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Copyright 1093 by Rontledge. Inc.
The Totalizing Quest of Meaning is revised here from When the Moon Waxes Red:
Representation. Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1991),
Z Trinh T. Mtnh-ha,
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Library of Congres.c Catalogin-in-Puhlicatinn Data
Theorizing documentary I edited by Michael Renov
p. cm.(AF! film readersSt
Includes bibliographical references (p.
St.
Filmography: p.
ISBN 0-415-90381-5,
ISBN 0-415-90382-3 (phk.)
1. Documentary films---Kistorv and criticism,
I Renov, Michael,
1950
TI. Series.
PNIQO
D6T5 I99
070.! 8dc2O
92-33807
-
CIP
British Library Cataloguin-in.Pnhlication Data also available.
10
Getting to Know You
Knowledge, Power, and the Body
.
Bill Nichols
7/ Getting
You
styles all but destroyed its credibility. Compared to the vivid impression
of reality conveyed by early cinema verit, reenactments seemed encrusted
with the traditions of studio flimmaking.
But the matter of authenticity is not so easily settled. In what ways is
a reenactment less authentic than a recounting? In a typical recounting,
we hear what someone says about an event that has long since happened
while we see authentic archival images of the event itself. Does this
strategy not confer greater truth-value on the spoken word than it deserves?
Is the spoken word not a reenactment in its own right, an interpretation
aided by hindsight and motivated by an implicit point of view shaped over
time? Testimony and commentary give priority less to what happened then
in any pure sense than to what we now think happened and what this might
mean for us. The working of hindsight is vividly demonstrated in Connie
Fields The Lfe and Times ofRosie the Riveter (1980) in which the women
witnesses recount their wartime experience in terms of their contemporar
understanding of feminist issues Similarly, the personal histories re
counted in Word Is Out(1977) draw upon the womens movement s stress
on the personal as political and a post-Stonewall aura of frank openness
to reconstruct lives whose history might well have been recounted quite
differently at an earlier historical moment. In Ken Burnss The Civil War
(1990), the commentary by present-day experts stresses the significance
of this war in the light of the subsequent 130 years of American history
particularly in terms of race relations and the continuing struggle of
African Americans for equality.
By avoiding reenactments, the use of interviews to recount events
together with archival footage (fact or fiction) avoids the problem of a
body too many, where actors double for historical figures. Actors can
never be the person they imitate in reenactments Instead historical docu
mentaries that rely on archival footage are faced with a body too few
lacking both actors and the historical figure: The historical person is either
deceased or no longer the person s/he used to be. The challenge becomes
to restore specificity to an historical figure or event. Representing the
subjectivity, perspective style, and perceptions of people is no simple
matter of offering likenesses of providing stand-ins who propose to
relay these qualities to us or of making a case about what an experience
was like for someone else. Archival footage is only a partial, though
valuable, solution to these issues of representation.
Archival footage also presents epistemological problems that are seldom
confronted. A conventional notion of authenticity is commonly invoked
that implies These images are historical (old) therefore they are authentic
(true) This functions as the equivalent of a default value with historical
material: Unless we are given reason to think otherwise, we will accept
them as authentic signs of their times. We know the past by (re-)seeinq
Gettinr
to
Knni You
those accused and those accusing others, construct the past they need,
burdening it with all the specificity of detail and motivational logic that
customarily serves as a guarantor of judicial certainty.
Reenactment in The Thin Blue Line offers a sense of how memory and
desire are historically situated and subjectively motivated, even in the thick
of an impersonal process of legal justice. Morris multiple flashbacks to
the police interrogation of Randall Adams and to the scene of the crime
n
urge us to see the subjective dimension that permeates historical represe
ng
asserti
tation. Morris questions the reliability of evidence while still
that there is a reality to which memory and representation allude.
In a similar spirit. Trinhs Surname Viet Given Name Nam does not
ews
reenact events or the past directly. Instead, it reconstructs the intervi
sed
compo
lly
that gave witness to them. These stylized interviews (forma
n
ing
functio
mediat
with slightly stilted. monotonal speech) emphasize the
g
ed
movin
in
involv
tion
of the interview itself and the processes of transla
r
to
anothe
ic
system
conom
from one language. one culture, and one socioe
s.
Both
nt
realitie
differe
of
while still attesting to the experiential fact
Trinhs and Morriss films contest a hegemonic organization of reality
that rationalizes or accounts for differences of interpretation within a single
ic
controlling frame. Although this point seems to emerge in a more academ
are
they
that
clear
make
films
both
or reflexive fashion in Surname Viet,
ity.
not simply involved in a game of formal reflexivity or historical relativ
ed
ce
provid
eviden
to
the
part
in
thanks
Randall Adams is now a free man,
ewees
intervi
mese
Vietna
the
play
who
women
by The Thin Blue Line. The
in the
in Surname Viet make clear that they, too, despite their new Jives
submis
three
and
virtues
four
the
from
suffer
to
e
United States, continu
sions that have implanted themselves in the bodies of Vietnamese women
r
for centuries. Representation operates neither univocally nor transpa
s
ently, but it continues to function ac a mediation between one person
reality and that of another.
issues of specificity. subjectivity, and knowledge are not limited to the
n to
historical documentary. They also arise in the movement, commo
e
te
instanc
concre
documentary, from the specific to the general, from the
g
and
meanin
mythic
to the lesson learned, from the material event to
tion,
moral significance. This movement goes by many names: exposi
ns
arise:
questio
case,
explanation. storytelling, and many more. In each
What generalizations are appropriate? What categories can serve to facili
sh
tate understanding and the acceptance of difference rather than dimini
nce
g
differe
reducin
,
typical
the
of
our receptivity to the unique in the name
ance?
4
to the measure of otherness, superiority, and domin
who undertakes
person
actual
the
One way to get specific is to ask about
lar for long
particu
the
discuss
cannot
We
this movement, the filmmaker.
ker
who urges
filmma
absent
often
of
the
without addressing the peculiarity
Bill Nichols
181
us to draw larger lessons from the specific ones lie or she learned and
filmed. This is an old convention in documentary. It feels natural for
events to refer to larger issues. They fall into place along the plot lines of
our master narratives. We assume they hold greater importance than the
person or presence of the filmmaker who provides them for us. But this
begs the central question. This is somewhat easier to see if we put another
assumption into question. What if the person filming is not one of us
but someone whose location or position is already marked as different?
This becomes particularly noticeable when the filmmaker is an exile, a
Third World exile, for example, who then puts on display for us the first
world sanctuary s/he inhabits. The self-evident quality of situations and
events, and the filmmakers place within them, become disturbed; they
fall subject to unexpected reinterpretations that undercut the naturalness
they might well otherwise have had.
One excellent example is Marilu Mallets Journal Inachev(Unfinished
Diary, 1983). The film, by a Chilean exile living in Montral, addresses
the politics of location directly. It stresses the centrality of the local over
the global, the specific over the general, the concrete over the abstract.
The experience of place and subjectivity is tactile, everyday, corporeal.
Unfinished Diary is not an exercise in imagination, an expansion of self
by constructing an Other, like the Orient, Third World, or even Canada.
that can then provide the welcoming features of an old, familiar friend.
It is not engaged in the game of representing a foreign culture whose
mystery the process of translation into familiar concepts and categories
dispels by means of commonsense
Mallets stress on the incidental and specific moments in her own daily
life, coupled with her memories of Chile and longing to have a place of
her own, render Unfinished Diary the opposite of the travelogue or its
respectable, that is, more institutionally disciplined, sibling, the ethnog
raphy. Movement and travel no longer serve as a symbol for the expansion
of ones moral framework, the discovery of cultural relativity, the heroics
of salvage anthropology, the rituals of self-improvement in the bildungsro
man tradition, or as training in the civil responsibilities of empire (or the
multinational, corporate environment of today). Movement and travel no
longer legitimate the subject s right to speak through/with disembodied
discourses, disembodied but master narratives and mythologies in which
the corporeal I who speaks dissolves itself into a disembodied, depersonal
ized, institutional discourse of power and knowledge. This is the Grierson
ianLorentzian legacy in documentary that Mallet rejects.
For Mallet, as for the dispossessed exiles and members of a diaspora.
movement and travel become an experience of displacement and disloca
tion, of social and cultural estrangement, of survival, and of self-preserva
tion. Mallet explores and proposes strategies of resistance practiced
182
I
I
I
I
adopt the
in the media. Ethnic Notions (1987), Tongues Untied does not
Events
Great
Of
Ruizs
Like
problemIsolu
tion.
of
classic expository model
evi
and
impressions
accumulate
to
tends
film
the
and Ordinary People.
as
Just
argument.
controlling
to
a
them
subordinatin
g
without
dence but
and
images
world
third
and
first
of
juxtaposition
a
with
Ruiz concludes
values that suggest attitudes lying behind the process of a French election
without determining it. Riggs concludes on a note that is less an explana
tion or a solution than a challenge. Riggss last voice-over commentary
This challenge
is, Black men loving black men is the revolutionary act.
and
hits the viewer viscerally. Whether the viewer is the one intended
the
of
spoken to by Riggs (black, urban, gay males) or not, the effect
from
statement
tapes structure is to position any viewer to receive this
precisely this point of address. When de Lauretis proposes that a feminist
film aesthetic might construct viewers who occupy a feminine subjectivity,
regardless of their own gender, she offers a proposition that can be
profitably extended to other subfrctivities. Riggs himself puts the point in
practical. nontheoretical terms that capture perfectly the importance of
specificity to the reconstruction of knowledge as embodied experience:
!S8
Now I realize you can speak in a very small, focused, particular way.
I dont mean a trivial way, but in a particular sense that is very
people who are not
community identified, personal, and yet reach
2
necessarily part of your immediate culture.
representation and the represented that viscerally exceeds the moment and
the frame. A gap opens that demands redress. A moral and political
imperative compels such a demand and will not tolerate indifference. The
beating was the speech of an institution (the LAPD) that announces on
every car its credo, To Serve and Protect. The trial was the speech of
an institution (the judiciary) that guarantees equality for all. The violent
aftermath was the speech of those beyond these discourses of the Law, It
was the speech of the unseen and the unheard, proclaiming indignation,
anger, and even hatred in a language incomprehensible to those at the
other end of the freeway, inside the lacunae of shopping malls, airports,
and cultural centers, in front of televisions and monitors, insulated from
the historical world as fully as Baudrillard himself appears to be.
Bad boys, bad boys; whatcha gonna do; watcha gonna do when they
come for you?
theme song
Cops
These films and videotapesThe Thin Blue Line, Surname Viet Given
Name Nam, Of Great Events and Ordinary People, Unfinished Diary,
Our Marilyn, and Tongues Untiedbring the power of the universal, of
the mythical and fetishistic. down to the level of immediate experience
and individual subjectivity. How does a text restore that order of magnitude
which characterizes lived experience when it can only represent through
evocations what lies beyond its own bounds? One set of answers, it
seems, avoids invoking the power of disembodied knowledge and abstract
conceptualization in favor of the enabling power stemming from situated
knowledge and the sub jectivities of corporeal experience.
150
Getrin,
to Kiow
You