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LOUIE YANG
Reassemblage: The Enlightenment of Documentary
The task of a true documentary film is to portray reality
objectively. But the complete reality of a culture is not easily portrayed:
it is too cagey and complex to be captured on film. The films of exotic
peoples and places that we have come to associate with ethnographic
documentary are actually deviations from true documentary. In their
representation of human societies, they routinely sacrifice the infinite
complexity of reality in an attempt to produce a definitive cultural
analysis for the sake of entertainment and the forwarding of a political
or social agenda. These films have been both a product and a
reinforcement of our Western biases about African cultures, biases
which underlie our willingness to accept an overly constructed and
simplified perception of Africa. It is these habits of perception that
acclaimed director Trinh T. Minh-ha addressed in her first film,
Reassemblage. In style and content, this keenly self-aware documen-
tary of Senegalese life challenges both our familiarity with the
conventions and techniques of traditional ethnographic documentary
as well as the underlying Western biases with which we view these
foreign cultures. Minh-ha wants to shake down our preconceived
notions of the primitive and the exotic in Africa, jolt us from our
Discovery Channel expectations of documentary, and make us aware
of our own narrow Western cultural view. Instead of delivering an
over-simplified, distilled analysis of Senegalese culture, Minh-ha
delivers a film that is acutely aware of the limitations of conventional
documentary. In Reassemblage, Minh-has camera simultaneously
comments upon the state of ethnographic film and records the passage
of time in Africa, giving us a documentary unfiltered by our Western
biases and unadulterated by the transformation into informational bytes.
To challenge our expectations of ethnographic film, Reassemblage
uses sound to jolt us out of passive viewing into a greater awareness of
the artificiality of the film medium. In the opening sequence, we hear
complex drum beats emanating from a black screen. Our attention is
forced to the music, so that we imagine a scene of dancing and festivity.
Yet we are jolted from our expectations when the first image is one of
everyday life and the music ends abruptly. This technique is repeated
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throughout the film, with abrupt stops and starts in the strikingly
nondiegetic sound. Where a traditional documentary would use sound
to achieve a sense of continuity and realism (albeit an oversimplified
realism), the sound in Reassemblage accentuates the discontinuity of
the film reality. Our habits of viewing are on unfamiliar ground; we
want to believe that the music and the image go together. We can
perceive a reality that combines the two media, but the film repeatedly
reminds us that the reality we are watching is unconnected to the reality
we are hearing. Although Minh-ha repeatedly demonstrates the
separation of sound and image in film, we are consistently fooled. It
is as if Minh-ha is attempting to demonstrate the impossibility of
capturing such a complex reality on film and the gullibility with which
we are willing to believe the reality portrayed in a documentary film.
Often, the silence that follows the music is broken by the heavily
accented voice of Minh-ha reciting a narrative script only loosely
connected to the image on the screen. The style and substance of the
narration is very different from the sterile academic descriptions and
pretentious pedagogy we are accustomed to in documentary films.
Minh-has narrative does not attempt to construct the reality of a
complex culture as a description: I do not intend to speak about, just
speak nearby.
In the films quiet narration, we are given insight into the cultural
tunnel vision which affects us all and infiltrates attempts at objective
documentary. Minh-ha speaks about a Western ethnologist who
defends the expertise of his profession: If you have not lived in a place
long enough, then you are not an ethnologist. Yet Minh-ha describes
a scene in which the cultural scientist is asleep within his home,
completely unaware of the everyday culture around him. The point is
that the ethnological definition of expertise does not include the
absorption of the culture, but rather the collection of discrete observ-
able facts. How can he be a Fulani? The ethnologist observes and
analyzes; he can only deliver the view of an outsider looking in. An
ethnologist handles the camera as he handles words. In the hands of
an ethnologist, the camera will record specific details of the Fulani life
and ascribe a meaning to each. In the hands of Minh-ha, the camera is
able to move freely, recording the reality around it.
In several instances, Reassemblage juxtaposes narration and
images to highlight the inaccuracy of our cultural expectations. In the
narration, Minh-ha describes the arrogance of a young Peace Corps
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volunteer. In his ignorance, he listens to his walkman and smiles
blankly. I teach the women to grow vegetables in their yard, he says.
This will allow them to have an income. I am not always successful,
but this is the first time this has been introduced into the village. As
Minh-ha repeats the last line, she shows us images of the village
women pounding and processing millet, a crop whose domestication in
Africa dates back as much as 10,000 years BC. Her point is not to
deliver a fact, but to demonstrate the arrogance and ignorance of our
Western perceptions. We feel the audacity of imposing our extrinsic
gifts on another culture, or attempting to measure the achievements of
one culture against the values of our own. In another instance, Minh-ha
addresses the issue directly: filming in Africa means, for many of us,
colorful images, naked-breasted women, exotic dances, and fearful
ritesthe unusual. Yet the scenes we are seeing are those of ordinary
life, a woman walking among homes and children eating from a bowl.
By contrasting narration and images, Minh-ha shakes our expectations
of ethnographic film and African cultures.
Just as sound editing and narration are used to question our
expectations of ethnographic film and Africa, the camera work and
image editing of Reassemblage are used to disturb our perceptions.
Instead of the logical sequence of images weve come to expect from
a documentary film, we have a disorienting jumble of jump cuts,
multiple angles, and short takes. The jump cuts literally jolt us through
space and time in our view of the subject. The lengths of the takes are
used to manipulate the tempo of the film, accentuating the fallacious-
ness of the medium and its ability to alter our observation of reality.
Occasionally, Minh-ha employs a succession of shorter shots to
accelerate the rhythm of the film, then concludes the sequence with a
longer shot of the scene. It is as if Minh-ha is demonstrating the power
of film and the ability of the filmmaker to alter reality.
As the images flash before our eyes, we strain to attach some
meaning or logic to each one. Our expectations of film are so deeply
ingrained, we are unable to see a sequence of images without attempt-
ing to decode the meaning we believe is hidden within. As we struggle
to understand, we hear Minh-ha whisper this fragment: The habit of
imposing a meaning to every single sign.
Throughout the film, Minh-ha attempts to make us aware of our
inherent Western biases and the way they color our view of other
cultures. She repeatedly displays images of naked-breasted African
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women at uncomfortable proximity, sometimes framing one breast to
the exclusion of all other features. By repeatedly taking us closer and
closer to female nakedness, Minh-ha is able to elicit a reaction of
unease from our Western mindset. By evoking this unease in the minds
of her audience, Minh-ha demonstrates how our cultural standards can
infiltrate our perception of others. Minh-ha tells us of a man who,
after viewing female nudity in an African documentary, sheepishly
explained to his wife, I have seen some pornography tonight. The
mans sentiment is an echo of our own Western thought, but the
African women do not see their nakedness as pornography. Nudity
does not reveal the hidden; it is its absence. When we view the bathing
women along the Senegal River, we feel like voyeurs sneaking an illicit
peek. But it is not voyeurism in the cultural context; we are only
violating our own Western sense of privacy. The conventions of our
Western culture become irrelevant in this African context.
Reality, as Minh-ha seeks to portray it, is delicate. Indeed, the
portrayal of a complete and objective reality is certainly impossible;
every movement of the camera and each decision of the filmmaker
changes it, until the image becomes an expression of the filmmaker
rather than of reality. I watch her becoming me. The task of the
camera is simply to record, yet we cannot help forming reality into
something greater, at the expense of objectivity. Creativity and objec-
tivity seem to run into conflict. Each editing choice and each narrative
script reveals an underlying Western bias. Reassemblage is making the
point that these methods of documentary adulterate the culture they are
attempting to describe by constructing and forming that infinitely
complex reality into a neatly packaged hour-long docudrama about
the romantic lives of primitive peoples. While commenting upon the
artificiality and shortcomings of these methods as well as the audacity
of imposing Western cultural standards upon an African population,
Reassemblage is also a prototype of a more objective method of
reflecting the complexities of a culture. In this capacity, it remains a
film about Senegal. A film about what? A film about Senegal. But
what in Senegal?
In the question, we recognize our expectations of ethnographic
film. We expect the film to address some issue or some detail of life or
some anthropological question. We dont expect simply a portrayal of
reality. To answer the questions any further would force a definition
upon the reality of Senegal; the film is about Senegal. And the film
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does present information about Senegal, though it is not in the discrete,
easily-digestible form of facts. Instead, in its jumble of images and
sounds, we observe the complexity of reality reflected. We cannot see
the whole picture; we are aware only that the images we do see are
unaltered and unfiltered. The power of the camera to record reality is
both extensive and severely limited. We know only what the camera
has recorded: that those girls were jumping rope then, and that that
boy was playing with a crab there. To claim any more knowledge of
Senegalese culture would be false and subjective; the film attempts no
generalizations of the greater picture. But the validity of each recorded
instance is absolute and objective. The best way to be neutral and
objective is to copy reality meticulously. Because reality is arranged
into an explanation of itself. Every single detail is to be recorded. . . .
Objectivity commented upon. It records. We come away from the film
with a collection of images and sounds, as if we have experienced
Senegal in a dream or in memory. The knowledge we have gained is
subtle and easily destroyed by the transformation into words. Reality
is delicate.
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