Nomadism in the cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha (original) (raw)
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PhD Thesis: Nomadism in the Cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha
Nomadism in the Cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2019
The concept of nomadism - which stems from Gilles Deleuze and Félix 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 Anzaldúa (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 (1985), and to what extent a nomadic approach can suspend utterance about Third World women.The last chapter looks at borders between Self and Other, the West and the rest, and how these lines are defied, blurred, or displaced in Tale of Love (1995). The history of ―Third Cinema (Solanas and Gettino 1969) is examined as a prelude to a postcolonial position on a cinema of exile. The notion of ―third space‖ in Homi Bhabha's critique of Third Cinema, ―haptic visualities‖ in Laura Marks and the ―crossroads‖ in Gloria Anzaldúa are evoked to examine ―spaces in-between‖, where the border is deterritorialized.
The Condition of Being Nomad: Expressions of Alter-Subjectivity in Ibolya Fekete’s Films
Describing the subject in terms of dissolving borders, shifting sovereignties, and porous nationalisms has been the project of feminist scholars for more than 20 years. Demanding new figurations of subjectivity that include a transgressive nationalism, a linguistic montage, and a monstrous ethic, Rosi Braidotti for example, in the mid-1990s theorized a subjectivity that sidesteps hierarchic and static definitions. More recently however, others like Katarzyna Marciniak, have problematized assumptions about “becoming nomadic,” or assuming the mantle of “alien” from the safety of academic and artistic territories, when the migrant is often the target of violence, disrespect, and a liminality that is neither free nor aesthetic. Expressions of nomadism can, however, diagram alternative models of empowerment and mobile subjectivity that are revolutionary. The transformation inherent in the concept of nomadic subject occurs not because it “allows for difference,” but because it experiences difference as a material, ethical relation to constant change. To explore this notion of a pragmatic, ethical expression of nomadic subjectivity, I am considering two films, Bolse vita and Chico, by Hungarian filmmaker Ibolya Fekete. In these films, individuals who find themselves freed from the perceived limitations of their political, economic, and personal situations, encounter new circumstances where they must both confront the painful contradictions between desire and possibility, and engage previously unimagined potentialities. Reading shifts in subjectivity brought on by profound political crisis, we see in these films a material expression of the ongoing but fleeting opportunities for transformation that upheaval offers. While this expression is mapped in multilayered, complex ways in Fekete’s films, I would like to focus on the way nomadic subjectivity unfolds through a porous engagement with language in relationships, that results in moments of shared subjectivity; at its best, the nomadic sensibility repeatedly redefines the territory of personhood such that the individual and the multitude are momentarily indistinguishable and constantly transformed. By comparison, when characters miss the opportunity to engage this redefinition and transformation, the alienation and violence of existing subjugating systems is reinscribed and augmented. A willingness to let go of the known concepts of “the self” and attempt communicating in a way that exceeds the boundaries of semantic systems, allows for an ongoing refiguration of concepts of self, family, and nation, toward a condition of perplexed mobility, the condition of being nomad.
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.
Chanson Pour Traverser une Rivière, directed by Ruy Guerra as a segment for Loin du Vietnam [Far from Vietnam], coordinated by Chris Marker, was excluded from the final version of this collective film. This «broken relationship» interests me as a symptom and starting point for broader reflection about how Guerra's very personal, nomadic, filming activity was articulated with the broader activism pursued by internationalist filmmakers. Guerra participated in Brazil's Cinema Novo, in Third Cinema movement and in the Mozambican government's effort to use cinema for «nation projection» (Frodon). How did Guerra's cinematographic work in these different contexts reconcile the goals of «Internationalist Cinema» with the need for national projection through films of a new African nation, Mozambique? Can an historic analysis on Ruy Guerra's film as «accented films» (Nacify 2001) enlighten us in this quest while trying to understand the singularity of his film practice? Can this filmmaker's nomadism provide the key to understanding his cinema as a heterotopia (Foucault), through which a «space-palimpsest» is projected on the screen, moulded by the director and by the spectator in function of their experiences, with multiple voices and different accents, but not determined by a national project?
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
Manthia Diawara’s Strategic Ruminations on Migration and the Conundrums of Cinematic Autoethnography
2019
Manthia Diawara’s films often situate his autobiographical presentation within an ethnosurround linking francophone West African cultural histories to issues of diasporic subjectivity in Europe and North America. In Rouch in Reverse (1995) Diawara focuses on the films of French anthropologist Jean Rouch to interrogate claims about ethnographic “knowledge” of West African cultures. Making Rouch the informant and Paris the locale of investigation, the film “reverses” ethnographic practice by situating immigrants as expert authorities and inverting conventions of representation, linking Diawara as “scientist” to his strategic ruminations on colonialism, patriarchy, and the limits of an ethnographic paradigm. Two decades later, in An Opera of the World (2017), Diawara repurposes footage from a “Sahel opera” to explore the plight of African and Syrian migrants risking precarious sea crossings. He intercuts these narrative segments with both archival footage of earlier refugee efforts a...
Humanities, 2021
The article examines an ensemble of gender and migrant roles in post-war Neorealist and New Migrant Italian films. Its main objective is to analyze gender and placemaking practices in an ensemble of films, addressing these practices on a symbolic level. The main argument of the article is that the way gender and migrant roles were conceived in the Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to challenge certain stereotypes characterizing the understanding of national identity and ‘otherness’. The article presents how the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain for problematizing the relationship between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Special attention is paid to how migrants are related to the reconceptualization of Italy’s national narrations. The Neorealist model is understood here as a precursor of the narrative strategies that one encounters in numerous films belonging to the New Migrant cinema in Italy. The article also explores how certain aspects of more contemporary studies of migrant cinema in Italy could illuminate our understanding of Neorealist cinema and its relation to national narratives. To connect gender representation and migrant roles in Italian cinema, the article focuses on the analysis of the status of certain roles of women, paying particular attention to Anna Magnagi’s roles.
The Colliding Worlds of Anthropology and Film- Ethnography A Dynamic Continuum
2017
The article explores three consecutive periods in which the disciplines of anthropology and film ethnography collide. The first moment examines the common practice of Bronislaw Malinowski and Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. I argue that Flaherty’s film illustrates the general fieldwork schema proposed by Malinowski to document the world of the Other-native. The second period connects the writings of Marcel Mauss and his influence in Jean Rouch’s cinéma-vérité. I state that Mauss’ radical sense of doubt about scientific pretentions of objectivity sustained Rouch’s cinematography with the general principle that reality is accessible only in partial form. Finally, the third period compares the anthropology of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro with the Sensory Ethnographic Lab’s film Leviathan. I argue that it is in both cases where bodily practices are being supported to account for more sensorial perceptions of the environment.
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.