On Friday December 6th, 2024, University of California, Santa Cruz welcomed to campus the internationally acclaimed independent filmmaker, music composer and scholar Trinh T. Minh-ha for a screening of her 2022 documentary, What About China?. After the screening, graduate students and faculty in attendance joined in a discussion about the film, its nonlinear aesthetics, its polyphonic and embodied worldmaking, and the ways that a filmmaker could give back to the community.
“What About China? is aesthetically enthralling, intellectually challenging, and politically nuanced,” says Yiman Wang, Professor of Film & Digital Media and East Asian Studies. “The film, like all Trinh’s films, does not send a ‘message.’ Her films are meant to be experienced multi-sensorially, and puzzled through.” Wang worked with her collaborating professors Boreth Ly and Hunter Bivens to bring Trinh to campus.
Trinh has been an avid supporter of UC Santa Cruz and the Arts Division. She is a friend and a collaborator to many professors, and was a mentor to Arts Division Dean Celine Parreñas Shimizu, a fellow filmmaker and feminist film scholar who emphasizes excellence in filmmaking combinded with a focus on diversity. At the opening reception to honor Trinh and her work, Dean Celine (as she is affectionately known) spoke highly of Trinh for inspiring her, leading her to becoming a filmmaker and a feminist film scholar.
What About China? utilizes footage Trinh shot on Hi8 in 1993-1994, edited with classic Chinese landscape paintings and montaged with a polyphonic soundtrack to create a poetic meditation on the concept of hexie, a term in Mandarin Chinese that means harmony. This notion, as traced in the footage, permeates through relationships between husband and wife, between family members, between multiple families sharing traditional dwellings constructed with region-specific architectural styles, between humans and other-than human animals and the broader nature cultural environment. The term “harmony” (hexie), as the film shows, has also become netizens’ euphemism for government censorship that seeks to “harmonize” (i.e., eliminate) dissident voices.
Wang describes the movie as an intertwining of nostalgia, humor and necessary opacity that radically challenges conventional ethnographic films. Trinh has also published prolifically on film and feminism which Wang teaches in her graduate seminars.
Trinh’s visit was the inaugural event of Revisiting Socialist Environmental Media speakers series, which probes the critical role art and media could play in promoting decolonization and environmental justice at different historical conjunctures.
This series was made possible thanks to support from the UCSC Committee on Research, UCSC Arts Research Institute, UCSC Film and Digital Media Department, UCSC Porter College, and the Kenneth R. Corday Family Endowment in Writing for Television and Film.
“We all benefited greatly from the conversation with Trinh, and look forward to having a chance to dialogue with her again when her new film comes out,” says Wang.