Vietnamese-born filmmaker, composer, and writer lectures and screens her latest work on November 11
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Thursday, November 11
4:30 p.m., Dana Auditorium
"Boundary Event."A lecture by Trinh T. Minh-ha (pictured), a professor in the departments of Women's Studies and of Rhetoric (Film) at the University of California-Berkeley. Vietnamese-born Minh-Ha is a writer, filmmaker and composer. Her work includes two large multi-media installations (The Desert Is Watching, 2003, with Jean-Paul Bourdier; and Nothing But Ways, 1999, with Lynn M. Kirby); seven feature-length films that have been honored in 30 retrospectives around the world (including the international art exhibition Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, 2002); and seven books, of which the more recent are: Cinema Interval, 1999, and, in collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, Drawn from African Dwellings, 1996. Professor Minh-Ha has just completed a new feature film, Night Passage.
Thursday, November 11
7:30 p.m., Dana Auditorium
"Night Passage" (USA 98 min., color, 2004). Film screening followed by discussion with Trinh Minh-ha.
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The world-renowned filmmaker, poet, musician, writer, and eminent thinker in the field of post-colonial feminist theory will be in Middlebury on November 11 for a lecture and discussion of a film screening.
"When I saw Trinh T. Minh-ha's work for the first time I was amazed," says Deb Ellis, professor of Film and Media Culture. "She communicated something so incredibly beautiful in a filmic language I had never seen before. Last year I was at a film market, and found myself standing next to a woman with a name tag—Trinh T. Minh-ha. I felt honored to have the opportunity to meet her. Later in the week, I went to a screening of her work in progress, Night Passage. Again, I was taken into another world—a narrative that wasn't a narrative, a real world that wasn't real … We are truly fortunate to have an artist of this caliber visit us."
Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, of the Rhetoric and Women's Studies Departments at the University of California-Berkeley, is known around the world as a cutting-edge filmmaker whose work challenges the boundaries of the medium. In the words of one critic, Steve Dickison of the Poetry Center, "Trinh T. Minh-ha's [art] radically remakes narrative modes of filmmaking by invoking and then reinventing the tools of the anthropologist, the poet and political witness, the visual artist and the musical composer."
The Vietnamese-born artist has received numerous prestigious awards and grants and has been given 30 retrospectives nationally and internationally for six films, among them The Fourth Dimension,
a film on the 'rituals' of Japanese culture and on time as explored and experienced in digital video imaging (2001); Shoot for the Contents, on culture, arts, and politics in China (1991); Surname Viet Given Name Nam, on identity and culture through the struggle of Vietnamese women (1989); Naked Spaces-Living is Round, on the relation between women, houses, and cosmos in West Africa (1985); Reassemblage, on filming in rural Senegal and a critique of the anthropological I/eye (1982).
Trinh Minh-ha is not only a filmmaker. She is also a prolific writer, a poet, a critic, and composer. She has written five books, composed musical pieces for percussion and electronic instruments, and has collaborated in the creation of multimedia installation art.
About teaching, Trinh T. Minh-Ha says, "I stress the role knowledge plays in the constitution of self and other, or in the students' daily lives and practices. ... I solicit from [students] the theory that arises from their own contexts and interactions. Of great importance is the ability to break the circular relation of supplier and consumer between student and teacher. ... Students are invited to expand their views by drawing unfamiliar, unexpected relationships in what they have learned. They are encouraged, on the one hand, to participate directly in the collective process of making theory so as to relate more intimately to the body of works with which they are engaged, and on the other hand, to develop, independently and creatively, the ability to think through relational possibilities.
"Students can be at first very troubled because they are being put in an uncomfortable place where suddenly everything discussed in class turns around and calls for a questioning of themselves. But without this, criticism tends to be reduced to a mere matter of judging (what is right or wrong, good or evil), and we keep our finger pointed at the 'other.' Questions of racism, sexism, homo- and xeno-phobia or whatever additional phobias we have in our society, all have to do with the way we conceive of relationships."
—Karin Hanta, Chellis House Director