This essay was commissioned by
Women Make Movies, a New York based media arts distributor. It is excerpted
below.
Intercultural cinema at Women Make
Movies by Laura U. Marks
There is a lively but
hard-to-categorize body of work out there, made mostly by diasporan or
"hybrid" artists. This work often uses experimental techniques to try
to represent the experience of being in more than one culture, or to translate
cultural memories into a new medium. Intercultural cinema is marginal in many
ways: political, formally experimental, short rather than feature length, and
not belonging clearly to any one constituency or audience. Yet it is the
wellspring of emerging hybrid cultures, and also of a rejuvenating cinematic
practice. Intercultural artists manage to produce this work, and audiences are
able to see it, thanks to distributors like Women Make Movies. What makes these
works unique is also what makes it most appropriate to WMM. The very qualities
that make these works important—their politics, their formal experiments, their
avoidance of easy categorization—also require a savvy marketing strategy in
order to bring them together with their audience. In this, Women Make Movies
has proven to be one of the most successful distributors of intercultural
cinema. Indeed, WMM has become something of an intercultural distributor
itself, allowing these uncategorizable works to disrupt its own categories…
Many
intercultural works are short. They struggle in a market oriented toward
features or, at the shortest, half-hour television programs, and they rely on a
distributor like Women Make Movies that is geared toward short works. Many
short independent films are produced as "calling cards" to entice
industry to invest in the filmmaker's feature script, but this is rarely the
case in intercultural cinema, for several reasons. Some of these films and
videos are ephemeral, one-time works by artists who, like Mona Hatoum, usually
work in other media. Many of these short, experimental works are
self-sufficient, making a point perfectly in 11 or 27 minutes that would be
lost in a feature-length production. Since so many of these films and videos
are not considered commercially viable because of their subject matter and
style, their makers are, ironically, freed from the pressures to court
commercial production sites. The pressure to produce a feature, regardless of
whether it is appropriate at this stage in an artist's development, has created
costly and time-consuming disasters. Some of the artists WMM distributes,
including Shu Lea Cheang, Cheryl Dunye, Helen Lee, and Rea Tajiri,
"graduated" more or less successfully to feature film production.
Nevertheless, the large number of short works
that constitute the beginnings of intercultural cinema face particular problems
of distribution and exhibition. For these short films and videos and short-run
theatrical features, independent distributors are crucial. In the U.S., much of
this work can be found at Women Make Movies, Video Data Bank, Electronic Arts
Intermix, Third World Newsreel, California Newsreel, Canyon Cinema, Arab Film
Distribution, Zeitgeist, First Run/Icarus, and other, often small and
specialized, usually not-for-profit distributors. In Canada this work is
carried by Mongrel Media, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, V Tape,
Video Out, Vidéographe, Groupe Intervention Vidéo, and others. These
distributors deal with festivals, galleries and museums, and academic bookers.
Their management styles range from actively marketing film/video packages to
complete laissez-faire. Women Make Movies is one of the more active marketers,
and considered by filmmakers to be one of the most efficient. Often subsidized
by government grants—and dependent on rentals and sales to museums,
universities, and other institutions that are themeselves lately in crisis—even
the longest established distributors have a precarious existence. Women Make
Movies relies on outside funding for only 10% of its income.
The
choice of distributor is an important decision for artists, who may feel a political
alliance with one distributor and an aesthetic affinity to the work of another.
For example, Rea Tajiri distributes History
and Memory with Women Make Movies, Third World Newsreel, and Electronic
Arts Intermix, thus reaching the feminist audience, the politicized
Asian-American audience, and the video art audience. Crude though such
categories sound, cross-distribution is an effective way to guarantee diverse
audiences. Women Make Movies is also considered by artists to have one of the
most efficient bureaucracies of any non-profit distributor…
Intercultural
artists often point out that their work cannot be subsumed under European
cinematic aesthetics.[1] But when it comes to marketing, which
ghettoization is better: to give viewers experimental narrative when they come
looking for "the ethnic experience," or to give viewers women of
color when they come looking for (white) "art"? Either way, audience
expectations will be diverted. For now, Women Make Movies seems to be taking
the strategy of "give 'em art" when they come looking for ethnicity,
not the other way around.
Like other
experimental cinema, intercultural cinema rarely makes it into commercial
theaters. Instead it circulates, often through distributors, to nonprofit and
artist-run centers, galleries, museums, festivals, colleges and universities,
public and satellite television, community centers, and activist organizations;
and frequently through co-sponsored screenings by several of these
organizations.10 Feature films do receive runs at art-house
theaters.
Such programs
organized by a producer/distributor are a rarity, however. More often the work
gets out through informal alliances between film/videomakers, distributors, and
programmers: for example, distributors will submit recent work to festivals, or
programmers will contact distributors, as well as individual artists, for title
ideas. The final responsibility to produce a coherent program lies with
programmers, curators, and festival organizers. As I have noted, one result of
multicultural funding policies is that artists of color have been forced to
deal with identity issues in order to get funded or shown. It is still the rare
festival that organizes around intercultural themes instead of identity
politics. Programs at festivals such as LA Freewaves and Toronto's Images
festival, for example, tend to organize works from very racially diverse video
artists, youth makers, and activist groups around idiosyncratic themes.
Intercultural
cinema assumes the interestedness, engagement, and intelligence of its
audience. Third Cinema pioneers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino called for
a cinema that does not underestimate its viewers but trusts them to interpret
the critical intent of its audiovisual images, in a precedent for the critical
complexity that characterizes intercultural cinema. "As Che put it, respect the people by giving them quality."[2] Kobena Mercer, similarly, argues that the new
Black cinema acknowledges the critical viewing capacities of its audience;[3] Toni Cade Bambara echoes this respect for the
audience's critical capacities in her remark that the reward of a demanding
film such as Daughters of the Dust is
participatory spectatorship and an "empowered eye."[4] Similarly, Victor Masayesva, Jr., argues that
Native audiences are impatient for works that will push the expressive
boundaries of film and video in order to tell their stories.[5]
Is there an
intercultural audience? Perhaps it is a sort of misplaced concreteness for me
to pay more attention to the "live" audiences at festivals and the
like than television audiences, which obviously are much larger. But it is at
the live events that one can see the audience that has constituted around this
work, and this is a thrilling event that the circumstances of virtual audiences
just don't match. Screenings of this work at festivals, movie houses,
galleries, and conferences witness the building of an audience, often from
surprisingly disparate individuals. The varied venues for this work, none
sufficient in itself, demonstrate that intercultural cinema cannot be contained
by identity politics.
A look at some
of the intercultural films and videos WMM distributes, incidentally all by
Asian-North American makers, will give some sense of the difficulty and value
of building an audience for intercultural cinema. A look at their booking
lists, or where WMM has succeeded in selling or renting them, will give some
sense of who the audiences are for these works. WMM's booking lists are like
dance cards (if you'll forgive the sexist metaphor), showing who found
particular films and tapes appealing: some previewing ("just
looking"), some renting the work, some committing to purchase. These lists
show that the audiences for intercultural cinema are indeed a rhizomatic
network, sometimes bound only by the circulation of a certain film or video
among them.
Great Girl (1994), a film by Kim Su Theiler,
retraces a young American woman's journey back to her Korean birthplace. Her
search for her home and mother is inconclusive, except for a few small traces,
like the scar on the young woman's forehead. A woman who may have been her
mother does not recognize Kim Su, but she tells of an accident her little
daughter once had with the scissors, which would explain the scar. The film's
metaphors of scarring and bandaging suggest that the passage from one culture
to another is a series of wounds that do not completely heal, but that become
part of the self. A poetic and elliptical film, Great Girl does not provide satisfying answers about the place of
adopted Korean children in North America. Instead it invites viewers to let the
images wash over without being immediately understood, metaphors in waiting for
a meaning that comes later.
Who, then, are
these viewers? The academic audience for Great
Girl shows up in sales to SUNY-Oneonta, Monash University, UC Irvine, New
York University, and UC Berkeley, and rentals by the Society for Cinema
Studies, the Honolulu Academy for the Arts, MIT, Hamline University, the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Parsons School of Design. One might guess
that these renters and purchasers are cinema studies departments, since this
"difficult" film invites close formal analysis; it fits into those
identity weeks at the end of a semester-long course on experimental film, and
those experimental weeks in courses on cinema and identity. Both kinds of
course are quite marginal to the cinema studies curriculum. Or it might be
shown in Asian Studies courses, or in production classes. The latter are some
of the most generous audiences for intercultural cinema, for they are less
interested in analyzing a work for its correct aesthetics and politics than in
seeing whether it works, and whether its strategies might work for them.
Great Girl also showed at festivals
(including some before its acquisition by WMM, such as at the Toronto
International Film Festival) and theatrical engagements: Vancouver's Pacific
Cinematheque, the Re-Visions festival in Winnipeg, the Bay Area Multicultural
Film Festival, and the North Coast Rape Crisis Center. It appears from the
dance card that the biggest Asian film festivals in the U.S., the Asian
Cinevision festival in New York and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Festival,
previewed the film but did not exhibit it. Not Asian enough? Too experimental?
Likewise with the Margaret Mead festival. Too self-reflexive, not ethnographic
enough, not Korean enough? A couple of television stations previewed the film
but did not rent it. A little too edgy, a little too short for broadcast? The
booking list is as interesting for intercultural cinema's missed encounters as
for its engagements, for it shows that while sometimes the apparently most
likely audiences will not engage this work, also unexpected audiences will turn
up.
Filmmaker
Laurie Wen, who emigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong when she was 12 years old,
begins her documentary The Trained
Chinese Tongue (1994) by describing the childhood ambivalence and
resentment toward her culture of origin, especially as it was manifested in
cooking. But recently she has begun cooking Chinese meals herself, and she
tells how now that she frequents Chinese markets, "I've been wondering
about people who live with the same sounds and smells:" the old woman
wearing six sweaters, the stylish businesswoman, the teenagers trying to learn
the names of ingredients. Wen approaches women in the fish market in Boston's
Chinatown and asks if they would let her follow them home and watch them cook.
The ensuing four encounters demonstrate that commonalities in cultural memory
are always mediated around differences, and that food provides not only a
source of performative, shared cultural memory but also a marker of many kinds
of disjunction; of generation, language, class, and place. In the scene that
gives the film its title, the abilities of the tongue to get itself around
Chinese words and Chinese food is the subject of most of the conversation. Mr.
Bao, a Chinese-American businessman whose wife is from Hong Kong, insists that
no Asian can pronounce the words "Fort Lauderdale." But, he says,
"we Americans" do not have the facility to extract small bones from a
piece of chicken inside our mouths; that is only something a "trained
Chinese tongue" can do.
Let's take a
look at The Trained Chinese Tongue's
booking list. It has had a successful career: fifteen purchases, mostly by
universities, including the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, but
also by WNET, Albert Wen (Laurie Wen's dad?), and the Secretary of Defense (did
they think it was a Chinese espionage manual?), and 21 screenings at
universities, media centers, and festivals. Both the L.A. Asian Pacific Film
Festival and the Asian American Film Festival picked this one up: it deals with
Asian hybrid identities in a fun and accessible way.
A less
conventional narrative requires more audience wrangling. WMM's catalogue does
its best to get words around Helen Lee's My
Niagara, but the film's oblique, languid narrative style does not lend
itself to the plot-summary format. It does tell a story of a Japanese-Canadian
woman who is drawn to a new lover, a Korean man from Japan, and to the cultural
tension and dislocation they share. It also tells how she and her father gently
come to terms around the death of her mother, whose absence leaves a tangible
silence in their house. But what is most magical about this film, and central
to its narrative, are visual moments in which time seems to suspend: when Julie
and her first lover break up in muttered remarks while the wipers leave ugly
streaks on the car windshield; when Julie and Tetsuro find a fish trapped in
the sanitary waterworks off Lake Ontario; and (my favorite) when Tetsuro lights
two wooden matches, which entwine in flames like star-crossed lovers. Certainly
these are hard to evoke in catalogue text. But customers looking for exquisite
form may not notice My Niagara in the
catalogue, while those looking for a sprightly story may be disappointed when
they preview the film.
Lee's Sally's Beauty Spot and Prey have been hits: the former for its
sexy, Bhabha-quoting postmodern critique of identity politics, the latter for
its tight narrative featuring the photogenic Sandra Oh with a gun. The booking
list for Lee's My Niagara suggests a
smaller audience. Let's see: sold to the University of Hawaii, George Mason
University, New York University and UC Berkeley. A little nationalist jealousy
evident in a preview by the National Film Board of Canada, which surely would
like to claim Lee as one of its own. Screenings at a decent handful of
universities, the Queens Museum, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, the
Seattle Asian American Film Festival, and the Los Angeles Asia Society. A
preview by the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival but no rental. The audience
for My Niagara, then, appears to lean
more toward the cinéaste crowd than
the Asian-diaspora audience…
Of course, a
list of screening venues still only hints at who the audience for these works
really is. Unexpected liaisons occur in classrooms and festival screenings. I
have an unshakeable belief in the "virtual audience" for film and
video, the people who do not comprise a demographic category but who somehow
trickle into screenings, get dragged into classrooms, or surf past one of the
rare TV broadcasts of short, experimental works and stay to enjoy the film. As
I noted, programs and festivals targeted at only a single ethnic group
perpetuate ghettoization and do not reflect the increasingly hybrid culture in
which we live. These works also miss part of their audience when they are
exhibited in experimental or documentary film circuits. The process of
coalition building that many organizations have incorporated at the level of
production must also be carried out at the level of exhibition. Women Make
Movies has begun to reshape the market for independent women's cinema, building
a coalition in the works it supports and on the pages of its catalogue.
Intercultural films and videos are gradually moving out of defined categories
and inflecting the work on every other page. We have good reason to hope that
audiences real and virtual will find themselves in coalition around these
exciting women's works.
[1]See, for example, Reece Auguiste, Martina Attile,
Isaac Julien, and Peter Gidal, "Aesthetics and Politics: Working On Two
Fronts?", Undercut, 17 (Spring
1988); reprinted in The British
Avant-Garde Film, 1925-1995, ed. Michael O'Pray (Arts Council of England,
John Libbey Media, and Luton Press, 1996), 270.
[2] Fernando
Solanas and Octavio Getino, "Towards a Third Cinema," in Movies and Methods. ed. Bill Nichols
(University of California Press, 1983), 56. (Originally published as
"Hacia un Tercer Cine," Tricontinental,
13 [October 1969].)
[3] Mercer, op.
cit.
[4] Toni Cade
Bambara, "Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dust and the Black American Cinema Movement."
In Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia
Diawara (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 133.
[5] Victor
Masayesva, Jr., "The Emerging Native American Aesthetics in Film and
Video," in "Landscapes," special issue of Felix 2:1 (1995): 156-160.