Cinema Interval Trinh T. Min Ha Analysis
Yula Dos Santos Costa
CINE 342
Prof. Shimizu
Midterm Question #1 Trinh T. Minh-ha is recognized as an influential and articulate voice in the various fields of reflection and practice in which she participates: independent cinema, film theory, ethnographic documentary, and so on. Her work can be thought of, from the figure of the interval, as an intermediate space open to multiple crossings, a zone of unforeseen associations of the sensible and the intelligible. The notion of the "interval" arises with reference in the works of Trinh T. Min-ha, in order to expand the conventional classifications implied in the acts of thinking and representing reality. In her book Cinema Interval, Min-ha mentions that interval and partition, after all, …show more content…
The representations of feminine reality by the communist regime in the post-war period are hardly confronted by the women's statements in the film, whose experiences obliterate any idealization: "The liberation of women here is understood as a double exploitation" narrates Thu Van. Archival fragments of various origins are put in relation and in perspective through many voices: two narrators alternate between reflective, historical approaches, and fragments of letters and poems, and to these voices are also added traditional songs. The paradox of such a process lies in its fundamental instability; an instability that brings forth the disorder inherent in every order, where the work, never freed from historical and socio-political contexts nor entirely subjected to them, can only be itself by constantly risking being no-thing. The essayistic form of the assembly of the sequences, which bets on appropriation, on the shifting of the fragments of their original contexts, the film claims a meaning that dwells "among" its multiple layers. Traditional tales can be associated with feminist poems, and war images to family pictures. To take ownership here is to bet on a female counter-history that shapes the ways in which Vietnamese women have been questioned by tradition, by nation, by heteronormative discourses, and even by Western forms of
CINE 342
Prof. Shimizu
Midterm Question #1 Trinh T. Minh-ha is recognized as an influential and articulate voice in the various fields of reflection and practice in which she participates: independent cinema, film theory, ethnographic documentary, and so on. Her work can be thought of, from the figure of the interval, as an intermediate space open to multiple crossings, a zone of unforeseen associations of the sensible and the intelligible. The notion of the "interval" arises with reference in the works of Trinh T. Min-ha, in order to expand the conventional classifications implied in the acts of thinking and representing reality. In her book Cinema Interval, Min-ha mentions that interval and partition, after all, …show more content…
The representations of feminine reality by the communist regime in the post-war period are hardly confronted by the women's statements in the film, whose experiences obliterate any idealization: "The liberation of women here is understood as a double exploitation" narrates Thu Van. Archival fragments of various origins are put in relation and in perspective through many voices: two narrators alternate between reflective, historical approaches, and fragments of letters and poems, and to these voices are also added traditional songs. The paradox of such a process lies in its fundamental instability; an instability that brings forth the disorder inherent in every order, where the work, never freed from historical and socio-political contexts nor entirely subjected to them, can only be itself by constantly risking being no-thing. The essayistic form of the assembly of the sequences, which bets on appropriation, on the shifting of the fragments of their original contexts, the film claims a meaning that dwells "among" its multiple layers. Traditional tales can be associated with feminist poems, and war images to family pictures. To take ownership here is to bet on a female counter-history that shapes the ways in which Vietnamese women have been questioned by tradition, by nation, by heteronormative discourses, and even by Western forms of