PhD Thesis: Nomadism in the Cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha (original) (raw)
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Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages: Third Cinema, Now
2011
Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21 st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces of memory and mourning, as well as sites of creativity and transformation. New assemblages of power emerge along with equally complex amalgams of resistance, producing multiple and competing cinematic regimes. Third Cinema, the cinematic movement that emerged alongside "Third World" struggles for decolonization in the late 1960s, laid claim to a global space of cinematic production outside existing geo-political relations of power, hierarchies of communication flows, and towards the liberation of the "Third World" and its cinemas. But while Third Cinema has ample genealogies and global sites of production, its critical tools have not been sufficiently engaged in an analysis of contemporary cinematic production, including digital video, interactive video installations, Internet art, and film, in the contemporary context of globalization, the transnationalization of capital with information technology at its core. Third Cinema offers the opportunity for understanding and developing generative intersections between the cinematic decolonization movements of the "Third World" and the present context of cinematic praxis of the "Global South." This dissertation engages the cinematic texts of Cao Fei, the Raqs Media Collective, Michelle Dizon, Cecilia Cornejo, and Fanta Régina Nacro in a conversation with Third Cinema. The texts selected for study include video, video installation, Internet art, and film. This selection highlights the diversity of contemporary cinematic practices and expands the definition of the cinematic. The process and conditions of production are analyzed, and key examples of each artists' cinematic texts are given a close reading. This conversation is anchored by three critical terms: apparatus, globality, and assemblage. Each of these draws upon genealogies that both productively resonate with historical notions of Third Cinema while also transposing it across theoretical scales. The notion of the cinematic apparatus has been key to previous theorizations of relations of power and knowledge production in cinema. It is used here as a technic for mapping the rearrangements of power and the attendant epistemic interventions evidenced in the cinematic praxis of these artists. The inquiry is centered on the question of how each artist produces a novel assemblage of the cinematic apparatus, understood as a relationship of author, cinematic text, and spectator, and how, in turn, this produces forms of globality, epistemes that are contentious responses to particular geo-political spaces of knowledge production. The inquiry proceeds through a politics as intertwined. Even more importantly, it provided the possibility of practicing film and politics with an equally integral poetics. This poetics, furthermore, was a poetics imbued with a distinctive voice, one that was fearless and forthright. This is the opening scene for this dissertation: The opening of this book. My first acknowledgement, then, must go to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose scholarship and artwork remain enormously generative achievements, always producing further affirmations and criticalities. If this dissertation marks a return to this book, it is only because many people have made this time-space travel possible. The writing of a dissertation, as many have observed before me, is a collective project. First and foremost, the voices I would like to acknowledge belong to those of my dissertation committee. My dissertation chair, Trinh T. Minh-ha, is a mentor, teacher, and colleague who consistently opens pathways of passionate, transformative scholarship, for myself and many, many others. Minh-ha's friendship and hospitality, rigorous scholarship and poetics, breadth and depth of knowledge across the disciplines, and keen critique combined with kind generosity, have made this project possible. Her books and films form a constellation of visionary openings. Laura E. Pérez opened the initial door to the University of California-Berkeley and has kept opening doors ever since. Her work on spirituality and transformation come from rich insights drawn from life, of which she is never afraid. Nelson Maldonado-Torres has a voice that enables a wide and deep imaginary of liberation. His dislocating of modernity and unleashing of being also creates a condition that makes this work possible. Deniz Göktürk is a fearless and precise critic, the best of friends for a writer. Her engaged transnational scholarship is also a model for this work, as well as her humor, commitment to interdisciplinarity, and productive skepticism. My department at the University of California-Berkeley, the staff and faculty of the Ethnic Studies Graduate Group, are committed advocates for the assertion of other worlds of sense and new forms of rigorous, interdisciplinary scholarship. In addition, the staff and faculty of the Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women's Studies have been generous, providing me with another supportive location at which to think and work. Beyond these companions, there have been important conversations in seminars, working groups and conferences that have contributed to the production of this work. Most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the members of the Visuality and Alterity Working Group (2005-2008), including Lindsay Benedict, Laura Fantone, and Annie Fukushima, whose work established a set of terms that enriched the thinking done here. The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC-Berkeley provided a wonderful home for that group. I have listened, over the years, to other voices, which have been constantly in the background: Those of my family. I thus acknowledge the contribution of my children, Isadora and Joaquin Bratton-Benfield. Their voices provide the soundtrack of my life, and is, in fact, a sound that infuses it with sheer pleasure. My partner, Christopher Alan Bratton, is a trusted interlocutor and creative collaborator whose spirit infuses this project. My parents, Dalida Quijada Benfield and Marion W. Benfield, Jr. are loving and generous, and have been important examples for me of risk-taking and fearless living.
Nomadism in the cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha
2019
The concept of nomadism - which stems from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and evolves into feminist and postcolonial critiques - provides an analytical framework to address the undetermined, multifaceted portrayal of tribal and diasporic women in the cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha. The thesis explores subject positions in selected films by Trinh through the work of Braidotti (2011) and the "mestiza consciousness" proposed by Anzaldua (1987), that provide an embedded and embodied philosophical basis for a nomadic film aesthetics and frame of analysis. The border is discussed as a site of encounter across cultures and social demarcations of alterity. The second chapter explores the nomadic film strategies that destabilise the time-space configuration of the film narratives in The Fourth Dimension (2001) and Night Passage (2004). Chapter 3 analyses Trinh‘s tactics that create a politics of "speaking nearby" in Reassemblage (1982) and Naked Spaces - Living is Round (1...
Third-world cinema: Creating People and Resistance
Journal of Philosophy, Culture and Religion, 2018
Cinema has introduced new approaches of expression for contemporary philosophy, that is inherited by Nietzsche, by departing from philosophy to meet the non-philosophic. Going to graphic museums or to cinema is a pivotal moment in order to encounter a particular concept; cinematic signs express ideas not only in the form of scenes, colours, lines of drawing, but also in the form of musical sounds. To understand a concept is no more and no less easy than watching a film, as a result, we will try through this article to address the importance of cinematic discourse and the relationship with the other , through the cinema of the Third World. In other words, how can cinematic art draw a new relationship with the other, opening up this relationship to what the self and the closed circles of identity are?. And how to address the subject of the other in international cinema. Keywords : Philosophy, third-world cinema, the Other, Liberation
Rethinking Third Cinema: Nollywood and Aesthetics of Imperfection
Nollywood Nation:, 2018
The idea of Third Cinema as expounded by Latin American film theorists is a product of revolutionary cultural movement in Latin America and other third world countries in the 1960s and 1970s. The term "Third Cinema" was coined by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their Essay "Towards a Third Cinema." Shaka posits that African film scholarship is lopsided in favour of the history of the film industry at the expense of theory and textual analysis. This paper attempts to address Shaka's concerns using the concept of Third Cinema, as theorised by Glouba Rocha, Garcia Espinosa and Fenanda Solanas & Octavia Getino among others, to critically examine the Nollywood phenomenon. Third Cinema is defined, in this paper, drawing reference from the manifestoes of Solanas and Getino's "Towards a Third Cinema," Julio Gracia Espinosa's "Aesthetics of Hunger," and Glauba's Rocha's "Towards an Imperfect Cinema." The ideas of Roy Armnes, who advised against imitating the art films of Europe and advanced technology films of Hollywood, have also been useful in delineating Third Cinema. This paper, therefore, situates Nollywood film culture within the general rubrics of Third World Cinema, but goes further to argue that within some cycles or genres of Nollywood film culture, some elements of Third Cinema theory may be found which qualifies certain Nollywood films as Third Cinema. In conclusion, this paper maintains that Nollywood film culture is heterogeneous; some genres are both revolutionary in certain universal sense and in their own unique sense.
Against a Migrant Cinema. Critical Reflections on the Postcolonial Perspective.
Cinergie, 2019
The notion of “migrant cinema”, on the one hand, tends to historicize a phenomenon,recognizing in the current socio-political context a common ground on which such products, despite theirdiversity, can grow; on the other hand, like any codification, this historicization tends to bring back to thecollective sphere what is often an individual artistic expression: as it does not speak of society, it is simplynot interesting. In this sense, as we will try to argue in this essay, the postcolonial perspective on the onehand proves to be effective, as it opens up film studies to important methodological contaminations; on theother hand, as a negative consequence, it tends to treat “migrant cinema” as a genre in its own right, thustransforming the “eye of the migrant” into an “eye on migrant”. In a critical-theoretical perspective, thispaper will debate on how the denial of the existence of a migrant cinema is not an attempt to deconstruct aconsolidatedhistoriographicalframe, butonthecontrary, itisawaytoavoidthatthishistoricizationimpliesand replicates the same dynamics of abjection that it tends to eliminate.
Third Cinema in the XXIst century: Against neo-colonialism.
For the past four decades or so, studies of Third Cinema have been restricted to the domain of niche, Third World films and non-mainstream cinematic movements. This work set out to examine the relevance of Third Cinema theory and practice in the contemporary times and secondly, to argue for the urgent need of anti-systemic and anti-capitalist platforms of film analysis and discussion. The thesis proposes an updated approach to the old theory of Third Cinema and it makes use of the case study design where Embrace of the Serpent by Ciro Guerra is analysed in-depth to explore the potential of the New Third Cinema as a resistance tool to the oppressive neoliberal policies. Looking at different themes, techniques and textual as well as visual content in the movie from a Third Cinema perspective, this research brings to light the power of cinema in highlighting and speaking about significant issues pertaining to neo-colonialism, racism, capitalism and even ecology. The utilisation of Third Cinema theory in this work can also contribute to its re-emergence from the academic oblivion and enhance further research and debate in this area of Film Studies.
In different ways, philosophers and film theorists like Deleuze, Mulvey and Bellour have demonstrated how paradoxical representations of time have haunted cinema from its inception. Central to this paradox is the trope of what one might call the ‘stilled image’ or ‘cinematic pause’ – characterised by a fixed frame held for a noticeably long duration, together with reduced or absent onscreen movement, often functioning to deliberately hinder a sense of narrative momentum. While this kind of image has frequently functioned in an ancillary capacity, certain directors have held fast to the trope and made it a central feature of their aesthetic. As such, it is often a distinguishing mark of so-called art cinema – evident in the work of Ozu, Warhol, the Straubs, Jarmusch, amongst numerous others. This paper explores the form and function this stilled image takes in the contemporary, transnational era of globalisation, focusing on representations of African diaspora. What role can the stilled image play in exploring cultural hybridity and transnational displacement – key factors that shape diasporic experiences and identity? What is the time and place of stillness in narrating experiences for which ‘time’ and ‘place’ are such fraught terms, marked as they are by an inherent paradoxical tension between the frustrated motionlessness of being stranded and the (often unwanted) mobility brought by travel and displacement? Where characters are frequently given over to thinking about a time and place other than the ones they currently occupy, fracturing the continuity of both time and space via memory as lack. Reading the stilled image through a range of theoretical and philosophical concepts – predominantly Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain and Deleuze’s Cinema writings – I use In Vanda's Room (2000) as a case study, exploring the film’s negotiation between the stilled image, movement and time to shape an understanding of diasporic experience.
Deterritorialized cinema, dislocated spaces and disembodied characters in Bogdan Mirică’s Câini
Caietele Echinox
The main assumption of this paper is that the Romanian film industry and the film directors themselves are going through a process of aesthetic and narrative transformation, mostly due to the impact of post-national cinema-making practices. Some of the recent works in Romanian cinema are following the logic of another stylistic, that of a delocalized cinema, a cinema that is both deterritorialized and non-specific nationally. This is explicit in the way the directors are defining the national space, the territorial identity and, finally, the way in which they project social and collective representations. Using as a case study Bogdan Mirică's first feature film, Câini (Dogs, 2016), the author argues that his cinematic practices indicate a conscious abandoning of the national specificity.
Migrant Thoughts. Cinematographic Intersections. (2020)
Hambre, 2020
As a publishing act, Migrant Thoughts argues that the image is inevitably nomadic and inexorably migrant and, as Henri Bergson reminds us, is everywhere. Everything is image. We are images among images, and in this respect film is no more than one of the media through which images move. Images become a gesture of resistance, as by being just an image and not a just image, as Jean-Luc Godard said, they are worthy and can never be subdued by power, despotism or an all-too human will corrupted by the idea of ownership. They are pure potential for resistance, as they are not a luxury, or a privilege, and much less a possession. On the contrary, they are the permeable condition of passage so that a living thing does not become stationary or stagnant. The image can of course move on the screen, but at the same time, the image makes a whole screen, a whole surface where it can continue. It continues in bodies, in writing, on these pages, as in politics, archives, memory, literature, and philosophy. The image migrates, and in its wake it provides and proposes intersections, intervals. That is, it advances through life affirming what is living as a cinematographic gesture and, in turn, it exceeds and goes beyond film itself. Or, to put it another way, where cinema itself has to open up to metamorphosis, it becomes a gesture of editing between blocks of text. As editors we have proposed a montage in three parts, with two intervals (opening and closing) as false cuts in a flow of images which could certainly exceed and migrate outside of the fragile content of this book. Florencia Incarbone & Sebastian Wiedemann Editors