REVIVAL SCREENING

USA, 1989, 108mins., 16mm 

Twenty-three years after its premiere, TrinhT. Minh-ha’s film remains a post-colonial classic, tackling issues of translation and untranslatability: from a Vietnamese transcript of half-spoken voices recorded at night, to the French publication of these interviews, to their re-translation into English by a native Vietnamese speaker, to the patient efforts of ordinary Vietnamese women to memorize and utter them—then to the lyrics of Vietnamese ballads translated into English subtitles—and finally to Trinh delivering, in English, fragments of oral history, epic poems, and folk sayings about women’s role in society. What is lost and what is gained in this multiple-entry process, in this palimpsest of half-erased texts? What is not gained is a “knowledge-about” a certain object: Vietnam. And what is not lost is a certain truthabout the bodies of Vietnamese women.

In person: Trinh T. Minh-ha