Material-Discursive Practices in Film. Diffractive Encounters with Memory, Matter, and Voice in Trinh T. Minh-ha and Natasa Urban
Material-Discursive Practices in Film. Diffractive Encounters with Memory, Matter, and Voice in Trinh T. Minh-ha and Natasa Urban

Summary/Abstract: This article explores material-discursive practices in contemporary cinema through a diffractive reading of The Eclipse(2022) by Nataša Urban and the films of Trinh T. Minh-ha. Drawing on Karen Barad’s agential realism, it examines film as a site of co-emergence for bodies, histories, and technologies. Rather than a passive medium, cinema is approached as an intra-active apparatus of world-making. Urban’s analog techniques—expired Super 8 film, hand-developed footage—dialogue with Minh-ha’s layered, reflexive aesthetics. Both disrupt representational norms through materiality, rhythm, and affective temporality. Mistakes, textures, and sensory traces are not flaws but agents of meaning. The analysis highlights how memory, sound, and image co-compose film’s epistemological force. Film becomes a dispositif of thought, resisting binary logic and fixed subject positions. The article contributes to feminist film theory, new materialisms, and post-truth epistemologies.

• Details
• Contents