Reassemblage

Trinh T. Minh-ha / Senegal / 1982 / 40 min.

synopsis

What exactly is Senegal? And what is a film about Senegal? These are the questions posed by director Trinh T. Minh-ha in her groundbreaking film. Her observations of a Senegalese village actually focus primarily on the language of film itself and the ways in which it shapes the viewer’s perception. Using a 16mm camera, she captures the everyday lives of the people of Senegal – their traditions, culture and community relationships. On a self-reflexive level, however, the film questions its own mode of representation as well as the conventions typical of ethnographic documentaries. It thus also brings to the fore the question of who is watching, who is being observed, and what power the image holds over what we consider to be reality.

“I don’t talk about things. I talk around them.”

biography

Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer and composer, and Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work includes nine feature-length films, which have been honored with over seventy retrospectives around the world, large-scale installations and numerous books, including Elsewhere, Within Here (2011).