkness.

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29 –30. ext | pond | fire performers | night Begins with a shot of a night frog whose shape swells to become (fade out) a cluster of light (fade up). The cluster slowly reveals itself to be the light burning from the torches of a group performance deployed by the side of a large pond. Kyra and Nabi are in a small boat, paddling their way to get closer to the shore, where the fire performers take turns to show their talent in solos and duos. The space of performance is transformed toward the end to a space of Light Writing.

31. int | house of immortality | borges, assistant, kyra, nabi Kyra and Nabi walk in a dark room and appear in dark silhouettes against a luminescent white screen. (The screen remains empty during the whole scene.) They react (bodily) to the luminosity/haze of the light while walking in very cautiously and looking around with curiosity. kyra

(alarmed, in whispering tone) It’s strange, Nabi. I have a feeling we’re being looked at. Right now, on a screen. nabi

Yes, I feel the same. There are eyes watching us. We don’t see them, but they are there (turning around spookily) and we feel them (shivers). On a table and facing one another are two rows of square boxes in fleshy-­ looking color and with a long slot on each of them. Kyra and Nabi happen to wander into the proximity of these boxes, and suddenly they jump in surprise, holding on to one another as the slots emit an uneven chorus of sighs, then of human whisperings. The two move closer to the boxes, trying to understand what they are seeing and hearing. The sighs and whispering emerge randomly. kyra

(motioning toward one of the boxes) Don’t you have the feeling that there’s an eye looking out of these boxes?

n i g h t p a s s a g e   51

A voice reaches them while they are still intensely experiencing the faint sounds of the boxes. uncle borges

Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you waiting so long. nabi

(whispering) That voice! . . . (louder) Oh, Uncle Borges! uncle borges

Hello, Nabi! Welcome to the House of the Immortals. This is my assistant, Hellas. I’m glad to see that our immortals have made such an impact on you and your friend. . . .  kyra

But . . . can your immortals, can they speak a clear language? uncle borges

Ah! I see I’ve whet your appetite, now. We are working on that. There are a few minor, little, insignificant problems. Mostly having to do with diction, pronunciation, and dialogue. But soon — very soon — not only will they be able to speak in clear language, but they will sing! (turning to his assistant) Hellas, do we still have our fellows (robots) up? hellas

Yes, they’re ready. uncle borges

(walking to where these are) Ah good. You’ll like these. (As improvised by Tom Zummer, with slide projection of his drawings of three robots. Improvisation should sound technological but follows a crazy, absurd logic; it should relate to questions of death and immortality.) [click] — Ah! This first fellow is named Marsalus. As you can see he is a rather large chrome-­and-­exoskeleton holding a rather large compartment for interior

52  s c r i p t

processors and gears and everything else. Marsalus has twenty-­six discrete, precise movements. He walks talks sings. But that’s not all. Look at that face! What do you see? nabi

(looking closer) Teeth? uncle borges

Exactly! A Robot with teeth! Why do you think there are teeth? nabi

(pause) I don’t know . . .  uncle borges

(with pride and delight) It’s for the cigar. nabi

(surprised) A cigar? Why a cigar? uncle borges

For the smoke rings! Marsalus is the only robot in existence who blows smoke rings! (Nabi looks surprised, confused; Uncle Borges takes a moment to bask in his pride, and:) Well, enough of that.  [click] — This fellow is named Sabor. As you can see, he’s a little more rotund, a little more squat, but also a little more delicate. And he walks with a kind of back and forth. He kind of balances with a to-­and-­fro kind of gait. (Nabi imitates Sabor’s gait.) Yes, a bit like that . . . only more like this. (Uncle Borges imitates Nabi imitating Sabor.) nabi

(imitates the antennae with two fingers) What’s that on his head?

n i g h t p a s s a g e   53

uncle borges

(turning around to look at the projected image of Sabor) Oh, those . . . antennae. I put them on originally as a kind of communi­cation device but, they never really worked. So now they’re really an ornament. They’re kind of a vestigial organ. Like your appendix, Nabi. It’s too much trouble to take them off, so I didn’t. Nonetheless, Sabor walks, talks, and smokes cigars. nabi

Why do your robots all smoke cigars? uncle borges

Well, it’s less a bad habit than an index of their humanity, something that we and they can share. So that theirs is not just an empty immortality, bearing the passage of the trace — even a small trace of humanity. That’s why I call this place the House of Immortals. This is the domus effigeum, the place of images — the oikon ton eidolon. The place where images go on.  Ah, well. Enough prattle. . . . let’s have the other one . . .   [click] — This fellow, I haven’t named him yet . . .  kyra

(looking very preoccupied at the end of the improvisation) Mr. Borges . . . I am still curious about your cubes over there. . . . If you can bring immortality to people, can you revive the dead bodies? uncle borges

Oh! Excellent question. But really a question more geared toward my colleague and dear friend, Doctor Kennedy. The man is an absolute wizard, a genius in matters of new technology and media. You’ve met him, I think. Yeah? He scans brains, so he knows that you’re here. Just go back out the way you came in, turn right, go down to the end of the hall. You’ll see him hard at work. Go on, go on, he’s waiting.

32. int | hall of images | dr. kennedy, collaborators, kyra, nabi Setup at Creative Technologies: a surrounding of large screens/monitors with footage of outer space and of heart beating, for example, and real-­time

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video images of the unfolding activities. On the side of one of the screens, the shadow of a camera person at work (supposedly shooting the scene itself) is also visible.  Kyra and Nabi are seen coming into the Hall of Images. Dr. Kennedy is working (all monitors are on in the dark room), listening to his own voice from his portable wrist-­recorder. Collaborator 1 (Yesufu) is conversing with him. dr . kennedy

(as improvised by Sherman Kennedy and his collaborators) I think if we fire up the machines we’ll get lucky this time and pull out some serious data. That looks good. Parent structures solid. Don’t know what happened last time that we got that glitch in the data. That was weird. So, I’ll have to make sure that the computers are capturing data structure. And energy looks good, so let’s see what we’ve got. Ha! Started already, very good —  collaborator

2

Dr. Kennedy, I was wondering if you had got any readings for luminosity and color imagery on the fluoroscope. I’m seeing some contrast errors that are sort of not what I would expect. I mean, I know we’ve got video cubes here, but to me it looks like video light cubed. I don’t see if this is really the way to go. Is there some other option we could use other than this? dr . kennedy

Well, All I can think of is film. collaborator

2

Yeah, but — what would be the difference between film light and video light? As Kyra hears Dr. Kennedy’s name, she shyly comes closer and closer to him, betraying her eagerness to ask her question while he’s talking to Collaborator 2. dr . kennedy

(off screen) Man or machine? It’s hard to tell. During our first experiments, we made the mistake of working with inanimate matter. Once we happened upon a mistake that

n i g h t p a s s a g e   55

made us realize that the material has to be receptive to the energy. That improved our success rate. Once we got volunteers who knew they were going to be revived, our results skyrocketed. It appears that the matter or the flesh has to be willing. The revitalization takes place on its own. We merely provide the circumstances that are conducive to this action. (on screen, with Kyra and Nabi on each side of him) When energy separates from matter something special occurs. It can leave a door open. With that door open it is much easier to put the energy back into the matter. The fact that we don’t have a higher yield is purely a matter of our lack of understanding of both the matter state and the energy state.

33. ext | pipes | flutist, kyra, nabi | night The flutist is performing music while walking on pipes, followed by Kyra and Nabi. All three are seen in dark silhouette against a background of agitated water movement.

34. ext | salt pond | man with light, kyra, nabi | night Kyra and Nabi walk in the dark, holding lit lanterns. We hear them, but we don’t really see them; all that we see are the two moving beams of light in the dark. Coming toward them is a dot of light that wanders erratically. As they come closer, they realize that the dot of light comes from a man (or a woman) who walks in the dark with a light attached to his head. He doesn’t see in front of him, so he staggers and trips over things in front of him. kyra

(pointing) Look! (Kyra and Nabi laugh) What a funny way to light yourself in the dark! man with light

I am the light!

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35. ext | lake | two dancers, kyra, nabi | night Woman Dancer 1 emerges from darkness and performs in the lake with a mask. Woman Dancer 2 approaches her from the back and slowly pulls her into the folds of her billowing robe — the folds of water. The duo struggle and perform a dance on death by drowning that mirrors Nabi’s own struggle. Through the dance, Nabi witnesses her own death.

36. int | train | storytellers, kyra, nabi, shin, extras | night Kyra and Nabi return to the train. Kyra walks ahead of Nabi. Nabi goes to fetch Shin, who gets up from the seat where he was sleeping and joins Nabi in the aisle. They leave the train in the background while the camera focuses on Kyra, who, as she comes in, is interpellated by Storyteller 2. He slowly hands a candle to her. storyteller

2

It’s dark in here. Take this light. Kyra takes the light with surprise and wonder. She turns toward Nabi. But Nabi and Shin are nowhere to be seen. kyra

(crying out in shock and looking all around) Nabi! (going up and down the aisle yelling desperately) Nabiiiii! Where are you? storyteller

2

(blowing out the candle) You don’t need it anymore. Kyra sits down and cries. storyteller

1

(gently) What on earth are you crying for? Look this way, will you?

n i g h t p a s s a g e   57

Kyra turns around toward the back of the train and reacts with surprise as she sees a multitude of joyful candles held by passengers. All the candles are then blown out, creating darkness. storyteller

2

(gently cheering) Happy is the one who walks free and feels the gentle breeze of friendship. Through her every vein and nerve flows the friend. If she speaks, it is to the friend. If she seeks, it is from the friend. storyteller

1

Your friend has gone off very far away, Kyra. There’s no point in looking for Nabi anymore. kyra

(wiping away her tears) But why? I told her we’ll stick together and we’ll just go on and on forever. . . .  storyteller

1

Of course, everyone thinks so. But you can’t go on forever. And everyone is Nabi. Everyone you meet, they’re all people you’ve danced with or ridden on trains with so many times before. Where the path ends, the novel begins. storyteller

2

“Fiction is a small window in your room.” Howsoever strange and mysterious the fiction may be It pales next to lived events. storyteller

1

Everything on screen has to go on disappearing if the stories are to live with us.  After all, that’s how we leave. We fade out from sight and memory, while other things fade in on screen, and the show goes on. storyteller

1

Disappear and Dissolve You were a child playing with your mother, n i g h t p a s s a g e   59

and that child disappeared You have become a young woman, so has your friend Nabi, and she disappears You’ll become a woman and you’ll disappear The whole of your friendship is condensed in this one passage A new dimension has come to you You’ll have to go on all by yourself

37. ext/int | little cabin | kyra | night Kyra wakes up from her sleep with tears in her eyes, lying in exactly the same position as when we last saw her lying down in Scene 6. She slowly gets up, looking around strangely, and heads back home. wide shot of Kyra bicycling away in loneliness.

38. ext | shore/water | lanterns | night Shot of several lanterns floating on water, followed by shots of three lanterns, then of a single lantern catching fire, fading out to a shot of another single lantern happily sailing on colorfully lit water.

39. ext | shore | kyra, nabi’s father, crowd | night On her way back, Kyra passes by the same shore as at the beginning of the film, and coming closer, she sees a gathering of people looking out to the water.  Suddenly she lets out a muffled cry, throws her bicycle on the ground, and hurries toward them, calling out to a silhouette near by. kyra

(crying out) What’s going on here? Has something happened?

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woman

A young woman has drowned. She tried to save a little boy who fell into the water. As Kyra walks ahead, a girl’s voice from nearby calls out to her. girl

Kyra, Shin fell into the water and Nabi jumped in after him, but by the time we got back with help they were gone. Everybody came out here looking for them. Nabi’s father is over there! Kyra makes her way closer to the water and as she recognizes Nabi’s father, she walks up to him. He stares out to the water and looks at his watch. She touches his shoulder.  As he turns around, he recognizes Kyra. nabi’s father

It’s no use now, she fell in almost two hours ago. (He looks at her silently for a while, then, nodding his head as if he has realized something, he affectionately puts his hand on her head) Thank you for having been with Nabi in her journey tonight. (As Kyra silently cries, he suddenly remembers) Ah! I’ve just seen your mother a while ago, Kyra. Go home, quick! She said she was heading home to see you. Now go . . . 

40. ext | water front | kyra bicycling | night Once away from the crowd, Kyra, her head bent, stops and leaves her bicycle by the side of a road looking onto the sea. She unfurls the red ribbon (the red thread of life) she carries with her, and facing the sea, she yells out, calling Nabi’s name, and lets herself fall on the ground, sobbing.

41. ext | pier/bridge | kyra bicycling | dawn Kyra is seen from afar bicycling on the bridge, beginning in the dark light of early morning and ending in the bright golden light of dawn.

n i g h t p a s s a g e   61

A Sound Print in the Human Archive With Sidsel Nelund

affinities and alliances sidsel nelund: I would like to begin by asking you to position yourself and your work in connection with autobiography. You have expressed that the autobiographical approach is a way to escape the Subject of Knowledge, which you see applied to Western thought. What is the potential of an autobiographical approach? How did you develop it, and how did you become aware of the advantages of it? Trinh t. Minh-­h a: I don’t quite know what you’re referring to in the first part of your question. Let me try to hear the words differently in addressing your concern. As a first reaction, I would say I have no affinity for the autobiography as a genre. I’ve not written any book nor made any film that can be called autobiographies. In fact, I have been introduced to a couple of literary agents and European publishers in the past who strongly urged me to write on my life, because for them, that’s what they can most easily sell. This would have opened a door for me to the world of commercial publishing, but unfortunately, the idea does not at all appeal to me as a writer. The unique, out-­of-­the-­ordinary story of an individual is what our society likes to consume. It may offer an interesting within-­bounds difference, but this focus on personality, private life, and contained individualism is ultimately comforting as it is easily consumable. This being said, I often teach a course on “the voice of autobiography,” focusing precisely on self-­narratives that challenge the conventions of autobiography and preestablished categories. I am thinking here of the range of diverse terms that such works have given rise to, like autoethnography, bio-­mythography, or autobiophotography. So I gather that your question refers to a larger sense of the term, as I sometimes use the “autobiographical” to refer to an intimate site of self-­as-­other

65

inscription, or of both personal and collective subjectivities. A site where, rather than being merely rationalized, theory is lived in the multiplicity of life experiences. Or more specifically, a site where the said or shown is one with the lived, and where, as an empty (linguistic) ritual, the creating subject’s “I”/eye appears only to disappear in the emergence of a textual and audiovisual event. In telling one’s story, one is told. I’s comings and goings in the verbal or visual text is a linguistic necessity, but it is an empty site where many I’s can find a habitat. This is nothing new, when you consider, for example, how “I” dwells in life, or works in a poetic context. It is never a space occupied by one’s small self or by a single individuality, if we are to reach out intimately to others. The art and practices of the self is not a mere matter of retrieving one’s individual past; it is an investigation of self and other that also involves an inquiry into the tools of investigation — here film, video, or writing. To picture and relay events of one’s life activities is potentially to produce new knowledge in a field of infinite relations. With such a transformative process of self-­discovery and self-­invention, one can explore the creative aspect of self-­narration —  or, as in my case, of narrations that take the self as an experiential site of reference — while addressing questions of representation and identity, of personal and collective memory. Such an exploration calls attention to the instance of consumption and contributes to the emergence of new subjectivities. What is truly creative often proved to be risky and profoundly unsettling. The writer Assia Djebar talks about the violence of autobiography, while Maurice Blanchot considers its writing to be a way of surviving through a perpetual suicide. As I have mentioned elsewhere, form, like content, is a political site. In the creative process, one comes up with a vibrant form only so as to address the vitality of the formless. Nelund: Your inspirations and theoretical belongings are many, from Eastern philosophy (India, Japan, China) and African oral tradition to French poststructuralism, feminism, and postcolonial theory. In a way, you compose your own theoretical and visual framework by weaving these inspirations into your books and films. How do you relate to them, and how do you think of them when you work? Trinh: It’s never a one-­way traffic. Rather than belongings, a term I almost never use, I would rather talk about affinities and alliances. And rather than seeing inspirations as existing before my work, I see them as encounters coexisting

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simultaneously in the work’s production process. If I find a praxis inspiring, it’s mainly because of where I am at that specific moment. So I don’t really “weave these inspirations into” my work; they emerge, perhaps as intersecting paths, as the process is set in motion. There’s no linear before and after. In other words, the project I create, the research I pursue, the work I engage in, or the life situation I live designate what inspires me. It’s a mutual process of transformation. Nelund: Among your studies are music composition and literature, and you write and express yourself through film, sound, writing, and lectures. What does it bring to your work to be able to speak through different media? Trinh: No more, no less than an ability to face our limits and to live multiplicity in its widening interrelated dimension: artistic, social, cultural, political, and spiritual, for example. Just to give a couple of threads: on the one hand, I’ve been working on such notions as “boundary event,” “body writing,” and subject positioning (“the subject on trial”), which involve the politics of form and representation, the questions of gender, identities, limits, or borders. On the other hand, my work can be viewed as having opened a creative space for the politics of speaking nearby; the questioning praxes of intervals, Third terms, in-­betweens, many twos, twilight and middle grays, outside-­in or inside-­out movements; and with these, the traveling self, the stranger in a strange land, the migrant at home, the wanderer across language, the many with one (rather than the official many-­in-­one of master narratives), and the inappropriate/d other. This cursory enumeration of some of the markers of my written and filmic work already gives you an entry into how I realize multiplicity. By focusing on subject positioning in the making process and on the tools of creativity (the unique properties and political reality of film, video, digital imaging, or of language, discourse, and writing), mine is primarily a work of exteriority — a term often used by continental thinkers to refer to an approach freed from the conventional claims to interior’s essences. But I would also say that my work doesn’t abide by the ex-­ versus in-­ divide. I use the terms exterior and interior in their nonbinary dimension, for depth and surface are inseparable, and the farther one explores inside, the wider one reaches out to the world.

a s o u n d p r i n t i n t h e h u m a n a r c h i v e   67

Being versatile in more than one medium, field of knowledge, or cultural context is like being able to type with five fingers instead of one or two. It’s exciting and challenging, as I am both bound to the specifics of each and freed from the tyranny of their norms. But, as you well know, people who type with one or two fingers can also do an excellent job. It’s neither speed nor quantity that defines “quality,” capability, or versatility. The “how” always comes with the “what,” even as you choose to emphasize one over the other according to circumstances.

research: the multiplicity of now Nelund: I would like to ask you about the aural dimension of your work. You have a practical and theoretical background in music, and the aural dimension is significant in your writing and films, which are carefully written with an emphasis on phonetics and rhythm. Simultaneously, the aural dimension is a strategy of some theoreticians, like Fred Moten, who seek to oppose the Western focus on the eye — on seeing — because it constructs an understanding from only one point of view. Can you say more about what the aural dimension and background means to you in your work? Trinh: Thanks for not losing track. It’s the dimension I enjoy the most in writing and in making films. Needless to say, the entire world is a musical event. And receiving this world as a sonic tapestry is not only a matter of writing or creating images with an ear — which is already a radical step, found only in some of the best works for me. In other words, music speaks not merely to our ear and mind but also to our womb, hand, foot — our body. To focus on the way a work breathes, moves, pauses, and rests. To hear not only the sonority of every word, every sentence, but also the tonality of the text-­voice and the musicality of language. . . . Here the writer’s, the image maker’s, and the film editor’s work thrives precisely on the art of listening — or on the ability of letting the world come to oneself as music. I have spoken at length in other interviews about language being literally a body’s and a people’s music, or about the importance of rhythm and voice in my work — rhythm, not merely as an aesthetic device, but as a physical, social, and political event. Of relevance, for example, is the way one receives,

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as rhythm and sonic choreography, the actions of both everyday life and special occasions, such as, on the one hand, small conversations, daily activities, people’s routine behaviors and interactions, and on the other, ceremonies, festivities, political manifestations, and art performances. Rhythm defines what I called “time rituals” in the film I shot in Japan (The Fourth Dimension, 2001), and it is inherent in the gesture of work or the movements of labor in the films I shot in Africa (Reassemblage, 1982; Naked Spaces — Living Is Round, 1985), for example. Hearing is never linear, as seeing can often be in mainstream media practices. In previous interviews, I have also expanded on praxes of “silence” and of “resonance” while working spatially with images in film and installation or with concepts in writing. Seeing (or sounding) reality primarily as relations and intervals opens wide the field of possibilities. For example, a poem read as a poem does not appeal to me. It is not necessarily through rhyming verses that poetry can be heard. However, what often fascinates me is, let’s say, theory read as poetry or poetry read as philosophy. I love it when poetry comes to me as (or in) fragments of everyday conversation, when scientific findings address the profoundly poetic dimension of life or of the universe. (I am thinking here of such work as The Secret Melody, one of the fabulous books by the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan.) In other words, when texts, speeches, discourses do not quite fit in preestablished categories and raise questions in relation to genre and classification. One can enter or exit a film, an installation, an experiment, a dance, a sculpture, or a verbal text by focusing immediately on whether or not it has a voice, as well as on where and how that voice situates itself. For me, the “voice” is a site and an activity by which the work’s social, ethical, and aesthetic positioning is conveyed to the viewer-­listener. One can locate it in the intervals between saying and seeing, speaking and hearing, or between language and image, sense and sound. In mainstream productions, image, sound, and verbal interactions are constituted as a homogeneous whole (the many-­as-­one fiction), but in my praxes, they are conceived so as to challenge the perpetration of relations of subordination between plastic representation and linguistic reference. There’s a widespread tendency to fold the space of the verbal over that of the visual (and vice versa), and hence to reduce them to the functions of illustrating, explaining, and duplicating. But in my work, the relation between the verbal, the musical, and the visual remains one of multiplicity.

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In resonance, all objects, all manifestations, all events have a sound component. To remain creative and keep open the field of possibilities, one listens to the intervals of “evidences,” to the becomings of what appears all too obvious to the ear and eye. This has always been part of my creative process, and this is also how happy findings and unplanned encounters find their way into the fabric of the work. Sometimes unwanted resonances become structural devices. They expand meanings in unforeseen directions and enrich the process of their production. Resonances between findings and between encounters account for what many viewers see as the unpredictable character of the unfoldings of my work or of the filmic and literary “reassemblages” I come up with. One of the most fascinating facets of cinema is the relationship sound has to visual image. The indefinite links emerging from the fabric woven between sense (or meaning), sight, and sound can be mutually expansive and creatively decentering. In working on the sound track of a film, for example, I either work with the local people’s music or, as in the fictional films, with musicians who improvise freely, independently from the images. This makes us all “composers” whose interactions are intensely defined by the art of listening in relation rather than of “making sounds” per se. Thus two, three, or more musicians are put in conversation, who might not have actually performed together. With solo performances, I create a kind of virtual musical ensemble, and with a single sound or some musical fragments, I create a multiplicity of “voices” in situ. The pleasure of surprising oneself and, later, of surprising the musicians involved by extending the possibilities of the music performed is very intense. Such a practice of multiplicity gives me a lot more room at the editing table to recompose or to “reassemble” the musical fragments, so as to create, with precision, new relations between sight and sound — that are not those of submission and domination and are capable of unsettling the norms, both in meaning production and in filmic impact. I also prefer to treat sound not as sound effects but as music, making full use of the forbidden field of what the classic, musically trained ear calls “noise” or “nonmusical.” My last film, Night Passage, offers, among others, an intense example of such a work on the sound track. With today’s digital technology, the possibilities of transforming and composing are infinite.

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Nelund: An important part of your work is the process of research, or one could even say that your artistic process and work is a continuous explorative research, and that creating films and books are part of this. Your research oscillates between research of the past, which goes through archival material, and research in the present, which is almost ethnographic. 
First, regarding the archive and research into the past: in films like Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) and Shoot for the Contents (1991) there is a reworking of archival records. I would like to ask you what challenges you in working with archival records, and why it is important for you to rework them. Trinh: Only Surname Viet uses archival footage; none of my other films does. But more generally speaking, making use of archival material, selecting images of the so-­called past that was caught on celluloid by others (or by myself), remains, very precisely a work of exteriority — a refusal to subsume the outside, the film or language reality, to the dimension of the inside and of an individual’s interiority. This is an aspect that underlies the body of my work. Such work requires a playful approach to a filmed reality that claims, in its own undoing, no interiority of reflection (the depth of psychological realism) and no positivity of knowledge. It’s a way of apprehending the limits — both material and mental —  of what has been, or can be witnessed and captured, as related to praxes of collection, preservation, and exhibition. In reworking the archival material, I am calling attention to the holes, fissures, and fringes of history, and hence to the need of rereading historical events with the omitted, the neglected, the marginalized, the misclassified, or else with the absent, the “nonevent,” and the nonarchived. The work of exteriority is here intimately related to what I said earlier on the autobiographical. The movement of I’s appearances in my work is the simultaneous movement of the speaking or making subject’s disappearance. To return to a point you made earlier: certainly, in modern society the eye is the dominant organ. Here writing and filmmaking are often reduced to producing what one can see and what is legible to the eye. The claim to “making visible” is ubiquitous, whether the work is explicitly visual or not. Such a claim, which continues apace with today’s new technologies — to see faster and always more, even at night and through surfaces — has, in the past,

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led many rationally enlightened researchers to view traditional societies regulated by the power of the spoken word as “ahistorical,” or having no history because the latter is typically defined by its exclusive relation to written records. This is the kind of violence civilizations based on the written word carried out in their civilizing mission. And perhaps this is also why memory and the archive have become the favorite topic of today’s researchers. In research and exploration, the question is not merely to gain vision and visibility. And in the politics of interpreters and interpretation, raising the question “Who’s speaking?” is also asking “Who’s listening?” To be aware, without closing off, of where and from where one speaks, or else of how, when, and by whom one can be heard cannot be reduced to a mere question of audience and readership. For me, it’s an ability to advance in the dark, a way of opening the field of possibilities in creativity, as well as a necessity to work with multiplicity in relations of power. What appeals to me is neither omniscience nor compartmentalized knowledge. It is also definitely not mere accumulative knowledge — the more-­and-­ always-­more that can be so boring, if not paralyzing, to the creative approach. Rather than consolidating subjectivities through expertise, research should always question its own form, destabilizing its own grounding in the process, if it is to maintain a relation of infinity with the field of its inquiries. Nelund: Second, regarding ethnography and research into the present: the way in which some of your films, such as Reassemblage (1982), Naked Spaces — Living Is Round (1985), Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), and The Fourth Dimension (2001), respond critically to ethnography reveals an insistence on what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously articulated as not speaking for the Other but with the other. You insist on maintaining an openness to the moment of the encounter that then becomes a generating force. Hence the research process in this case is dependent on the now of the encounter with the represented and on how this now develops. How do you think of the “now” of your research?
 Trinh: You put it very nicely. The link you trace between the commitment to speak with, the generative force of encounters and the creative multiplicity of now is simply perfect. I don’t have much to add . . . I have repeatedly been asked, in previous interviews (some of which were published in Framer Framed and Cinema Interval), to elaborate on the praxis of

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speaking nearby, as initialized in Reassemblage but realized in all of my work. In the politics of representation, again, it’s a way of voicing in relation to and of speaking in proximity — whether the other is present or absent during the speech act. The praxis often puts me on precarious ground, making it impossible for me to function in an unquestioned position of authority, hence allowing me to avoid the trap of merely speaking about, for, or on behalf of, as well as of claiming to “give voice” to the repressed and underprivileged. The challenge of speaking nearby takes on a new lease on life with each work I create, and the praxis has become almost a kind of signature. “Now” lies in the instance of the yet-­to-­be-­named. It often escapes us and is not to be grasped in the concepts of things, for it does not imitate or illustrate. Being attentive to the “now” of research is, as mentioned earlier, doing research that questions its own form — the very instance of searching, or the materials, methods, and principles that go into research and its diverse manifestations. Not only is the researcher being watched in her thought process; she is also herself the witnessing. She enters the “now,” intensely receptive to anything that comes her way, without getting attached or letting it drive her every move. Nelund: One of your chapters in Woman, Native, Other (chapter 4, “Grandma’s Story”) begins with a quotation from the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, which seems to relate to your method of letting “something” arrive from nothing. This nothingness is also related to silence, which you use a lot in your films. Will you elaborate on how the space of nothingness influences your research practice? What research areas are of special interest for you at the moment? Trinh: Nothing and something are really one reality. If many of us tend to write during nighttime or at dawn with day’s birth, it’s mainly because one creates best when one has nothing in mind. Emptying it from its daily dose of noises and sound bites is a kind of necessary ritual if one is to live more fully. It is from and toward nothingness that all creative powers spring forth or flow back. I remember many years ago teaching students in a film production program and telling them it may help to do extensive research on the subject of their interest — whether this has to do with a culture, a people, or a performance, for example — but ultimately they would have to let go of that research when they are on the site, for the elaborate treatment they are often required to write would not be of much use then. In that sense, no amount of accumulative

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knowledge would help for creative work. Entering fieldwork with the self as an empty, experiential site of reference would open many doors to their approach in cinema and would give them the kind of joyful confidence they often lack when they let themselves be intimidated by professionals’ expertise or by the feeling that they “don’t have enough knowledge.” But as you can imagine, it’s difficult for many of us to make use of such freedom in nothingness, and some would much rather have a set of ready-­made criteria to proceed by, for they badly need story lines, treatments, techniques, and “methodologies” to operate. These provide them with an illusorily stable ground on which to advance. Something is made of nothingness, or better, of no-­thingness. As work, movement, or life potentials, nothingness is not opposed to fullness. The research I have been doing throughout the years remains at the core, a “no-­name research.” It takes on a different face according to circumstances, and its manifestations vary with each situated context. The politics of the everyday is, for example, a constant in my books, films, and installations. The everyday is widely thought of as the banal, the familiar, and the static — something we are so used to that it tends to go unnoticed. But there is always the possibility of the everyman turning into a suspect and of everyday activities turning into political activities, as exemplified by the struggles of women and marginalized peoples around the world. The everyday, punctuated by the ritualistic and the ceremonial, is what I often translate onto film and video media; it is difficult to show and pin down, because everyday happenings allow no hold and almost no control. Thus one often travels in order to see and to experience anew what tends to be taken for granted in the daily and the ordinary, as one readily forgets that the everyday can be dangerously creative. Lately, I have been working, for example, with “walking” as an activity and as a way of apprehending the world. Walking here is also a kind of virtual-­ physical, or 010101 activity, as in digital technology. I call it Walking with the Disappeared. The exploration finds its way into two projects; one is a book in progress on the wounds of our time as seen through the current colonial wars. The setting for the book is a walk during twilight, when events of the world come to the walker in an unplanned, unexpected, albeit tightly interrelated way. It gives the reader an entry into a very different dimension of war and features certain aspects of Occupation through the deeds of two Giants: the

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United States and China. Opening with the ending of the war in Iraq, it unfolds its course across times and territories, involving the wars in Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Lebanon, and the transnational struggles of women in the United States, Argentina, Mexico, and China. It ends with the challenge of Tibet. The other project is a large-­scale multimedia installation, L’Autre marche (2006–9), which I have conceived in collaboration with the artist and architect Jean-­Paul Bourdier, for the 160-­meter-­long ramp that gives access to the entrance of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. This project is precisely based on an ancient practice of independent travelers in Asia, whose indefinite walk is a profound way of letting the world come to us with every step.

work: the movement of exteriority and the teacher as hypertext Nelund: Now moving to your films and books: there seems to be a complementarity between form and content, where the form conveys the ideas existing in the film or book. Would you term your films and books “performative” in the sense that they perform what they convey? Or would you rather say that you let the content take shape during the process of research and creation, not thinking of its performative forces? Or both? Trinh: You seem to use the term performative as a separate concept or idea that one could merely put to use in the making of a project. Although, according to the definition you gave, the term can certainly be applied to my work, I don’t see the relationship between content and form as complementary. They are inseparable: a single reality, like the two facets of the same coin. In this monkey business of the mind, one can say that the forces of the form determine the forces of the content; both the “what” and the “how” take shape during the creative process. You don’t pour new content into an old, pre-­prescribed mold, because you’ll then remain in conformity. Performative, reflexive, interactive, deconstructive — are all terms widely used in relation to my work. However, each term needs to be negotiated anew with each project realized. For example, the movement of reflexivity in my films and writings is not that of a mere interiority. It’s not only a question of observation being also introspection, or analysis of a subject being carried out simultaneously with the investigation of one’s own projection. The reflexive process from outside in

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and inside out is often also a movement between outsides only, between surfaces and interfaces — in brief, the movement of a demanding work of exteriority, whose critical contribution requires a radical shift in criteria. This is where the term performative becomes useful, as it also needs to be differentiated from the mere performance. Ultimately for me, the performative is a strong instance of engaging the “nothing” that goes into the making of “something.” And hence the demands of performativity have little to do with the formal quality (as convention has it) of a performance. Nelund: As mentioned above, you were a pioneer in the 1980s, creating tools of resistance for marginalized groups to resist being stigmatized as Other. Your earlier work especially aims to create tools for the Other to be applied in struggles of liberation. What form does this tool take now in your films and books, and how can it be used? Trinh: Anything can become a tool. It all depends on the circumstances and the contexts of the work. There’s no prescription to be handed down. The situation is similar to what we’ve discussed in relation to form and content. As I’ve said elsewhere, unlike the instrument whose function is to serve, the tool workable across struggles is used to give form, to deform, and to transform. Whoever wishes to make use of them would have to put them to use in a way that remains unique to their project or struggle. To apprehend the tools I have offered in my recent works it is necessary to see what I have done in the shift from analog to digital cinema, for example, and to engage in the art and politics of such films of mine as The Fourth Dimension and Night Passage. Many of the tools offered are also specifically discussed in my book The Digital Film Event (2005). And, needless to say, we have touched on quite a few tools in this interview, which I have elaborated anew in relation to your questions. It is up to you, you and the potential readers, to decide how you would want to put them to use. Nelund: By using various media you have the chance to meet your audience in diverse situations. As an example, the q&a after a screening is something you mention as very important for you because you can engage directly with the audience. Another situation where you engage directly with an audience is via your position as a professor in gender and women’s studies and in rhetoric at Berkeley. However, the teaching situation is different, as there is a certain canon that has to be adhered to. So when you mention that

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you aim for “the known land [to] be transformed into unknown territory” I cannot help thinking, how do you bring such an aim about within a teaching situation? Trinh: I’ve always been teaching in more than one field and more than one department. Interdisciplinary and transnational work continues to determine the core of my university activities. Operating in at least two departments characterized by a profoundly interdisciplinary curriculum has certainly been, for me, a way of affirming and prolonging my commitment to social multiplicity and cultural difference in crossing boundaries. Of great relevance to such a commitment is the role of the teacher as “hypertext” — a role I have actively cultivated and fine-­t uned with each class taught. Rather than giving a straight, static lecture, I work at adapting it fluidly, according to what the students activate in their solicited responses to it. By leading them to other pertinent information on their demand, the hypertext-­ teacher makes possible a dynamic organization of knowledge through unexpected and often unusual connections (the magic of hyperlinks) that highlight our sense of spatiality and perspective, all the while deepening our textual engagement through close readings. However, with this role of the teacher as hypertext, I have also consistently put emphasis not on acquiring and accumulating knowledge per se, and the challenge in teaching and advising remains, for me, not that of providing or transmitting a body of knowledge but that of introducing a substantial difference in the students’ relation to knowledge. What I seek to provide them with are tools of analysis — tools carried across specific contexts and realities — that allow them to find a voice and to define their intellectual itineraries on their terms (no matter how fraught with questions this can be). Emphasis is therefore not put on mere acquisition of knowledge in research but on the role that knowledge plays in the constitution of self and other or in the students’ social lives and professional practices. By urging them to ask anew basic questions (concerning such activities as reading, writing, seeing, speaking, listening, doing research, for example), from where far-­reaching theoretical and practical implications can be explored together, I work at helping students hone their own singular potentials while learning myself to develop an ear for the creative “missing link” between the widely contradictory opinions and experiences that they bring into the classroom.

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This return to the most simple in order to engage in the very complex, this simultaneous process of removing, adding, and multiplying is meant not only to help break the circular relation of supplier and consumer between student and teacher but also to develop theoretical dimension and scope in the way we conceive of our social and ethical everyday. While studying the works of thinkers, writers, and artists carefully selected according to the focus of the course, students are invited, on the one hand, to participate directly in the collective process of making theory (rather than passively reading about it) so as to relate more intimately to the body of works with which they are engaged and, on the other, to develop, independently and creatively, the ability to think through relational possibilities. This practice of collective theory-­in-­the-­making has been developed through the years, at the cost of a certain difficulty for both student and teacher. Tensions in the learning process can be initially disorienting for students who are more prone to consuming packaged knowledge — but they also tend to dissipate for many during the semester. As you can see, there are many similarities between my teaching and my creative work. Interdisciplinarity has, in my context, not been a question of accumulating expertise — that is, of gathering and juxtaposing specialized knowledge while leaving their boundaries intact. It is rather one of working on their very encounters so as to substantially shift and alter them.

a multicellular, multi-­art event Nelund: Night Passage, directed and produced together with Jean-­Paul Bourdier, is your most recent film. It is an astonishing film that generates many questions within a variety of topics, and I will present only a few of them here. Night Passage is an homage to Kenji Miyazawa’s Milky Way Railroad, a Japanese sci-­fi classic for children from the 1920s. The structure of Night Passage corresponds more or less to Milky Way Railroad, but major changes have been made; for example, the protagonist of Night Passage is a girl and not a boy, as in Milky Way Railroad. In the process of adapting the sci-­fi novel you must have thought of how you wanted to tell the story today and also how to tell it with today’s technologies: digital film. Why did you choose to tell the story the way you did, and why use digital film?

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Trinh: As with all great work, there are many ways to enter his narrative: through the eye not only of a child but also of a wise man and a multitalented artist, geologist, and agronomist, whose song is indelibly marked by the death of his young sister. What inspired me most in Miyazawa’s Milky Way Railroad, also translated as Night Train to the Stars, was the unusual space of happenings it opened, at once magical and scientific. As readers, we are happily invited, through his poignant story event, to see into the empty core of existence. The journey leading us from wonder to wonder is also one in which death shapes our daily truths. As with my previous works, Night Passage is a film event that turns around on itself and looks at itself in its production activity  — or in the very act of coming into being and “dissolving” (so to speak) into nothing. Such an infinite movement of reflexive performativity, which is intensified by digital imaging, throws the making and viewing self into an abyss. It enables us both to work with our specific limits (including film’s limits) as we address our mortality and to expand our mind as the ripples, once set in motion, continue to multiply indefinitely. The more vibrant the “forms” in Night Passage, the more fully the film event thrives on the void. To be able to feel this Void at the core of every reality —  human, animal, vegetal, mineral, or digital — radically shifts our outlook on life. When one works with something as impossible to represent as death, and the experience of near-­death, one is bound to take a leap to pass from one language to another, from the rigor of rational precision to the rigor of casual imprecision, or else of another kind of precision: sensual, emotional, virtual (but not necessarily mental), and spiritual. Conceived as a multivoice, multitableaux, and multi-­art event, Night Passage can be said to unfold through a series of filmic gestures, each defined by a specific location or setting, and distinct choreography of camera and body movements, as well as by precise lighting, colors, sound, silence, and resonances. The “multicellular” aspect of the work turns the space of narrative film into a multiplicity of interrelated but self-­contained scenes. One can enter the event, for example, through the door of verbal interactions or of bodily imagination and spiritual aspiration. As you have probably noticed, the multiplicity in appearances (related, among others, to gender, ethnicity, and cultural differences) comes with a multiplicity in languages and utterances. The words of wisdom that the two young

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women protagonists, Kyra and Nabi, receive during their night journey come from many places: storytellers, or the Men of the Night; the sick father; the crazy linguist and researcher Aunt Wolf; the Man of Wisdom on the street; artists, musicians, and dancers; but also scholars, scientists, and tech people. The verbal dimension is thus conveyed through a rich tapestry of ways of telling: street talk, storytelling, verse singing, crazy rhapsodies, introspective musings, as well as fatherly advice and teacherly, scientific-­like excursus. There are many ways to come to my films: through the dated categories of the spiritual, the plastic, the discursive, the technological, the social and political, for example, or obliquely, through any hybrid combination of all of these. The multiplicity of performing spaces, across time and location, as related to the young women’s longings and desires in this film event is a bit like that of the Russian matryoshka, or nesting dolls. Inside every big “Mother” some five to ten smaller ones are found. What delights and captivates our attention is not only the gesture of duplicating ad infinitum with women figurines but also the “unbeatable” character of these figurines, which sometimes come with rounded bottom and thus, when struck down, never fail to bounce back up. More than with my other films, Night Passage can spatially be edited as an installation, so the scenes can be simultaneously shown on several screens in a location. There is something for every viewer, and those who enter my films fresh, without much baggage, or sensually in now-­time, without trying always to make sense, usually get a lot out of the event. This is an ability that has little to do with any knowledge of film traditions or digital media. Nelund: Some of the aspects that are strong in Night Passage, like the use of tales, rites, and the intercultural, are also aspects that characterize your oeuvre in general. As an example, there is a character in Night Passage, Mrs. Wolf, who says, “A friend is another self,” and for me, such a phrase links back to your thoughts on self and the other developed in earlier works. Yet in Night Passage (and also in your film The Fourth Dimension) a new topic is emerging: the relation between technology and the human. In some scenes humans extend into technology via microphones, light, and screens. Will you elaborate on how the aspect of technology and the human interests you in relation to other concerns, such as rites and tales? Trinh: Very nice links drawn. But rather than responding with rites and tales in mind, I would say that touching on technology and the human feels to me

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like pulling together all the threads of our previous discussion on multiplicity, the Now, and the Void in relation to the digital. The D-­passage is one in which the “real” is a rendering of data, and everything becomes numbers, reduced to surface effects. What one sees as something constantly returns to nothing. This applies to the main characters’ experience during their journey in the fourth dimension, on and off the night train — which is also that of the film viewers watching Night Passage. One can apprehend such a passage in a reductive way, as a paring down of the human to the machine, or in an expansive way, as a radical rethinking of cinema with the digital and a widening movement of the no-­frame framer’s awareness. Each major scene features a different journey, and each constitutes a passage of its own. While divagating, Aunt Wolf, the linguist-­researcher, asks whether she’s “a raccoon becoming a wolf, a b52, a map, a river.” In her world, words are immense. They “grow silently” and come through her randomly, as so many ripples on the surface of water. Their echoes float out of her control. She’s only this empty sound vessel through which they manifest themselves in leaps, bounces, and bursts. (She needs to have her filing cards hung like linens; otherwise she “can’t remember [her] lines.”) When words question words, internal and external voices mingle, while inquiries about the way these could be consumed are heard aloud. Being a “human” here is being a sound print among others, or else a vibe in the stream of endless words — “the sound people make.” “What we say can be caught / ten thousand years from now / Sound prints are like fingerprints, and soon we’ll exist digitally,” she remarks aloud and concludes, “No sound ever dies.” Sound and images having their autonomous anticipatory functions in an incessant stream of information. . . . Automatons operating beyond their programmed agency . . . the idea of infinite duplication, of endless looping or of being recorded for eternity in a human sound archive appeals to many today. Take the scenes with Uncle Borges in the House of Immortals and Dr. Kennedy in the Hall of Images. I provide the setting and the focus, but the performers, Tom Zummer and Sherman Kennedy, who play “themselves” while adapting the roles of Uncle Borges and Dr. Kennedy, largely improvise the dialogues. The scene with Uncle Borges, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s vision of immortality, was initially longer, but much has been cut out. As it now stands,

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Uncle Borges’s immortals exist in rows of whispering boxes whose spirits manifest in human sighs, moans, and laughs, as well as in light squares wandering solo or in locomotion across the image space. These light squares speak of the “no-­image” frames digitally produced in the computer, freed of reference and freed from representation. Uncle Borges also designs robots with teeth who smoke cigars, “so that theirs is not just an empty immortality, bearing the passage of the trace — even a small trace of humanity.” His colleague and friend, Dr. Kennedy, whose research is geared toward reviving the dead body, notes that “revitalization takes place on its own. We merely provide the circumstances that are conducive to this action.” He regrets “our lack of understanding of both the matter state and the energy state.” The passage in the film from the third to the fourth dimension during nighttime and back is, similarly, one in which a new digital image can be made to arise from the preceding one, not linearly but from any point within the latter. Such a basic understanding radically changes the way narrative cinema is conventionally conceived and frees us from the many rules of continuity as related to matching shots in editing and to screen direction in storytelling. Again, the new arises anywhere from the old, and something comes from nothing to return to nothing. The journey is indefinitely marked by comings and goings. Nelund: Finally, what is your relation to the Latin American public, and how do you think your work connects to this part of the continent? Trinh: You are here calling attention to your immediate readership and to the conditions of this interview. Latin America (a much contested label!) remains very special in my learning itinerary. I traveled to Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru right after I graduated from the university. It was then, literally, a journey into the unfamiliar — my first contact with another Third World context, in which I encountered dire border problems with my identity papers and was made aware of the intense difficulties of traveling as a Vietnamese. I also got to enter the culture through the notion of “Third Cinema” and the rich body of films and filmmakers gathered around it, some of whom I’d come to meet later on in film festivals and conferences. My films have been recurrently shown in Brazil, and dedicated filmmakers and researchers (under the

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supervision of Sylvia Caiuby Novaes) are making the translations into Portuguese possible in order to get the films screened more widely. But aside from this preliminary introduction to the culture, I still have a lot to learn. It is not for me to say how my work connects to this part of the continent. I will leave that task to people like yourself, who may be more in tune with the audiences in Latin America.

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Note Sidsel Nelund is a writer on the arts currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Copenhagen, working on an ethnographic and art historical investigation of the production of knowledge in contemporary art. Nelund holds a BA in comparative literature and an MA in modern culture from the University of Copenhagen together with an MA in aural and visual studies from Goldsmiths, University of London.  This interview was published in Disturbios Culturales, edited by Jose Ossandon and Lucia Vodanovic (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Protales, 2012), and a shorter version appeared, both in English and in Danish, in sum Magazine for Contemporary Art, no. 5 (2009), 75–82, with the following introduction by Nelund: Born in Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-­ha is known as a filmmaker, composer and writer. Contributing generously to these art forms, she was also a pioneer in the 1980’s theoretical conceptualisation of the Other, verbalising especially the position of women in developing countries. 
  Currently, Trinh T. Minh-­ha holds the post of Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She has lived, among other places, in Vietnam, USA, France, Senegal, and Japan and this geographic diversity is reflected in her work, in which several countries have been the documentary or fictional stage of her films. 
 Trinh T. Minh-­ha’s early films, Reassemblage (1982) and Naked Spaces — Living is Round (1985) questioned the ethnographic eye in representing reality, whereas the later Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) challenged the genre of documentary, while exposing the politics of the interview. Today, Trinh T. Minh-­ha’s work investigates the relation between reality and technology.
  The political potential of film and writing is ever apparent in Trinh T. Minh-­ha’s work, and she has worked artistically to create tools to be applied in the struggle of liberation for marginalised groups. However, she also moves in circles of documentary, cinema, feminist studies, postcolonial theory, contemporary visual art, literature, and music composition. This interview consists of 4 parts concerning positioning, research, and media, finally coming back to positioning again.

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The Depth of Time With Alison Rowley

somewhere from the middle Alison Rowley: I have been reading Milky Way Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa, which was written in 1927, because I was curious about why you chose this novel as a starting point for your digital film Night Passage. In the introduction to the English translation of the book I read that Miyazawa was Japan’s best-­loved children’s writer, as well as one of its three great modern poets. He was a chemist and government agricultural agent and also worked as a schoolteacher. Although he was well known in Tokyo’s literary circles, he lived hundreds of miles away from the capital, in the isolated province of Iwate in the North of the country, and while he was knowledgeable about most branches of modern science he also searched for a belief system that would accommodate the religious teachings of both Buddhism and Christianity. Miyazawa was born in 1896 and died in 1933, so his life and work coincide with the high point of Western modernity. They also, it seems to me, correspond with the observations you made about contemporary Japan in The Fourth Dimension. The film attends to the encounter between the rituals of traditional culture as they persist today in the everyday life of the country and sophisticated new technologies of communication and representation, which are structured by their own ritual forms. In The Fourth Dimension and in Night Passage the train is, quite literally, the narrative vehicle of the films. In The Fourth Dimension it travels between past and present; in Night Passage the journey takes place between life and death. There is a moment in The Fourth Dimension when we see a young woman asleep on a modern Japanese train. Does she dream the story of  Night Passage? This is a way of asking, Are the two films companion pieces? How do you understand the relationship between them? Trinh T. Minh-­h a: Great questions that need no answer after all. You have somehow situated this entire film within an image sequence of another film and linked it to the sleep state of a woman in the train. What a wonderful way

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to connect Night Passage with a previous film of mine and to see them in relation as a dream within another dream. As viewers, one often forgets that each film, each image has its own history and trajectory. We have to begin somewhere, so it’s normal that you start with Miyazawa. The information you gave could be helpful to the reader unfamiliar with the name, which is often the case when the writer is from the non-­Western world. But although I am not indifferent to biographical details of his life, they are of limited use here. I would rather begin somewhere in the middle: with the spirit of his work, which was how I met him on the page, and with what I retained from the book Milky Way Railroad or Night Train to the Stars. The relation that Night Passage maintains toward this book is that of inspiration — and not of illustration, imitation, description, or realist rendition. In other words, viewers need not read Miyazawa to enter the film. The question of “source” or “influence” is of little relevance, for what compels me to make the film after having read his book is not its mere content — the story, the message, or the information — although these have a role and are quite wonderful in his case. It is rather the sparks generated by our encounter, the freedom, and the insight for new possibilities that the book opens up to. As one of the vehicles of the life-­and-­death passage — the others being, for example, the bicycle, the boat, and the ship — the train runs at the core of his voyage, not as one that begins and ends the story but as one that gives access to the Milky Way and allows its passengers to rediscover, at each stop, the queerness of human desire and yearning. Life is not explicable when it is lived intensely, with magical freshness. What I kept of Miyazawa in Night Passage were spirit, structural forces, and field of action. His story has no development, so to speak. Broadly speaking, it is composed of an opening and a closure and, in between the two, a space of free-­flow happenings and encounters. It was the freedom provided by such a framework that appealed to me initially. In coming up with a night train of my own, the only traces of his that I retain in the film can be found in its beginning and ending and in some incidences on the train. The rest, the middle, is where the ride to an elsewhere happens and where everything comes alive in the journey. The train appears in the middle of Miyazawa’s story, and it is from this middle that possibilities abound. As in ancient Asian praxes, practicing the Middle Way does not mean being

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halfway. No compromise, indecision, or noncommitment is implied here. On the contrary, the middle is where there’s no duality, no leaning on one side or the other, hence no foreclosures due to barriers. The form that emerges is like the moon of realization: empty in its fullness, with neither beginning nor end. Deleuze and Guattari picked up a grain of Zen and became very attuned to this particle of the East when they recalled how Eastern arts always grew from the middle and urged us to start again from the middle — so as to work with new relations of speed and slowness, thereby enabling new possibilities of assemblages. Inter, between, midway: what comes to our senses is always on the go, already in motion. Each scene, each sequence could be an autonomous gesture with a center of its own. Story and plot are minimally retained only to set free the field of affects. We may use them as a way to “humanize” a larger-­than-­life event, reducing it to the size of our mouth so that we can digest and regurgitate in putting it into words. For me, the term dream in its normative sense is not quite adequate when applied to the different passages at work in Night Passage. Night travelers and film face infinity with the multiplicity of comings and goings offered in the middle. Rather than leading from one point to another, passages are middles, intervals within intervals, since life itself is an interval between birth and death, and each life is an interval within numerous other lives. This is all in response to your situating Night Passage somewhere in the middle of my film body’s trajectory — already in motion in The Fourth Dimension. We can even travel further in time, in and out of the digital realm, if we return, let’s say, to the sonic plane of the train in yet another fiction film of mine, A Tale of Love.

cinematic, industrial, digital Rowley: Trains and the idea of the magical journey figure at the very beginning of cinema’s existence. The famous sequence of a train pulling into a station made by the Lumière brothers, shown in 1895, and George Méliès’s fantasy Le voyage à travers l’Impossible (1902), initiate the two dominant strands in cinema history: the documentary and the fiction film. For me a sense of the nineteenth-­century industrial technological revolution pervades Night Passage. To take just one instance of many: at

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the Word and Sound Station the three travelers enter a corridor that reminds me of the organization of cabins on an ocean liner. A door leads them down a metal staircase into the bowels of what could be a ship’s engine room. A sound, the subtle transmutation of the train’s horn into a ship’s Klaxon, strengthens the association. Or again, at another point in the film, the travelers push a trolley through what looks like a gallery in an underground mine into what turns out to be a sculptor’s workshop. And the sculptor, working in welded metal, acknowledges a debt to constructivism. Thus are linked the ideas of industrial technology, revolution, and art. At the same time Night Passage is a profound engagement with the possibilities of twenty-­first-­century digital technology. There is a poetic synchrony between these two historical moments of great change in our experience and understanding of relations between time and space as they have been, and continue to be, inscribed in cinematic practice. This is a compelling aspect of the film for me, and I am reminded of Philip Rosen’s project in his book Change Mummified to examine relations between cinema and the category of history as it crystallized in the West in the nineteenth century along with fully developed industrial capitalism.1 Is this an idea you set out to explore in the film? Trinh: The time factor, the shifts in perception, as well as the simultaneous engagement with both phases of technology are very adequately captured in the examples you gave. I spoke at some length in The Digital Film Event about this relation between the mechanical and the digital as two major historical moments of change that inform and are determined by our imaging practices. I was invoking the former not only through Lumière and Méliès, but also through Eisenstein and Vertov. The link between technology, art, and revolution became more manifest in time. As a Russian painter [Kasimir Malevich] remarked almost a century ago, the revolution in the arts via movements such as cubism and futurism foreshadowed the revolution in politics and economics. In the scene with the sculptor, Joe Slusky, who performs himself and improvises while addressing his own work, speaks of color and form in terms of touch and “automotive paint,” a fluid “beyond flesh and bones,” or else an “urban undersea with all this kind of blue.” He talks about the unknown being “the whole trip,” about “finding these structures going upriver, excavating” whatever drives them, and then going back again and again to see what else can be “unloosed.” He summarizes his welding work in two words: breath and oxidation. Breath cutting through metal.

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Technics and spirit brought alive. Tactility, motility, and liquidity in the field of light and matter. Viewed in the context of Night Passage, such an improvisation is quite perfect — a qualification that couldn’t be further from Joe’s mind, for he had then no idea how it could affect the film. It was not easy to go on rambling in front of a camera, but with him, every take was unique, and we only did two takes of that scene because we realized Joe couldn’t repeat himself. These are the kind of quirky monologues that effortlessly unfurl while he’s at work. Having often listened and laughed with them, we decided, Jean-­ Paul [Bourdier, the codirector] and I, to ask Joe to do just that on camera. This was how we worked with a number of artists in the film. The scene with the two black scientists and experts in technology was initially conceived with a similar spirit. These largely unscripted or at times self-­scripted interventions constitute the documentary parts of Night Passage. Joe’s spiel on his art trips gives us a glimpse of how the unknown lies at the core of revolution. Far from being preset, reality and events manifest themselves in a state of constant adaptation and growth. While showing the industrial and the mechanical via digital performativity, the film features technology’s mediation in a spiritual passage of life-­death transmutation. Your putting to question the category of history as it crystallized in the West — and I would add the category of visibility to it — is here very relevant. This regime of imposed linear time and chronology has not only given rise to unremitting divisions between official and nonofficial historicist narratives; it also invites us to indulge in the delusion that knowing all there is to know — where we’re going and what, how, or even when the end will be — is all there is to life. Depending on how we live it, our relation to speed or time-­space and knowledge, as well as to memory and antimemory could free or deeply enslave us.

cinema screen, strip of celluloid, and electronic train windows Rowley: The opening sequence of Night Passage, before the title appears on the screen, is a stunningly economical condensation — which makes it incredibly beautiful — of the idea of cinema as a form of what Rosen calls modern historicity. The reduction of the three-­dimensionality of the railway carriage to the dense black two-­dimensional matting of a row of illuminated windows recalls a flat strip of celluloid, the traditional base

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material of cinema itself. The camera’s track along the length of the carriage demonstrates in slow motion the old linear animating mechanism, the persistence of vision at twenty-­four frames a second. When the camera stops tracking for a moment it zooms in to the brightly lit squares of window to focus on the illusion produced by the mechanical operations of camera shutter and projector gate, namely the illusion of life in depth, which at the same time is merely a projection and the windows a cinema screen in the darkness of the auditorium. In addition we know that the moving images we are watching are not mechanical at all but electronically produced with digital technology. Visually there is a lot going on in a very short sequence. Trinh: Yes. The responses I got from a number of viewers on this very opening sequence was, further, that somehow the row of windows reminded them more of those of a ship than those of a train. I was quite astounded when I first heard that comment, because I did try at one stage while editing the film to give the feeling of a train running on water. An aftereffect of that intention may still linger on, perhaps in the way motion and movements come through to the viewer in this one-­minute sequence. At work is a net of fluid, spatial movements that can be quite difficult to rationalize; these are the horizontal move of the series of windows across the screen surface, followed by the vertical move into or slow close-­up on these windows, or the gradual closing in of the camera lens (with, reversely, the small details growing larger) — what one can call the visible time courses of a virtual depth. Aside from introducing the viewer to the visual core of both the story in the film and digital imaging itself, as you have so accurately described, what this short sequence potentially invites the viewer to do, right from the start of the film, is to come into the world of sonic imaging otherwise than through the binary of form and content or of physical and virtual reality. Disappearance is made tangible with appearance, and the unseen seeable in what is shown. (“What are they looking at?” is a question inscribed in the images of that sequence as well as along the entire film.) There are many ways to enter cinema, and our responses here are only two examples. Experiencing the forces that drive the film, its undercurrents, movements, frequencies, dynamisms, modulations, tonalities, and rhythms, for example, certainly leads us to a wealth of possibilities in reception that make conventional interpretation of meaning, theme, character, and storyline quite stale and reductive.

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going into darkness Rowley: The sound in the opening sequence has a particular resonance for me. There is the echoing blast of the train horn, some bars of saxophone music. When the title of the film appears and the text divides to give depth to the screen, there is a sound like a birdcall, followed by the distinct hoot of an owl. I was reminded at this point of Tracey Moffatt’s treatment of the title of her film Night Cries, in which the text is accompanied by an ambiguous sound. Is it a cry of distress, human or animal, or the wheels of an abruptly breaking train on its rails? It is impossible to tell which. Moffatt plays on the b movie, gothic horror tradition of sound and graphics for her effect. Her sound evokes nightmare, yours dream, so really they are very different in tone and meaning; however, I think there are important links to be made between the two films around the figure of the train. In both it is associated with escape from the hardships and unhappiness of daily life, with the suddenness of death, and crucially the vehicle is a signifier of nineteenth-­century expansion. The final act of colonizing, imperial capitalism in the Australian outback is played out in all its complexity between two women, the indigenous Australian and the white settler in Moffatt’s Rural Tragedy — the film’s subtitle. In Night Passage the Men of the Night, the two storytellers, the African American and the Irish American, are reminders of earlier phases of violent colonial, economic expansion. The young travelers from the West Coast of America embody its contemporary realities. Trinh: I like the association with Moffatt’s work, and your suggestion of a sonic fabric that connotes an earlier phase of colonization is fascinating. The example of the storytellers on the train is certainly indicative of such a context of power relations, although I was working here more explicitly with the question of Voice — which is what I also see as crucial in Moffatt’s Night Cries. A couple of viewers also said that the film’s journey brings to mind Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, especially as it led them to the scene with the young women paddling along the river and being lit up by the spectacle of fire dancers. But frankly, Conrad has never come to my mind — neither in my writings nor in my films — and neither does Moffatt’s work in Night Passage, although it is much closer to my heart. Perhaps in relation to these associations, I can discuss the element of darkness. One of the passages of the film repeatedly invoked and quoted by several crew members as well as by some film reviewers is when one of the Men of the

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Night, the Irish storyteller, calls to the two main characters as they head out of the train, “Remember the rules of night passage. Don’t stop in the dark or you’ll be lost. Move to the rhythm of your senses. Go where the road is alive.” I am reminded here of a famous Zen koan that tells about an event between a master, Ryukan, and a freedom searcher, Tokusan. The searcher had traveled from afar to study with the master. One night, as he was working with the master far into the night, the latter noted that it was getting late and told him to retire. As Tokusan lifted up the door curtain to leave, he turned back to Ryukan, saying, “It’s dark outside.” The master lit a candle and handed it to him, but as the searcher was about to take it, the master blew it out. At this, Tokusan suddenly had a deep realization and made a bow. There’s much more to this simple and rich story, but I’ll stop here to dwell on what leads me to it: travel and darkness. We each have our darkness. Where’s yours? What would you encounter, and who would appear on your night train? In my “vision researches,” I have time and again tried to function without my heavily corrective glasses, and for me, if myopia proves to be initially an acute form of darkness, it also turns out at times to be an unexpected form of light. Not only did I realize the capacities with which I could still function, but also I was able to see certain things I couldn’t with my glasses on. For many of us, our everyday is our darkness. What our peers do to us (making of us a laughing stock, for example, as with Kyra in the film) and what we do to them in revenge; our moments of cruelty and inhumanity; our colonial quest, our warring instincts, or blind pursuit for what ends up sapping our vitality as well as our sense of freedom — these are the facets of daily life we can’t escape and are bound to walk into as darkness meets us. In other words, how do we travel? How does the world come to us? Through which window (hearing, touch, taste, sight, or smell, for example)? And by what light in the night? These are structural questions in Night Passage that also fare as some of the undercurrents in my other films. Going into the dark anew with each film, stepping into the world, entering the known unknowingly have allowed me to actualize capacities of mine I was not aware of. Even though I didn’t recognize them at first, they were always there, awaiting the ripe moment to manifest or disappear. These “flashes” from “the river under the river” are so many lightbulbs that switch on by themselves to sustain our creative practices.

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Darkness has no beginning nor ending. But there, where the night seems darkest, is also where we are most likely to light up and where the road becomes alive as we trust the rhythm of our senses. “I am the light!” says a laughing traveler of the dark, with the fire literally burning on top of his head in the film. Miyazawa’s darkness is very different in tonality from the one explored by the young women in the film. His train flight leads his male protagonists to the starry sky or to the Silver River (the Japanese term for the Milky Way) above, whereas the ride in Night Passage leads rather to the River of golden light below, farther into the depths of earthen water. This is where the drama of dying and drowning unfolds in the twin and multiple dances of bodies coupling, struggling, and irresistibly being lured into dark waters. Ultimately everything is bound in the journey to dissolve (as digital technology makes it all too easy for our belief-­images to fade in and out of sight). It is by riding, walking, and paddling into loss, betrayal, and mortality that Kyra, the main character, merges into light — her own — at the close of the film. The deeper the shadow, the brighter the light. One cannot fully rise unless one goes far down into the substance of the dark. The downward-­upward movements of consciousness meet in freedom. In an interview with Woody Allen, which Jean-­Luc Godard captured in his film Meetin’ W. A., there’s a very insightful moment when they discuss darkness. The differences between these two men of fame became most telling when, upon hearing Godard mention the freedom to go into the dark and to come out from it, or to go into the dark to find light, Allen asked if Godard meant “to go to the cinema,” to which Godard answered, “No, to make film.” For Allen, going to the cinema is going to the movie theater, which is most enjoyable because “light is always disappointing” and darkness offers him “a place to escape to.” Similarly, when asked about the editing of his films, his response was that the editing room “is not cold.” Although his answers are quite genuine, it seems to me that Allen is primarily an actor and that he enjoys tremendously internalizing the role of the everyday man — even and especially when he is not supposed “to act” with the interview format. He speaks of film from the consumer’s rather than from the maker’s point of view, and for him, darkness connotes physical comfort, as in a sleep that promises only refuge and rosy dream. Escape, rather than freedom. This could account for the fact that, despite his vehement swearing to normality, his fans attribute his very effective portrayal of daytime neuroticism

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to his personality rather than to his acted character. Nighttime is stabilized and reductively conceived as being opposite to daytime, and the cinema that results from such a binary has been the endearing staple of mainstream productions.

the body and technology Rowley: In “Time Paths,” the lecture you presented at Congress cath 2005 at Leeds on the themes of the ethics and politics of virtuality and indexicality, you spoke of the implications of the move from analogical to digital technology for your work of imaging and sound recording the complex locations of transcultural encounters in time. In addition it seems to me that in Night Passage you are using the technology to explore as well the complex spaces of transhistorical encounters. This point leads me to ask you about an aspect of  Night Passage I find quite difficult to articulate accurately. It has to do with a particular quality of the mise-­en-­scène of the station stops on the train journey. The manipulation of digital image and sound material with computer software has been a major resource in the production of science fiction film for special effects. As one writer puts it, “A creative imagination roams through digital domains unencumbered by the constraints of corporeal existence that are a way of life for analogue artists.”2 Because Miyazawa’s story is a kind of science fiction narrative, generically it lends itself to this kind of treatment. Night Passage, however, is full of sounds and images of embodied knowledge and skill: flute and drum playing, for example, various traditions of dance, rhythm, movement, the simplest production of light with fire, the sensual appreciation of food. A commitment to the “analogical” limits of the pro-­filmic event at the level of the image is an obvious way in which Night Passage does not square with the out-­of-­body utopian rhetoric of some digital imaging and theorizing around virtual reality. Trinh: Yes, that rhetoric is widespread and quite misleading. Largely based on the deep-­seated duality between mind and body, spirit and matter, it’s easily recognizable in certain reactions from viewers, programmers, and critics who seem to know what digital is all about. Although it’s a commonplace, linking exclusively the corporeal to the analog seems rather illusory and needlessly reductive. For me, the more cutting-­edge studies of digital media focus precisely on the vital role of embodiment in our experience of reality — manifested in its manifold forms, both phenomenal and virtual, to use a dysfunctional binary.

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These include all the researches aimed at extending the body, giving rise to distinctions between the body image or the body as object and the body schema whose field of operation is preconscious and subpersonal. Yet, as in a spiral, the move forward in novelty is also a leap back in time, for this is where new technology potentially meets the ancient Asian science of living, whose spiritual praxes refer not to one but to seven bodies in a human: the physical, emotional, mental, astral, etheric, celestial, and ketheric. Here the physical body is only one among others, whose center channels the Earth’s energy, grounds us in the material world, and is located at the base of the spine. It can be viewed as being at the end or beginning of the human body, but what about the rest? Seven and yet one. The term body itself is used very differently in this context. We have a lot to learn of ourselves, for we do not live in eternity; eternity lives through us. When spirit and soul are indivisible, there’s no separation between higher and lower. As the part of us that takes in the obtrusive and the dark of matter, soul is what makes the world “real” and is made real by the world. Interestingly enough, rather than achieving immersion through the illusionism of virtual reality spaces that characterizes mainstream vr researches, artists’ media projects today often privilege the unfolding behavior and bodily movements of the participant. Some of the ideas developed at the initial stages of installations that I’ve made in collaboration, like L’Autre marche (2006–9, at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris) and Nothing but Ways (1999, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco), call for full interaction between human body and technology to determine letters’ mobility in their projections, on the one hand, and to produce sound through motion sensors and contact microphones, on the other. For financial reasons, the mutual interaffect called for in the former project was not realized as conceived (partly because of the costs raised by the very large scale of the installation). But these are two examples among many in media arts. As you have acutely noted, far from removing experience from materiality and embodiment, technical and cinematic mediation in Night Passage makes use of the flexibility of digital technology to feature the (spiritually) interpenetrable relation between human and machine, intermittently inscribing the human-­ computer interface in the transient formation of its images. In the journey on the River, it is this interaffective exploration of the human and the machinic that manifests itself through embodied vision, knowledge,

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and skills. The human body, a mortal vessel of immortality, stands out in the film as one of the vehicles of light and darkness mentioned earlier. The means to move on one plane are the means of artistic inscription and communication on another plane. The use of the bicycle and the small boat are examples of technics and body singing in tune: to ride, to move, one has to pedal or paddle. Too much control and the body-­mind stiffens; too much leaning on one side or the other and one falls; balance is then lost unless one learns to loosen up and let go. “Remember the rules of night passage. Don’t stop in the dark or you’ll be lost.” It is in rowing along the shore of the River that the young women catch sight of the body-­fire dances turning into light writing on night sky and water. And as you may remember, Kyra returns to life by bicycle. The train she takes to travel in time “is weird,” for it neither runs on steam nor on electricity — an imaged train caught somewhere between appearances: the material look of metal vividly brought about via immaterial light. Her descent with Nabi and Shin into what you have so accurately identified as “cabins on an ocean liner” and further as “the bowels of what could be a ship’s engine room” is the descent into the womb of “the ship of death” — an image immediately recognized and named as such by many viewers at screenings of the film in Japan. Bicycle and boat of life, train of transit, ship of death; ultimately life, transit, death are here interchangeable. What immediately comes to my mind is the image of embodiment and self that Roland Barthes offers with his Argo ship: each piece of this white luminous ship is gradually replaced by the Argo­ nauts such that they end up with an entirely new ship — without having to alter the name or the form but leaving nothing of its original identity. A vessel whose parts keep on changing and whose totality is in constant motion: this is also a way of digital imaging, and this is how Night Passage works for me as digital film event.

not so cool: eye hears, ear sees Rowley: There is, however, another such aspect of the film, no less obvious but that some viewers find uncomfortable. This is what I call the diy, the do-­it-­yourself look of the magical mise-­en-­scène of the station stops. For me, this is bound up with your sensitivity as a cinematic translator of Miyazawa’s novel, which is, at one level, a children’s story with children as its main characters. I’m thinking, for example, of the very

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simple way of spatializing the mysterious sound terrain at the Sound and Word Station by drawing with colored pigment, first on the beach and then on asphalt mapped out in patterned sections as if for a game in the street or playground. While the image is simply made, the sound engineering in that sequence is, by comparison, very sophisticated, and in fact you reveal the sound engineers at work recording the sound of the travelers eating at a dinner gathering in the otherwise ordinary environment of a friend’s apartment. In this way the digital manipulation of recorded sound that produces the mysterious effect of moving around the colored drawing in the earlier sequence is demystified. You show how the sound is made, and once we see the process reattached to human causality, it is no more mysterious a process than is making a drawing with colored pigment. There is a complex play going on here between a politics of translation (of the novel), which involves fidelity to the particularity of Miyazawa’s work with the science fiction genre, using the appropriately flexible resources of digital media that is associated with infinite, rapid, disembodied “special effects” in mainstream, commercial science fiction films. Some of which you proceed to demystify in your film by showing the material conditions of their production. The whole magical mise-­en-­scène of Night Passage has the quality of the imaginary places and events children create with the bits and pieces of everyday material and objects they have to hand: paint, cardboard, shards of broken mirror, string, and clothes pegs. The Immortals, for instance, are just like the projectors I used to construct as a child, with batteries, bits of wire, and flashlight bulbs under cardboard boxes with holes cut in their side. So imagine my delight when it is revealed that it is by their light that the figures of the two young women are thrown in silhouette on a screen in an image of the very beginnings of cinema itself. For me, it is an image that also recalls the beginnings of feminist political analysis of cinema spectatorship in Laura Mulvey’s demonstration of the way the unconscious of the patriarchal society structured narrative cinema, with the silent image of woman as bearer, not maker, of meaning. She used psychoanalysis as a political weapon against the patriarchal order in which we are caught. The robot prototype whose mark of humanity is cigar smoking, is that a reference to Freud? Trinh: Yes, for many feminist viewers, it certainly is. Some saw this scene as being fully reflexive, both in relation to the film and digital imaging and to language and discourse. Worth noting here again is the collaboration that went into the scene with Uncle Borges and his House of Immortality. It is coscripted

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with Tom Zummer, an artist and philosopher, whose impressive erudition is characterized, among other singularities, by a gargantuan appetite for learning and passion for books — one that incorporates their materiality (quality of paper, print, fonts, texture, size, design, etc.). I wrote the part of the Immortals as inspired by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, and the rest is Tom’s: both the creation of the robots and their presentation. As with the sculptor, Jean-­Paul and I have heard Tom speak while showing us his robots. We love his drawings and the attention he brings to infinitesimal details, his incredible humor, and his mind “excesses,” so we asked him to share them on film. It is often in the small, the trivial, and the daily that we realize the extent of our social conditioning. Although I enjoy it, I have little to do with the unique index of humanity being also a mark of gender and sexuality in the world of robots. You have a wonderful eye for subtle details in the examples you gave of the film. Concerning the work on the transcultural and the transhistorical, which you noted earlier, in this scene with the Immortals, there’s the example of silhouette and shadow work that recalls the beginnings of cinema — and rather than returning to Plato’s cave, which often serves as a reference for Westerners, I am thinking here of the inter-­Asian origins and histories of puppetry and shadow performance (Chinese, Indian, Javanese, to mention the more well-­ known ones). But with these diverse beginnings of cinema, there are also the questions of screen histories and of digital postphotographic imaging. (Yes, all these convoluted inter-­, trans-­, and post-­ prefixes that define our times!) Presented in that scene are three screen surfaces and spaces: those of cinema, video, and still photography (here transparencies), and in addition, running across the surface of the images of that entire sequence are light squares (or what one can see as spirit-­and-­soul projections of the light boxes or the Immortals)  — with no photorealist content. This is an example of the transhistorical scope of the film, one that I can bring to discussion only once it has spoken to viewers like yourself. The other scenes you mentioned are those featuring bodily responses to the sound of color and of food in the instance of their consumption — what my films have always invited the viewers to do in the instance of watching them. Already with my first 16mm film, Reassemblage, viewers have expressed, through controversial, baffled, angry, or elated comments, their visceral responses to a

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form of primary, radical discomfort. And as one of them excitedly shared in a public debate, what the film offers him is an experience of film in which literally, “I hear with my eyes and see with my ears.” Sound is neither merely temporal nor merely spatial. As you have noted, spacing and spatialization play an important role in sound work. The sound in the scene focused on colors is actually quite simple in conception: to each color corresponds a sound emitted upon touch. The surface of the touch screen —  sand, asphalt — matters. And since the three characters each have their own particular rhythm in simultaneous bodily responses, what you hear ends up sounding quite complex, almost as if organized from a score written for an electronic musical ensemble. Rowley: I have had conversations with some viewers of  Night Passage who have difficulty with these childlike, homemade aspects of the film. There is a tendency to mistake your pol(e)itical, reflexive work with new technology for an embarrassing faux naïveté, or something like that — it’s hard to name the reaction precisely — but it is particularly noticeable in academic environments, as if Night Passage represents a falling away from the level of sophistication of your previous work. There is an inherent judgment of quality in such responses. Is this a reaction to the film you have encountered?3 Trinh: No, this is the first time I’ve heard of this, although I can understand where it may come from. Interestingly enough, it just so happens that the scenes mentioned concerning color and food are the most commented upon. Many listeners, musicians, sound technicians, and educators in grade schools as well as high schools pick these out as their favorite scenes. The child mind, the beginner’s mind comes in as many forms as there are individuals. The discomfort with the not-­quite-­child and the so-­called lack of sophistication has a role here. You have already expanded on this earlier and provided a substantial, on-­the-­mark answer by focusing on the politics of translation, exposures, and incorporation of the “how,” and especially by sharing the joys and magic of imaginary creatures and events you create or make do as a child with the bits and pieces of everyday material available. There’s not much more for me to add to this. Perhaps, to reopen the space of reception, I would take a slightly different direction and relate this negative discomfort precisely to the impact of technology in commercial productions of the film industry. When it comes to new

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technology, people tend to recognize it only in products with a high-­tech look. This is the look that sells, with its dazzling artifices and pithy gadgets. Anything other in appearance tends to be “not cool.” Money also produces believability and credibility; the money image is what many continue to value as promoted through the media’s untiring pursuit of artificial naturalism. In other words, all is in the look and the sophistication of the make-­believe apparatus. This ever-­more-­hip-­cool-­coarse-­or-­slick image effect has become quite a cliché, and ironically, the look of discontinuity or the inclusion of processes, which were so dear to experimental filmmakers, are now “in” for popular mainstream cinema. This being said, shallow imitations and appropriations on the level of the look have little to do with the vision researches of radical experimenters. In these times of postcolonial struggles, postmodern recovery, and “green sustainability,” to use a trendy term, I would say that we need to be at once very primitive and very cultured. Awkwardly, efficiently “low” and competently, unfittingly “high,” shuttling effortlessly between the avant-­and arrière-­garde and surfing in and out from the middle. In other words, marginalized groups could be all at once sophisticated, provocatively high-­tech, and defiantly vernacular. Rather than entering the film with judgments on whether the film’s portrayal of the child’s “naïveté” looks “real” or “faux” (I’m working here with these words that are not mine and not really appropriate to my undertaking in Night Passage), it may be more timely to shed these old standards and especially judgments of quality, so as to come to terms with the transhuman mind of new technology. To return again to my film Reassemblage, which has had a very difficult and controversial start but has since then enjoyed very wide exposure across cultures — here is a film with a bare-­bones budget that anyone can make, whether in artistic, social, or technical terms. In previously published conversations, I have also expanded at length, for example, on the primordial work of rhythm in cinema, or on slowness and rituals (including the rituals of new technology) being fully assumed as a form of resistance and a mode of experiencing. The play on the senses in the sound scenes mentioned earlier can be experienced as an individuated but nonrepresentational encounter between sight, sound, and human touch or else as embodied forces, rhythms, and sensations. Deleuze, who also gives a primary role to rhythm (and not meter) in his analyses, speaks of it as a base commonly

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shared between words, lines, colors, and sounds, and I would add, body. To quote him, “Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level and as painting when it invests the visual level.” And I would add, as dance when it invests the bodily level. Cézanne calls it a “logic of the senses” — neither rational nor cerebral. Again, what is thought to be modernist often turns out to be ancient practice: Asian artists of old did not separate the visual from the verbal and the musical, for being a painter and a poet was one and the same. Through calligraphy what is manifested is not “art,” so to speak, but ch’i or ki —  breath-­spirit — and song from matter. After all, isn’t cool a term that one would also apply to people who have a pace and a rhythm of their own and who either do not let themselves be distracted by pressure from their peers and external events or simply tune in fully with any current that crosses their path? Working at the junction of the analogical and the digital in film, one is bound not only to challenge tendencies to determine what the quality new tech look should be like but also to question this all too dominant exclusive investment in the look (of quality via believability) —  often expressed through a sightless vision.

continuity in the digital passage Rowley: You observe the conventions of analogical filmmaking for much of the time in Night Passage. Instances in the film when you do manipulate the digital image are therefore quite striking because they are relatively rare, and most telling when they are barely visible. This brings me back to your choice of the Miyazawa story as a starting point for the film. In your “Time Paths” lecture at Leeds you spoke about the potential of digital technology for “sculpting and dilating time in new ways” and your interest in the “infra-­ordinary” use of postproduction special effects. In the scene in which the unhappy Kyra sits down with the flutist and homespun philosopher, an astonishing example of the “infra-­ordinary” occurs. As the man speaks the words “confront the night until you see the light in there,” a square expands, starting at the center of the frame. I don’t know what the technical term for the effect is; however, that nondiegetic movement within the image produces, for a split second, the illusion of sculptural relief. This is, if I am not mistaken, the first instance of a postproduction visual special effect in the film, and, as an “impossible” manifestation of the (analogical) cinematic image, it functions to open the passage of the film’s title — the passage between life and death — where

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the narrative of Miyazawa’s novel takes place. This is a brilliant example of using a postproduction technique unique to digital imaging as a formal tool for translating the “magic realism” of the narrative from literary to cinematic form. Trinh: You specifically grasp these visual details in their functions. I wouldn’t be surprised that a number of viewers see them as technical errors, but still, errors that they readily attribute to digital duplication or projection. The digital makes its reappearance in quite surreptitious and unexpected ways! I prefer that the touch of new technology be light in the film. Unlike escape, freedom is dangerous in its creativity and prone to misappropriations and misunderstandings. I assume that by “conventions of analogical filmmaking” you are pointing to photographic realism or the use of photographic image in its reference to and visual likeness with lived reality. If so, then yes, I was not doing away with photographic realism but using it otherwise. I was working in between, with both the film look and the video look, and within these two, with instances of non-­ and postphotographic digitization whose data space does away with external reference. The series of light squares related to the Immortals, whose motion across the screen recalls the train windows of the opening sequence, is another example I discussed earlier. In realizing a film event, I work less with digital per se than with the way of the digital. It’s not a question of producing a nonhuman, automated vision, nor that of turning every live-­action image into data for manipulation and special effect purposes. Understanding what is radical to digital imaging allows one to work differently with the experience of film and imaging, while soliciting from the viewer a new seeing, one in which the human, although all too visible, remains an other among others, no longer superior to the machine in terms of sight and speed, for example. In other words, we would have to learn to see wide into the depths of time, and hence to see not with our ordinary eye. In Night Passage the image’s surface of visual realism is punctuated with imperceptible (not invisible) disturbances. As with my other films, form is arrived at only to address the formless, for rather than being set in opposition, they constitute the two facets of every reality. Constantly in dissolution on the canvas of time are the many forms of life that appear while others disappear. Liquidity and dissolution run through the film. Since the focus is on passages, it is mostly in the transitions, in the in-­between of shots and sequences that dig-

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ital undoing and dissolving of the image — disintegration, decomposition, vanishing, and passing from image to nonimage — is perceived in its time course. The touch of time travel in the film is also light. The journey between the third and the fourth dimensions, between the departed, the living, and the dying, or between what we call past, present, and future is realized with little and barely perceptible effects. The same may be said of the way time is stretched in the relation between the bicycle ride, the journey on and off the train, and the death of one of the main characters. Despite the seemingly realistic look, very little of what may be viewed as the conventions of feature narratives is actually kept. To mention yet another example, one of the aesthetic choices that came in the process of working on the blueprint of the film was to have each main scene actualized in a long take and a camera gesture of its own. In other words, Jean-­Paul and I have mostly discarded the standard procedures of breaking a scene into master shots, medium shots, and close-­ups. (Unlike in my previous “documentary” films, there are very few close-­ups in this one.) In this cells-­ and-­rhizomes structure, where each scene has a temporality, a space and a place, a beginning and an ending of its own, we have also done away with the cutting back and forth between over-­the-­shoulder shots and reverse shots that is standard in scenes with conversation between two or more people. Instead the camera’s movement is choreographed so that it constantly moves — in the dark to the rhythm of our body-­in-­reception — until it achieves its full gesture in its time sequence. As with Borges’s city, this could be said to be a film event in which centers are everywhere and peripheries are nowhere. The substantial, reflexive, and transformative role that transit and transition play in the film is relevant to both its story and its use of digital technology. For me, one of the very significant shifts that digital technology has introduced in filmmaking and especially in cinematic storytelling concerns our very perception of continuity. With the immense flexibility that digital technology gives us in postproduction, what we keep or discard from the golden rules of film continuity is widely up to us and to our creativity. In other words, if experimentation in film has allowed us to challenge them, digital technology has freed us from the conventions around matching in action, location, camera position, and screen direction (that is, the spatial dynamics within the film frame or how a subject travels across the screen). Today there are so many possibilities

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in making transitions that we no longer need to follow the rules to achieve continuity, and those of us who have little need for a “continuity supervisor” on the crew can now relax. It is interesting in these times of rapid globalization to note, for example, the widespread use of certain facile transitional devices that require no knowledge of film conventions, no visual or mental investment — and no creativity. To achieve the trendy “cool” look and effect of high-­tech action and high-­speed mobility, and to tell viewers, for example, that the protagonist (who is now mostly a lone fighter on the run and an unbound world traveler) has changed his whereabouts on the globe, it suffices to show, through a rapid cut, a postcard shot of a city with its name in caption. Recklessly we scan the unending violence and leapfrog through a dozen capitals, from Washington to Berlin to Casablanca, during the unfolding of the narrative, with no need for any visual link between the shot or the cities, nor any rational connection in the flight across first world and third world nations. (The Bourne series is one example.) Amazing. Spectators don’t call these amateurish, because the high-­tech money image is there. Despite the semblance of freedom in creativity, their spread is symptomatic of the complexities of our time-­bound conditioning. How mainstream feature narratives quickly appropriate and dilute the demanding work of fragments, discontinuity, and exteriority inherent in experimental arts is intriguing.

man passenger in women’s time Rowley: In “Still Speed,” your conversation with Elizabeth Dungan about The Fourth Dimension in The Digital Film Event, you speak about what Paul Virilio calls “the third interval, the interval of speed-­light that is neither temporal nor spatial,” and you name such an interval “ ‘Women’s Time,’ as possibly defining Japan’s Time.” 4 In Milky Way Railroad Miyazawa’s travelers are two young male friends; in Night Passage the companions on the journey are two young women. Generally I am not surprised by the change, given your history of engagement with feminist politics; however, it also suggests a specific structural link between Night Passage and The Fourth Dimension. Night Passage concerns another kind of “third interval,” an interval that is neither life nor death, traversed in the bond of friendship between two women. Miyazawa’s story, and the gender transposition in its translation from literary to cinematic form, allows

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you to make, provides, it seems to me, the perfect vehicle for a more poetically resolved figuration of “Women’s Time” than could be achieved in The Fourth Dimension. Trinh: Great way to end and reopen our conversation. Night Passage showed to a number of audiences in Japan, and for me, the most memorable ones so far were those populated with “experts” on Miyazawa. I was expecting blows of all kinds, partly because Miyazawa has become a cultural monument after his death (for it is always difficult to touch a national icon), and partly because of the choices I’ve made in remaining loyal to him — not by illustrating the story but by keeping its spirit. This entails, as you know, a certain freedom in sketching my own night passage, and in the realm of form, the question of gender is not accidental; it is rather foundational. But for once, my attempt to brace up in getting ready for adversarial, fault-­finding comments proved to be useless. The receptions I have had there from artists, poets, writers, scholars of the “Kenji circle” (as a friend of mine calls it), and people of other professions who love or are related to Miyazawa were very intense, insightful, and moving. Viewers were struck by the scenes around the ship of death, the land and water border voyages, the nocturnal dimension of the journey, and the importance given to the work of light. Comments on the forms and trajectories of light in lighting abound. (“I” in Miyazawa’s poetry is a “blue illumination.”) Since these audiences know the story well (which is not necessarily the case with teen audiences), they were very attentive to details and to the “how” in what the performances came to actualize. After Night Passage showed in Tokyo and in a few other cities of Japan, I was invited to present the film at Miyazawa’s birthplace, in the prefecture of Iwate, as part of the Hanamaki City cultural activities and on the occasion of the 110th anniversary of Kenji’s birth, when an international conference on his legacy was also held. At the screening of Night Passage at the Iihatobu Center, whose audience knew little about my background and feminist work, I did get provocative questions related to the shift of gender. But as far as I could tell, they came largely from a place of curiosity, and the questioners seemed appeased when I linked the necessity of that shift to the role of inspiration; the difference in imagery and desire between boys and girls, or between Miyazawa and myself; and the foundational role of the experiential body in the descent into dark waters (as compared to Miyazawa’s ascent to heaven — a yearning seemingly closer in its image repertoire to Christianity than to Buddhism). 116  c o n v e r s a t i o n s

A male viewer further told me, somewhat reluctantly, after this same screening that actually he thought “the switch of gender made the film much stronger — stronger than the original story.” He said he was a bit annoyed at first, because he was pretty sure that such a bold change wouldn’t work, and came into the film with a lot of skepticism as to what I could do. But he was ultimately surprised by the whole journey. Another unexpected response was, for example, the one given to me by the scholar Nishi Masahiko, whose refined contribution to the Miyazawa event reminded the audience, among other things, of Tokyo imperialism and the shame of the colonized through the plight of peoples of the North and Northeast, like the Tohoku (Kenji’s birth region), and through the work on mythical epics by an Ainu woman, Chiri Yukie, who also died young, while in her bloom, in the same year as when Kenji’s sister died (1922). Nishi noted how Night Passage seemed “to have moved the disciples of Kenji, [who] discovered a new type of force, which had been latent in Kenji’s work.” He thought that my translation had given a different direction to previous understandings of Kenji, and further said that he was particularly moved by the “homosexual friendship” and by “the absolute youth of the two girls/boys.” This comment, which, for me, is very rich in what it does for the film, provides me with a link to your remark on “the third interval” and “Women’s Time.” Nishi recalls Chiri in reading Miyazawa, just as I saw the death of Kenji’s sister through every line of his poetry and got intensely involved in the D-­ passage (the dissolving digital passage and the three D’s invoked in the film) via his Night Train to the Stars or Milky Way Railroad. This is where the terms transfer and shift of gender seem more adequate than change or switch. These crossings in gender time, culture, geography, and technology bring to the fore the question of formed, barely formed, and unformed relations. Viewers in the United States involved in queer cultural politics have, for example, given insightful feedback on the multiplicity of forms of coupling, pairing, doubling, and teaming that are highlighted not only in the scene of the fire dancers but throughout Night Passage. Elated, as some of them told me, they were very attentive to the way the film focuses on the many possibilities of liaisons and alliances in relationships. Time lived in its course; space experienced in its indefinite multiplicity; bodies, metabolic and metallic, interpenetrating in their mutual affects on the

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surface of densely layered time. In a daring analysis of patriarchy, war, sexuality, and the economy of violence based on movement and vectors in Negative Horizon, Virilio wrote about man being the passenger of woman, not only in the way he came to the world through birth but also in their sexual relations. In other words, woman is the first transportation vehicle for the species and, in terms of both economics and politics, “the first transportation revolution.” In offering him free time, she “became ‘the future of man,’ his destiny and destination.” I will not go into this, but of interest to us here is women’s time in relation to what Virilio critically sees as the emergence of the locomotive body of the passenger and the acceleration of movement assimilated to a progression and to progress — “a curious blind alley in the history of movement,” as he puts it. The passage-­interval that characterizes women’s time is what Julia Kristeva called intra-­ and extrasubjective time, cosmic time, the time of “unnamable jouissance.” In feminist struggles, one recognizes the double political gesture, which consists of inserting women into history, all the while refusing the limiting linearity imposed by history’s time — time as departure, progression, and arrival. Linking the interval of speed-­light to this double gesture of women’s time, one can also put to use Deleuze’s musical notions of pulse time as related to optical vision in striated space and non–pulse time as related to haptic vision in smooth space. Between the double structure of internal tempo and external measure that characterizes the evolution of Western music and the free-­flowing, nonmeasured rhythm of extra-­European music, there is a third interval that is neither temporal nor spatial. And in the context of a trans­ national feminist temporality, I would simply say that between you and me, there are so many travelers — among both the living and the dead.

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Notes Alison Rowley is senior lecturer in historical, critical, and theoretical studies in visual art in the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster. Her book Helen Frankenthaler: Painting History, Writing Painting was published by I. B. Tauris in 2007. Her writing on contemporary art includes essays on aes+f, Chantal Akerman, Richard Billingham, Willie Doherty, Sarah Lucas, and Jenny Saville.  This interview was first published in Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the Image, edited by Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 111–33. 1. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 2. Timothy Binkley, “Refiguring Culture,” quoted in Rosen, Change Mummified, 319. 3. The formation Pol(e)itics was the title of Documenta X in 1997, and I am thinking of Night Passage as a film that functions in the way that Gayatri Spivak understands the relation between the political and the poetic when she writes the following in an interview for the Documenta X book: “The political is a calculus. That is why class must remain. But one must make it play, and when one makes it play then the ‘e’ comes in. That is when you loosen not just the rights but the responsibility in this very peculiar sense: attending to the other in such a way that you call forth a response. To be able to do this is what I am calling the poetic for the moment, because that brings in another impossible dimension, the necessary dimension of the political.” Catherine David and Jean François Chevrier, Documenta X: Pol(e)itics (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998), 768. 4. Trinh T. Minh-­ha, “Still Speed,” in The Digital Film Event (London: Routledge, 2005), 10–11.

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What’s Eons New? With Rosa Reitsamer

a drop of ink: resistance and representation Rosa Reitsamer: As the title for the book is New Feminism: Worlds of Feminism, Queer and Networking Conditions, I would like to start the interview with the conception of “difference” and “third world” developed in your book Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Sexual, cultural or “ethnic” differences are interconnected on different levels to questions of representation and visibility. For centuries we couldn’t find any representations of queer, black, Jewish, or “third world” women in the fields of culture and art in Western societies, and the ones that were available reproduced the white Western imagination with the “other” and “otherness.” In the past decades, mainstream culture happily absorbs any representations of “otherness” and “difference,” and ethnic, cultural, and sexual minorities have become more visible. But at the same time, the whole machinery of (re)producing stereotypes has not changed much. Therefore questions on visibility and representation need to be reformulated and different strategies need to be found. How would you estimate these changing processes of visibility and representation of minorities in the past decades? According to the above description of changing modes of visibility, how can we — as women, feminists, and queers with different backgrounds, stories, positions in society — make “differences” productive for resistance these days? Trinh t. Minh-­h a: There’s a tendency, in the way we raise questions, to focus on results — especially on those all too visible that can be easily identifiable and measurable. Despite this irresistible yearning for immediate gratification, struggles for freedom are carried out not because we think we will instantly

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obtain results and change things to our advantage overnight but because somewhere inside, we feel our riverbanks breaking open. There rises from our overflowing, larger-­than-­self state something we want to yell out to the world. Every single seed has the potential to bear fruit, but whether, when, and how that fruit ripens still depends on many circumstantial factors. Moreover what can easily be offered as a solution in the short term rarely works in the long term. History is full of figures whose fights against injustice have more to do with necessities than with mere successes or “victories.” These figures are the ones who live on within us today. No processes of change can be generalized without our taking into consideration the differences of contextual and circumstantial forces. In Western progressive milieus, one can say that the claim to self-­representation among marginalized groups has been both challenged and expanded by a more acute awareness of the politics of representation. Difference and “third world” are just two concepts among the many explored in Woman, Native, Other. I don’t particularly hold onto them. They are temporary sites of discussion that have allowed me to enter the struggle for freedom through the doors of postcolonial theories, to question related power relations, and to engage in the problematics of gender, ethnic, and profession identity, involving, for example, practices of naming, voicing, and locating in the quest for knowledge and truth. Mainstream cultures of capitalist societies excel in consuming difference, giving it its limited share of visibility once it is fitted into recognizable categories of the special, the lesser, the minor, the queer, the poor, the old, the abnormal, the handicapped, the alien, or even the alternate. This is why, in these strange times of “shock-­and-­awe” war scenarios, far from reaching its end, the struggle has gained in unprecedented scale, magnitude, and scope. To introduce change, one would have to shift one’s own ground and see things anew. Looking through the lens of ideological critique and focusing on stereotypes and visibility doesn’t lead us very far. Rather than going for the new object of study, the new product to consume, one should work on new ways of seeing, of being, or of living the world. Perhaps it is time to look at the nature of our own understanding of what you just called “productive resistance” and to assess how — in our very “resistance” — we may have been working in complicity with what we set out to criticize. What makes global fear and

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intolerance possible? As we look at the conditions that continue to feed the climate of hatred and destruction with which we live today, perhaps what hasn’t changed much is our own landscape of beliefs, our sense of righteousness, or of failure and success, for example. With racial, sexist, class, and religious discriminations becoming so glaringly visible in recent local and global events, it is worth reviving the call of certain feminists as well as leaders of the third world, such as the ex-­president of Haiti, Aristide, to “democratize democracy.” As I’ve said elsewhere, a drop of ink can change the composition of a glass of water. Or of the ocean — even if that change is not visible to the eye. For me, this is the force of each individual’s active contribution in society. Despite all the pessimism voiced, I am very confident in the impact of that drop in every moment and aspect of our lives.

“red” and “gray” and “inappropriate/d other” Reitsamer: In your impressive body of work, you develop certain tools and instruments to work on borders, to push them forward, to bridge gaps between dualism and antagonism. As I understood, you use terms such as inappropriate other/same or the color red or gray as tools and instruments to resist appropriation and exploitation. How can these tools and instruments work within the Western context of “interculturality,” “intersubjectivity,” and “inter-­/transdisciplinarity”? How can they work outside the Western capitalist spheres? How can we use the term inappropriate other/same or even the colors red and gray to diminish hierarchies in a society based on gender and “race”/ethnicity? Trinh: These tools are inter-­, cross-­, and transcultural by nature. They arise from the encounter of what one can call Eastern and Western thoughts and are explored at the very critical threshold of the latter’s differences in my writings. So they already work across different contexts of subjectivities, cultures, and disciplines, to use your terms. Your being receptive to them today, despite our different backgrounds and the gap in time, is an example. Rather than returning to the “inappropriate” and “inappropriated” other, or the color red, on which I have written and spoken at some length, I can shortly recall here the work I’ve done on gray, a color I often wear as well as purple, in

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their wide range of hues. There’s a whole palette of midway colors, and I am now doing work on sky blue. . . . I remember when I first gave a talk on gray, it was at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, on a panel with Peter Sellars and the Palestinian filmmaker Michel Kheilifi. The organizers were very eager to involve Palestinian voices and outsiders’ voices like mine. I thought about the position I assumed on the color line in that context and I decided to elaborate on gray. I was then working with “twilight,” as a state of both light and mind transition, and was linking it to the concept of Rikyu gray that underlies Japanese aesthetics since the later Edo period. The history of gray in Japanese culture is substantial and very nuanced. It used to be negatively associated with such words as ash and rat, but thanks to Master Soeki’s (aka Sen no Rikyu) spiritual art of tea in the sixteenth century, people became very fond of it, and names for the innumerable shades yielded by this color had proliferated accordingly. Unlike the gray in the West, which is conceived of as a mixture of black and white, Rikyu gray, as Kisho Kurokawa characterizes it, is a combination of four colors: red, blue, yellow, and white. In this “color of no color,” all colors can be said either to cancel each other out or to transform each other so radically as to affect their familiar appearances. The new hue is a distinct color of its own, neither black nor white but somewhere midway, where possibilities are indefinite. In color genetics, gray is at the center of humans’ sphere of colors. A human is gray in the midst of the chromatic world. And gray, as we’ve seen, is composed at its core of multiplicities. Similarly, twilight, the in-­between of endings and beginnings, or of two lights, two worlds, is a becoming-­no-­thing moment in which the play on the visible and the invisible creates a sense of intense ephemeral reality — or of life as no more and no less than an interval between birth and death. Gray conceived and lived as multiplicities and possibilities rather than as binaries and oppositions can lead us to far-­reaching transformations in terms of foreign policies, of geo-­and biopolitics on the world map. With the ongoing cruelties, oppression, and destruction in the Middle East as well as in other parts of the globe, the audience who came to listen to us panelists at the film festival was extremely receptive to the impact of such a self-­and-­world view. Some of them were moved to tears, for, as they told me, this was their daily

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reality, and it sufficed that they looked up at the common sky to clearly see such wealth of colors every evening, as the day was nearing its end.

the sap that matters Reitsamer: With each film you want to transform the way you see yourself and the world, to transform people’s ways of seeing and experiencing films, and to transform filmmaking. How do these different levels of transformation interact in your films? I think that the production of meaning is important to bring about a change in the conventional ways of viewing films. Which methods, tools, and strategies do you use for the production of meaning in your films? Did your methods, tools, and strategies change since you started filmmaking? Trinh: The external and internal demands of a work do not preexist its making. It’s not part of what I can plan for or control ahead of time. Each film offers a process of its own. Each calls for strategies and generates tools of its own, as required by the specific context that defines it and is defined by it — all of which I have discussed at length in my books Framer Framed, Cinema Interval, and The Digital Film Event. Changes are therefore inevitable from one film to another. For example, what works intimately for Reassemblage can neither be repeated nor applied to Naked Space, Shoot for the Contents, or The Fourth Dimension. Similarly the structural principles that lend themselves to the making of a digital fiction film like Night Passage have little to do with those that inform the choices of A Tale of Love or Surname Viet Given Name Nam. There are no uniform ground rules, no single method, and no ready-­made prescription possible — only an on-­site alertness, an actively receptive awareness that manifests itself in each encounter and each instance of making or experiencing film. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the films lack structure or meaning. On the contrary, rather than being imposed as a one-­size-­fits-­all mold into which a diversity of contents may be poured without much consideration as to how the two relate, structure is here integral to the demands of each work. The latter has no preconceived form. Focusing primarily on meaning, story, or message is the most conventional way of viewing films. We are here confined to the realm

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of relative interpretation. So focusing on the production of meaning may take us a step further into the realm of “reading” (as used in contemporary theories), allowing us to scrutinize means and processes. But even then, such an approach may immediately meet with its limits if it is viewed separately from the production of form — and vice versa. The two cannot be separated. As I use the term, form and the politics of form cannot be reduced to questions of genres, styles, and composition or of representation. In ancient African and Asian “arts,” if composition, legibility, or resemblance never really constitutes the criteria for true artistic work, it is mainly because, rather than abiding by form or content, emphasis is laid on the “breath” that animates a work and brings it to life. In my practice, such a work remains attentive to its own “nature,” to the movement of its unseen undercurrents, and to its continual processes of formation and deformation. Highly attuned to moments of transition and to the transience of visible realities, it is free to move between genres, between the photographic realism of mainstream films and the antirepresentative materiality of experimental films. As an example, I would just mention here the last digital fiction film I made, Night Passage. As usual, audiences across contexts, including those of the art and experimental film world, tend to watch it either with anticipation for story, message, character, dialogue, conflict, action, and setting — all built to the norms of commercial features — or they watch it with expectations for “visionary” formalism such as optical wizardry obtained through distorting lenses or extravagant camera movements and positions, or else narrative fragmentation and discontinuity devised through irrational plot, disjunct combinations, and antiplastic, anti-­aesthetic, antirealist imagery. The experience of film is much richer. It cannot be reduced to such a form-­ or-­content binary. Other than a “good story” and visual feats or antifeats, there are other dimensions, often unseen and literally unseeable but intensely dealt with in my work. For example, I made The Fourth Dimension to call attention explicitly to the dimension of time as related, among others (space, height, size, duration, speed), to that of light — creative and spiritual light, in darkness. The differing time-­space possibilities that digital film can offer through layering and compositing are indefinite.

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Night Passage brings that sense of time and light even further, as film is here spatially construed as a time journey that enables many time journeys; in other words, as a time interval in which time intervals contain one another potentially ad infinitum. The relation between the one and the many is like the two facets of a coin: full on the one side and empty on the other. For, as digital technology clearly exemplifies, without the constant return to invisibility, the visible cannot be. Like ripples on the surface of water, the passage between life and death is full of passages. The film’s aesthetic fabric is basically that of a time frame within other time frames. Rather than pursuing the illusion of the three-­dimensional, it offers an experience of the two-­dimensional that leads directly to the fourth. It is conceived with an arbitrary beginning and ending and with rhythmic comings and goings suddenly dissolving into one another. In the choreography of movements of appearances and disappearances, the linear and the cyclical are both strongly featured. Again, they are necessarily nonoppositional structural devices, for they emphasize what one can call the nonillusory aspect of film reality. All of my films explore that fluid relation to infinity within the finite. To use an image, it is not only the shape or the flowers and fruits of a plant that matter; it’s the sap that runs through it. Appearances are appearances and images are images. They are not opposed to substance, nor do they try to pass for lived reality, since they have their own living reality, their own nonhuman individuation as appearance and as image. Every film manifestation is experienced as being at once definite in its structural condensation and indefinite in the fluidity of its spirit. In the tuning in with the forces of a life event, one can say that form is attained only to address the formless. Working with an ear and eye for the empty field of possibilities and potentials allows one to remain in touch with the infiniteness of a form that is also no form. Rather than merely speaking of production of images or of meaning, one can approach filmmaking as a net of under-­and crosscurrents  — a manifesting of forces.

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the labeling of . . . Reitsamer: In the past decades, it has become popular to find labels for the musical and artistic productions of minorities. In my opinion, labels such as “Balkan jazz” (“Balkan” as a prefix for any kind of cultural production for people from the former Eastern Europe), “urban music” (as a synonym for “black music”), or “world music” have become marketing tools for (re)packaging “Eastern art” or “black music” for a white, Western audience, and furthermore, these labels have been created in order to make it easier for white, Western artists to participate in “black music,” “Eastern music,” or “world music” genres without worrying about political issues that listeners might anticipate with these terms. In the use of the terms “Eastern art,” “urban music,” or “world music” as marketing tools for any kind of music developed by minorities living inside and outside the Western spheres, there are two major points missing. First, the influence of migrants and migration movements in the development’s hybrid sounds, and second, the relation between the terms “world music” / “urban music” / “Balkan jazz” and the living conditions of migrants based in Western European and U.S. cities. How do you interpret these processes of labeling? What experience do you have with labeling your work? Do you think that these labels and terms can be used in an emancipating way? Trinh: Labels, like names, are guests of realities. On the one hand, we are constantly ordering and classifying so as to tame, neutralize, or facilitate consumption in naming. On the other hand, assimilation, rejection, and reappropriation are part of the strategic struggle of marginalized people. At best, labels also enable the neglected, the forgotten, or the disenfranchised to gain a certain visibility and to form new alliances. There are dominant homogenizing practices (as rightly exemplified in your questioning of white Western artists’ participation), but no homogeneous context of reception for the labels you mentioned. Furthermore, in trying to link arts and politics, you point to migration movements and the living conditions of migrants. But here again, it all depends on how you take up these questions —  quite trendy in certain academic milieus, together with those of citizenship, communities, and the nation-­state. “Migrants” is a label much contested today

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by those to whom it is readily applied. In this era of “postethnic” youth, the term could prove to be highly discriminatory since it tends to call upon originary ethnicities of nonwhite groups, thereby separating them from the rest of the population even when many of them are born in Europe and America rather than in remote “third world” lands. There’s no pristine place from which to work, and as long as closures are not received merely as closures but also as possibilities for new openings, critical inquiry continues its course. The function of labels should be primarily strategic and deconstructive, especially in marginalized contexts, for the constant undoing of what is given is here a necessary tool of survival.

more underdog than the underdog Reitsamer: Since the 1980s there has been an ongoing feminist debate about science, knowledge, epistemology, and gender that is connected to questions of “standpoint.” At the beginning of these discussions, theorists such as Sandra Harding and Patricia Hill Collins suggested that feminist social science should be practiced from the standpoint of women, because women are a subordinated group in society who can see and understand the world in perspectives that are different from the existing male-­biased knowledge. These theories have been further developed: not only the women’s standpoint but also a marginalized standpoint would be more appropriate to produce emancipating and critical knowledge. According to these discussions of who actually could be the subject to produce emancipating knowledge and science, I think Donna Haraway’s statement is crucial, that there doesn’t exist an innocent position in society and that not every marginalized position is a useful one. But in the end, in my opinion, the question remains: How can we position ourselves so as not to contribute to everyday sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-­Semitism? Trinh: “Everyone wants to be the underdog nowadays,” as a performance artist friend of mine used to say laughingly. Is such a trend an unconscious homage to our struggles of liberation (“white envy” was a concept much discussed among some black British thinkers in the 1980s), or is it rather one of these

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“liberal” moves to shuffle the cards, appropriate the front line, and dilute the effect of voices from the margins? I understand your stance and the difficulties of having to walk through a minefield — something everyone who knows the taste of oppression routinely experiences in the dominant’s terrain. It would be so simple if we could just solve all these questions once and for all and settle for the worse of what political correctness could produce, as if a one-­size-­fits-­all prescription could be at all possible. . . . After all, how nice it is sometimes to be useless, the way women and artists are often made to feel in their activities. Without uselessness, life could be very contrived and deadening. Nothing is “natural” when it is a question of position, perspective, mind frame, viewpoint, or standpoint, as you put it. And there’s nothing unusual in the fact that underprivileged members of society are often endowed with a double consciousness, or at least two simultaneous views in any life situation (those of both the dominant and the dominated), because of the way they have been socialized. When you don’t have the means or are simply not driven by much of what seems to rule over the thinking and doing of the majority around you, it may be clearer to you that you do not have to hold on to something you can neither possess nor keep forever, whether this is physical, mental, or emotional ownership. Taking women and the question of gender as a departure point or a strategic position to question what tends to be taken for granted in relation to knowledge and power is not the same as legitimizing this in order to occupy and exclude. Being attentive, conscious, and aware, like being alive, cannot be retrieved or prescribed for validation purposes. The challenge of emancipation knows no single time frame and no boundary.

new feminism? Reitsamer: Since the 1980s there have been discussions on the systems of domination and how we can analyze the interaction with racism, homophobia, colonialism, and class in a “matrix of domination” (Hill Collins). These discussions and theory are summarized under the term intersectionality. At the same time, new agents, such

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as black feminists, cyber feminists, and feminists from postcommunist countries, have become visible, and the queer movements are important to rethinking today’s position and situation of feminism. According to these developments, do you think that we can speak of “new feminism”? And if so, what do you think is actually new? Trinh: As you can tell from our discussion all along this interview and as mentioned in my book The Digital Film Event, what is “new” is not so much to be found in new products, concepts, and images but in the possibility of a new seeing, to use the term in its generic, inclusive sense. The question is not only “What do you see?” but “With what eyes do you see?” I am not returning here to the question of perspective and viewpoint that we’ve just discussed. Rather it’s something closer to the power of renewing oneself, of being “reborn” and seeing the unsame world, the unsame reality with fresh eyes. The same old eye is an eye entrenched in one facet of the coin. I am reminded here of Assia Djebar’s writings on women of Algiers, in which she spoke of the many body eyes — the breast, navel, sex organ, for example. The eye of the dominated is a site of multiplicity. And each site offers a sight, as well as a way of seeing or gazing back of its own. The female body that goes outside or is seen in public constitutes a danger in its very nature, for a woman moving around freely, making herself vulnerable to abuse by exposing herself to every look, is always a threat to the male prerogative of scopic exclusivity. If I were to linger on the side of daylight and of visibility (the more easily talked about facet of the coin), with its politics of difference in naming, I would agree with you and say that one way to point to the “new” in feminism is to locate it at the junction of the postcolonial, the post-­and transhuman, the cyber, the transnational, the color and queer struggles. At best, each of these labels forms a net of potentials of its own, and each refers to a distinct junction, a different possibility in exploring feminism as related to the social matrix of domination you mentioned. But this being said, what seems more important is to scrutinize the prefixes inter-­, post-­, and trans-­ as well as retro-­, arrière-­, and avant-­ that define our times. What happens, for example, to each of these prefixes if time (and progress) is not conceived as a line in chronological order but as a perfect circle (the

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Eternal Return) or as so many spirals, each with its own cycles of renewal? For the new to be, one would have to be committed to the possibility of newness. In other words, what in a system makes it a “living system”? The ability to dwell as well as move with — moments of instability and vulnerability, of passage and new return — rather than the clever skill, as promoted by computer technology, to accumulate and tabulate, to chart the befores and afters, and to sort out the rights and wrongs of information is part of what has enabled the possible new. There are truly no new thinking, new writing, or new objects per se, only new combinations, new relationships, and new possibilities. Addressing the complex conditions created with global technologies is also not merely remodeling or updating our identity through new means, as Marina Grzinic pointed out in the context of Eastern Europe and postsocialism. In the ongoing questioning of nation-­states, the division of the world into first, second, and third continues to disintegrate; so does the hierarchical order based on economic development and the primacy of material reality. What seems to emerge in this climate of dissolution and globalization is the difficult politics of alliance based on the constant deterritorializing of the very ground on which one stands. Such a politics inevitably includes strong currents of reterritorializing that remain at best strategic, circumstantial, and contingent. In feminist and queer of color contexts today, gender as identification has become much more difficult to naturalize. So are race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, and class, for example. Woman is being lived and claimed fluidly, not as a personal or impersonal identity but as a form of individuation (rather than individualism), as a multiplicity, a “crowd, a one-­woman march, procession, parade,” “a horizontal vertigo,” an “oblique” dance, “a porteña,” to use some of Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s terms in her Buenos Aires. For me, being part of the feminist struggle is to continue, almost blindly and each time anew, to indicate the possibility of a different path of resistance, or simply of being-­with — one engaged in the perpetual task of “gendering” and “queering” dominant forms of thinking and practices, including one’s own, especially when they tend to take themselves for granted in defining what constitutes the “feminist,” “queer,” “postcolonial,” “postcommunist,” or “transnational”—  as it is often the case with any label. Questioning power relations, reconceiving the relationship between the one

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and the many, seeing the potential of the utterly singular in the global, or using invisibility while working with visibility, for example, are some of the moves that allow us not only to beat the Master at his own game but also to fare fearlessly between established forms — and hence to remain free to assimilate, to reject, or to differ, while keeping an eye on the potentials of voiding. The “new” lies in the way we conceive of “newness.” What appears new may be eons old, but it is new because, ultimately, we feel new.

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Note Rosa Reitsamer holds a PhD in sociology and is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Music Sociology at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria. Her publications address the questions of how agency is achieved in youth cultures and popular music scenes and how gender and ethnicity are negotiated by cultural producers. Her monograph “When Will I Be Famous? Die Do-­It-­Yourself Karrieren von djs” will be published in 2013.  This interview was first published in New Feminism: Worlds of Feminism, Queer and Net­working Conditions, edited by Marina Grzinic and Rosa Reitsamer (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2007), 317–27.

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The Politics of Forms and Forces With Eva Hohenberger

prologue Eva Hohenberger: You started filming as an amateur, after studying comparative literature and music and after living in Senegal for some years. Could you talk a little bit about your beginnings as a filmmaker? How did you get involved, and how do you conceive of the status of the “amateur”? Trinh t. Minh-­h a: I don’t really see myself as an amateur, nor do I have any affinity with the “professional” and the normative claims that accompany such an identification. These terms have very little relevance in my context, although I appreciate the way certain thinkers, like Barthes or Deren, redefined the amateur as an independent, “counterbourgeois artist” through their practices. I’m thinking here of the link drawn with amator, the one who loves, and hence of the emphasis put on pleasure and raw substance rather than on competition and conventional mastery. Filmmaking is certainly a work of love for me; so are writing and composing music. I never thought I would be a filmmaker. It happened quite accidentally in 1980, when I had just returned to the States from three years of research and teaching music in Senegal. I was undergoing cultural shock, having moved from a vibrant, collective lifestyle in Dakar to the rather dull, isolated, and highly individualistic context of academic life in Norman, Oklahoma. There were many reasons for making the difficult decision to leave Senegal, especially with regard to the educational system, which had been inherited from the old, pre-­1968 French system. But, as with every loss, there’s a gain. It was during that most depressive period of change that I began my activities as a filmmaker. I befriended a number of artists teaching at the university there and was introduced to the crafts of filmmaking through the generous exchanges I had with the filmmaker Deborah Meehan. She now teaches at Pratt in New

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York. It was thanks to her and to her assistant Charlie Woodman that I learned filmmaking, from a to z, and independently from the mercantile demands of the film industry. Hohenberger: Your first films have been documentaries (Reassemblage, Naked Spaces — Living Is Round); in the meantime you have made seven films, two of them fictional. How do you conceive of the relationship between the two genres? Are there some things, some issues that interested you but couldn’t be represented in a documentary? By what criteria do you choose? Trinh: A film is primarily a film. At best, genres can be viewed convivially as different processes of reality and multiple creative practices for freedom. But in the film world, they are often hardened into definite categories bound to the politics of production, exhibition, and distribution that determines the way people fund, consume, and evaluate cinema. They set up hierarchical divisions aimed at reiterating prevailing power relationships. For me, the best documentaries are those that remain aware of their fictional nature as image, and the best fictions are those that document the reality of their own fictions. People often ask whether my making feature narratives is indicative of a shift in my itinerary as a filmmaker, because they tend to think that we can work in only one category. But the one luxury that independent filmmaking offers us is precisely the ability to shuttle — not necessarily from one category to another but between categories. Whether the result leans more toward the documentary or the fictional side depends largely on the subject and the creative process. In my practice, for example, documentary may refer to an outside-­in movement, whereby images are created by letting the world come to us with every move. And fiction may refer to an inside-­out movement, in which images are produced by reaching out to the world from the inside. These movements easily overlap in the in-­between realm. If the materials recorded dictate the form the film will take, the subject of exploration designates which process would be most adequate for its unfolding. Hohenberger: Besides filming you have also written extensively, and all of your work, be it written or filmed, very strongly resists a clear assignment to a certain generic category. You always emphasize the space “in between” or, concerning your way of

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working, “the jump into the void,” which means a kind of productive space that opens up new possibilities beyond the narrowness of certain aesthetic categories. But even if your work constantly crosses generic boundaries, such boundaries are nonetheless a necessary precondition for recognizing that you always try to transcend them. Only by knowing that there is such a category as “documentary” will saying — as you did — that “there is no such thing as documentary” make sense. Isn’t that a constant paradox in your work, that it must necessarily presuppose boundaries to be able to work on their crossings? Trinh: Your raising this question and gearing our conversation toward the documentary is largely due to our context of production — to the fact that this interview is meant for a book on documentary filmmakers. So the question performs that very paradox it is pointing to and tells us something about the conditions for paradoxes. It’s important not to confuse the film with the discussion around it or with the theoretical work that comes with it. What the experience of film offers cannot be duplicated or explained verbally. This is why, as said in Reassemblage, “I do not speak about” but only “nearby.” This applies to the nature of the commentary or the aphorisms in the film as well as to my own practice as I speak and write. I theorize with my films, not about them. The relationship between the verbal, the musical, and the visual, just like the relationship between theory and practice, is not one of illustration, description, or explication. It can be one of inquiry, displacement, and expansive enrichment. Rather than merely serving meaning and message, the verbal forms a parallel track and has its own creative dimension. In public debates and in interviews, the terms of the discussion are initially determined by concerns of viewers that are not necessarily the initial concerns of the filmmaker. My intentions and motivations are only part of what goes into the readings and theories advanced, which are also built on the unpredicted interactions among elements in the work and are often densely populated by other people’s feedback. Boundaries come primarily with viewers’ expectations, and one addresses them as one learns of them. Rather than being the preconditions for any creative work, they are pseudo-­problems that arise with our limits in reception. As I’ve specified elsewhere, my films are not made in reaction to anything; this is not enough to motivate me to create. They are

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made because of a number of strong encounters and feelings, such as the love that one has for one’s subjects of inquiry, for example. It may help to read the quote you made in context. I wrote, “There is no such thing as documentary . . . despite the very visible existence of a documentary tradition.” The paradox is here fully acknowledged; it is part of the provocation issued to draw people’s attention to the documentary establishment’s misleading claims. On the one hand, anyone working intimately with the reality and the materiality of film would feel at odds with categories that merely reflect the way society compartmentalizes knowledge into “expertise” for the purposes of control and consumption. When assumed, the place of paradoxes, which exceeds reaction and opposition, can be a very lively place.

the aesthetics of documentary Hohenberger: After seeing your last film Night Passage, it seems a little strange to address you as a documentary filmmaker. The film tells the story of a girl who becomes adult by overcoming severe experiences of loss — she has lost her mother and her best friend — in a way, through aesthetic experiences. In a certain sense one could say that this is a canonical story in which the topic of a journey is read in a psychological way; traveling becomes exploring the yet unknown self by exposing oneself to yet unknown experiences. But what is striking is that the journey may also be seen as a kind of time travel through the history of artistic media, or better, through the aesthetic use of media — aesthetic in the very basic sense of perception. Kyra, the main figure, is given an opportunity to perceive, one might even say the “healing” force of aesthetic experience, which is strongly tied to the body. Her commitment to the art forms presented is not just watching, as usually encountered in cinema, and seeing is always related to a bodily sensation or action. For example, there is a wonderful scene where she experiences sounds together with taste, or another one where she and her friends experiment with colors making sounds depending on how they move on the colored surfaces. The film might be seen as a strong argument for the synaesthetic pleasures offered by all kinds of aesthetic media production. I see here a link to your documentaries because they work with similar principles of synaesthetic pleasure. The most basic one is that of rhythm, which I feel to be at the center of Naked Spaces, not only in the film’s use of indigenous music but in its reverberations through your use of verbal repetition in the commentary. Can we take Night Passage as a statement about your aesthetic commit-

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ment and position aside from the boundaries between genres? Would you say that there is a specific aesthetic position in your work, and how would you yourself describe it? Trinh: There are many ways to name this commitment. I would say that my films are made to shift our perception of reality and experience of cinema —  which involves the whole of our body. This is aesthetics’ radical force. When reality starts speaking to one differently, one can easily “get high” with aesthetics, as it also leads to what I’ve called an elsewhere within here. Indeed without an awareness of its social and existential dimension, aesthetics remains largely conventional and normative. The politics of form, which includes but is not reduced to the politics of representation, may be said to be a constant in my work. So is the spirit of witnessing that runs through the films, cutting across genres and categories. It is very apt to take Night Passage as a point of departure for discussing my aesthetic position, but as with every film I’ve made, the commitment is always at least twofold — two, not merely as a duality, but as a radical shifter that designates many twos or a multiplicity. Structuring artistic principles can be perceived simultaneously in their plastic and cinematic effects and in their social implications. Every statement advanced in the film can be understood within its story space or in the gap between screen and spectator, as a reflexive device and a witnessing voice. The matter is the form. By committing to form one commits to content, and vice versa. As with my previous films, which offer multilevel perception and reception, Night Passage is made to function on more than one level of reality. And while all levels are interactively related, each runs independently with its own rules and logic. For example, when the little boy in Night Passage remarks, “This train is weird,” one can receive this on more than one level: on the story level, as a mere comment on the train that he’s riding; on the level of the spiritual journey of the characters; or on the level of the film itself unrolling on screen. As noted by the storytellers onboard, it’s a train running in the “fourth dimension,” neither on steam nor on electricity, whose clatter is the sound we hear inside us: “It just runs, because that’s what it is supposed to do.” You have noticed how the psychological travel could also be a time travel through artistic means. During this voyage in time, the train not only presents itself in its double dimension — both outside and inside — as an odd bodily train, Kyra’s everyday life train (from

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which she says she “can’t get off, because those who stand alone are always made fun of”); it also represents the film as a strip of celluloid, a train of still images speeding on screen. The time-­space in which the different materials of the cinematic fabric —  images, graphics, words, music, and environmental sounds — are woven is that of a multiplicity. Their expansive relation in my films is not one of domination and subordination. Ear and eye, for example, never duplicate one another. They interact in counterpoints, syncopations, off-­beats, and polyrhythms, to borrow some musical terms. Rhythm is the base from which form is created and undone. It determines both social and sensual relationships. In the play of hear and see, silence and sound, stillness and movement, many viewers have vocally remarked that images in my films make them hear while the sound track makes them see. The hearing eye and the speaking ear are constantly at play, and form is arrived at only to address the formless. These are the two facets of a single process — or of life and death. Hohenberger: Even if  Night Passage is a fiction film, there are some documentary parts in it. All the artists Kyra meets seem to play themselves, and while representing figures of the fictional world they perform their arts as they would do on stage. Some of them even give statements about their work, like the sculptor. So in a certain sense one might call the film at least partly a documentary about some individual artists. On the other hand, the topic of doubling seems very prominent in the film: Kyra and her friend often watch scenes that double their lives; the two girls double each other like the female dancers double the girls; there are two storytellers, and even the fathers of the girls seem to double each other. In the prominence of the motif one might see a reworking of the problem of identity but also a statement about the ontological nature of photographic arts, which double the object/person before the camera. When you speak about the “witnessing spirit” of the film, is there any connection here between “to witness” and “to double”? Trinh: What a great coupling. Your comment on doubling in relation to the issue of identity and the nature of photographic art is absolutely right on the mark. I have elaborated elsewhere about alterity being radical to the definition of an image. My image is there where I am not, literally and physically speaking. The encounter with my otherness and the spectral me can be very disturbing. Some of my psychoanalyst friends are, for example, very sensitive

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to mirrors in a room. As I happen to have plenty of them at home for feng shui purposes (the science of living with the environment), when these friends come to visit me, they scrupulously turn their backs to the mirrors. In art across cultures, representations in doubles of divinities or plants and animals, for example, refer to the double aspect of every life force: the yin-­yang of existence or the positive-­negative of things, both in terms of social values and of photographic imaging. As in a process of sedimentation, the self’s geological layers can unexpectedly show its ancient colors when the many buried me’s surface into the conscious me through small and big incidences. The double in the domain of self-­knowledge is quite common; so is the reading of the encounter with one’s double as a sinister event. To see one’s double is to see oneself dead. In their night passage, most of the encounters Kyra and Nabi have as they enter darkness upon leaving the train are those likely to open a window into their true nature (as with Kyra in her identity struggle) and to invite them gradually, in diverse exposures, to get “in the water,” so to speak. Here the water that kills is also the water at the source of beings. Echoes, twins, mirrors, couples, and doubles abound in the film. The two young women’s voyage is strewn with echoing words, laughter, and sounds; with digital images that mirror and repeat ad infinitum in immortality; and with enlaced bodies that struggle in the dances of fire and water. The two train stations where Kyra and Nabi get off are those of Sound and Word and Light and Dance — the very elements of cinema. Ear, eye, and the whole of the body are solicited in this experience of the flame and the flow. One can say that as a witness of her own death, Nabi enters a different phase of dying with each encounter made on screen. An ending turns out to be another beginning, for, with the loss of a friend at the close of the film, Kyra also finds herself and her mother anew. In fact only the beginning and the ending of the film refer to its fictional source of inspiration, which is a novel by Kenji Miyazawa. The rest, or the entire development of the film, remains ambivalent in its status, because the material shot is largely based on collaborative work and on performances improvised by the artists involved: the sculptor; the robot-­designer and philosopher; the musicians on screen (drummers and electronic composers); the cyberscientist and technicians; the many fire performers, masked dancers, and twin dancers who move in pairs. This constitutes the documentary part of the film, which

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focuses not so much on the individual artists per se but on their practices of art as means of transformation. Witnessing as the main guiding spirit of the film is not manifested only in the protagonists’ roles through the encounters they make; it is also very explicit in the way the camera refuses to enter the realm of psychological realism by consistently looking at and from the exterior. There is no attempt to “get inside the characters” or what they express. Jean-­Paul and I have devised each scene as a self-­contained gesture and event, so there are almost no close-­ups, except as an explicit marker in core moments of transition, and no shot-­reverse-­shot, not even in conversational situations, as normatively required. Witnessing, not merely as grasping something on the run, as in news coverage, but as a state of consciousness, a relation to knowledge and the self in which the indefinite doubling and multiplying unsettles any sense of fixed identity. In short, witnessing as way of living fully: the open ear and eye that let things come on their own accord and at their own pace. Hohenberger: I would like to talk about another scene in Night Passage that I liked very much and that seems to point to certain problems of documentary as well. It is the scene where the two girls meet the (female) scientist: she starts talking by reading a definition of an animal, then asks the two girls to help her hang filing cards on a clothing line. She then talks about language itself, thereby literally losing her head (her head goes out of focus). For me, this scene formulates a funny and self-­ironic statement about scientific work that, after all, forms part of your own work. Starting with the desire to get a hold of things by naming them correctly and having the statement written down, science ends up with the ambiguities of language itself; if language can’t catch the world, how could images? And what could this mean for documentary, which for Bill Nichols belongs to the same “discourse of sobriety” as science? Trinh: Yes, well said, for language, like the image, is fictional by nature. Scientific findings can be far more “incredible” than religious beliefs or outer space imagination. For me, the most moving and challenging works in the sciences are those that remain aware of the inevitable role of fiction in furthering experiments. Science needs poetry, and no scientific description can be separated from its mode of observation. The performative and self-­reflexive scope of the scene you mention extends to the entirety of the film. The researcher-­performer (Aunt Wolf in the film) tells us of her need to have her lines spread out in front

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of her — hence the hanging of the filing cards — to help her remember them for delivery. As part of the processual filmic fabric that unfolds in front of the viewer, words question words, sounds echo sounds, internal and external voices mingle, while inquiries about the way these are being consumed are heard aloud. The scene also features the web of endless words in which we fare as “the sound people make . . . that can be caught hold of since each person has a different vibe.” With new technology, as remarked by the woman researcher, “sound prints are like fingerprints and soon, we’ll exist digitally, we’ll be able to hear sermons and lectures made a thousand years ago.” The obsessive desire to preserve, to record, and to archive for the purposes of memory plays a large role in the making of documentary. Collecting data, objects, and information for information’s sake partakes in the “museumification” of things and events. What seems indispensable to a dominant mode of knowing appears recklessly ignorant to other modes of living. For remembering in the context of a museum display, archival classification, history retrieval, and reality documentation go hand in hand with the process of profound forgetting. Of relevance here, for example, is the struggle of Native Americans to reclaim the bones of their ancestors — and with these, Hi-­story in their own words. Such a fight goes to the heart of power relations. It calls for the necessity to move beyond material cause and evidence to restore agency to the marginalized in an exploitative system of visibility. Documentary is often equated with truth, and narrative fiction with imagination. But, as is well known, reality is often stranger than fiction. It is far more fascinating than what we can come up with, for the “real” cannot be reduced to the visible, the tangible, or the material. Fact is not truth. Accumulating facts does not necessarily lead to truth, and just as one gathers them to prove, one can also use them to falsify, negate, or disprove. The politics of interpretation is always at work. What I question at length in my films are the factitious claim to objectivity and the pursuit of naturalism in the development of a media technology that promotes the illusion of increasingly unmediated access to reality. Hohenberger: I would like to talk about language in your films, especially interviews. The device of the interview seems a good example; usually interviews belong to documentary, where they fulfill a specific function: integrated in a chain of arguments, they

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stand out as formulating a kind of truth that is independent from the one who argues. And it seems to be exactly this function that you try to explore in many of your films, whether one calls them documentary or fiction. The question always seems to be what it means to speak in front of a camera. It is interesting to note that in your documentaries you try to avoid any naïve speaking of a protagonist. Rather than using “normal interviews” you prefer creating a kind of experimental setting, like in Surname Viet or Shoot for the Contents, or you do without interviews at all, like in Naked Spaces and The Fourth Dimension. Is the “normal interview” too worn out, in your eyes? Or do you avoid it because of its implicit power relations? Trinh: I did call the interview “an antiquated device of documentary” in Surname Viet, where the politics of interviewing and of subtitling as well as the question of language and of translation in self-­representation are structurally featured. But as you’ve noticed, although I may not use them in certain films, interviews are an important part of my work, both in film and in book forms. Addressing the politics of form requires innovative imagination, for each film is a new challenge of the “how,” “what,” “when,” and “where.” Therefore exposing the workings of the interview is not a mere question of avoiding “normal interviews.” As you can tell by our interview and by those published in Framer Framed and Cinema Interval, one of the constant “abnormalities” is that I don’t just answer questions, because it’s the “inter” in interviews that appeals to me. The encounter between us is an encounter not between ready-­made sound bites but between languages, cultures, concepts, events, and processes. It offers a third ground from which I work at shifting the nature of the points raised, using them as departures to offer an expansive field of practice in filmmaking. This takes time and space on the page; it raises problems of choices and limits as related to the number of characters we’re allowed for publication. Power relations lie at the core of normative representations. I’ve previously spoken at length on the deceptive mechanism of questions and answers and on the problematics of “giving voice” in the positioning of interviewer and interviewees. What I find refreshing is your take on it — that it all boils down to the issue of speaking in front of a camera. This is where documentary and fiction, or witnessing and acting, meet on the film screen.

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Hohenberger: The interview is only one of the dominant modes of speaking in documentary; the other is the commentary. It may assume a broad variety of language forms, from a subjective poetic language to a factual, technical one. In what is called auteurism in documentary we often find the commentary to be the most prominent place for the filmmaker to inscribe herself in the texture of her film. Conversely, the audience learns to distinguish voices and ways of speaking, the professional voice from the voice of the amateur. The latter can function as a door opener that helps the viewer/listener to get involved in a situation where he or she feels he or she is addressed personally. You have always used commentary very sparingly. In Naked Spaces the commentary consists of a montage of quotations by very different authors and people, and you had it spoken by three female voices, including your own. When you spoke by yourself in The Fourth Dimension it was immediately noticed and mentioned in almost every review of the film. Why have you been so cautious with your voice? Trinh: Your question seems to raise two issues: that of the commentary in general and that of my voice more specifically. I touched on the first one earlier, when I discussed the relation between music, image, and text in my film, in which the verbal is treated not as a comment about the image, that is, as an instrument to give meaning to the visual, but as a creative element of its own. In our need to come up with meanings and to impose them, we tend to use and consume language in its most reductive function. But language has its own complexity and multiplicity, which can offer a very fertile ground for artistic realizations. On the one hand, meaning is a mental construct; it’s just one dimension of language. On the other hand, the poetic force of a commentary, a physical voice, or a tonality has little to do with what people commonly view as “poetry.” You don’t need to write a poem or to rhyme verses in order to produce poetry, which is not only aesthetic but also social and existential — a state of being. Similarly, speaking through my voice in the first person “I” is not necessarily personal or subjective, at least not in the way these terms are usually under­ stood. For I’m not trying to get at any internal essence, and my films do not lead to self-­interiority, as with psychological realism. On the contrary, working at ceaselessly undoing preconceived images, sounds, and words, and hence at freeing the film from any single authoritative center, not only do “I feel less and less the need to express myself,” as stated in Reassemblage, but also I respect the opacity effect of the unknown other. 152  c o n v e r s a t i o n s

However, where being cautious may help is when objectivity is claimed in “giving voice.” Documentaries often fall prey to the ideology of transparent representation. They naïvely pretend to be neutral in presenting the two sides of things through pros and cons. But what tries to pass for objectivity is often no more than a noncommitted stance unaware of its own politics. In affirming righteously that one opens a space for those who do not have a voice, one often forgets that the gaining of voice happens within a framed context, and one tends to turn a blind eye to one’s privileged position as “giver” and framer —  albeit a framer ultimately framed as well. Exposing this very power relation through subtle cinematic devices that make the viewer surreptitiously aware of the filmmaker’s position remains a real challenge with each new work. Hohenberger: Another device you constantly explore seems to be lighting. The whole tradition of direct cinema and its ideological implications, first of all the inseparable bond between technology and immediacy, put the device of lighting on the side of fiction film. For documentary there exists an ideology of “naturalness” which tries to make invisible all technology that is necessarily part of the filmmaking process, and lighting was one of the first “sacrifices” of this ideology. In your films lighting gains back an important place and role; you even work together with Jean-­Paul Bourdier, who is credited for “lighting design.” The word design alone points to a nonspontaneous way of working, thus leading the work in the direction of fiction. Beyond the claim for visibility, which for most documentaries seems to be the sole intention for lighting, what parameters govern your concept of lighting? Trinh: When I am doing the cinematography myself, lighting is conceived quite intuitively. I have always disliked clinical images, by which I mean the kind in which lighting is used (and overused) only to make the object of focus legible to the viewer. It’s all linked to the way one relates to what is being filmed. Instead of “going at it” and treating it as an object to be captured, the camera can look at the filmed subject nonpossessively, sliding on its surfaces, passing nearby and caressing it, for example. So the lighting comes from this kind of attitude: How do you light a subject if you don’t want to simply present an object? What you come up with would be based on your own rapport to your subject and on your attitude in relationships. When I have to direct and therefore to work with a cinematographer, as in the interview scenes of Surname Viet Given Name Nam and Shoot for the Contents,

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or as in the fiction films, A Tale of Love and Night Passage, I rely on Jean-­Paul’s talent as an architect and designer. Lighting is then treated the way language and music are treated in the relation between ear and eye — that is, as a creative dimension and a visual “track” in its own right. Its function is not to serve actors and their environments, as in conventional narratives, nor does it hide itself in the pursuit of naturalism, as in conventional documentaries. It has its own rules and logic in acting on the senses. These change with each film, but if I had to generalize, I would say that Jean-­Paul’s attitude to light and color is radical: he has no affinities for the discreet charm of the bourgeois range of pastel colors. Lights come in primary colors and in distinct, punctual shapes. This is true for the films mentioned, except for Surname Viet, whose lighting stays closer to my two previous films shot in Africa in playing on the contrasting blue and orange spectrum of film coloring. Exploring lighting as a cinematic gesture of its own here has very little to do with what the film world calls “theatrical lighting.” I’ve discussed elsewhere the social connotation of primary colors in working with multiplicity and the racial color line. The dance of color is, in all senses of the term, a tale of humankind. Being “color blind” in our society should not simply be understood as being oblivious to color, but rather as being blinded by the vanity of color — the way discrimination based on skin color is. “The five colors will blind a man’s sight,” says a statement in Shoot for the Contents. It is with this critical perspective that we work explicitly with colors, all the while disliking the chatter of visible things. Visibility is not our main concern, and our cinematographer (Kathleen Beeler) has often had to remind us of the factor of legibility in the process of image making. Whenever there’s a choice, we would prefer a contour in darkness rather than a full legible surface in functional or illustrative light. The quality of darkness determines the quality of light. In Night Passage the little boy also says, for example, “My light got carried away. I couldn’t run fast enough to catch it.” Again, one can hear this on at least two levels: in the context of the story, when Shin loses his lantern while playing by the sea on the night of the festival, and in the wider context of the spiritual journey featured by the film — every viewer’s own journey. What happens when one’s light gets carried away? Would it be the end of sight, or would one learn to see the light in the dark?

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These questions open up to further inquiries, both artistic and existential, about cinema as well as about life and death. Because night is featured in the film, the main difficulty the crew struggled with during the shoot was bound to the problem of lighting at night, especially outdoors. We erroneously thought that with digital video, we would need fewer lights for our shoot, but actually lighting could be much more crucial with video than with film, if one is to obtain similar colors and resolution. Further problems commonly arise in the next phase, that of video projection, for, among other considerations, it is most important that the blacks in the film look black rather than milky black. Hohenberger: Music also has always played an important role in your films, but while it is usual to have a score for fiction films, it is not usual to have a score for documentaries. Since A Tale of Love you have worked with a group called The Construction of Ruins. In The Fourth Dimension you show a lot of Japanese ceremonies with their original sounds, mostly flutes and drummers, but you also added a composition by The Construction. Can you tell me about the process of weaving together the original and the composed sounds? And how did you integrate your commentary? Trinh: We can see it as a conversation among sounds. The process is no different from the ones I’ve discussed earlier concerning the use of words, images, rhythm, and lighting. It’s all a matter of multiplicity and independence in close relationship. The specific sound of an event, a location, a body, or an object is woven, the way musical motifs and notes are, into the fabric of nonrepresentational sound improvised by the musicians of The Construction of Ruins. Music and sound design is the part I enjoy the most in putting together the film. But it is also the part most difficult to verbalize, because music is a dematerialized art and one that easily frees itself from representation. In mainstream film sound, the ear is subordinated to the eye; the visual track comes first, and the sound track is there only to serve the image, illustrating it, giving it the realism it lacks, and amplifying it when it fails to convince, for example. This is why a number of filmmakers whose strength lies primarily in the image (like Sohrab Shahid Saless, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov, or Bela Tarr) tend to dismiss music and its superfluous, ornamental role in film. They avoid or minimize the musical in their works and use enhanced

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environmental sound for intensified psychic effects. But for me, the taken-­for-­ granted divide between noise and music, which has been so important to the ear trained in Western classical music, is quite obsolete. Every sound, every so-­called noise can be made musical, especially when one works intensely with rhythm, resonance, and vibration. The sound track should in every way be as inventively powerful as the visual track.

the ethics of documentary Hohenberger: Another question at the center of your work is the question of representing “the other.” I put “the other” into quotation marks because it conveys such a wide range of topics and subjects in your films. The other may be a cultural artifact, like African architecture and music in Naked Spaces; a social group, like the Vietnamese women living in the United States in Surname Viet Given Name Nam; a person, like Kieu in A Tale of Love; or a country we don’t know much about, like China in Shoot for the Contents. Defining the other as other may depend on anthropological assumptions (everybody or everything beyond myself is other to me, which implies for me, for example, certain ethical tasks), or it may depend on political power relations, which are usually quantified by the idea of majority and minority. The other is always a relational concept, necessarily bound to an idea of identity on the one side, from which “the other” differs. Seen from a more functional rather than anthropological perspective, one may perhaps say that every society, in reproducing itself, at the same time produces the notion of otherness. In this (re)production it relies on political and juridical procedures as well as on symbolic or aesthetic ones. Each society has at its disposal a number of stereotypes in representing the other, whether for negating its difference or for foregrounding it. Isn’t it hard to escape these stereotypes because they are deeply rooted in the historical unconscious, as well as the idea of otherness itself? How would you describe your concept of otherness, and how is it possible to avoid falling into the traps of stereotyping the other in the process of representation? Trinh: This is not a subject I can summarize in a few lines; that’s why I’ve written a whole book on it, Woman, Native, Other, in which I’ve had to use the entire range of personal pronouns to explore the radical relationship of self and other. A few examples of “other” in my work and its politics of naming: the inappropriate/d — woman, native, handicapped, abnormal, deviant, queer, foreign, refugee, not-­yet-­citizen, nonaligned, marginalized, silenced, dominated,

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oppressed — in other words, all those who stray from the norms of man, mankind, and human. And with these, the other within: the West in me, or the Master, the dominant I, the sovereign subject, the Us versus Them, the omniscient, rational outsider, and more — all also inside me. Viewed both negatively and positively, and depending on one one’s attitude in relationship or one’s positioning in specific situations, the other is the one who escapes one’s control and exceeds the self indefinitely. Power relations are of an infinitely complex nature, and this is a challenge I’ve had to take up with every work I undertake. Sometimes one cannot avoid falling into traps, but if one witnesses the falling and the setting of traps, then one can use stereo­ types for what they are, in order to undo them and shift the terms of fixed representation. Hohenberger: The question of otherness as well as the question of speech directly lead to ethical issues, which seem inseparable from the aesthetic ones. Ethical questions, one could say, are concerned with problems of responsibility. In your writings you develop some concepts that seem to cover both aesthetic and ethical questions. One of these concepts is the concept of “speaking nearby,” which is opposed to the idea of “speaking about” (something or someone). Usually documentaries speak about or, as in the case of the interview, delegate speech to someone else, who then speaks about. Could you explain the concept in this double perspective of ethics and aesthetics? Trinh: It’s a very simple concept, and yet, when you haven’t practiced it, it may appear abstract or cryptic. In the context of power relations, speaking for, about, and on behalf of is very different from speaking with and nearby. To give an example from our everyday, if someone very close to you, like your lover or your mother, is the subject of your discussion, how would you speak? If that person is not with you when you talk, then you can easily speak about her even though your close relationship already makes it uneasy for you to objectify her. But if she is right next to you, then you’ll have to speak differently, being attentive in everything you say to the fact that she can talk back. Once you pay sustained attention to this, your ear becomes attuned to the way a person negotiates his or her space in producing intuitively a speech based on this awareness of power relations in knowledge. The very palpable lack or presence of such an intuitive grasp is what immediately strikes me in listening encounters.

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Making a film that shows and speaks with the subject of your inquiry as if she is listening and looking next to you would shift subtly but radically your mode of address, of framing and contextualizing. Whether this subject is actually present or not doesn’t matter; you’re committed to speaking nearby him, her, or it. What has to be given up is, first and foremost, the voice of omniscient knowledge. Similarly, speaking nearby my films also implies, for example, that I can tell you what I do in these films — the thought and making processes that go into their realizations — but I cannot tell you what they mean or how to experience them. Meanings can always be expanded at infinity when one speaks nearby. In positioning your voice next to, you acknowledge that there’s a space in between, an interval of possibilities, and you learn to speak with audible holes and gaps. As in Reassemblage or in Night Passage, questions such as “What is the film about?” and “Where are we going?” can only be answered anew each time with the cooperation of the viewer.

the politics of documentary Hohenberger: Since its beginnings as a distinct film genre, documentary has been used for political reasons, to persuade people, to strengthen their beliefs in certain political values, or to produce a certain image of their society. In this sense documentary has always served as a political instrument. After World War II the educational, persuasive, and propagandistic functions of documentary were taken over by television, which is a highly nationalized medium and which first and foremost serves national(istic) purposes. After the civil rights movements and their use of independent media, we have witnessed a repoliticalization of documentary rooted in an open conflict with television. This new “movement” accuses television of lying and tries to establish itself in counter­ point, by telling the truth. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit may be an example. But insofar as this new political documentary remains deeply connected with television, it also shares television’s ideology of truth. How can we conceive of political documentary in another way? Do we have to remember “the lessons of Godard,” for example, and his famous sentence that we shouldn’t just make political films but films in a political way? And wouldn’t that mean to follow up with some old avant-­garde ideas such as the constructivist politics of form? Can these ideas still be valid and useful?

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Trinh: Nothing is more conventional than an approach to politics that is aimed at the most obvious location of power: the head of state and other personalities of the body politic. It’s fast-­food politics. Sometimes we take advantage of it, the way we may eat a McDonald’s hamburger on the run because it’s fast and cheap and allows us to partake in the illusion that it serves the average lower middle class. The reactive claim to truth and the open conflict with television has a role to play in these times of global fear officially maintained via pathological lies. But it is nothing new when we think of the pioneering work of Marshall McLuhan in the late 1960s (The Medium Is the Massage). However, what seems “new,” for example, is the Cannes validation of this conflict (through Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit) at a time when the European and American superpowers are at odds with each other concerning the war in Iraq. For me, politics permeates our everyday; it is a dimension of one’s consciousness in being. People talk about getting temporarily involved in it or about mellowing out and leaving it altogether at some stage of their lives. But politics arises in all of our activities, whether or not we recognize it. Godard’s distinction between making a so-­called political film and making films politically is here very apt. It helps to widen the scope of the political, freeing it from the domain of economics and established institutions of power. The implied refocus on a caliber of consciousness in the making process or on form as inseparable from content serves as a reminder of how films about progressive actions can ultimately prove to be regressive in their unquestioned replication of structural relations of power. Similarly, the politics of form cannot be reduced to the series of -­isms that mark social and artistic movements. Form in its radical sense should address the formless; it ultimately refers to the processes of life and death. Affirming form is recognizing the important contribution of each vibrant life as a continual creative process. All the while, letting form go is acknowledging our own mortality — or the necessity to work with the limits of every instance of form. This is how the question of multiplicity and the politics of identity can be viewed at best. And this is also what I’ve been doing with every film and with Night Passage, which focuses on friendship and death as a response to a specific political moment of our time.

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Hohenberger: Another, related question may be the spreading of documentary into the spaces of art; no gallery, no museum today can do without monitors, and often what is shown there are documentaries. Some filmmakers, like Chantal Akerman or Harun Farocki, have been invited to present their documentary works as installations, and well-­known documentary filmmakers like Emile de Antonio, for example, are (re?)discovered by the “art space.” To be honest, I don’t know what to think about this development; sometimes I have the feeling that the “art space” tries to politicize itself by pointing to reality with the help of documentary forms, thereby repeating their promise of authenticity, which critical filmmakers like yourself have tried to subvert. On the other hand, the exhibition of moving images in museums implies another form of watching, less concentrated and more like that of the “absent-­minded examiner.” This was how Benjamin once described the modern subject’s mode of attention in the midst of modern city life, with its constant flow of “shocks” and media reproductions. Following Benjamin, some critics have hailed the destruction of contemplation, since contemplation belongs to the “sacred” reception of traditional art prescribed by the institution of the museum itself. But don’t films as time-­based art need a certain kind of “contemplation” because, otherwise, they are looked at like television (to which Benjamin’s notion seems to fit much better)? You are involved in the art world directly; you have made installations for specific art spaces, your films have been largely financed by art institutions, and your position “in between” make them easily fit into the category of “art films.” Is the art world too narrow a space for the exhibition of your films? Or is art the only institution where you can get money for your films in the United States? Did the situation change with Bush? Trinh: Small clarification here: except for the nea (National Endowment for the Arts), from which I’ve occasionally received partial support, none of the other funding sources for my films are art institutions per se. They are either specific film organizations or, more generally, foundations that fund film production among other cultural activities. The film world and the art world do not really mingle, even at the level of independent filmmaking. My direct involvement with art venues is more recent, for my films do not easily fit in the category of “art film,” which, as with other categories, has been used sometimes to include and other times to exclude them.

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The inclusion of films in important international contemporary art events is still a phenomenon largely ignored by the art critic milieus, for example. While art biennales and triennales easily include video art and installations, they are far from being ready to incorporate films. This was quite noticeable whenever I participated in one of these events as a filmmaker rather than a “visual artist.” (Documenta 11 and the Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo more recently are strong examples.) It could be a very frustrating learning process for both filmmakers and curators, for despite the effort on both sides, the treatment of the cinematic medium remains fundamentally marginal and inadequate. I agree with you that films creatively worked on as a time form require a different mode of viewing, but not many films retain that dimension today. Those that do would most likely suffer in these conditions, as mine did, even though with every loss there is also some gain. To say this is simply to point to the challenge that certain filmmakers will have to take up as art venues become more open to films. It would be interesting to take in the different modes of watching so as to work with them critically. The advantages that come with the dilemma of double and multiple belongings are not negligible, especially when the situation with funding for noncommercial films like mine has drastically changed for the worse this past decade, especially with the dire fiscal situation caused by the Bush administration’s cuts in the arts. The financial conditions in which I produce my films have been extremely difficult, to put it mildly. And although film festival venues in Europe and North America have given a more important role to documentaries in general, they have also explicitly turned their effort to catering to the demands of commercial cinema, as programmers across nations have proven to be increasingly cautious and conservative in their selection of narrative works. The mercantile mind sets the rules, and “business is the bottom line,” as many agents of the independent feature world proudly proclaim.

the technologies of documentary Hohenberger: The Fourth Dimension was the first of your films to be shot with digital video, but instead of using this technology to increase the impression of authenticity, the film points to quite a different direction. The new technology sometimes appears to

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be a tool to examine the older film technology. This impression is even stronger when watching Night Passage, where one of documentary’s central metaphors, the window to the world, is constantly explored by foregrounding the function of the frame and the whole process of visibility/invisibility which is at play during a film’s projection. You even deal with the whole history of visual media, starting from shadowgraphs and ending with digitally produced scientific images, with a very long sequence in the middle, where you expose the basic principle of cinema (light moving in time or light writing) in your technical treatment of a group of fire performers. Can you talk a bit about your way of using new technologies? Trinh: In turning to digital technology for the production of my last two films, I have been working more intensely with time, as referred to by the title The Fourth Dimension and as dictated by the medium itself. I’ve also been working with what I call “still speed” (in my book The Digital Film Event) to characterize what this technology can offer and seems best at. Formed via a scanning mechanism, the digital image is continuously in the process of appearing and disappearing. Its inherent mutability doesn’t really allow one, for example, to produce a still image, for movement continues, unfinished, in the “freeze frame.” This can profoundly affect one’s sense of time, one’s yearning for immortality, and one’s response to death. These are all the focuses of Night Passage, both thematically and structurally speaking. As with my previous works, this film turns around on itself and looks at itself in the act of coming into being. Such performative reflexivity, which throws the making and looking self into an abyss, is a way of exposing our limits and addressing our mortality. Digital systems are founded on binary structures of 0s and 1s. On off on off. Now 1. Now 0. The marketing mind has not failed to appropriate this to economic ends, and as the trend shows, narratives are now likely to come in sequels, the audiences being kept in wait for the next, more sensational episode yet to come. I deal with this ethics of disappearance and reappearance quite differently. In Night Passage, where film and video aesthetics coexist without one being subsumed into the other, the magic of digital technology may be seen subtly in the transitions for which I use the dissolve as a structural device — one that I have never resorted to in analog film, preferring then the straight cut or even the jump cut. Everything in Night Passage reflects and performs the notion of passage and,

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with it, the continual morphing, the state of transformation during the trajectory toward death, the fading into darkness, no form or the void, and the return anew on screen. What computers offer in cyberspace is so fascinating that we revel in the endless possibilities of special effects. We let our computers rule our lives, leaving them on all day and all night so we can access information at the speed of light through our fingertips. In this age of Augmented Reality and of Remote Control, where relationships away from the computer are at stake, we may have to learn anew when to turn the machine on and when to turn it off. Hohenberger: The notion of technology may not only point to the development and uses of hardware (technics) but, following Foucault, also to certain productive social procedures that imply technics but are embedded in other discursive mechanisms. Thus one might talk about documentary (in Nichols’s sense of a “discourse of sobriety”) as being a technology of truth. You have always been skeptical about the notion of truth, at least about the idea of a single one, but don’t skepticism and relativism lead one to abandon the idea of truth altogether? Don’t we need “truth” as a kind of halt or stop sign beyond which would reign the powers of “everything goes”? Shouldn’t we keep an emphatic notion of truth? Trinh: Sure, but it’s always in the name of my truth that I give myself the license to stamp out others’ truths. . . . As long as the praxis of truth is bound to that of domination, it remains an anthropomorphic conceit and, as exemplified by historical world events, a violent blinding response of man to mortality. Despite the easygoing character of the statement “Everything goes,” nothing is more difficult to assume. People on the spiritual path dedicate their whole lifetime to practicing it, but, as with everything else, the path is full of thorns, for only when there’s nothing at the base, when one has freed oneself of all attachment, does everything truly go. Truth cannot be opposed to “everything goes,” for truth is in between all regimes of truths. It has no name. This is the very challenge it continues to raise with the documentary as a technology of truth.

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Note Eva Hohenberger is a lecturer in media studies at the Ruhr-­University Bochum, Ger­ many. Her research interests center around the history, theory, and aesthetics of documentary film. She has edited a book about the theory of documentary (Bilder des Wirklichen, 3rd edition 2006) and the only German-­language book about Frederick Wise-­ man (Kino des Sozialen, 2009). Website: http://www.ruhr-­uni-­bochum.de/ifm/institut/mit arbeiterinnen/wiss_hohenberger.html.  A shortened version of this interview was first published in German (translated by E. Hohenberger) in Poeten, Chronisten, Rebellen, edited by Verena Teissl and Volker Kull (Marburg, Germany: Schuren Verlag, 2006), 294–308.

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L’Autre marche (The Other Walk) By Trinh T. Minh-­ha and Jean-­Paul Bourdier

Large-­scale multimedia installation Musée du Quai Branly, Paris June 19, 2006–2009 A cultural rite of passage and a transformative walk conceived for a 160-­meter ramp that precedes the entrance into the new Museum of Mankind, the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Images across Asian, African, Oceanic, and American cultures are selected and structured rhythmically so as to work on the visitors’ perception and prepare them in their journey amid the museum’s visual and material environments of world cultures. The project was completed for the opening of the Musée du Quai Branly on June 19, 2006, and was kept on view until 2009.

As is often said in Asia, what is miraculous is not to walk on water but to walk on earth. Walking is an experience of indefiniteness and of infinity. With each step forward, one receives wide open and deep into oneself the gifts of the universe. The passage of the other into oneself, the course taken between sounds, images, and aphorisms or between the said and the seen along the ramp is an initiation walk that spans several cultures of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America. With each step taken, relations between passage, passerby, and passing time are mutually activated. Questions raised through sensual experience could incite the visitor to reflect on his or her present activities as a spectator, researcher, or visitor.

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Meaning moves with walking and with the coming and going, appearing and disappearing of the lit aphorisms. The strolling along the ramp could turn out to be a “rite of passage” whose fluid movement in three phases, “Transition,” “Transformation,” and “Overture,” is suggested accordingly through sonic and visual rhythms. To each phase of L’Autre marche corresponds a rhythm as well as a sonic environment. To each screen corresponds a sequence of images peculiar to a culture (Senegal: Tokolor, Mandingo, Joola, and Soninke; Yemen; Vietnam; China; Japan, Indonesia, and the USA). Awareness of a different walking toward the Self, the Other, and the World takes place in the space between. Being at once exterior and interior to the museum, the trajectory in the ramp is also a passage from the human to the vegetal, animal, and mineral universes and back. Access to an other world is characterized by a work unfolding at the limit of the visual, between the immateriality of the light-­images projections or the resonances of the sound environment and the ostensible materiality of the museum objects.

The installation unfolds in twenty-­eight autonomous visual sequences, with shifting aphorisms in twelve different languages intermittently appearing and disappearing (via nineteen gobo projectors) on the sides and on the floor. It includes nineteen digital video sequences projected on screens (phase 1), on the ground (phases 2 and 3), and on the two side walls of the ramp (phase 3); three sequences of sounds composed for each of the three phases; and nineteen aphorisms projected on the ground, on the guardrails, and on the vertical inner surfaces along the ramp. These aphorisms are as follows (originally in French with translations into twelve other languages that are only indicated here for the main three aphorisms): PHASE I. LE SOI ET L’AUTRE—SELF AND OTHER Le monde vient vers soi à chaque pas With each step, the world comes to us (translated into Arabic, Chinese, and Swahili)

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L’entre-musée Between-museum Illusion d’un tracé stable dans la rivière Illusion of a stable trace in the river The watching image (originally in English) PHASE II. LE MONDE EN SOI—THE WORLD WITHIN THE SELF A chaque pas, une fleur s’ouvre sous nos pieds With each step, a flower blooms under our feet (translated into Korean, Portuguese, Bahasa, and Russian) Vitesses de l’autre Autre temps The other’s speed Other time Dans l’instant, le temps s’ouvre infini In the instant, time opens out infinitely Not descriptive Not informative Not interesting (originally in English) Le doigt qui montre la lune n’est pas la lune The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon Voir sans voix Voix aveugle Seeing voiceless Blind voice

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PHASE III. L’AUTRE EN SOI—THE OTHER WITHIN THE SELF Apprendre à marcher de nouveau Learning how to walk anew (translated into Spanish, Farsi, and Ancient Egyptian) cette image que je suis this image that I am entendre avec l’oreille de l’autre hear with the other’s ear savoir par le non-savoir know through nonknowing l’entrée en soi ouvre sur l’autre moving into oneself opens onto the other Le monde est comme une goutte de rosée qui s’évapore aux premiers rayons du soleil (Proverbe sérère) The world is like a drop of dew that evaporates At the first sun rays (Sereer proverb) Il est souvent dit en Asie, que le miracle n’est pas de marcher sur l’eau, mais de marcher sur terre. La marche est une expérience de l’indéfini et de l’infini. En allant au devant, pas à pas, c’est l’entrée en soi des dons de l’univers que l’on reçoit. Le passage de l’autre en soi, le parcours entre images, sons et aphorismes, ou entre le dit et le vu au long de la rampe est une marche initiatique qui traverse plusieurs cultures d’Asie, d’Afrique et d’Amérique. Chaque pas contribuerait à engendrer les relations agissant entre passant, passage et passager. Les questions que pose l’expérience sensuelle pourrait inciter le visiteur à la réflexion sur son activité au moment présent et dans sa position de visiteur-­spectateur-­chercheur. Le sens bouge avec la marche et selon l’apparition et la disparition, lumineuses, des aphorismes. Parcourir la rampe devient comme “rite de passage” dont le mouvement fluide en trois phases, “Transition,” “Transformation,” et “Ouverture” se trouve suggéré par des sons et des rythmes visuels correspondants.

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A chaque phase de L’Autre marche correspond un rythme, un son et une musique particuliers. A chaque écran correspond une séquence d’images provenant d’une culture spécifique (Sénégal: Toucouleur, Mandingue, Diola, et Soninké; Yemen; Vietnam; Chine; Japon; Indonésie; Amérique). La prise de conscience d’une marche autre à la rencontre du Soi, de l’Autre, et du Monde s’effectue dans l’espace entre. A la fois extérieur et intérieur au musée, le trajet dans la rampe est aussi un passage de l’univers humain à l’univers végétal, animal, et minéral. L’accès à un monde autre est caractérisé par un travail qui se déploie à la limite du visuel, entre l’immatérialité des projections d’image-­lumière ou des résonances de son, et la matérialité des objets du musée.

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L’Entre-­musée The World, with Each Step With Elvan Zabunyan

site of controversies: the museum Elvan Zabunyan: The Quai Branly Museum opened in June 2006. Years of controversies on this institution’s status preceded its inauguration. Some of these discussions were about how the museum, devoted to the conservation and presentation of artwork and objects qualified as “primitive,” was supposed to be named. The Quai Branly Museum has finally been named after its Parisian location, even if this title does not in any way refer to the huge collection it owns. The 300,000 pieces of the collection of Musée de l’Homme were transferred to Musée du Quai Branly. The Musée de l’Homme, located at the Trocadéro in Paris, was founded in 1937 during the Universal Exhibition. Dedicated to the history of natural sciences and the history of human evolution, from both an anthropological and a cultural perspective, it was considered a “laboratory museum” focusing on human species researches on a universal scale. While the goal of the Musée de l’Homme was clearly linked to scientific research, we see that Musée du Quai Branly is oriented more toward an aesthetic and exotic approach, presenting, within a demonstrative scenography and without cultural contextualization, master pieces of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The collection of the Musée du Quai Branly is also composed of pieces from the former Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, which is itself the former Museum of Colonies inaugurated during the International Colonial Exhibition in 1931 at Porte Dorée. In France the research focusing on this history of the colonial past is quite recent, and one notices that major questions that could lead to a better understanding of the nature and the origin of these ethnographical objects integrated in the French collections are avoided. While the Musée du Quai Branly contained an important research center to address the problematics linked to questions of museography and archive, the displacement imposed by the architecture of the institution on the visitor of the museum goes paradoxically more toward a partitioning than an encounter between cultures. In

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that context, I found it very interesting that you were invited to do a major installation precisely in this part of the museum, which I think Jean Nouvel called the “Snake” and which is a ramp between the lobby and the main exhibition halls. To invite you was in a way to validate, thanks to your artistic experience and your critical interrogations, what the curators were supposed to underline. It was also a way to welcome film practice and a contemporary artistic installation into the museum. Your position as an artist and an intellectual engaged in postcolonial research was also supposed to help them to define, precisely at this strategic location of the museum for the visitors, an aesthetic position. Could you come back to the origin of this invitation and the way you decided to proceed with this work, which links moving images to projections of text excerpts? L’Autre marche is also a very evocative title.1 Trinh T. Minh-­h a: So much has been written about the Musée du Quai Branly before, during, and after its construction in Paris that we hardly need to add anything to it. As your contextual sketch nicely captures, while overtly serving as cultural centers, museums are covertly complex political spaces. No wonder that the naming of this museum project, backed by President Chirac, was so controversial. (Previous presidents were even keener on having a signature building erected during their term, and the Centre Pompidou is but one example.) Much of the protest and savvy talk around the Musée du Quai Branly seems to remain largely caught in diehard forms of oppositional thinking. These were voiced explicitly as an opposition to the more evident sources of “imperial” power (Jacques Chirac and his architect, Jean Nouvel) but circulate more insidiously as a struggle of power between knowledges and expertises. Blatantly acting out in much of the criticism of the museum is the conventional fault line between the arts and the social sciences, or between aesthetic and so-­called scientific demands. Anthropology, sociology, or history versus performing, plastic, and time-­based arts, for example. Some scholars and experts invited on the opening days of the museum were incensed that they had not been consulted more closely, and most of the reactions unleashed around what they thought to be “right” versus “wrong” representations were extremely territorial in nature. For those who preach “context” over “form,” the museum authorities replied by pointing cleverly to what they see as innovation:

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data and contextual information tactfully kept to the virtual realm, thanks to new technology. But such an approach to new technology is more like shoving problems under the carpet rather than addressing them. Conveniently avoided, as you pointed out, are questions related to the nature and origins of the objects on display, as well as the very politics of objectifying in acquiring, collecting, displaying, classifying, narrating, and archiving — whether for a scientific or an artistic purpose. Also avoided is the architecture’s role in fetishizing them by dramatically isolating, clustering, cramming them in confined, overdetermined spaces. Obviously a focus on form per se does not necessarily elevate or restore the object to its full “aesthetic merit,” although it may help to detach it from the surrounding glue of pseudo-­scientific discourse. However, this critical talk was possible only after the museum opened and its construction reached a certain level of completion. At the time I was contacted, and even during the two and a half years we worked on the project, everything about and around the museum was research in progress, in terms not only of visual realization but also of social and political impact. Even the data first given in the architectural drawings that concerned the space for our installation (which is the long entry ramp leading to the main exhibition halls of the museum) kept changing every time we showed up at the site of construction, making it very difficult for us to plan what exactly could go into the project, when, where, and how. Translated into English, L’Autre marche could be both “The Other Walk” (or “The Other Step”) and “The Other Is Walking.” The installation was realized in collaboration with Jean-­Paul Bourdier, upon invited international competition. Germain Viatte, the curator at the Musée du Quai Branly who initially selected the participants for the competition, saw my film work at Documenta  11 in Germany and was apparently taken by Naked Spaces — Living Is Round. The anecdote that led to my involvement shows how things often follow their own course, independently from our initial intention. In early 2004 I received the remnant of what appeared to be a large envelope, whose content got lost during the mail transportation process. (It is not uncommon since 9/11 for me to receive packages emptied of their contents, probably due to Security’s negligence after they opened them.) For weeks I didn’t

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act on it, thinking it was some mere invitation for a conference, but the envelope kept on popping up on my desk when I cleaned it, so I finally called the museum to inform them that their package came emptied. They immediately express-­mailed a new package, and to my surprise as well as disconcertment, I discovered I had only two weeks left (rather than the six weeks they initially allowed for) to come up with a proposal for a huge project running along the 160-­meter-­long ramp that precedes the entrance to the museum exhibition halls. I was one among four installation artists from different historical and cultural backgrounds from whom they had requested proposals for the ramp — the others being Alan Fleischer (United Kingdom), Chris Marker (France), and Tony Oursler (United States). With such a time crunch, I had to put all other production activities aside and team up with Jean-­Paul, who has been doing extensive work in both art and architecture. We each took on specific tasks while working together on the conceptual and creative aspects of the project. Jean-­Paul’s contribution was crucial in making the link between the evolving architectural data of the building and the precise design for the art installation. It was with the first proposal we put together, in February 2004, that we won the installation project. Little did we know then, when we accepted the project, how complex and demanding its realization would be, not only in its scale and scope but more so in terms of intricacies of power relations. Quai Branly being a politically controversial presidential project of ambitious breadth, what followed after this good start for us was a lengthy, most challenging work process in which we had to negotiate tightly between our artistic endeavor and the impositions of a system ruled by heavy French bureaucracy. It took us two years and a half — working not only with the diverse scientific, technical, administrative, and production hierarchies but also directly and indirectly with the museum’s star architect. To the president’s credit and to the credit of the amiable, hardworking staff of the museum who carried out his contested mission, Chirac was one of the very few prominent heads of state to publicly affirm his alliance with contemporary indigenous movements (and with “peoples who have been brutalized, exterminated by harsh and insatiable conquerors,” as he reminded in his inaugural address on June 19, 2006). But despite the anti-­ethnocentric and decolonizing claims voiced with skill and care by the president to promote respect

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for indigenous struggles and les arts premiers (and hence to “imagine a special place that does justice to the infinite diversity of cultures”), his star architect did not hesitate to rule imperially over the space of the museum and to reenact almost to the letter the colonialist’s clichéd role of appropriating and stamping out difference. There was truly not much room for discussion with my project, but as one of the key staff at the museum optimistically remarked, “Just give him time and he’ll end up liking it.” France, more than any other prominent European country, has gladly turned a blind eye to the “postcolonial” question and is very slow in recognizing the significance and impact of it in its current relations to its former colonies. This is particularly true, as the more recent riots in the country of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité have shown, but also, as you yourself have been made to feel, in your own experience as a scholar working with postcolonial praxes in the arts. In its hubristic narrative about its Others, even the French Left has been in deep denial of its legacies of colonialism in the way it protects its colored citizens, extolling and dismissing them in the same breath. It was only very recently that its more intellectual media started engaging the question, featuring a couple of postcolonial scholars. (This was the case, for example, with Le Monde, one of the most widely read newspapers in France and beyond.) Too late, too little, perhaps. It’s hardly surprising that, for example, despite the all-­too-­good initial intention, the place given to Aboriginal art at Quai Branly remains utterly problematic, although the architect and the curators claim to feature them. Through the architect’s vision, not only are the Aboriginal artists’ works confined to the administrative annex quarters of the museum (if one looks for them, some of the work can be seen on the ceiling of administrators’ offices), and hence conveniently set apart from the main museum event, but the works also run the risk, in the way they are treated, of being reduced to a genre of the primitive and a kind of interior design aesthetic. The claim to feature indigenous art of the world goes hand in hand with the primitivizing of the museum’s setting, with its exotic tropical environmental look. To paraphrase what you have suggested, as artists, we were indeed one of the colorful pegs in the strategic machinery that allows the museum to appropriate a colorful aesthetic position.

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the flower step Zabunyan: Since the beginning, your work has created a deep link with the notion of scale, both from the historical and the spatial points of view. This scale is that of the world that you are looking at through the lens of your camera or through your writings; it is that of your displacement from one cultural territory to another — also a way to include more specifically the filmic space and contemporary reality. And it is as well the scale of memory, both collective and personal. This relation to the world is created, first, of course, with the images you bring back from your journeys abroad but also in the way you make these images resonate between themselves, creating visual encounters around concepts such as those, for example, of the frontiers you often refer to. In the installation at the Quai Branly, there is clearly the wish to construct a relationship between these images of the world and the walk of the spectator on this ramp who meets, step by step, each projection anew. Could you talk about the link you wish to create between the scale of the world and that of the walking body?2 Trinh: A walk at the scale of the world, as related to memory and to the body in movement . . . What a great way to condense your experience of the installation. Perhaps I should come back to the way we initially conceived it so as to address what you raise in your question. L’Autre marche is the very first artistic event that the museum visitors experience, before having access to the inside spaces of the museum. It functions as a potentially transformative walk whose fluid movement in three phases is suggested by these three main aphorisms projected on the floor: With each step, the world comes to us With each step, a flower blooms under our feet Learning / how to walk / anew To each phase corresponds a visual rhythm, a sound environment, and a body-­ in-­movement position. To each screen or screen space corresponds a sequence of images peculiar to a culture (Senegal: Tokolor, Mandingo, Joola, and Soninke; Yemen; Vietnam; China; Japan, Indonesia, and the USA). These images are selected and structured rhythmically so as to work on the visitors’ perception and prepare them in their journey amid the museum’s material environments of world cultures. They unfold in nineteen autonomous video sequences projected on screens, on the floor, on the side walls, with nineteen shifting

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aphorisms in twelve different languages intermittently appearing and disappearing along the winding ramp. These are also projected (via gobo projectors) in punctuation with the images. As I wrote in the artist’s statement for L’Autre marche, it is often said in Asia that what is miraculous is not to walk on water but to walk on earth. Walking is an experience of indefiniteness and of infinity. With each step forward, one receives wide open into oneself the gifts of the universe. In these ancient traveling practices, it is never a question of “discovering” the world — a term so dear to the colonial quest and conquest. Rather the focus is all on the ability to receive and the expansive nature of reception. The mutual passage of the other into oneself and of the self toward the other, or else the course taken along the ramp between sounds, images, and aphorisms, between the said and the seen, the here, there, and elsewhere happens as an ascending walk when one enters the museum and as a descending walk when one exits the museum. Meaning moves with walking and with the coming and going of the lit aphorisms. The strolling along the ramp could turn out to be a “rite of passage” whose three phases, also conceived in terms of “Transition,” “Transformation,” and “Overture” (or in reverse order), unfold across images I’ve shot of several cultures of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America. With each step taken, relations between passage, passerby, and passing time are mutually activated. Questions raised through sensual experience could incite the visitor to live anew his or her intimate activities as a spectator, researcher, or visitor. Awareness of a different walking toward the Self, the Other, and the World takes place in the space between — l’entre-­musée, as I call it. At once exterior and interior to the museum, the trajectory in the serpentine ramp is also a passage from the human to the animal, vegetal, and mineral universes. Access to a world other is situated somewhere between the immateriality of light-­images projections or of sound resonances and the materiality of the objects crammed into the museum’s exhibition spaces. By expanding the visitor’s receptive faculties through the choreography of immaterial events, L’Autre marche solicits from him or her an openness in absorption that comes with a different walking. It can be said to supplement, while standing distinctly apart from, the museum’s project, which remains here bound to collecting and exhibiting material objects. At the core of the instal-

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lation lies the very event of light — immaterial and avisual — whose changing intensities make and unmake, saturate or efface the images. The focus is on light as an event of its own rather than as a means to visibility and legibility. To say this is not simply to point to the nature of film and video as light but to build a project entirely on and according to light — both natural and projected (including, for example, the aphorisms which we did not want simply to paint, draw, or fix by other means). The differing relations drawn across cultures and the indefinite encounters created between image, sound, aphorism, and strolling visitor, as you describe them, are very meaningful. These relations differ according to whether you enter or exit the museum, that is, according to whether you engage the ramp in ascending or descending order. We initially conceived of the screen spaces and projections placements as closely related to body-­mind movements. Visual polyrhythms are accordingly devised as acts of welcoming, of blooming, and of blossoming in multiplicities. To be intensely aware of one’s body while walking — that is, of where one puts one’s weight; how it feels to head forth, to linger, to step left, right, or around; how, in following one’s feet, one turns one’s head, moves one’s shoulder, lifts up one’s chin or lowers it to look down while stepping into and across an image, for example — is to come back to the very basics of “walking,” and hence to be able to unlearn the individuality (ideological, cultural, personal) of a walking while “learning how to walk anew”: free.

light: the other-­into-­self passage Zabunyan: The idea of passage — of crossing or passing by — in your work is clearly defined by these contact points between visual elements that function via interaction and disjunction. When we observe and study the installation at the Quai Branly, several approaches are possible. There are images we look at and sentences we read as we walk through the lights of the projected words. The spatial construction questions as much the architecture of the museum as our own isolated, individual experience, and we have a very subjective reception of your work, even though, as mentioned earlier, the work refers to the scale of the world, which we really cannot control. You create a representation of this passage, and it exists in an in-­between that is both spatial and temporal. The museum is a location where memory is preserved; it is a historical

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anchorage. You succeed in creating a passage that refers to this function of the museum, but you underline at the same time how an artistic experience is specific in making it fluid and ephemeral. Do you agree with such a comment?3 Trinh: Yes, the passage can be said to be altogether spatial, temporal, psychological, existential, social, aesthetic, and spiritual. It is an in-­between, involving time in space, movement in stillness, and vice versa. In following up on your question, I am reminded here of a famous line apparently misattributed to Emma Goldman: “If I can’t dance to it, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” I like the way you dance with us when you bring together this figuration of passage at once precise, fluid, and ephemeral and the museum as place of memory conservation or historical anchorage likely to solidify via its legitimized practice of collecting materials for display. The tension is very palpable even though, as you remark, I work in differential rather than oppositional modes. Certainly there’s room for as many choreographies as there are walkers in L’Autre marche.

A Hybrid Space Trinh: Unlike the walled spaces inside the museum, the ramp is a hybrid space whose challenge is twofold. First, in terms of light, it should be treated both as partly outdoor (subjected to daylight in sections covered with glass panes) and partly indoor — hence the unevenness of the available outside-­inside light. And second, it is a passage; hence, as we have been made to understand, the installation we create should not be so compelling as to make visitors stop, blocking the way into the museum. This is a very ironic situation to find oneself in when one is a filmmaker. But the challenge became part of the installation. Because of the shifting quality of the ambient light, the project comes and goes in its differing degrees of visibility. It partly appears, disappears, and reappears according to the time of day as well as to the weather and the season of the year. On the one hand, if they don’t want the installation to be so compelling as to make visitors stop in the ramp, then visitors should be able to move in whichever way they are led by their journey, and they should be able to tune in to the sight and sound of what they experience. Actually, quite a few do, as in the third phase of the walk, for example, when seawater is projected on the floor. This is particularly noticeable in the descending walk, when visitors come out

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of the museum and are back on the way to integrate the streets outside. Some of them squeezed themselves on the sides of the ramp to avoid stepping on the images; some leaped across them; others danced to the wave movements; and still others, startled as if they saw the water for the first time, hurriedly took off their shoes and then relaxed, laughing at themselves. The best I’ve witnessed was when, upon seeing these sea waves lapping on the shore, an elder man quickly reacted, pulling his trousers up, as in a reflex. Most important to the installation are the technical details around screens, projectors’ lumens output, and ambient light. However, despite all the mechanisms of control set up around the project (which was submitted, as required, in half a dozen stages while in progress to a committee of six to eight members that included not only the architect and the curator but also the leading staff of the diverse scientific, technical, financial, and architectural departments), the museum administration missed out on the crucial role that image and light play in the project. For example, in the opening phase, instead of having four large Daylight screens — that is, high-­definition gray screens made for projections in full outdoor light — as we had repeatedly specified, they simply came up with regular white screens. The same attitude prevailed when they replaced the high-­lumens projectors we requested with low-­lumens projectors used in administrators’ offices. These are just two examples indicative of how ridiculously useless all this rigid bureaucratic control and order proved to be in the end. It took much tenacity and humility from the two of us, alternately yelling at and begging the totally unprepared technical team during some three weeks, to bring the project to an acceptable stage for the inauguration date. And after that we have had to persevere and remain firm in following up on the details to obtain more satisfactory results following the presidential event.

The Double Movement of Interiority and Exteriority Trinh: Working intensely with the light within (video and projector lights) and without (ambient light through glass panes) as related to a large-­scale site-­ specific installation, we were prepared to make the available light part of our artistic endeavor. In other words, we expected the project to fade in and fade out to a certain degree with the different periods of the day and seasons of the year. But we were far from expecting it to disappear almost entirely at certain times of the day — noon to 3 p.m., for example — especially during summer, when

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the light outside is particularly bright. This was the frustrating situation with the project on the inauguration day, June 19, 2006, and during a couple months after, when it was still in progress. Immediate responses we got then from visitors and from our friends and acquaintances varied widely, from those who barely noticed it and thought it was invisible, to those who were so taken in by it as to linger on the ramp for several hours before they proceeded to the interior exhibiting spaces of the museum. This was also how we intensely learned that cloudy, rainy days and wintertime could turn out to be our installation’s best friends. . . . There’s more than one way to experience the passage and to discuss its mobile in-­betweenness: physical location, existential no-­thing-­ness, differing time-­space experience, challenging multicultural interactions, strategic outside-­inside positioning in cultural politics, intimate image-­mind-­body process, or spiritual praxis of light in semidarkness. These are a few examples of possibilities in articulating this passage in the ramp. Mainly based on the element of light for its visibility, the project lies in the realm of avisuality — being not entirely visual and situated somewhere between the extravisible and the infravisible. Says an aphorism in L’Autre marche: “Voir sans voix / Voix aveugle” (Seeing voiceless / Blind voice). Located neither quite inside nor outside the museum, in a transit realm where visitors come and go, the way projected aphorisms across cultures (re)appear and disappear, the installation may, as suggested earlier, be viewed both as an enrichment of and as a comment on the function, content, and direction of the museum that remain heavily focused on material reality and on the acquisition and exhibition of objects as cultural evidence. Awareness of a different walking toward the Self, the Other, and the World thus takes place, as you said, in the space between, in the passage’s double movement of interiority and exteriority. Access to a world other is facilitated by an installation work that unfolds at the limit of the visual. Each walk is unique to the walker — immediately visible in its particularities. (This is the realm of differences across images, sounds, sayings, and languages.) And yet, exceeding the visible, it is, in its larger scope, a way of existing with the world — an attitude toward life, where multiplicities and one are simply the two facets of the same reality. One experiences the world through one’s singular body of walking, but to let the world come to oneself, one would also have to drop that personal body

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so as to take other bodies intimately into one’s walk. Says another aphorism in L’Autre marche: “l’entrée en soi ouvre sur l’autre” (moving into oneself opens wide onto the other).

the walk between Zabunyan: We were mentioning how, in your films, the way you record images of the world you encounter matches a construction that deliberately reinforces the rupture of the narrative. In a film, the montage is a succession of shots that exist in a two-­ dimensional space, with, let’s say, a beginning and an end, even though repetitions and ruptures are possible. In L’Autre marche, because we are in a three-­dimensional space, we have the impression that this process of the montage is suddenly revealed, as if the displacement of the spectator was “doing” and “undoing” the installation at the rhythm of her or his steps. The relationship is established through a process in progress, where this same spectator will have a different perception and a new interpretation if she or he walks in the direction of the exhibition halls or comes back to the lobby. To walk upward or downward on this ramp makes her or him even more aware of the verticality of her or his body when images are projected on the walls and on the floor. Her or his experience of the installation therefore goes together with a loss of balance. I would like to know if, for you, this walk toward the exhibition halls where all these ethnographic objects are presented could be interpreted as an almost initiatory journey, where again this notion of in-­between is reinforced?4 Trinh: It’s quite appropriate to end this conversation with your insightful reading, concerning the destabilizing experience of becoming in L’Autre marche. Certainly the notion of an “initiation walk” or “rite of passage,” as I mentioned earlier, is very relevant. In fact the ritual dimension was much stronger in the initial proposal we made for the project. And I am using the term ritual here in its wider scope, to refer less to coded social performances than to dynamic, creative practices aware of the codified passages they necessarily go through to be what they are. Making a film or a video, for example, is to engage in ritual — both the rituals of technologies and those of creating and structuring images. Thus to be unaware of the rituals that structure our everyday life is to remain deep in conformity — caught in conventions without consciousness of them as conventions, and hence without agency. I have dealt at length with this question in a previous film I shot in Japan, The Fourth Dimension (2001).

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Liquid Screen Trinh: One of the elements we initially featured in L’Autre marche was a FogScreen. Depending on whether the visitor enters or exits the museum, the walk would end or begin again with the crossing of an immaterial screen that serves as a threshold site. On this screen, an image taken from an entranceway of a traditionally built dwelling in Africa would be projected, whose visual impact would be that of a luminous door giving access to a different world. The ephemeral and incomprehensible nature of the FogScreen, as well as the possibility physically to walk through what appears as a partition at once solid (from afar) and liquid (at closer range), would awaken and focus the visitor’s attention on both the subject presented and the very production of image, here of the door image. The walk along the ramp would thus offer an experience of transformation clearly marked as a rite of passage which, while showing “tradition,” opens onto the creative use of the latest technologies. Standing as a virtual door, the FogScreen paradoxically manifests the immaterial nature of the image. As with smoke and fog, images projected on it change, disintegrate, and take form again when one touches it or blows on it, for example. Such an invisible canvas usually has a magical effect on the spectator and attracts the public’s curiosity through its absence of materiality. Taken further, it could, like the other elements featured in L’Autre marche, function as a comment on the fictional depth of all cultural constructs. Screen, canvas, partition — the FogScreen would be the liminal gesture closing or reopening a rite of passage that leads from the outside in or inside out, as the visitor reintegrates the city. Unfortunately, although the museum committee enthusiastically endorsed this feature in the first stages of the project, they gave up on it in the process, mainly because of their dwindling budget, they said. Similarly, smell — a familiar component of rituals — was another dimension proposed at the initial stages of L’Autre marche. The general emphasis was on land and water, or on earthen and sea fragrances in phases 1 and 3, with more accented odors suggesting specific localities and cultures in phase 2. This is how many of us largely experience cultural particularities. When I was living in Senegal, for example, every time I traveled and flew back into Dakar, I was hit by the local smell of spices and musk as soon as I stepped down from the plane, before I saw anything of the city and its people. To this day,

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whenever it is a question of detecting a location or of following a story, I rely more intimately on my ability to follow the track of a scent rather than on merely what my eye and mind tell me. Having already worked with the dimension of smell in narrative in one of my previous films, A Tale of Love (1996), I was eager to explore it further in the tridimensional space of installation work. But the museum administration also took it off at the later stages of the project, voicing concerns about visitors’ possible allergies to scents, which could be aggravated by the confined corridor space of the ramp. Although I didn’t agree with such a concern, I could easily understand how odors could provoke strong reactions from people. As I’ve discussed elsewhere in relation to A Tale of Love, when a forgotten scent hits you, you never know where it leads you or what it will do to you, and “by the time you realize it, it’s too late. You’re hurled into the dark corridors of buried memories. And you walk around crazed,” said one of the film’s main characters. Each scent unfolds with it a whole narrative track that emerges wildly and effortlessly if one is available enough to let it come at its own pace. The sense of smell is continually said to be the sense of memory and of imagination. Image, scent, and sound are all experiences of transience. No matter how strong and persistent their impact can be, sounds are bubbles on the surface of silence, fragrances are volatile, and projected images are made to disappear. And yet the experience of the walk needs not be lost. This is what L’Autre marche could acutely offer the strolling visitors at a self-­to-­world scale. A wide range of screens and screen surfaces is also used for the installation, which perform as rites and rhythms in the walk’s spatial, temporal, and corporeal space, while rendering visible both the partial nature of images and the way one perceives them. With such a field of vision and movement, at once so confined (limited to the ramp space) and potentially so expansive, the reality of diverse cultural forms comes to the visitor in rhythmic fragments and layers.

Human, Vegetal, Animal, and Mineral Trinh: Screens, images, and installation are conceived so as to expose the “hand,” or the gesture of production, while showing the subject. This is what makes all the difference in what certain visitors see as the possible commodifying of cultures through the facile consumption of images, especially when these are shown in a context of transcultural multiplicity. Such concerns are

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above all indicative of what kind of walk the visitor has taken on the ramp. Indeed all depends on the visitor’s receptive capacity. Some hurry up the ramp, paying no attention to what’s along their path, too eager to reach what they’ve come to see: the building, the interior exhibition spaces, and the collection of objects on display. Others walk through it, seeing only what they are used to seeing, focusing exclusively on the contents of certain images and, as their logic has it, on otherness via the human. But needless to say, L’Autre marche does not merely feature images or the human world. More inclusively, it leads the visitors on their ascending walk from the human to the vegetal, the animal, and the mineral worlds, and the same applies in reverse order when these visitors leave the museum. To focus only on the images’ content is to miss the installation — for it is not a show of pictures. Getting stuck on one element in one’s walk would prevent one from seeing how it acts in accordance (or discordance) with the rest of the installation, and hence to apprehend things and events in their interdependent relations. To my great surprise, and yet not surprisingly, children have been quite an unexpected gift to this installation. I have never thought of my work as appealing to a child audience, but I have been proven wrong more than once. In fact in watching and learning from museum visitors’ reactions to L’Autre marche, we have been rewarded time and again by the way the work interestingly comes to life with children’s effortless involvement. Teachers usually take whole classes for a visit on Wednesdays. The children’s interactions with the installation were ingenious and immediate; quite obviously they see things many adults don’t, and they have no qualms turning the entirety of the ramp into a playground. For example, one of the concerns raised by the museum staff in relation to the images being projected on the floor (in phase 2) is that stepping on the images would be offensive to certain cultures, and yes, I understand that. (The incidence of the shoe hurled by an Iraqi audience member at our ex-­president Bush is quite memorable in its connotations!) But in certain other cultures touching the feet of a person is a mark of respect, not only for that person but even more so for oneself on the spiritual path. As I told them, it all depends on how the different elements play out in relation to one another, including here the way the visitor receives these images. Some quickly pass their hand under the projector light, as if to test where the source of light is, and then immediately move away from the image, perhaps in fear of being ridiculed. Others,

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who stopped to look at the images and avoided walking on them, told me how insensitive and mindless the other visitors were, who didn’t even care where they put their feet. And yes, they were not entirely wrong in their opinion. But the best examples were to be found in the way children reacted. They became extremely excited as soon as they saw images on the floor; they stooped down to scoop them in their hands; they exclaimed at what they saw, especially when they recognized the graceful movement of a jellyfish (which the parents hadn’t figured out yet); they lay on the floor, wriggled, turned and twisted their bodies in accordance with what they saw, or they squarely entered the image by standing underneath the projector’s light and reveling out loud at the projections they saw on their body. They played with this for as long as the teachers would let them, taking turns or acting as a group collectively to receive the image onto them. The sight of children playing with the images in small groups under each of the projectors in an entire section of the ramp was truly hilarious. Equally important, as you’ve noted, is the role of the aphorisms, whose function is to displace, destabilize, and expand what is taken for granted. Their presence contributes to the inquisitive nature of the walk among images of the world, thereby facilitating a shift of perspective or of position. As lights that disappear and reappear in changing forms, these multilingual aphorisms are not reduced to the function of communication and signification or of illustration and explanation in relation to the images. What seems most relevant is to create a subtly, mutually enriching relation between the said and the seen, the verbal and the visual, the graphic and the plastic. Here children also have an interesting role to play; they read the aphorisms aloud, focusing on every word, but what enchanted them most was the fact that these aphorisms not only change, but some of them are also mobile, and the children utterly enjoyed following them, accelerating, slowing down, turning about accordingly. In the end, the children seemed to have understood best that you cannot step on an image projected, because as soon as you try to do that, the image is on you! The installation can turn the ramp into a stage, and, as with a performer on stage, as soon as the visitor walks in, the dance begins and the walkway starts to come alive. To let the world come to oneself with every step is to enable the walk along the long ramp to take on a life of its own.

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Notes Elvan Zabunyan is a contemporary art historian and art critic based in Paris. She is an associate professor at the Rennes University (Brittany, France) and has been the director of the Curatorial Program in the Art History Department since 2002. She has published many essays on contemporary visual arts in books, exhibition catalogues, and journals and is the author of Black Is a Color: A History of Contemporary African American Art (Paris: Dis Voir, 2004, translated into English in 2005). Her research focuses on a redefinition of contemporary art history through postcolonial theories and the genealogy of cultural displacement; she also works on feminist art and theories at the turn of the 1970s. 1. A  ll questions by Elvan Zabunyan were originally asked in French and later translated into English by Zabunyan for publication. We include here the original French version for each of the questions. Z: Le Musée du Quai Branly a ouvert en juin 2006. Plusieurs années de polémiques sur le statut de cette institution ont précédé son inauguration. Ces discussions portaient notamment sur la façon dont le musée, consacré à la conservation et à l’exposition des œuvres d’art et objets dits «primitifs», devait s’appeler. Le Quai Branly a finalement été nommé d’après sa localisation parisienne sans que rien dans cet intitulé se réfère à la nature de l’immense collection qu’il possède. Ce sont entre autres les 300 000 pièces du Musée de l’Homme qui ont été transférées au Musée du Quai Branly. Le Musée de l’Homme situé au Trocadéro avait été fondé en 1937 pendant l’Exposition Universelle, consacré à l’histoire des sciences naturelles et à l’histoire de l’évolution humaine tant du point de vue anthropologique que culturel, il était considéré comme un « musée laboratoire » privilégiant la recherche du devenir de l’espèce humaine à l’échelle planétaire. Alors que le but du Musée de l’Homme était clairement liée à une recherche scientifique, on constate que le Musée du Quai Branly privilégie lui une approche esthétique et exotique en présentant, dans une scénographie démonstrative et sans contextualisation culturelle, les chefs d’œuvres d’Afrique, d’Océanie ou des Amériques. La collection du Quai Branly est aussi composée de celle de l’ancien Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, lui même ancien Musée des Colonies inauguré Porte Dorée à l’occasion de l’Exposition Coloniale Internationale de 1931.  La recherche portant sur l’histoire de ce passé colonial en France est relativement récente, on s’aperçoit que la plupart des questions qui pourraient permettre d’interroger la nature et l’origine de ces objets ethnographiques qui ont intégré les collections françaises sont éludées. Alors que le Musée du Quai Branly est doté d’un pôle recherche important tentant d’apporter des réponses muséographiques aux problématiques d’exposition, de documentation et d’archives, le déplacement imposé aux spectateurs par l’architecture même de l’institution tend paradoxalement plus au cloisonnement qu’au dialogue entre les cultures.  Dans ce contexte, il m’avait paru extrêmement intéressant que tu sois sollicitée pour une installation permanente, précisément dans cet espace que Jean Nouvel appelait je crois « le serpent » qui était une passerelle/passage entre le hall d’entrée du musée et les salles

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d’expositions. T’inviter c’était d’une certaine manière essayer de valider par ton expérience artistique et ta pensée critique les interrogations que les conservateurs pouvaient être en mesure de se poser, c’était aussi pouvoir intégrer une pratique filmique contemporaine et une installation artistique dans un musée. Ta position d’artiste intellectuelle engagée dans une recherche postcoloniale allait les aider à réarticuler, au sein de cet espace muséal stratégique pour les visiteurs, une position esthétique. Pourrais-­tu revenir sur la genèse de cette invitation et la façon dont tu as décidé de procéder avec ce travail, où images se mêlent aux textes projetés et s’appuie avec L’Autre marche sur un titre évocateur? 2. Z: Depuis son origine ton travail interroge une notion d’échelle, tant du point de vue historique que spatial. Cette échelle, c’est celle du monde que tu regardes à travers ta caméra ou tes textes, c’est celle de ton déplacement d’un territoire culturel à un autre, c’est une manière d’englober l’espace filmique et la réalité contemporaine, c’est aussi l’échelle de la mémoire tant collective qu’individuelle. Ce rapport au monde passe évidemment par les images que tu rapportes de tes voyages mais aussi la façon dont ces images résonnent entre elles, créent visuellement ces rencontres autour, par exemple, du concept de frontières que tu utilises souvent. Dans l’installation au Quai Branly, il y a clairement la volonté de construire une relation entre ces images du monde et le déplacement du spectateur qui avance sur cette rampe et qui croise à chaque pas une projection, pourrais-­tu parler du rapport que tu as souhaité créer entre cette échelle du monde et celle du corps qui avance? 3. Z: L’idée du passage dans ton travail est clairement lié à ces points de contact entre des éléments visuels qui fonctionnent dans leur interaction et dans leur disjonction. Quand on étudie l’installation au Quai Branly, plusieurs approches complémentaires sont possibles. Il y des images que l’on regarde, des phrases que l’on lit, celles des projections lumineuses que l’on traverse. La construction spatiale interroge tant l’architecture du musée que celle de notre propre expérience en tant qu’individu isolé, nous avons une réception très personnelle de ton travail alors que ce dernier renvoie comme nous le disions à une échelle du monde qui d’une certaine manière nous échappe. Tu crées une figuration du passage et celui-­ci existe dans un entre-­deux à la fois spatial et temporel. Le musée est un lieu de conservation d’une mémoire, un point d’ancrage historique, le passage que tu arrives à concrétiser prend en compte cette fonction mais en soulignant le caractère ponctuel de l’expérience artistique, tu la rends fluide et éphémère. Es-­tu d’accord avec une telle analyse? 4. Z: Dans tes films, nous le disions, la façon dont tu enregistres les images du monde que tu rencontres correspond à une construction qui vient volontairement renforcer la notion de rupture narrative. Dans un film, il y a un montage qui est par définition la mise en contact de plans, le tout existant dans un espace bidimensionnel où il y a un début et une fin, et ce malgré les répétitions et les ruptures possibles. Dans L’Autre marche, parce que l’on est dans un espace tridimensionnel, on a l’impression que cette idée de montage est volontairement mise à nue, comme si le déplacement du spectateur faisait et défaisait l’installation au gré de ses pas. La mise en contact est établie au sein d’un processus en devenir où ce même spectateur aura une perception et une interprétation nouvelle s’il se dirige vers les salles du musée et s’il en revient.

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Ainsi le fait de marcher sur cette rampe ascendante ou descendante selon là d’où il vient lui fait encore plus prendre conscience de sa verticalité alors que les images sont projetées sur les murs, sur le sol et lui font par là même comprendre que son expérience de ce que tu proposes est aussi liée à un déséquilibre. J’aimerais savoir si pour toi, cette expérience du déplacement vers les salles des collections où ces objets ethnographiques sont exposés fonctionne comme une marche presque initiatique où là encore l’idée d’entre-­deux est renforcée?

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Illustrations, Filmography, and Distribution

Illustrations Photo design and installations drawings by Jean-Paul Bourdier. Front and back cover: Stills from Night Passage, as designed by Jean-Paul Bourdier, with the assistance of Jenny Vilchez. Photos in parts I, II, and III are from Night Passage. Photos in part IV are from the large-scale multimedia installation L’Autre marche, all copyrighted by Moongift Films.

Filmography Night Passage. 2004. 98 mins. Digital. Color. Distributed by Women Make Movies; Arsenal-Distribution; British Film Institute; i-gong. The Fourth Dimension. 2001. 87 mins. Digital. Color. Distributed by Women Make Movies; Arsenal-Distribution; British Film Institute; i-gong. A Tale of Love. 1995. 108 mins. Color. Distributed by Women Make Movies; ArsenalDistribution; British Film Institute; Image Forum; i-gong. (Print with Chinese subtitles at the Golden Horse Tapei Film Festival Archives.) Shoot for the Contents. 1991. 102 mins. Color. Distributed by Women Make Movies; Image Forum; i-gong. National Film and Video Lending Service. Surname Viet Given Name Nam. 1989. 108 mins. Color and b & w. Distributed by Women Make Movies; British Film Institute; Arsenal-Distribution; moma (New York); Image Forum; i-gong. National Film and Video Lending Service. Naked Spaces—Living Is Round. 1985. 135 mins. Color. Distributed by Women Make Movies; British Film Institute; Arsenal-Distribution; moma (New York); Lightcone; i-gong. National Film and Video Lending Service. Reassemblage, 1982. 40 mins. Color. Distributed by Women Make Movies; Third World Newsreel; British Film Institute; Arsenal-Distribution; moma (New York); Lightcone; Image Forum; i-gong. National Film and Video Lending Service.

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Distribution Arsenal-Institute Für Film und Videokunst e.V. Arsenal Distribution Kinemathek Postdamer Str. 2 d-10785 Berlin, Germany Tel: (030) 269 55 142 Fax: (030) 269 55 111 Email: [email protected] http://www.arsenal-berlin.de British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street London W1T 1LN Tel: +44 (0) 20 7255 1444 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7436 7950 www.bfi.org.uk i-gong Media Theater / Alternative Visual Culture Factory (121-836) 서울 마포구 서교동 330-8 2층 2F 330-8 Seogyo-dong Mapo-gu Seoul, Korea Email: [email protected] www.igong.org / www.nemaf.net   아이공 Image Forum 2-10-2 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku Tokyo, 150-0002, Japan Tel: 81(0)3 5766-1119 Fax: 81(0)3 5466-0054 Email: [email protected] www.imageforum.co.jp

Lightcone 12 rue des Vignoles 75020 Paris, France Tel: 33 (1) 4659 0153 Fax: 33 (1) 4659 0312 Email: [email protected] Museum of Modern Art Circulating Film Library 11 W. 53rd Street New York, N.Y. 10019 Tel: (212) 708-9530 National Film and Video Lending Service Cinemedia Access Collection 222 Park Street South Melbourne 3205, Australia Tel: (61 3) 99297044 Fax: (61 3) 99297027 Email: [email protected] Third World Newsreel 545 Eighth Avenue, 10th Floor New York, N.Y. 10018 Tel: (212) 947-9277 Fax: (212) 594-6417 Email: [email protected] www.twn.org Women Make Movies 462 Broadway, Suite 503K New York, N.Y. 10013 Tel: (212) 925-0606 Fax: (212) 925-2052 Email: [email protected] www.wmm.com

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Index

color, 12, 42, 55, 82, 126, 154 commentary, 144, 152, 155 consciousness, 6, 100, 134, 149, 161, 196 constructivism, 93 continuity, 13, 85, 109–34 “counterbourgeois artist,” 141. See also Barthes, Roland crossroads, 11, 14, 24

Adnan, Etel (poet and painter), 9 affinities and alliances, 65–66 ahistorical, 73 Allen, Woody, 100 amateur, in relation to filmmaking, 114, 141, 152 Argo, 104 arrière-garde, 109 aural dimension, 68 autobiography, 65–66 avant-garde, 9, 109, 159 Barthes, Roland, 104 Beeler, Kathleen, 21, 154 between, 11–15, 91, 93; journey between dimensions, 113–14; between mind and body, 101–4, 110; relations between sight and sound, 67, 71–72. See also inbetween realm; inter-; midway birds of passage, 5, 12–15 Bischoff, John, 34 Borges, Jorge Luis, 107 Bourdier, Jean-Paul, 3, 12, 21, 76, 80, 94, 107, 113, 149, 153, 154, 171, 186, 205 Bourne (film) series, 114 Brown, Chris, 34 Buddha, 15 Buddhism, 89, 116

darkness, 11, 14, 32, 45, 50, 57, 59, 99–100, 104, 128, 148, 154, 166, 195 D-cinema, 9, 12–16, 71–78, 84–87, 91– 96, 100–119, 126, 142–48, 151–55, 163, 165 death, 3, 5, 12–16, 52, 90–97, 110, 125, 129, 147–48, 155, 161, 165–166 Dharma, 9 Digital Film Event, The, 93–94, 119, 165 disappearance, 11, 72, 96, 129 diversity, 10, 87, 126, 187 diy (do-it-yourself), 104 documentary, as genre, 9, 87, 94, 113, 142–67 dream, 3, 11, 14, 24, 26, 32, 89–91, 97, 100 drowning, 11, 14, 57, 100 D’s, the three: Die, Dissolve, Disappear, 3, 46

Campanella, 7 children, 199–200 Chirac, Jacques, 184

Elsewhere within Here, 90, 146 encounters, 5, 14, 66, 71–73, 80, 90, 101, 148–49, 158, 188, 191

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ethnography, 65, 73 everyday, the, 3, 75, 80–89 exteriority, 67, 72–78, 114, 194–95 feng shui, 148 Festival of Light, 26, 45 fiction, as genre, 9, 59, 70–71, 87, 91, 101, 106, 126, 128, 149–55, 197 forces, 7, 122, 129; bodied, 109; perfor­ mative, 76; politics of forms and, 141– 63, 167; structural, 90, 96. See also form form, 7–9, 71–74, 91, 108, 136; in relation to art, 87–89; in relation to color and light, 42, 200; in relation to dance and movement, 50–57, 142–46; in relation to gender, 116–17; politics of forms, 152–61. See also forces Fourth Dimension, The, 5, 44, 70, 78, 83–89, 113–16, 126, 128–29 freedom, 16, 75, 90, 99–100, 112–16, 121–22, 142 Future of Ice, A, 5, 17 Gemeli, 40 gender, shift or change, 117, 123 Giovanni, 7 globalization, 16, 114, 137 gray, 67, 123, 125, 194 hearing, 70, 99–100, 147 Heart of Darkness, 97 Hellas (assistant to Uncle Borges), 52 hypertext, 76–79 imagination, 15, 42, 82, 101, 121, 149–51, 198 immortality, 15, 51, 54, 85, 106, 148; house of the immortals, 106 in-between realm, 142

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India, 15; dance, 50, 107; Eastern philosophy, 79; scorpions, 45 inter-, 11, 91, 107. See also between; midway interdisciplinary, 80 interval, 14, 67, 70–73, 91, 114, 117, 118, 126–29, 151, 159 Japan, 188; culture, 6–10, 14–17, 66, 80, 114, 125, 155; films shot in, 70, 104, 116; media of, 5 karmic evolution, 13 Kenji circle, 116. See also Miyazawa, Kenji Kennedy, Sherman, 10, 21, 55, 84 Kyra, 3, 10, 11, 21–61, 100, 104, 110, 144–46, 148 language, 52, 67, 82, 106; as form, 152–54; musicality of, 68, 70; reality of, 72 Latin America, 85–86 L’Autre marche, 76, 103, 171–77, 181–85, 188, 190–205 Lee, Denice (actress), 7, 10, 21 L’entre-musée, 190 lighting design, 21, 153, 154–55. See also Bourdier, Jean-Paul light writing, 58, 104 liquid screen, 197 Little Prince, The, 6 Marsalus, 52–53 Middle Way, the, 90 midway, 5, 91, 125. See also between; interMilky Way Railroad, 5, 7, 17, 22, 82, 89–90, 114, 117 minorities, 6, 121, 131

Miyazawa, Kenji, 5–7, 9, 11–17, 21–22, 30, 45, 80, 82, 89–90, 100–101, 104, 106, 110, 112–17, 148 mobile in-betweenness, 195 mobility, 103, 114 Moffatt, Tracey, 97 Moten, Fred, 68 multiplicity, 66–73; in relation to film and form, 82; social, in regard to teaching, 79; in relation to technology, 117, 137. See also interdisciplinary “museumification,” 150 Naked Spaces, 14, 70–73, 87, 142, 144, 151– 52, 156, 185, 205 new seeing, 122, 136–38 Night Train to the Stars, 3, 5–7, 17, 22, 82, 90, 117 Nishi, Masahiko, 117 nothingness, 74–75 “now,” 74 other, 165 oxidation, 42, 93 passage, 10–17, 84–89, 118, 137; cultural rite of, 171–77; spatial, 191–205 Payne, Maggi, 34 performative, 13, 76, 78, 149, 165 poetry, 5, 9, 116–17, 149, 152; in everyday conversation, 70 power relationships, relation to genre, 142, 153 predatory cinema, 15 Quai Branly Museum, 183–87 realism: photographic, 128; psycho­ logical, 72, 149, 152

Reassemblage, 14, 70–74, 87, 107–9, 126, 142, 152, 159, 205 rebirth, 13 resonance, 70–71, 82, 97, 156, 172, 181, 190 rhythm, 9, 13, 33, 46; as aesthetic device, 68, 70, 96, 144, 155–56, 172, 188, 196–98; in music, 113, 118, 155, 147, 156; physical and social event, 100–101, 108–10, 122, 118, 129, 171 Sabor, 53–54 self-discovery, 66 Senegal, life in, 141 silence, 22, 26, 38–39, 70, 74, 82, 147, 156, 198 Silver River (Japanese term for Milky Way), 14, 100 Slusky, Joe, 21, 42, 93 social consciousness, 6, 134 sound: integration of music and docu­ mentary with, 144, 147, 156, 198; relation to image, 67–87, 97, 101. See also silence space-frame, 42 spacing, art of, 10, 108 spatialization, 108 Subject of Knowledge, 65–66, 72–73 Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 72–73, 87, 126, 153, 205 Tale of Love, A, 12, 91, 126, 155–56, 198 technology, 97, 115; in relation to film industry, 121, 174 Third Dimension, 43, 85, 113, 114 “third interval,” 114, 117 time-space, 3, 14, 94, 128, 147, 195 Toshiko, 6, 7 transculturalism, 3, 7, 10, 14, 101, 107, 123, 198 traveling self, 10, 67, 144

index 

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voice, 6, 11, 21, 29–30, 44; of autobiography, 65–68; giving voice, 151–53

Wolf, Mrs., in relation to research, 21, 36–41, 83 Woman, Native, Other, 74, 122, 156 “Women’s Time,” 116–18

Western thought, 123; in relation to autobiography, 65

Zen, 91, 99 Zummer, Tom, 21, 52, 84, 107

Uncle Borges, 21, 52–54, 84–85, 106 unconscious, 9, 38, 106, 132, 156

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