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Essay on Trinh Minh-ha, the Most Honest Filmmaker
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer and composer was born in Vietnam. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam is an experimental documentary film about exile and displacement. This documentary fits within Hamid Naficy definition of exilic cinema’s alternative modes of production (in his own words): “Exilic films are often critical, collective, interstitial within the dominant film industry, low-budget and narrowly distributed, self-inscribed, multilingual, and perhaps not surprisingly, sad.” He further states “Every exilic film is at once an allegory of both exile and cinema.”
Trinh’s thought on this documentary is (in her own words) “Displacement involves the invention of new forms of subjectivities, of pleasures, of intensities, or relationships, which also implies the continuous renewal of a critical work that looks carefully and intensively at the very system of values to which one refers in fabricating the tools of resistance...Walking on masterless and ownerless land is living always anew the exile’s condition; which is here not quite an imposition nor a choice, but a necessity” (Trinh 1991 19, 26).
After she made two post-colonial ethnographic films she made a third one on her own community of Vietnamese- American women in order to make Surname Viet Given Name Nam. This film repeats the already published interviews with Vietnamese women in France, and put them together in the form of documentary footage and stills, synch-sound footage, proverbs and poetry, two voice-over narrations, and written text.
The film is in black and white color, the voices speak in Vietnamese and English, and the text is white, blue and red. As Trinh states (in her own words): “Let difference replace conflict” (1991)
The film utilizes a mixed form in order to eloquent the intricacy and diversity of Vietnamese women's’ lives and roles within culture, and to counter the thoughts the West has about Vietnamese people....
