There Is No Such Thing As Documentary - Tumblr Posts

EB  Another word that you often critique is ‘authenticity’. Today, authenticity tends to be fetishized in contemporary art in a very uncritical way. The same is true, to some extent, in mass culture. There’s even a book by business management writers B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore called Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (2007). What, in your opinion, is wrong with it?

TM  Firstly, it has to do with power relations in knowledge: authenticity is always defined by the one who consumes the so-called authentic. It’s almost always construed for the other. And, secondly, if the other is claiming it for themselves, such authenticity could either be a reaction to or a way of internalizing dominant values. That word still righteously circulates in the documentary milieu today with regards to films made on and from Africa, for example.

I made a film on Vietnam (my so-called native land or birth culture) titled Surname Viet Given Name Nam. You can tell immediately by this title that a national identity is not given but construed according to circumstances and contexts (here in its gender politics) – and the more you look into what you think is unique to your culture, the wider it gets. What is thought to be typically Vietnamese turns out to be not so typical after all. In the series of names shown and historically used to refer to Vietnam throughout the centuries, one can acutely discern the diversely political periods of colonization and foreign rules. One sees how the country’s identity is, in reality, a multiplicity and an assemblage – constantly being construed in the present. What is conventionally understood as authentic is highly questionable because you can only be authentic if you confine yourself to locking doors and putting up fences.

‘There is No Such Thing as Documentary’: An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha