Output details

Night Passage: The Depth of Time

This is the first published, chapter-length dialogue with Trinh T. Minh-ha, internationally renowned filmmaker, writer, music composer, and Professor of Women’s Studies and Rhetoric (film) at the University of California, Berkeley, about her experimental digital film ‘Night Passage’ (2004) made in homage to Kenji Miyazawa’s novel Milky Way Road (1991). The chapter is the outcome of a lengthy period of discussion with Trinh T. Minh-ha, in person and by email, begun at the University Leeds and continued at the University of Ulster when she accepted my invitation to be a keynote speaker at ‘Contestations’, the Association of Art Historian’s conference (April 2007), which included a screening of ‘Night Passage’. The interview concerns the implications of the historical move from analogue to digital moving image and sound production for our lived experience of contemporary space-time relations. In dialogue with the artist, the chapter takes the form of a close critical reading of particular instances in Trinh’s translation of Miyazawa’s novel, that address relations between the nineteenth century mechanical and twentieth century digital technology as two major historical moments of change that inform and determine our imaging practices. The dialogue explores ‘Night Passage’ as an example of the meeting of ancient wisdom and new technology, offered by digital film’s capacity to subtly dilate and sculpt time, whilst challenging the out-of-body utopian rhetoric of some digital imaging and associated theory. The dialogue is chapter 6 in a book of trans-disciplinary essays, in which major artists, filmmakers, film theorists, philosophers, literary critics, information theorists and cultural analysts examine the contesting terms, ‘virtual’ and ‘indexical’, in contemporary art and cultural theory. Other contributors to the book are Antony Bryant, Juli Carson, N. Katherine Hayles, Anna Johnson, Mary Kelly, Brian Massumi, Claire Pajaczkowska, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Martha Rosler, Samuel Weber and Paul Willemen.