Documentary Film Beyond Intention and Re-Presentation: Trinh T. Minh-ha and the Aesthetics of Materiality

Abstract

Pluralism-the incommensurability and, at times, incompatibility of objective ends-is not relativism, nor, a fortiori, subjectivism, nor the allegedly unbridgeable differences of emotional attitude on which some modern positivists, emotivists, existentialists, nationalists and, indeed, relativistic sociologists and anthropologists found their accounts.-Isaiah Berlin, 1990, p. 87... the agent is awash with many images, many excitements, merging fears and fantasies that dissolve into one another. To sort things out to a point at which they seem like an assembly of definite and identifiable voices is already an achievement.-Bernard Williams, 2002, p. 195The documentary easily lends itself to an exploitative attitude in which the director projects collective conceptions or subjective views on the world. On the other hand, the notion of the documentary alludes to an attitude in which the author is sensitive towards features, gestures and material traces that cannot be constructed or directed. The latter notion is similar to Theodor Adorno's (2004) idea of the aesthetics of materiality. Materiality, in the sense that Adorno uses the word, refers to two different aspects of depiction. First, materiality refers to the medium itself and the technique that is used. Film as a medium; the different technical operations, the apparatus and the different stages of production provide certain material conditions for depiction. Secondly, materiality refers to the material qualities of the object in the film -features, gestures and other material traces that are registered irrespective of the intentions of the author. In acknowledging these material aspects, Adorno expresses a certain understanding of the morality of depiction. This involves an ethic where the portrayer refrains from erasing the different material traces that reveal the mediating purpose of depiction. According to Adorno the artwork mediates by participating in the historical world; it does not communicate a ready made image of something beyond its boundaries (Sinha, 2000, p. 157). When the director preserves the material traces in the film recording that bear witness of a world beyond the intentions or conceptions of the author, he/she accepts that the cinematic space, just like the social and historical world, is not directly controllable or maneuverable.Contrary to the Aristotelian line of thought, the aesthetics of Adorno is not based on a relation of likeness between the representation and the object that is represented. In his reading of Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Martin Jay (1997) notes that there is something contradictory or nonsensical in the notion of Aristotle's mimesis. On one hand, mimesis refers to the imitation of nature, a duplication that is based on the idea of the sufficiency of nature. Another meaning of mimesis is the substitution (recreation, simulation) of nature; this entails a change or a refinement of that which already exists. In the first case we can speak of reproduction and in the second case of production-something renewed. The distinction can also be described as the difference between imitation and replacement (Jay 1997, p. 39). The problem within aesthetics is the assumption that these two aspects can be categorically separated, for example in the categories of subjective and objective or documentary and fiction.Although Adorno (2004) sees the potential of art in its ability to express the otherness of the other in a way that brings forward that which is beyond our personal projections or from a collective culturally determined ideology (p. 5), he realizes that it is not possible to reduce the content of a work of art to something authentic per se. The paradox in the classical mimetic understanding of art is revealed in the question; how can making bring to appearance what is not the result of making; how can what according to its own concept is not true nevertheless be true? (p. 141). The picture is always something material and a result of production, despite the attempts of the so called realistic tradition to conceal these traces of materiality in the picture. …