Nov 25, 2013

"D-Passage is a nuanced and original intervention in new media and digital arts. For Trinh T. Minh-ha, the digital artwork, or ‘D-work,’ is characterized not by the technology that delivers it but by the ‘passage’ itself: digital form achieved in flux, in the movement of experience and sensation through the work. Words are never merely words in her work, and the same is true for images, ideas, sounds, music, voices, faces and figures, movement and tone. Everything is marked by a passage elsewhere."—

Akira Mizuta Lippit

, author of Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video

D-Passage is a unique book by the world-renowned filmmaker, artist, and critical theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha. Taking as grounding forces her feature film Night Passage and installation L’Autre marche (The Other Walk), both co-created with Jean-Paul Bourdier, she discusses the potentials and impact of new technology on cinema culture, and explores its effects on creative practice. Less a medium than a “way”, the digital is here featured in its mobile, transformative passages. Trinh’s reflections shed light on several of her major themes: temporality, transitions, transcultural encounters, ways of seeing and knowing, the implications of the media used, the artistic practices engaged in, and the representations created. In D-Passage, form and structure, rhythm and movement, and language and imagery are inseparable. The book integrates essays, artistic statements, in-depth conversations, the script of Night Passage, movie stills, photos, and sketches.

Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, multimedia artist, writer, composer, and postcolonial feminist theorist. Her award-winning films—including Night Passage, The Fourth Dimension, A Tale of Love, Shoot for the Contents, Surname Viet Given Name Nam, Naked Spaces – Living Is Round, and Reassemblage—have been shown at film festivals and in museums around the world. She is the author of numerous books, including Elsewhere, Within Here; Framer Framed; When the Moon Waxes Red; and Woman, Native, Other. Trinh T. Minh-ha is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.