Old Tropes New Tricks: Repetition in Reassemblag

Old Tropes New Tricks:

Repetition in Reassemblage

In Edward Said’s book, Orientalism he defines the term as several interdependent interests. He maintains, “The relationship between the Occident and the Orient is one of power, domination and of various degrees of complex hegemony”(5).  The site of hegemony is where this idea of Orientalism is re-enforced through culture and its interests. Trinh Minh-ha questions how to diverge from these Orientalist representations of Senegal through various forms of deconstruction in her 1982 film, Reassemblage. She does this by trying to locate where the reproduction of hegemony happens in representation and the parallels it has with repetition. By utilizing a similar poststructuralist lens of looking at the “Other” through various filmic translations described in her 1989 interview with Scott MacDonald. She states, “Translation, which is interpolated by ideology and can never be objective or neutral, should here be understood in the wider sense of the term- as a politics of constructing meaning”(Minh-ha, 127). By taking into consideration the construction of familiar western representations of Senegal, she is able to deconstruct and de-familiarize them through various modes of representation. In this essay, I examine the experimental film strategy of repetition that Trinh Minh-ha uses to create a post colonial critique of representations of Senegal and how the film is able to breakout of Orientalist/ Africanist discourse by drawing attention to Orientalist depictions. I will be illustrating my point through examples of how Minh-ha uses repetition in the film form, image tropes and sound with specific examples in Reassemblage.

The repetitive use of blank screens is a crucial element throughout the film that gives the viewer a chance to establish and reflect on their relation to the various forms of representation. This tone is set in the first forty-five seconds of the film where there is a full black screen with the music of Joola drums playing in the background. It sounds like a celebration with the various volumes of chanting, laughing and rhythmic music. We hear a combination of instruments working in rhythmic harmony and a sense of community is felt through the conversing voices in the tribal languages that even the viewer, presumably, can’t understand. Since there are no subtitles either, this allows for the viewer to simply focus on what these sounds remind them of. One may then ask, what about this music makes me think of Africa? And what do I see when I think about Africa? Here, Minh-ha gives the viewer a moment to acknowledge their own pre-conceived associations with the music and possibly open up a dialogue for examining where those notions stem from.

Through her editing process she is able to craft an incomplete and decentered representation of several tribes by over-using classic experimental film techniques such as jump cuts, close-ups and panning. This, I think, reflects the complexities and impossibility of depicting an accurate representation of another culture in a lot of ways. She does this through the pans by sticking to either a vertical or horizontal axis. This makes the viewer constantly aware of the limits of the camera frame and the inaccuracies of depicting space. Within the cameras fleeting unstable pans and fractured images, the possibility of grasping this way of life visually, becomes apparent. She mentions in her interview that “...No reality can be captured without transforming” (Minh-ha,115). By acknowledging that everything we experience is a translation through our own filter of experiences, this opens up a space for the viewer to examine the specifics within their own tropes. “The subject stays in its world and you try to figure out what your relationship to it is. It’s exactly the opposite of “taking a position”: it’s seeing what different positions reveal”(Minh-ha,115).

            About thirteen minutes into the film, the viewers are again confronted with their own projected representations through the jump cuts between the blank screen and the naked breast. At first we hear drumming and laughing in the background of the blank scene. Then it cuts to a close up of a naked breast and then pans out to two women using long wooden poles to crush what looks like corn. By associating a naked breast with the everyday banal task of crushing corn, she normalizes it. Later on in the film, we hear Minh-ha’s voice say, “Nudity does not reveal- the hidden- It is it’s absence. A man attending a slide show on Africa turns to his wife and says with guilt in his voice: “I have seen some pornography tonight.” By associating the breast with the absence of the hidden, this makes the viewer think about the openness of breast in Senegal versus its sexualized associations in America. Here, it would be against social norms for women to do their every day jobs topless, and not much would probably get done, needless to say. This is a result of our own cultural hegemony and we project this onto representations we view.

Along with the naked breast, Minh-ha uses animal carcasses as another stereotypical “Africana” image. At one point in the film, the carcass of a dead cow became juxtaposed against the dry roots of a tree. The carcass has a dry, grey tone and protruding bones that look almost identical to that of the tree roots. Both of the forms became almost indistinguishable through the abstraction by removing the surrounding context. This shot perhaps echoes the idea of life (represented by the tree) within these seemingly dead and lifeless tropes, such as the abundance of dead animals. In the interview with Minh-ha she states, “The term “experimental” becomes questionable when it refers to techniques and vocabularies that allow one to classify a film as “belonging” to the “avant-garde” category”(114). These ideas of classifying, categorizing and questioning modes of representation are something she continues to bring up in various ways though out her film, and I think is reflected here. It’s extremely difficult to use not only common methods of making experimental films but also the commonly seen depictions of Africa, like these dead animals. Through using these images such as the naked breast and animal carcasses, she defamiliarizes the familiar and criticizes it.

Another way she uses repetition is through the looping of sound, not just for the purposes of fragmenting or emphasizing effects but as an effort to bring out the subtleties and nuances in hegemonic images of Africa through repetition. She was more interested in how these sounds would come back to her throughout her shooting across Senegal. For example, about thirteen minutes into the film there becomes a sound that vaguely resembles, “a-goot-goot-goot-ah-con-telli-toko.” Again, it seems absurd to try to pin down what it sounds like but after about the fifth listen you start to recognize the subtleties and that each time this phrase is repeated there are nuances within it. Sometimes the “goot-goot-goot” part only has two, “goot-goot” and the tone of voice changes from sounding far away, to extremely close and from a single voice to multiple voices in tandem. In her interview, Minh-ha says, “Each language has its own music and its practice need not be reduced to the mere function of communicating meaning. The repetition I made use of has accordingly, nuances and differences built within it, so that the repetition here is not just the automatic reproduction of the same, but rather the production of the same with and in differences”(114). Here, she points out that by not assigning a meaning to every single “sign”, one becomes open to the nuances within language while also finding the nuances within Orientalist depictions of culture. By being attentive to these subtitles and being ok with not being able to grasp, package or even fully understand a culture, is to accept that there is complexity in the stereotypes and complexity in the seemingly banal.

Minh-ha responds to these cultural legacies of colonialism by putting a mirror up to the viewer through various forms of repetition. She makes us confront these symbols of underdevelopment by over using them and thus is able to deconstruct these seemingly concrete ideas by acknowledging them in various ways. I believe this film provides insight into the broader questions of the production of the “Orient” and how to diverge from that. Said states, “To say nothing of historical entities—such as locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are man-made. Therefore, as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that has given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect on each other”(5). By acknowledging that these ideas of the “Orient” emerge from European discourse, are man-made and depend largely on representation rather than a natural occurrence, we also recognize that these have the capability of change, and that change starts with being aware of them and sharing that awareness with others like Minh-ha has done through her film.