A Necessary Experiment?

Trinh Minh-Ha's Reassemblage (1983) is an experimental depiction of the Senegalese people, a thriving African community who are often improperly portrayed. The film sets out to dispel such previous portraitures through such unconventional techniques as jump cuts, stretches of silence and blank screens. These technical elements are often jarring and get in the way of getting the film's message across. The disconcerting nature of the filmmaking is particularly perplexing when hearing Minh-Ha's intentions (or lack thereof) in a dialogue with Constance Penley and Andrew Ross entitled When I Project It Is Silent.

In this dialogue, Minh-Ha states, "Any motive that I had before starting work on the film necessarily dissolved as I went along, so that creating consisted not so much in inventing something new as in rediscovering the links within and between images, sounds and words." From this statement, it seems that while Minh-Ha may have had an initial plan of attack, she abandoned any goal to create a coherent piece for the sake of getting a better understanding of what and why we capture certain subjects on film. As such, it is implied that the collection of footage for this piece was done without bounds, and consequently without order. Minh-Ha herself describes that the filmed subjects were "purposeless," that their filming was not "governed by a single rationale."

While my experience watching experimental films is limited, I feel comfortable saying that lack of structure in filming is not necessarily detrimental to experimental film, on the contrary I presume in some instances such filming has the potential to be conducive to challenging traditional film conventions. My problem in this particular case is that Minh-Ha tries to address a very specific issue (rectifying past ethnographic portrayals) from loosely related images. In essence, she creates a very definite story from haphazardly captured footage, resulting in a clumsy balance between story and discourse.

Minh-Ha makes it no secret that her intention was to "[unsettle] our habit of seeing through the documentary 'object-oriented' camera eye" to give an unfettered image of the Senegalese lifestyle. By choosing not to abide by the typical structure of documentary to achieve an authentic and organic representation, she seems to forget that so long as the subjective eye of the camera is recording, truth is being filtered. The filmmaker's presence is simply not natural to this people's environment. Thus it is natural to question whether Minh-Ha's straying from conventional story-telling is any more effective than documentary.

Two particular techniques Minh-Ha uses to "better" project her message come to mind. The first is the absence of sound and/or image - the stretches of silence and blankness mentioned above. When questioned about this particular technique, Minh-Ha suggests, "Silence is an important part of the work: it makes it breathe." Thus one can conclude that the ultimate goal of using this technique was to make the film as organic and alive as the people it depicts. While Minh-Ha confesses her awareness that silence can be "disquieting and disorienting" she maintains that this "breathing" also functions as an opportunity for the viewer to reflect on the previous image and narration to form his own conclusions. However, at times, Minh-Ha's unconventional and disjoint techniques prevent the viewer from obtaining a decent understanding of these people, thus it is implausible for her to expect viewers to make sense of her abstract narration and imagery to develop their own interpretation.

The viewer's experience was perfectly summed up when addressing another repeated convention of Reassemblage: close-ups on women's breasts. My own rationale of these shots was to suggest the fertility and health of these people. To me this made perfect sense when put in context with Minh-Ha's narration about the usual images of African women, with starvation apparent in their frail topless bodies. So I was surprised and curious to see the various interpretations around the room when this was brought up in class. One person suggested these close-ups were used to commodify/fetishize women, while someone else suggested the close-ups functioned to focus on a single woman rather than always looking at a number of women collectively. Furthermore separate suggestions were made that these shots function both to humanize and to dehumanize these women.

With the idea that this film was meant to correct the public perception of Senegalese people, I read the filmmaker's admission, "My approach is one which avoids any sureness of signification," and consequently had to question the credibility and persuasiveness of Reassemblage. When asking viewers to draw finite conclusions about their own potential misconceptions, I have to believe that a more resolute set of concrete assertions than Trinh Minh-Ha's abstract musing is necessary to change a viewer's mind.

Blindness Review

Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness is about a city that is rapidly falling victim to an unexplained epidemic of sudden blindness. The government’s immediate response is to quarantine all infected individuals in an abandoned prison-like hospital where these neglected individuals must fend for themselves when denied medical care, hygiene and sufficient food rations. At the head of this effort are a doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore), the true heroine of the story, who sticks by her husband’s side despite never losing her vision. The semblance of order they create is challenged when the hospital is filled beyond capacity and the will to survive supplants the will to co-exist.

Right from the beginning we are met with the idea that vision allows for order. In a hectic urban environment, the only thing keeping drivers from running each other off the road are bright red and green lights. The opening sequence juxtaposes shots of accelerating and braking cars and the impatient, frustrated people controlling them with close-ups of stoplights as they simply switch on and off. This regulated chaos is thrown when a single driver can no longer interpret the visual cues overhead: he has gone blind.

In the film, blindness is presented as a milky whiteness that clouds one’s vision, a decision that was presumably chosen for both narrative and technical significance. From a writer’s standpoint, the ability to perceive light yields the possibility that these characters will overcome this affliction to see whether they will simply return to their former lives or if they will forever be impacted by this ordeal. Furthermore, whiteness gives metaphorical significance to the story in that the absence of light (the typical interpretation of blindness) is replaced by the sensation that all the lights have been turned on, implying a period of reflection and understanding.

The technical aspects of portraying blindness are two-fold: presenting the perspective of the blind person and presenting the world in which he endures. These two perspectives are achieved through a clever combination of sound and lighting. As we watch each successive character lose his sight, we hear an eerie mix of bells and ringing that is reminiscent of the sensation of hearing loss. Lighting comes into play when the wife of the first victim calls the hospital from the kitchen. The room starts out perfectly lit, but when her blind husband enters the backlight fades throwing the foreground into shadows. In the hospital, where all characters except Moore are blind, this subtle technique is replaced by more overt use of whiteness. Many shots show a blind subject in focus with the surroundings all blown out (i.e. overexposed) to isolate the character as he stumbles through the unseen corridor. These shots help the audience to better understand the disorientation and panic that causes the makeshift society of blind people to crumble.

It was this crumbling that first led to the surprising comparison of this movie to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. Boyle’s film involves a different kind of outbreak, one that infects people with murderous rage, but the film is equally effective in capturing the chaos that ensues when society breaks down. Both films have a shot of a once bustling city street, now completely abandoned, being traversed by a lone vulnerable human. The barren wasteland really evokes the carnal aspect of life without structure, without society. Both films have their protagonists facing kill-or-be-killed situations where the only foreseeable goal is to survive. When pitting one ward of patients up against another over limited food rations, it’s easy to compare them to the mindless zombies of 28 Days Later whose only ambition is to feed.

This carnal theme is also conveyed in Blindness through the use of color and music. With the exception of the aforementioned stoplights, all of the colors (for both sets and costumes) at the beginning of the film are very soft and muted, giving the world a very clean, simple look. The sterility of the undisturbed world is used in contrast to the world post-epidemic. As soon as blindness spreads and the hospital wards fill up, the white hallways quickly become soiled with trash and human waste with no one able to see the difference. Humans pass through the mire barefoot and naked, indifferent about their surroundings, only concerned about continuing forward. This animalistic nature is echoed through the simple African drumbeat that remains the only soundtrack until the core group of patients regains some dignity through the harmony they find in one another.

As the film points out, the sense of agnosia (the inability to interpret sensations) inherent in losing one’s vision has etymological roots in the ideas of ignorance and lack of belief. Thus it seems natural to use blindness as a vehicle for exploring psychological constructs in the absence of a stable society. I believe the film was incredibly successful in this respect as it was able to portray man at his ugliest and his finest in the face of such insurmountable odds. Now I may be biased toward high stakes, dystopian, psychological thrillers (with a movie collection containing Sunshine, Children of Men, and Equilibrium), but I think the combination of such an interesting premise, strong acting, and such clever filming techniques (lighting, sound, editing, etc.) truly make Blindness a movie worth watching.