Janus East and West

multicultural polyvocality—Trinh Minh-Ha's The fourth dimension and the digital film event

pp. 181-209

in: Daniel White, Film in the anthropocene, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

This chapter argues that Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, including its concepts of spatiality, temporality, and phenomenal form, intersects with digital media and late modern industrial technologies, especially high-speed rail, to produce a Janus-faced vision of Japan, old and new. The sensibility evoked by Trinh's digital film event is in the spirit of what F.C.S Northrop called "the meeting of East and West" (1946). Her work shapes an autopoietic perspective consonant with Varela's second-generation cybernetics, Dōgen's Zen, and Bashō's haibun (prose with poetry) to recreate a sense of itinerancy through the multicultural landscape of the Anthropocene.