Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen

“Trinh T. Minh-ha’s first film, Reassemblage (1982), poses the question: how does the prism of observation we traditionally bring to viewing cultures outside of our own disturb them? Clarifying her intentions in a voiceover at the film’s outset, the film-maker states that she does not want to “speak about,” but rather “just speak nearby” her subject. Thus, Reassemblage disorients the viewer by eschewing any trace of narrative linearity in its representation of the Senegalese culture. In place of the omniscient voice-over we have been conditioned to expect from traditional ethnographic documentaries, a largely non-verbal, discontinuous soundtrack of music and silence accompanies the film’s montage of fleeting images of the Senegalese women, to which no stable meaning is or can be assigned. In the forty-minutes of footage, the lighting and camera angles are constantly changing, always before we can focus our gaze.”

- “Trinh T. Minh-ha,” La Triennale—Between the Near and Far: Concerning Ethnographic Poetics (traveling exhibition; “Palais de Tokyo and other venues 20 April–26 August 2012”), accessed December 8, 2012, http://www.latriennale.org/en/artists/trinh-t-minh-ha