Naked Spaces—Living Is Round

Discussing the problems of representation that arose around the making of Privilege, Rainer once drew a comparison to the positions of Trinh T. Minh-ha, an artist familiar with the thorny terrain of filming cultures other than one’s own. Trinh’s influential critiques of ethnographic traditions are manifested not only in her writings but also in the very shape of her movies, which eschew the authoritative design of many anthropological studies in favor of nonlinear structures and disjunctive sound-image correspondence. One her most stunning achievements, Naked Spaces is a poetic consideration of vernacular architecture and daily life in Senegal, Mauritania, Togo, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Benin. Trinh has written that in the film “three modes of narration-exposition are explored through three women’s voices. Each voice speaks for a different cultural heritage, a different linguistic logic, and a different way of realizing information. The relationship between words and images is, as intended, an uncomfortable one.”