What I see is life looking at me I am looking through a circle in a circle of looks. (Trinh T. Minh-ha, Reassemblage) "Who is speaking?" "I do not intend to speak about/ Just speak near by". At the outset of Reassemblage, an extremely poetic film produced in 1982 by Vietnamese American director Trinh T. Minh-ha, a whispering voice-over makes this statement of intents, which has become a sort of ethical as well as aesthetical imperative for everybody wanting to engage with the representation of

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... the Other', either in film, literature or criticism. Later in the film, this statement comes up again in a fragmented and re-assembled form, like an echo, a trace, a blurred memory: "Speak about/ K-about". 1 Even if the film were tempted into speaking 'about', it could not. Its voice falters, breaks, stops. Reassemblage is a superb example of 'speaking near by' a living community without trying to give it a voice. It is also a sophisticated piece of film criticism, which questions documentary form and its devices, especially those evidently in tension with techniques of observation originated in ethnographic milieus (such as questionnaires, interviews and participant observation). Filmed in Senegal ("A film about what? My friends ask,/ A film about Senegal; but what in Senegal?", the voice-over keeps asking), it juxtaposes discrete moments of everyday life in a local village and segments of encounters between western observers and local people: a Peace-Corps Volunteer, a woman gynaecologist, a well intentioned ethnologist who "defines himself as a person who stays long, long enough, in a village to study the culture of an ethnic group". The ethnologist tries to make his presence as unobtrusive as possible, in order not to modify the authenticity of the reality he wants to study. But the voice-over comments are ironical: "What can we expect from ethnology?", or "He thinks he excludes personal values. He tries or believes so but how can he be a Fulani? That's objectivity". 2 The rhythm of the film is punctuated with pauses and silences, which structure with their breathing pulse the re-assemblage of segments of 'authentic' conversations and performances by the local people, comments and reflections by the voice-over, repetitions, suspensions, variations and resonances, to use a term and a notion which is central to Trinh T. Minh-ha's effort "to resist diverse forms of centralisation -the indulgence in a unitary self, in a locus of authority". 3 1 From the script of Reassemblage, in Trinh T. Minh-ha, Framer Framed