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ANTHROPOLOGY | NARRATIVES | INDIGENEITY
Changing perspectives on Indigeneity
(in dialogue with the work of Nguyễn Trinh Thi)
Among my absolute highlights of the Singaporean summer of 2022, was a meetup with Vietnamese art filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi, on the occasion of the screening of three of her seminal films at the National Gallery Singapore, covering almost ten years of her growth and her gradual change of sensorial perspective, as a documentalist of Indigenous cultures, and as an artist.
I think that artists play a much-underestimated role in how we design society. They contribute to the narrative that propels communities on their journeys — and as such, their artifacts and mentifacts are constituent elements of the systemic design of our narratives for the future. For artists such as the filmmakers of the fourth cinema and the fifth cinema, this is more than true.
Barry Barclay’s fourth cinema theory
The idea of an evolutionary pathway for cinemas, and, by extension, of the narratives expressed by them, was first clearly laid out by the legendary Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay, in a lecture at Auckland University Film and Media Studies Department, September 17, 2002.
