Traces and Intervals featured films by artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Midi Onodera. Like Laiwan, in the early 1980s these artists worked in conceptual and formal processes that sought to intervene in stereotypical expectations of identity through a destabilization of language, and a deconstruction of cinematic form.
In 1993, Laiwan would write in Angles magazine: “In our struggles against oppression and racism it is important to look at Trinh’s strategies in her filmmaking and writings to find models she was working towards, and the models she is working from, so that we can move on in our own work in culture and identity.” Traces and Intervals takes Trinh’s notion of the cinema interval as its starting point, the possibilities of a pause from one space to another that constitutes an interruption and irruption. It is at this intermission, distance, lapse or gap between states that the threshold of representation and communication appears. Each film in the series breaks with representation and identity as a fixed truth, offering instead a critique of the documentary desire through what Trinh calls an “unsutured process of meaning production.”
PROGRAM
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, White Dust From Mongolia (USA/South Korea 1980, 30 min.)
Trinh T. Minh-ha, REASSEMBLAGE (USA/Senegal 1982, 40 min.)
Intermission (15 min.)
Midi Onodera, The Displaced View (Canada 1988, 50 min.)