Trinh T. Minh-ha
Encyclopedia
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer
, academic and composer
. She is a world-renowned independent filmmaker and feminist, post-colonial theorist. She teaches courses that focus on women's work as related to cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and the arts. The seminars she offers focus on Third cinema, film theory and aesthetics, the voice in cinema, the autobiographical voice, critical theory and research, cultural politics and feminist theory.
She has been making films for over twenty years and may be best known for her first film Reassemblage, made in 1982. She has received several awards and grants, including the American Film Institute’s National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award, and Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Her films have been the subject of twenty retrospectives.
, Vietnam
, in 1952. She was brought up in South Vietnam during the American War. She studied piano and music composition at the National Conservatory of Music and Theater in Saigon. Trinh migrated to the United States in 1970. She studied music composition, ethnomusicology, and French literature at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where she received her M.F.A.s and Ph.D. degree. She has been teaching in the Gender and Women's Studies
Department at the University of California, Berkeley
since 1994 and in the Department of Rhetoric since 1997. She has also taught at Harvard, Smith
, Cornell, San Francisco State University
, the University of Illinois, Ochanomizu University
in Japan, and the National Conservatory of Music in Senegal. She is trained as a musical composer.
and released in 1982. This film was part of a three year work on ethnographic field research in West Africa
through the Research Expedition Program of the University of California, Berkeley. In Reassemblage Trinh explains that she intends "not to speak about/Just speak near by," unlike more conventional ethnographic documentary film. The film is a montage of fleeting images from Senegal and includes no narration, although there are occasional statements by Trinh T. Minh-ha. None of the statements given by her assign meaning to the scenes. There is music, silence, sometimes Trinh views a movie, refusing to make the film "about" a "culture". It points to the viewers expectation and the need for the assignment of meaning. The audience is left with a sense of disorientation.
Trinh's unique presentation of images serves as a language for the abstract, often exoticized representation of African Culture in Western countries. She re-frames the images in order to establish a figurative filter - a usurped privileged gaze. The montage of images point towards the economy of entertainment, which exoticizes images; exploited by the international community as justification for continued neocolonialism. Trinh's images re-present struggle and resistance to the mystification and exoticization of African life. Her images suggest a process of interpretation as an explanation to resist prescribed assumptions and the perpetuation of stereotypes, as it is announced in the opening statement, "Not descriptive, not informative, not interesting."
at the American Film and Video festival.
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, academic and composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
. She is a world-renowned independent filmmaker and feminist, post-colonial theorist. She teaches courses that focus on women's work as related to cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and the arts. The seminars she offers focus on Third cinema, film theory and aesthetics, the voice in cinema, the autobiographical voice, critical theory and research, cultural politics and feminist theory.
She has been making films for over twenty years and may be best known for her first film Reassemblage, made in 1982. She has received several awards and grants, including the American Film Institute’s National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren Award, and Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Her films have been the subject of twenty retrospectives.
Biography
Trinh T. Minh-ha was born in HanoiHanoi
Hanoi , is the capital of Vietnam and the country's second largest city. Its population in 2009 was estimated at 2.6 million for urban districts, 6.5 million for the metropolitan jurisdiction. From 1010 until 1802, it was the most important political centre of Vietnam...
, Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
, in 1952. She was brought up in South Vietnam during the American War. She studied piano and music composition at the National Conservatory of Music and Theater in Saigon. Trinh migrated to the United States in 1970. She studied music composition, ethnomusicology, and French literature at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where she received her M.F.A.s and Ph.D. degree. She has been teaching in the Gender and Women's Studies
Women's studies
Women's studies, also known as feminist studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field which explores politics, society and history from an intersectional, multicultural women's perspective...
Department at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
since 1994 and in the Department of Rhetoric since 1997. She has also taught at Harvard, Smith
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
, Cornell, San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...
, the University of Illinois, Ochanomizu University
Ochanomizu University
is one of only two national women's universities in Japan. The other one is the Nara Women's University.-History:Ochanomizu University was founded in 1875 as a teacher training institute for women located in Tokyo's Ochanomizu neighborhood. On September 1, 1923, the campus was destroyed in the...
in Japan, and the National Conservatory of Music in Senegal. She is trained as a musical composer.
Reassemblage (40 mins, 1982)
Reassemblagehttp://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c52.shtml is Trinh T. Minha's first film. It was filmed in SenegalSenegal
Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...
and released in 1982. This film was part of a three year work on ethnographic field research in West Africa
West Africa
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Western Africa includes the following 16 countries and an area of approximately 5 million square km:-Flags of West Africa:...
through the Research Expedition Program of the University of California, Berkeley. In Reassemblage Trinh explains that she intends "not to speak about/Just speak near by," unlike more conventional ethnographic documentary film. The film is a montage of fleeting images from Senegal and includes no narration, although there are occasional statements by Trinh T. Minh-ha. None of the statements given by her assign meaning to the scenes. There is music, silence, sometimes Trinh views a movie, refusing to make the film "about" a "culture". It points to the viewers expectation and the need for the assignment of meaning. The audience is left with a sense of disorientation.
Naked Spaces - Living is Round (135 mins, 1985)
In Naked Spaces: Living Is Roundhttp://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c53.shtml, Trinh T. Minh-ha elaborates on Reassemblage. She examines the themes of postcolonial identification and the geopolitical apparatus of disempowerment in Reassemblage to create an ethnographic essay-film on identity, the impossibility of translation, and space as a form of cultural representation.Trinh's unique presentation of images serves as a language for the abstract, often exoticized representation of African Culture in Western countries. She re-frames the images in order to establish a figurative filter - a usurped privileged gaze. The montage of images point towards the economy of entertainment, which exoticizes images; exploited by the international community as justification for continued neocolonialism. Trinh's images re-present struggle and resistance to the mystification and exoticization of African life. Her images suggest a process of interpretation as an explanation to resist prescribed assumptions and the perpetuation of stereotypes, as it is announced in the opening statement, "Not descriptive, not informative, not interesting."
Surname Viet Given Name Nam (108 mins, 1989)
Surname Viet Given Name Namhttp://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c58.shtml is not made in Vietnam. The film is composed of newsreel and archival footage as well as printed information. The film features interviews with five contemporary Vietnamese women. Trinh T. Min-ha intentionally leads the viewer to think that the Vietnamese women being interviewed are really the people they portray. After which it becomes clear that the interviews are re-enactments by immigrant-actors who live in the United States. Surname Viet Given Name Nam "allows the practice of interviews to enter into the play of the true and the false, and the real and the staged." Trinh T. Minh-ha by showing both the staged and the "real" interviews it demarcates the differences of the two which addresses the invisibility of the politics of interviews, and further relations of representations. The film asks the viewer to consider issues such as plural identity, the fictions inherent in documentary techniques, and film as translation. Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, has received much attention, including winning the Blue Ribbon AwardBlue Ribbon Awards
The are film-specific prizes awarded solely by movie critics and writers in Tokyo, Japan.The awards were established in 1950 by which is composed of film correspondents from seven Tokyo-based sports newspapers...
at the American Film and Video festival.
Shoot for the Contents (102 mins, 1991)
Shoot for the Contenthttp://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c61.shtml refers in part to a Chinese guessing game. It is a unique maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. The film ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, stemming from events at Tiananmen Square. The title juggles with documentary concepts of getting to the truth: "Shoot for the contents". Simultaneously, it questions the film itself, "guess what's in this film." The film inquires into the process of film-making. The film is delicately layered with Chinese popular songs, classical music, sayings of Mao and Confucius, women's voices, words of artists, philosophers, and other workers. The multifaceted layering of images and sounds once again touch on themes Trinh addresses in earlier film (Surname Viet Given Name Nam) on the multiplicity of identity, and the politics of representation, in this case, re-presentations of China. The film's delicate balance between omission and depiction and its play with colors, rhythm, and the changing relationship between ear and eye suggest shifts of interpretation in contemporary Chinese culture and politics.The Fourth Dimension (87 mins, Digital, 2001)
The Fourth Dimensionhttp://www.wmm.com/filmcatalog/pages/c546.shtml is Trinh T. Minh-ha's first digital video feature.http://www.filmref.com/notes/archives/2006/01/the_fourth_dimension_2001.html It is an exploration of time through rituals of new technology, daily life and what is understood as conventional ritual, including festivals, religious rites, and theatrical performance. The film brings the viewers to a recognition that "in the end" "what is sensually brought on screen" is not "Japan, but the expansive reality of Japan as image and as time-light." Here, travel through Japan is through a camera, a travelogue of images, where a visual machine ritualizes the journey. The images that come alive in time also frame time in the film; this is where the actual and virtual meet- The Fourth Dimension. In the process of ritualizing the images of "rituals of Japan" it is an encounter between self and other, human and machine, viewer and image, fact and fancy, the nexus at which the past and present are made possible.Publications
- Un art sans oeuvre, ou, l'anonymat dans les arts contemporains (International Book Publishers, Inc., 1981)
- African Spaces - Designs for Living in Upper Volta (in coll. with Jean-Paul Bourdier, Holmes & Meier 1985)
- En minuscules (book of poems, Edition Le Meridien 1987)
- Woman, Native, Other. Writing postcoloniality and feminism (Indiana University Press 1989)
- (German edition: "Woman . Native . Other - Postkolonialität und Feminismus schreiben." Edited and introduced by Anna Babka. Translated by Kathrina Menke. turia & kant, 2010.)
- Out There: Marginalisation in Contemporary Culture (co-editor with Cornel West, R. Ferguson & M. Gever. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and M.I.T. Press, 1990)
- When the Moon Waxes Red. Representation, gender and cultural politics (Routledge 1991)
- Framer Framed (Routledge 1992)
- Drawn from African Dwellings (Indiana University Press 1996) with Jean-Paul Bourdier
- Cinema Interval (Routledge 1999)
- The Digital Film Event (Routledge 2005)
- Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (Routledge 2010)
Installations
- The Desert is Watching (in coll. with Jean-Paul Bourdier, 2003, Kyoto Art Biennale)
- Nothing But Ways (in coll. with L Kirby, 1999, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco)
Music
- Poems. Composition for Percussion Ensemble. Premiere by the Univ. of Illinois Percussion Ensemble, Denis Wiziecki, Director. 9 April 1976.
- Four Pieces for Electronic Music. 1975 Performances at the Univ. of Illinois.