The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

questions and misguidedly expecting documentary
films to deliver definitive answers.
Trinh's refusal to countenance realist representation
thus carries a certain absolutism.
In effect she essentializes realism as necessarily
hegemonic in function, downplaying
its possible subtleties and subversive capacity.
Trinh's statements of purpose in filmmaking
always carry the disclaimer that
intentionality can never exhaust meaning.
Employing a textu(r)al metaphor she argues
that "a film is like a page of paper which I
offer the viewers... [who] can fold it horizontally,
obliquely, vertically; they can
weave the elements to ther liking and background."
The issue of textuality emerges in
the reprinting of film-scripts, which translate
the visual and aural experience of filmviewing
to written text and thus militate
against the more dislocating effects of Trinh's
films. For example, the juxtaposition of text
and image in the film Surname Viet Given
Name Nam splits the activities of reading,
watching, and hearing, which are usually
collapsed into unity by the synchronicity of
voice-over and image. But the printed page
offers alternative anti-mimetic strategies,
including the reproduction of extracts from
the working film script together with
examples of design sketches which show,
among other directorial choices, the manipulation
of lighting tint, direction, and
intensity for each take. In her essay "The
Totalizing Quest of Meaning" Trinh distinguishes
between self-reflexivity as authorizing
device in ethnographic representation
(to expose context and methodology and so
enhance the appearance of scientific
rigour), and self-reflexivity as "[inquiry]
into production relations." The diagrams in
Framer Framed invite the latter interpretation,
but they also serve to defend Trinh's
professional credibility by revealing the disjointedness
of her films to be carefully contrived
and not, as one disparaging viewer
put it, something that "looks like my mother's
first attempt at video."
Trinh attempts to pursue anti-humanist
conceptions of subjectivity in her interviews
as well as in her creative work. Wary
of the construction of the film-maker as
originating genius, Trinh politely dispatches
questions probing for clues towards
subjective or intentionalist interpretation
(such as inquiries into her intellectual
influences or formative childhood experience).
As a consequence, the interviews
seem curiously devoid of Trinh's responses
to her own situation, including her membership
of a "Third World" intellectual élite
teaching within a Western institution.
Trinh abhors disciplinary "territoriality"
but does not pursue the particular conditions
enabling her own geographic, creative
and intellectual mobility.
In this refusal to respect disciplinary
boundaries Trinh adds cogent arguments to
the debate about appropriation of voice,
now burgeoning as a newly institutionalized
field of academic inquiry in Canada as
elsewhere. Trinh encourages creative
engagement with an other, undertaken
with love, appreciation of beauty, and
"wonder [that] never seizes." She attacks
self-styled experts who presume to bear
authoritative, "objective" knowledge to be
wedded to the "subjective" knowledge of
the cultural insider. Trinh herself breaches
ethnographic decorum by, for example,
reproducing film stills without captions to
identify geographic location, tribal affiliation,
or other markers usually assumed to
enhance cultural significance.
Trinh's own cultural background is
impeccably hybrid — she has studied in
Vietnam, the Phillipines, Senegal, France,
and the United States — but her argument
about deterritorialized knowledge extends
to western philosophy itself. Post-structuralism
has, Trinh claims, been made possible
by non-Western thinking. Thus,
ironically, the post-structuralist insight that
the Western Self consumes the Third World
as other itself came about through the cul-