On Thursday, October 14th, 2004, I attended a screening of Trinh T. Minh-ha's latest work, Night Passage, at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The event also included a lecture and discussion session with Professor Ryūta Imafuku (Cultural Anthropology, Sapporo University) and Professor Narihiko Nishi (Comparative Literature, Ritsumeikan University). Through a variety of art forms - film, poetry, music, writing - Minh-ha has explored the problem of plural identities from postcolonial and feminist perspectives. She draws on her own personal experience, being born in Vietnam, and having studied in France and the U.S., and taught in Senegal. She now teaches film theory at UCLA, Berkeley. My reason for attending this event was because I am particularly interested in the boundaries between film - particularly fiction - and documentary, so I wanted to learn more about Minh-ha, a film artist who is not bound to one genre.
A strong impression I received from attending this event was that Minh-ha believes in the power of film to express ambiguity and plurality. Her latest work was a cinematic version of Miyazawa Kenji's classic Ginga tetsudō no yoru. Minh-ha is said to have been strongly drawn to the transcultural elements in Kenji's story, which features many motifs which transcend mere 'difference' or 'national borders'. For example, American place names and Italian people names appear in a Japanese setting and boundaries are continually blurred between the heavens and the earth, animals and humans. Minh-ha emphasizes that it is transculturalism, not multiculturalism, with which she is concerned here. While the term 'multiculturalism' suggests diversity and mixing, 'transculturalism' involves both the co-existence and transcendence of difference. Kenji's story world is scattered with diverse cultural elements and this enables differences to co-exist and therefore be overcome.
The film relocates Kenji's story to California and the protagonist is also changed from a boy to a girl. She takes a train journey at night with a female friend and they have many strange adventures along the way. At the end of the journey, the friend dies but, as though in exchange, the protagonist's long-lost mother returns home and this is where the film ends. California symbolizes a transcultural place, and the use of a female protagonist is to avoid the stereotypical gender roles suggested by Kenji's original scenario of "the mother waiting for the father's return." The film certainly highlights what could be considered Minh-ha's best feature, the disruption of 'stereotypical identities'. However, what especially attracted me about this work was the way in which Minh-ha perceives visual images.
The film begins with the image of a train with rows of red and blue windows. The train is something which 'passes through', an idea which is also reflected in the film's title Night Passage. Minh-ha sees 'passage' (to walk), not as something with a straightforward linear objective, but for the action itself - to wander and loiter, to hover and drift aimlessly; to enjoy the action of walking for itself, and to perceive the event itself as your own action. One of the advantages of film is that it can express such physical sensations. In fact, Minh-ha says that enjoying an action for the action itself is what film is all about. In the film, transculturalism is symbolized in a dance which does not appear to come from any particular culture; instead, the scene, taken by a digital camera, captures the beauty of the dancers' movements and of the fire from the torches which they are holding. Moreover, the film does not have a clear-cut storyline. Visual images are scattered like patchwork, imparting an equal level of meaning to each scene. By breaking away from a conventional, unilinear story structure, Minh-ha is able to present us with the movements as they are.
In other words, her images evoke ambiguity and plurality, unlike those single-sided images presented in journalism or advertising. One could even say that her film is poetic, which is most probably what Minh-ha is aiming for. In a modern world flooded with symbols which have only explicit denotations, Minh-ha continues to seriously confront the possibilities of visual images. I cannot help but feel that this is what makes Minh-ha such an important artist for us today
1 Japanese scholars generally refer to Miyazawa Kenji by his first name, Kenji, although it is not a literary pseudonym.
ICU Graduate School : Azuma, Shiho