Reassemblage (1983)

I watched T. Trinh Minh Ha's Reassemblage without much previous knowledge about the director or the film. That proved to be a good thing and a bad thing. A voiceover guides us through the film. The words spoken are elusive, poetic strikes against colonialist thinking and seeing. Reassemblage is not traditional narration. It is not a film with a story. Rather, the film appears to be a questioning of the gaze of the documentary. Trinh Minh Ha points out the risks of exoticizing the Other. She is not, she says, making a film about Senegal. Trinh Minh Ha places one image of "objectivity" next to another; the ethnologist falling asleep beside his tape recorder while the locals perform music; the invention of underdevelopment; needs are created, so that help then is needed, too; the ethnographic "insider's" perspective - to spend two weeks in one place. She doesn't attempt to convey a completely different approach, not an alternative story; she wants to disentangle exoticizing tendencies. This is disassemblage and reassemblage of images and sounds.

The film comprises images of women, Senegalese women. They work, they feed children, they dance. This is not the image of Africa (Africa, Africa - yes no) as we are used to see it. The film confronts us with our own expectations (Trinh Minh Ha's own, too?) about "Africa" and these poor, "underdeveloped women". The film, sometimes, goes along, showing images of carcasses and naked female breasts. But it always subverts. Instead of poverty, we see happy faces, activity.

What I didn't know when I sat down to watch the film is that Trinh Minh Ha's film was part of an ethnographic research project.  When realizing that, I could no longer interpret the film as a fight between the Film maker and the Scientist. At least it is not so easy. To some extent, Reassemblage is a film about connection and disconnection, contextualization and decontextualization. As much as I like this film - its brilliant use of sound and image - I don't know if I share Trinh Minh Ha's reservations as to a film being "about" something, that all we can do is to "speak near by". In every scene, she shows how the film is not "about". Being "about", in her view, seems to be synonymous with objectification and false claims to reality. It is evident that Trinh Minh Ha wants to make no such claims. But what exactly is she so afraid of here? Would she say there can be no images that do not distort? Is there no true or right account? - What I intend to say is that it is not clear what she would see as the contrast to the exoticizing gaze.