by Yehui Zhao
Introduction
Trinh T. Minh-ha introduced and expounded on the concept of interval, a sense of betweenness, where you are free without having to define or locate oneself, in part allowing oneself to not be here or there, invisibles coexisting with visibles. To allow myself to be asynchronous is to unlearn my longing for comfort, security and definition. Drifting in New York, my life asynchronously unfollows my past and my present – I am not here nor there. Instead, I exist somewhere in between. As I explore the intervals of my life, between generation, location, culture, time, ideas and traditions, I become drawn to and find comfort in in experimenting with this sense of disorientation.
This research focuses on two filmmakers who both explore intervals in their work, one about womanhood and generation, and one about diaspora, filmmaking and feminism, both of whom have touched on the idea of self-portrait. Instead of locating who they are, they explored the possibilities of who they could be, alluding to who they are in others’ eyes as well. Both are Asian female filmmakers, one living in Beijing and one in the U.S., although they have distinct life experiences and approaches in filmmaking, they both frame the culture of gender and origin in personal and meditative ways.
Zhang Mengqi and Self-Portrait
Zhang Mengqi (章孟奇) is an independent filmmaker living in Beijing and part of Folk Memory Project (民间记忆计划). She graduated from the Dance Academy of Minzu University of China in 2008 and has been a resident filmmaker and choreographer at Caochangdi (草场地) Workstation in Beijing, centered around the first Chinese independent filmmaker Wu Wenguang. When producing her first feature Self-Portrait with Three Women, 2010, she envisioned it would be a film about her and her mom, however, it ended up being a film about her, her mom and her grandmother, because as she filmed, family conflict emerged and she became an interval between her mom and grandmother’s unfortunate marriages. Marriage and womanhood is what Mengqi was grappling with in this film, as she existed as an interval between who she wanted to be and her mom’s expectation of her. Mengqi communicated the intimate but conflicting connection between her and her mother by using her own body to project the images of her mother, shouting out her longing to explore love, connection and sexuality. The visibles in the films (older generation’ unhappy marriages) created a space for the invisibles (women’s role in society and the missing sex education for women). The invisibles interfered with the visibles by Mengqi exploring the family history in order to understand her own existence and making sense of her own desires.
Folk Memory Project, founded in 2010 with a total of 125 participants today, is an initiative that asks young filmmakers to return to the villages they came from, interview the elderly on their experience in the “Three Years of Famine” as well as during the “Land Reform”, the “Great Leap Forward”, and the “Cultural Revolution”. For most young people who are not professional historians, interviewing for folk memory is not only a process of historical data collection, but also a process of learning how historical memories and records are stored and told. The Folk Memory Project itself is an interval of history and the present, roots and residence. Young people are time travelers in search of a past that visibly connects to their origin, their family history and a past that was lost and forgotten in the fast flow of development, modernism and free markets. The Folk Memory Project sets up an interval between young and the old and explores the betweenness of city life and the underrepresented village life. Mengqi’s work Self-portrait: building the bridge at 47 KM, a film about her exploring the forgotten history of her dad and grandfather’s origin, became an interval of history (her grandfather’s life) and family story (Mengqi’s father left the family since she was two). Mengqi said that her Folk Memory projects often became the process of recollecting history, instead of history itself, as history can’t be linear and memories intersect with each other.
In a place where community unity is promoted, Mengqi believes the concept of community groups is relatively new in China. She stated that Folk Memory Project is a group of freelancers who center on creation and critiques, and that they don’t see each other frequently (they meet for weekends for group discussion).
Surname Trinh Given Name Minh-ha
When talking about intervals, Trinh T. Minh-ha said they exist between Franz Fanon’s definition of three stages of Third Cinema, assimilation, rejection and struggle. It is in the space that’s in-between these stages that we see the struggle, resistance, learning and unlearning, gazing and ungazing, seeing and not seeing. Minh-ha was brought up in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and studied cinema and cultural theory in Senegal and Dakar. She moved to the United States in the 1970s and has been a professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley since 1994. She was a musician before she is a filmmaker. Minh-ha writes about the rhythm of life, which is not the rhythm of aesthetics but the rhythm of daily life, the language, the history of talking, and the architecture and experience of the body. This rhythm of life is expressed through the separation of eye and ear, which manifested in her films Reassemblage, 1982, and Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1985. Minh-ha also discusses our tendency to homogenize our eye and ear, the two of which are completely different processes as what we see is not exactly about what we hear and what we hear doesn’t completely cover what we see.
In Surname Viet Given Name Nam, Minh-ha interviewed a few Vietnamese American women without cuts and asked them to interpret and reenact the interview scripts from other Vietnamese women who had never lived in the U.S.. The visibles, the Vietnamese American women and their stories and the reenactment of Vietnamese women’s stories, speak to the invisibilities of duality of identities, the obscurity of life experience and the media’s power to misinform. The separation of our eye and ear happened when we didn’t see the Vietnamese women but only heard their stories. Minh-ha’s exploration of intervals here is the distance between what we see and hear, the diaspora between life experience, and the politics of translation that started somewhere and arrived elsewhere. Translation and subtitles are often used as the intervals between two languages – in Surname Viet Given Name Nam, the interviews in Vietnamese were collected and translated by Mai Thu Vân into French, which were then translated into English by Trinh T. Minh-ha and reinterpreted by Vietnamese American women in the film. Translation adds to the space between identities and locations, and the power is compromised when a story is reinterpreted. Viewers coexist with the film and are asked to question the meaning of seeing and hearing in relation to the complicities of our experience and identities.
Minh-ha also questions the problem of “speaking about” (interpreting everything in relation to human experience), and advocates for “speaking nearby” (the condition of being close without occupying). Minh-ha is “speaking nearby” portraits of women, as a stranger in a strange land in Reassemblage. Minh-ha has said that nearness is a way of listening to intervals. She saw the authority of anthropology in Senegal culture and recognized the experience of being an insider (shared colonialism) and an outsider (lack of knowledge). This gave her the desire to make films that don’t resemble any institutional perspectives. Reassemblage reflects Minh-ha’s questions about the way of viewing and seeing both culture and women. She dismantles the concept of interview and portrait by challenging the way we build connections between the ear, the eye and the hand, thereby preventing the viewers from easily following her voice and the visuals.
The “Third” in Third Cinema
As hard as it is for an audience to define Third Cinema in reference to its history and origin and the flexibility of inter-genre art works, it could be just as hard for a filmmaker to categorize their film as Third Cinema today. Perplexed by the idea of Third (although I do like the unworldly free spirit attitude in that term), I wonder if Third can be replaced by a new word, say Marxist, liberation, decolonizing, etc, but I am hesitant to refer to Third Cinema philosophically or politically as such because for me Third Cinema doesn’t particularly apply to a theory or a preexisting discipline. When I stumbled upon Minh-ha’s writing and speaking, and she used the word “Third Term” from Chinese literature which is defined not as a deviation of first and second term but a space of its own, I started researching where this theory comes from, and reread Laozi’s writing: Dao (way of living and being) begets One, One begets Two, Two begets Three, Three begets all things. If I interpret it my own way with my understanding of Taoism, one to two and to three is a progression in reaching the harmony of the universe. Therefore, three is a necessity, achievement and a result of one and two. Applying this to Third Cinema, I have come to a new realization that Third Cinema was destined to happen and can be a way to reach all things without limitation and constraints, a cinema of freedom that surpasses first and second cinema. With this concept Zhang Mengqi and Trihn T. Minh-ha are searching the intervals between Third Cinema and all (I think “all” here can be defined as the rhythm of our life, citing Minh-ha’s speech). I started reading about Chinese independent female filmmakers during the Third Cinema Asian session. The same week after I watched Female Directors by Yang Mingming, I found Self-portrait with Three Women by Zhang Mengqi and felt resonated with how she captured the heaviness of daughtership and womanhood. Mengqi explores the space between the daughter and woman with the choreography of her rhythm of life through dancing. With the concept of intervals, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s talking mesmerized me. She introduces herself “my first name is Minh-ha”. I love that she kept the way her name is written, surname first and first name last. What it means to switch the other way to fit the western standards? Does that also switch our time and space and stories? Minh-ha’s film Surname Viet Given Name Nam touches on the idea of switch by filming Vietnamese American women their own stories and reenacting Vietnamese women’s stories. It is that switch of intervals that undoes our learnings of what we see and hear, and asks us to question our gaze.
What’s our routine in seeing and believing? What happens when we choose to see and not see? My thoughts switched from “tell the untold” to the space between “tell” and “untell” and the space between “told” and “untold”. “Tell” is an active voice and “told” is a passive voice. Documentary filmmaking integrates the two voices – cutting and editing an interview is also telling and untelling what’s told by the interviewees; adding sound to visuals is embroidering what’s been told by the visuals. “Tell” and “untell” doesn’t have a colonizing relationship but a parasitic relationship – they rely on each other to exist.
The distribution of the films of these two artists makes me consider the concept of community. For a country that promotes community spirit, the concept of forming a community is new, according to Mengqi. Mengqi’s community at Caochangdi Workstation has been loosely organized and centers on critiques and discussions. Minh-ha’s films have been promoted among Asian filmmaker communities or women filmmaker communities and international film festivals. Minh-ha stated that she started making films because her friends were doing so, and Mengqi started making films because she joined Caochangdi Workstation. Neither of them consider themselves to belong to a community because their work is something in between, an interval that can’t be labeled or defined and they are comfortable communicating it through films.
Minh-ha said that there is no such thing as documentary and to use an image is to enter fiction. This is particularly true when we are making films about ourselves because one can’t remain neutral about oneself but can make a portrait that speaks to their personal truth. According to Minh-ha, authenticity can’t be used to define a film because authenticity is always defined by the one who consumes the so-called authentic. It’s almost always constructed for the other. The same idea of authenticity can be applied to Third Cinema. Third Cinema has often been defined by others, scholars, intellectuals and theorists, by those who consume them. For me, Third Cinema is a living term that fully embraces the struggle and liberation of the colonized, their land, their rhythm of life, their past and presence, their struggle now and in the future. Third Cinema is defined by life itself.
Reference
Asian Female Filmmakers
Yang Mingming
Yang Mingming is a Chinese filmmaker. She graduated from National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts. Female Directors (2012) is one of her significant work.
Liu Jiayin
Liu Jiayin is a Chinese independent filmmaker and educator, born in Beijing in 1981. She has made two experimental features combining documentary and narrative elements, Oxhide (2005) and Oxhide II (2009), both of which received international awards. Liu used digital video and a series of long takes to stage scenes from the life of her family in their cramped Beijing apartment. Her mother and her father—a struggling skilled leather craftsman whose work material gives the film its title—perform their own parts, alongside the 23-year-old director as herself.
Zeng Zeng
Zeng Zeng directed Sea Above, Cloud Below as her graduation thesis from Beijing Film Academy. Zeng Zeng is the contracted director of Dirty Monkey 72 Transformations Film Project, initiated by Ning Hao and aims to discover young filmmakers with a unique story to tell. Her representative work is Summer Secret.
Mako Idemitsu
Mako Idemitsu is an experimental video art and film artist. Mako Idemitsu’s work is a reflection on gender roles, and also on the nature of personal identity and self in society. She also showed how the modern family in Japan was oppressing the identities of Japanese women.
Rea Tajiri
Rea Tajiri is a Japanese American filmmaker and writer and her films include History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991), Strawberry Fields (1997) and Little Murders/Obits (1998). “Rea Tajiri’s films straddle documentary and art film genres, finding new ways of storytelling that embrace the murky spaces of memory, history, and public consciousness.”
Shu Lea Cheang
Shu Lea Cheang, artist, conceptualist , filmmaker and networker, has worked in the field of net-based installation, social interface, networked performance and film production. Her work traverses between hard and soft, sex and polities, fiction and reality, fantasia and earth-bound. Her works include Color Schemes an interactive three-channel video installation, film Fresh Kill, installation Bowling Alley etc.
Janice Tanaka
California-based Janice Tanaka is considered a pioneer in the use of processed images within experimental narrative form. She brings a painter’s sensibility to her intricately textured video collages that blend social and political observations, philosophical inquiries, and personal introspection. Her work uses original footage, appropriated media images, and densely layered electronic processing to transform the autobiographical into the universal. Her videos treat issues of Asian American history and identity, from the enduring trauma of internment camps during World War II to the blending of cultural values from the Old to New World.
Curated Findings
Filmmaker Zhang Mengqi: Folk Memory Project how to rebuild people centerness
This is a Beijing journal published article about Zhang Mengqi’s life and creating experience, and a script of an interview with Mengqi about the creation process of her first feature Self-Portrait with Three Women, and Self-portrait: building the bridge at 47 KM. This interview explores the family relations and community support of independent filmmakers.
From Memory Interview to Art – Guo Rui
This is a published report for the Folk Memory Project documenting the process of the project, villages and participants that were interviewed in each province, social projects and art works produced through the Folk Memory Project. It recorded the creation process and the lives of young filmmakers that are part of the project and how their works are distributed and screened.
Beijing New Youth Film Festival Film & Austro Sino Art Program
This is a program for the Beijing New Youth Festival that celebrates the creativity and bravery of young filmmakers in China. This program covers the history of an independent screening center in Beijing Trainspotting Cultural Salon and the films being selected at the festival, blending the fiction and non-fiction films.
Self-portrait and 47 Miles: Zhang Mengqi’s Self-reflection through Moving Images by sohu.com
An article about Mengqi’s screening in Beijing bookstore, it is an overview of two of Mengqi films and her art statement of what these films mean for her.
Trinh T. Minh-ha: An Interview
An interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha about the politics of language, as well as the forces of ethnocentrism and colonialism that naturalize the telling of histories. In this interview, she discusses her decision to move to Dakar, Senegal, and the impetus for the production of her first film, Reassemblage. The film was created to oppose the institutional knowledge of “Africa” depicted by the colonial administration.
‘There is No Such Thing as Documentary’: An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha
An interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha about why her films are neither documentary nor fiction. She stressed the problematic definition of authenticity and duality and complexity of feminist identities.
Traitors and Translators: Reframing Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam
This essay analyzes that in Surname Viet Given Name Nam Trinh acts as a traitor to the documentary form and ethnographic mode of inquiry. Expounding upon the idea of feminine betrayal, Surname Viet also exposes the ways in which translation and treason are tied to the female body within a nationalist context.
Ute Meta Bauer in conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha
An interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha about how her thinking, writing, filming, and editing inform and influence each other. Minha-ha talked about her ideologies of feminism and postcolonialism in her work and her efforts to separate what we see from what we hear.
Trinh T. Minh-ha (Just Speak Nearby, day 1 excerpt)
An interview with Trinh about her definination speaking nearby and how it is manifested through her film Reassemblage.
30 Chinese Independent Female Filmmakers (Mainland)
A list of 30 Mainland China female filmmakers and their works.
Film Quarterly Spring 2020: Volume 73, Number 3
A collection of scholarly articles studying international independent filmmakers, tracing their life and films. Searching for Betty Chen rediscovers the story of Asian American women who participated in the Ethno-Communications Program, an affirmative action initiative formed by a group of filmmakers of color.
dGenerate Films: Independent Chinese Film
A leader distributor Chinese independent films.