Crossing Borders of Alterity, Opening Curtains

Trinh T. Minh-há, third cinema and the border cinema

Abstract

Crossing the border, physical or imaginary, for Trinh T. Minh-ha, is an aesthetic and political act. Crossing borders raises semantic, cultural and political shifts. This act implies opening curtains, bringing into the field of the visible subjects hitherto erased from the screens, confabulating discursive strategies to deterritorialize the canons of the masters' discourses through the sieve of postcolonial criticism. Thus, she produces border texts, sounds and images, both in her theory and in her cinema, with a focus on the figure of the outsider woman. Here I seek to tackle the threads of continuity and discontinuity that unfold from the third cinema, a political cinema whose motto is the insurgency against the (neo)colonial regime, causing seismic shocks in the way of thinking and making political cinema in the so-called third world. , paving the way for exilic, diasporic and nomadic cinemas. I try to answer how philosophy and film theory approach the representation of the invisible, but inevitable subjects that these cinemas treat as central: the people.