Yasmine Louali, 2024
This essay examines two landmark experimental documentaries: Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (1971) and Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage (1982), as sites of radical rupture with the conventions of documentary filmmaking. Moving between close formal analysis and theoretical reflection, the paper argues that what connects these two films, beyond their shared classification as experimental, is an animist ethics of the image: a refusal to treat their subjects as inert matter to be captured, explained, or possessed.
Where Brakhage strips cinema of language entirely through using silence, direct manipulation of the film strip, and the grammar of sensation over narrative: Trinh T. Minh-ha deliberately decouples sound from image, refusing the authoritative commentary that escorts ethnographic film. In both cases, the frame becomes a space of feeling rather than information; the viewer is invited to sense before they are invited to understand.
The paper traces how these strategies amount to a shared political position: the rejection of the omnipresent, neutral eye of documentary tradition (what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls speaking about) in favour of a cinema that speaks nearby. It reads this proximity as a fundamentally decolonial gesture, one that refuses the extractive logic of representation and proposes instead a porous, situated, and sensorially alive relationship between the image-maker and the world they film.
Full text available upon request : studio@yasminelouali.com
