For me, what is cinematic, poetic and political thrives at the boundaries of cinema, poetry and politics. Yet very few art works deal with the boundaries of art rather than constituting a mere instrument for self-expression or for information. My films are all, in a way, experiences of limits. Each is realised at the frontiers of several cultures, genres, disciplines, realms (visual, musical, verbal, for example); each constitutes in its own way an investigation of these frontiers. And if none of them can respond neatly, once and for all, to the question ‘What is the film about?’, they have all hopefully contributed to opening a space for creative critical reflections on cinema, art, feminism, and cultural politics.

The making of each film transforms the way I see myself and the world around me. Once I start engaging in the process of making a film or in any artistic excursion, I am also embarking upon a journey whose point of arrival is unknown to me. Because my work has often proven to be disturbing in the way it unsettles old viewing and thinking habits, and because of the ensuing hostility it has encountered, I have had to learn to speak lucidly about it. But, for me, intentions and preconceived ideas have a very limited role in the creative process. Most fascinating are the impasses, the blind procedures, the magical accidents, the unwanted discoveries, as well as the time wasted, the useless moves, the resonances generated despite one's wishes and unknown to oneself in advance - hence unforseeable to the performers and to the viewers during the unfolding of the film.

Aside from wishing to transform and to be transformed in making films - to sensitise people to other ways of experiencing film, and hence to other ways of feeling and thinking - I also hope that the circulation and exhibition of my work will contribute to redefining the notion of ‘audience’, by which people tend to confuse marketing power and standardisation of needs with the ability to speak across boundaries of language, class, gender, and culture, for example.

The works I have been producing can be viewed in general as different attempts to deal creatively with cultural difference (the differences both between cultures and within a culture). They seek to enhance our understanding of the heterogeneous societies in which we live, while inviting the viewer to reflect on the conventional relation between supplier and consumer in media production and spectatorship. It seems most important with regard to film culture that its audience (or rather, its participants) not only be offered a culturally diverse film landscape that engages the multiple histories and memories of the different communities of Asian, African and European descent, but that this audience also be treated as active social subjects engaging with film and the arts in diverging and critical ways.

As a regular film viewer, what I find most valuable, fascinating and informative are films that confront the complexities of life in the diverse pleasures they offer, and are thereby more likely to offer a mutual exploration (between filmmaker, the filmed material, and the filmviewer) of a social, political, emotional or artistic situation.

Trinh Minh-ha’s films include ‘Naked Spaces’, ‘Reassemblage’, ‘Surname Viet Given Name Nam’ and ‘A Tale of Love’. The article above is an extract from ‘A Shift of Rhythm’, originally written for an exhibition of Trinh Minh-ha’s films at the Tokyo Metropolitical Museum of Photography in 1996.