Reassemblage: A Deconstruction of the Picturesque
One of Minh-ha’s missions with Reassemblage is to deconstruct the I-centric, Western discourse of structuralism. It is the Western gaze on the East, and in particular Eastern women that Reassemblage puts at the center of this objective. Minh-ha attempts at a solution that creates a middle ground where the filmmaker, the subject, and the audience all have the ability to interpret without deception of intentions. In her words, “by refusing to naturalize the I, subjectivity uncovers the myth of the essential core, of spontaneity and depth as inner vision.1" The subjectivity is the fuzzy area that results from the confusion of the notion of the other, where the filmmaker is what Minh-ha calls the “inappropriate other,” one “who moves about with always at least two gestures: that affirming ‘I am like you’ while persisting in her difference and that reminding ‘I am different.’”2
A topic that Reassemblage
provoked many questions on, Trinh T. Minh-ha is often asked about the “lack
of conflict” in her films. By supposedly
skirting around politics and social issues, she is accused of only indirectly
addressing concerns of her subject. This
sense of conflict, reliant on polarity, is replaced by difference. In the interview where Minh-ha explains her
lack of conflict, she does not mention the paradox of this change in perspective.
In structuralism, where theory relies on binary relationships of male/female,
West/East, etc., it is only Western ideology that flourishes.
True, Minh-ha avoids the conflict of dualisms, however, she creates
a further conflict within the viewer where the generalizations of structuralism,
firmly engrained rhetorical strategies, are not the basis for interpretation.
It is, in fact, easier, far more conventional, to seek identity through
alterity; give this up and there is only ambiguity.
The sequence of Reassemblage
that had the most poignancy for me was the topless woman in the first of the
three villages that Minh-ha visits; soon after we see a woman spitting on her
baby to clean it, we are shown the image of this topless woman, where
overexposure of the woman’s breasts serves as a critique on Discovery Channel
style ethnographies. A close up is shot
of the woman’s nipple where a bug lands and crawls about. Shown in Discovery Channel ethnographies to
illuminate otherness, a woman’s naked breast is a subject of Reassemblage because it gets the
audience to recognize the device of using a topless woman in developing third
world custom as “other.” This is
creating Minh-ha’s paradoxical conflict; by exposing the traditional
ethnographic manipulation of otherness, she’s giving the audience the option to
explore the potential of cinema when the structures of interpretation are
broken down. Thus, she leads the
audience to a power struggle that isn’t simply based on the notion of the
Western world finding an identity through the supposed simplicity and primitive
nature depicted in ethnographies.
In the essay, When the Eye Frames Red, Minh-ha writes on the process of her
filmmaking strategies, and on her multiple identities that contribute to her
films. She sites an example that
illustrates how she deals with alterity.
When she begins a documentary, she claims that she has no preconceived
notion about where the film will end up.
Minh-ha talks about the freedom of structure in her films as the trait
that provokes the most reactions. Reassemblage has been critiqued because
the freedom could allow the film to be made anywhere. Regarding this, she says, “Well then, I would
have to say ‘no,’ because each film generates its own bodyscape—as related to
specific places, movements, events and peoples—which cannot be reproduced
elsewhere.” The previous statement,
coupled with the claim of going into the film with a clear slate is far more
relativistic than the product of Reassemblage. The refined narration in Reassemblage shows us that she did, in fact, have predisposed
notions about the relationship between the East and the West before beginning
the movie. Thus, the preconceived
notions of how the film will progress should not be confused with her
particular gaze as filmmaker, which she does not deny.
When filming, Minh-ha usually takes
multiple shots of scenes that catch her eye.
When she has the camera, Minh-ha notices that she is able to show a
“smoothness of the gesture,” which is why she usually uses the first footage
that she takes, so that the response of the subject hasn’t had the chance
to refine itself.3 It is reassuring to hear this because the audience’s
unfamiliarity with the subject, if this is true, is also a mirror of terrain
that Minh-ha is not familiar with.
This furthers Minh-ha’s
paradox. The greater conflict lies
within the avoidance of alterity, because Reassemblage
becomes a work obsessed with the idea of the other; in fact, it relies on the
other as much as the traditional ethnographies do. Only difference, albeit a dramatic one, is
that Minh-ha is congnizant of her position as both an outsider and an insider,
an indefinable position where she isn’t able to complete either role.
Reassemblage,
at once, is a film about the feeling of being an observer and a participant in
rural Africa, of self-reflective and scholarly observations about the role of
ethnography on the rural women of Senegal.
We are constantly being asked, what good has ethnography done for
Senegal? Have ethnographies helped
Senegal appreciate Senegal, or have ethnographies helped Euro-America reinvent
itself? The identity crisis of the West
is well defined in Minh-ha’s essay, Not
You/Like You, as “usually a search for the lost, pure, true, real, genuine,
original, authentic self, often situated within a process of elimination of all
that is considered other, superfluous, fake, corrupted, or Westernized.” In other words, as Kirk Hoppe asks in his
critique of the West’s role in ethnographic films, “Whose history is being
created?” Hoppe sees the same troubles
with ethnography as Minh-ha. He sees the
traditional alterity in ethnographies as insecurity on the part of the
filmmaker—where the filmmaker goes into the project looking for something,
where inevitably what is being sought—most likely a primitive, true sense of
his/herself—will be found (624).
When this happens, due to a
consciousness often hidden from the audience, the ethnography shifts to a
performative mode where the subject understands the goals of the ethnographer
and understands how to act to use the film for their means. For example, Hoppe mentions that the common
inquiry of ethnographies, “what happened to you during your life?,” carries
with it the baggage of years of Christian missions, where for a similar purpose
to ethnographies, the word “life” came to mean struggle, drama, and even the
absences of Western rights (630): a word and question intended to mask the
motivations of alterity, intended to inflect a specific emotion. The invisibility of the implications of the
question and the word harbor the deception of the ethnographer.
This three-part deception, of the ethnographer
on the “other,” of the “other” back on the ethnographer, and finally the ethnographer
on the audience, is cyclical, all parts relying on the other.
However, the burden is on the filmmaker/ethnographer to adjust the
balance of the relationship that exists with the audience and the “other.”
Minh-ha, speaking of Euro-American ethnographers, says, “the conceited
giver likes to give with the understanding that he is in a position to take
back whenever he feels like it and whenever the acceptor dares or happens
to trespass on his preserves.”4
It would be impossible for Reassemblage to avoid this controversy
and the imbalance of the filmmaker with the audience and the other; perhaps
this is why no attempt is made to do so. Subjectivity
is never hidden, given the films essayistic qualities, yet Minh-ha does have
a socioeconomic background that allows Reassemblage rights that many other ethnographies don’t have. As a woman born in a third world country making
a film about women in another third world country, there opens up an opportunity
for the filmmaker to have an insider’s perspective as well as an insider’s
respect, while at the same time keeping distance that comes when one is an
observer.5 For this reason, Reassemblage’s bend is obvious, therefore revealing it’s subjective
nature, a documentary blurred between auto- and traditional ethnographies.
This newly defined position, which
Minh-ha calls the “inappropriate other,” is the development that Reassemblage attempts and is the change
that the critics of the Western gaze call for.
The “inappropriate other” has an obligation to a sense of selflessness,
where through a consciousness of the duality of the “I,” the conceited giver
who is the traditional ethnographer can break the pattern of deception.
The aesthetic of Reasseblage again needs to be
examined. The mixing of the ugly and the
beautiful seems to serve a purpose synonymous with Trinh T. Minh-ha as a film
maker, where the contrast of perspectives creates the effect of deconstructing
notions of what is and is not beautiful.
Consistent with the mission of post structuralism, Minh-ha invites the
audience to question, then question again the polarity of the ugly and the
beautiful, east and west, feminine and masculine, and the alterity these
dualisms rely on.
The inflection at the end of the
film is purposefully inconclusive. The
feedback loop between the viewer and the documentary is not one where the
Western audience feels good, however, there is a heightened awareness of the
self, the individual’s role in the relationship between the East and West,
between masculinity and femininity. Reassemblage is an attempt at
anti-propaganda, so the viewer is not trapped into the inaction of reaffirming
the already dominant belief structure.
Bibliography—
Hoppe, Kirk. Whose
Life is it Anyways? The Journal
of African Historical Studies. Vol.
26, No. 3 (1993), 623-636.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0361-7882%281993%2926%3A3%3C623%3AWLIIAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J
Minh-ha, Trinh T.
Not You/Like You. Feminism
and the Critique of Colonial Discourse, 1998. http://humwww.ucsc.edu/CultStudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_3-4/minh-ha.html
Minh-ha, Trinh-T. When The Eye Frames Red. [Berkeley
October 8th, 1998]
http://www.ntticc.or.jp/pub/ic_mag/ic028/html/136e.html
Note: in the essay I refer to this
piece as an essay; it is, however, an interview.
Minh-ha,
Trinh-T. Interviewer Interviewed: A Discussion With Trinh T. Minh-ha. 1993.
http://pages.emerson.edu/organizations/fas/latent_image/issues/1993-12/print_version/trinh.htm
1 From Not You/Like You
2 Not You/Like You
3 When The Eye Frames Red