Followed by booksigning and film screening.

Trinh T. Minh-ha is a preeminent independent filmmaker and theorist on film, feminism, and art, and Professor of Women's Studies, Film Studies, and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. In her writings and interviews, as well as in her film scripts, Trinh explores what she describes as the "infinite relation" of word to image. Cinema Interval (Routledge, 1999) brings together her recent conversations on film and art, music and language, life and theory with several critics, as well as two film scripts that deal with the shifting realities of China and Vietnam. The interviews cover a wide range of issues concerning "the third term," or the "space between"-between viewer, maker, and film; image, sound, and text; or else between different sets of fictions, different forms of blindness and lucidity; between love and resistance.Films by the Vietnamese-born, French-educated Trinh include Naked Spaces: Living Is Round, Shoot for the Contents (screening tonight), and Surname Viet, Given Name Nam. Her books include When the Moon Waxes Red, Framer Framed, and, with artist and UC Berkeley Architecture Professor Jean-Paul Bourdier, Drawn from African Dwellings, from which she will also read. Books are sold at the Museum Store and at the booksigning, where everyone receives the 10% members' discount.Shoot for the Contents Trinh T. Minh-ha (U.S., 1991)A poetic meditation on form and content, word and image, Shoot for the Contents builds its layers of inquiry upon/around Chairman Mao's principle of "letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend." Trinh T. Minh-ha has described the film as "an excursion into the maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. (It) ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, as refracted by the Tienanmen Square event....Sounds and voices punctuate the visual space, layering two women's dialogue with folk songs, the sayings of Mao and Confucius, and the words of artists, philosophers, as well as other cultural workers. Like traditional Chinese opera, the film unfolds through the interplay of 'bold omissions and minute depictions' to render the 'real in the illusory and the illusory in the real.' (This) freedom in cinematic documentation...also materializes on screen the shifts of interpretation in Chinese contemporary culture and politics."