Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen (1983) dir. Trinh T. Minh-ha

In her debut film, Trinh T. Minh-Ha challenges us to hear with our eyes and see with our ears. “A film about what?” she asks herself and the audience. “A film about Senegal?” Reassemblage’ does not get to the bottom of village life on the spot, but takes it as an opportunity to reflect on ethnographic film and its colonial implications. According to the title, emblematic images are rearranged, brought into different contexts and habitual appropriations of what is shown are made more difficult. Above all, the politics of representation is in the foreground here and is dissected on the sound and image level. The film is only conditionally concerned with the everyday actions of the (primarily) shown women, but rather with the associations of the audience. Today, Trinh’s critique of the colonial gaze is established in the documentary field, yet the power structures she addresses still largely persist. Thus, even after almost 40 years, the film still holds a mirror up to the viewer. This film, as the rest of Trinh T. Minh-ha‘s body of work, is at the field of many disciplines and questions them in endlessness ways. What is filming? What is the place of the filmmaker? What is or should be an ethnographic documentary? Her first work is breaking with the conventional codes of the ethnographic documentaries of that time, in the first minutes of the film the soundtrack turns off for a moment to let her announces in her clearly spoken voice: “I do not intend to speak about, just speak near by“. But more widely, she also openly questions society and our perception of reality, “Reality is delicate” she says, our “habit of imposing a meaning to every single sign” is also criticized. Reassemblage opens on the following sentence: “Scarcely twenty years were enough to make two billion people define themselves as underdeveloped.“, in 1982 twenty years is also the approximate amount of time since when most African countries became independent (above others, 1960 for Cameron, Togo, Mali, Senegal, … 1962 for Algeria, Rwanda…), Reassemblage is a film produced in a newly post-colonial Africa. “A film about what?” “A film about Senegal.“, Trinh T. Minh-ha asks but also answers the questions the viewers could have, this way she establish a direct contact with the ones who watch her film. More precisely this film focus on women in a rural Senegal in 1981, and Trinh reports the words some of those women have told her, but also the questions she has asked them, in those interrogations she sometimes plays with the imagination and cliché that the western world had on the African continent. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s critical thinking and the demonstration made of it in Reassemblage is so potent, that almost each moment of this film can lead the viewers to doubts, discussions but also create new visions on different subjects. Within the year, the film became a classic of experimental ethnography and in 2012 it’s thirty years since Reassemblage had been released! But even though many years have passed since she produced that film and spoke those words, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s critical essaying is still powerful to many contemporary viewers, and provokes undoubtedly as much interrogations, sure different, as it did in 1982.