Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
TRINH T. MINH-HA
December 6 – December 22
FILMMAKER IN PERSON ON FRI & SAT, DEC 6 & 7!
Few artists or thinkers have created bodies of work as challenging, intellectually stimulating, or conceptually rich as Trinh T. Minh-ha, the renowned filmmaker and theorist. Trinh’s career has encompassed multimedia installations, eight extraordinary films, and numerous written works that stand as pioneering examples of cultural, literary, and film theory. Her moving-image works – which are as different from each other as they are unified by her unmistakable sensibility and intellectual rigor – intersect with the traditions of ethnography, personal documentary, essay film, and narrative drama, even as they critique each of those modes from within.
Raised in Vietnam, and originally trained as a music composer, Trinh came to the U.S. for her studies, and has since taught at Harvard, Smith, Cornell, San Francisco State University, the University of Illinois, Ochanomizu University in Japan, and the National Conservatory of Music in Senegal. She is currently Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Both her films and her teaching embody her deep devotion and peerless contribution to contemporary thinking around feminism, gender, post-colonialism, cultural politics, and literary and film studies. In conjunction with our ongoing series, “The Cinema of Gender Transgression,” and in celebration of Women Make Movies’ new digital restorations of REASSEMBLAGE (1982) and SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM (1989), Anthology welcomes Trinh to New York for a complete retrospective of her films.
“In the films, installations, and books [Trinh] deconstruct[s] claims to identity, presence, and authenticity, holding them to be the product of patriarchal and colonialist epistemologies. Whether in the re-enactments of SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM (1989) and the poetic theorizing of “Woman Native Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism” (1989), or in her more recent turn to exploring digitization and climate change, Trinh insists on dislodging the illusory purity of inherited categories to make way for the hybrid and in-between. Crucially, this cross-disciplinary practice is not one of simple negation: Trinh breaks down dominant languages in order to imagine other forms of relation and expression.” –Erika Balsom, FRIEZE
Trinh T. Minh-ha will be here in person on Friday & Saturday, December 6 & 7!
This retrospective is co-presented by Women Make Movies (www.wmm.com). Special thanks to Trinh T. Minh-ha, as well as to Kristen Fitzpatrick & Colleen O’Shea (Women Make Movies) and Edda Manriquez (Academy Film Archive).
Four of the films in the Trinh T. Minh-ha retrospective (SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM, SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS, THE FOURTH DIMENSION, and FORGETTING VIETNAM) are also part of the series, The Cinema of Gender Transgression.
