SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM
Uncertainty is a difficult premise on which to build a documentary, although there are times when it may be the only honorable perspective. To be without certainty usually means to be without authority, and it is the position of authority that generally determines the form and address of the documentary as we know it.
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Undermining documentary authority is a central aspect of all three of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s films to date–her short Reassemblage (1982), her feature Naked Spaces (1985), and now her second feature, Surname Viet Given Name Nam. Much of what is transgressive about all three films can be traced to this purpose. (In the new film, her method of carrying out this program depends in part on some delayed exposition, and readers who would prefer to approach the film innocently are advised to read no further.) In her first two films, both of which deal with West Africa, Trinh challenges and refutes the underlying principles of ethnographic films through camera work, editing, and the use of offscreen commentaries. The first two sentences uttered in Reassemblage go straight to the heart of the matter: “Scarcely 20 years were enough to make 2 billion people define themselves as underdeveloped. . . . I do not intend to speak about–just speak nearby.” Significantly, in the credits of Naked Spaces (a film that deals with West African architecture), Trinh both gives herself a director’s credit and places an X over the word “directed”–dislocating our usual sense of authority at the outset, and indirectly suggesting that redirection and indirection are equally descriptive of what she does.
The speakers often pronounce English words phonetically rather than accurately, and their heavy Vietnamese accents oblige us to make a concerted effort to understand them. Sometimes a portion of what they’re saying appears graphically on the screen, which assists our understanding; but occasionally this “visual aid” also derails us by furnishing a text at some variance with what we hear. At other times, the visual text becomes so prominent that we find we have to choose between reading and listening. (“Do you translate by eye or by ear?” one of the narrators asks at one point.)
Trinh’s many activities and influences seem to be at play throughout the film, informing its rhythms and textures as well as its poetics and its sense of plural voices. The film opens with silent, slow-motion color footage of a row of Vietnamese women dancing, accompanied by sounds of moving water, then of an explosion. Finally, as the film’s title appears underwater and against a black background, we hear a thunderstorm; its sounds seem to combine the two previous sounds. As in Naked Spaces, the offscreen commentary is assigned to many different female voices with a variety of accents–South African and American as well as Vietnamese–and none of these is privileged over any of the others as a conveyor of the “truth” or assigned an ethnic identity: an American voice is just as likely to relate the experience of a Vietnamese woman as a Vietnamese one. What Trinh herself at one point describes as “the impossibility of a single truth in witnessing, remembering, recording, forgetting” informs the subject matter as well, which ranges from Vietnamese folklore to critical commentary to historical reflection to personal experience. The effect of using many voices is to cut these texts loose from their sources and allow them to circulate freely in the space of the film and the spectator’s imagination, along with the Vietnamese instrumental music and songs that are also heard.
Late in the film, Trinh offers a poetic commentary that gives us a fresh notion of both the war in Vietnam and cinema: “War as a succession of special effects: the war became film before it was shot. Cinema has remained a vast machine of special effects. If the war is the continuation of politics by other means, then media images are the continuation of war by other means: immersed in the machinery, part of a special effect, no critical distance. Nothing separates the Vietnam war and the super-films that were made and continue to be made about it. It is said that if America lost the other [war], they have certainly won this one. . . . There is no winner in a war.”
