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Person,
Place or
Thing:
at the S.F. Film Arts Festival
viewed November 4, 1999 at the Roxie Cinema
You give for what you take -- I wouldn't have even
heard of this event had my boss not asked me to get free
tickets from FAF (my company is a major sponsor of
theirs). Unfortunately when getting his tickets I
forgot to reserve a couple for me, so my friend Will and
I had to shell out the bucks to watch 90 minutes worth
of "a clump of short films gathered around
fountains, buses, roads and the people on them looking
for their place in a world that is moving faster and
getting smaller by the minute" (taken fron the
festival program). I had the opportunity to meet
some of the filmmakers at a special reception that I did
get a free ticket to, but when I got there I found
myself utterly outclassed. In the 15 minutes I
stayed there I made sole conversation with a transsexual
filmmaker who was working on a trans-gender trans-genre
project, mixing mystery, comedy, music and porn.
"The trans-gender community should have their share
of entertainment too," this lady proclaimed, and
she would provide it, working with her first female-male
director for this special project. Like I said, I
was out of my league.
I was very pleased with the seven films I saw.
Two of them had immediate commercial gimmick potential:
the 1 minute "Flip Film" was an attractive,
animated bus trip through San Francisco, told in
flip-book fashion. The charming and wonderfully
choreographed "Office Furniture" intercut a
young woman's futile downtown job search with shots of
office workers prancing and spinning balletically down
the streets. There was also a smattering of the
conventional. Jensen Rufe's "The Ugliest
Fountain in the World (Without a Doubt)" was a
crowd-pleasing, Roger and Me-style investigation
into why a god-awful excuse of a fountain was ever
erected in front of the art building of the Cal
State-Humboldt campus. The equally popular
"Can't Speak" by Sugimasa Yamashita follows a
Japanese student's painful initial attempts to speak
English in a North Bay school. The actress who
played the girl couldn't have been more perfect, with
her slooping shoulders and humble, unconfident
manner.
Then there were the challenging films that, for the
most part, really engaged me with fresh looks at people,
places and ideas. Diane Kitchen's "The Penfield
Road" was, according to the program, "a short
portrait of Penfield Road and the sights along the way,
including Starved Rock, Little America and the Silver
Black Fox." Damned if that's what I
saw. It was more like a relentless succession of
repeating images flashing back and forth over a
fragmented Christmas tune. I felt like I was
watching someone's vacation on super 8 with a broken
projector. The weird thing is I liked it, or at
least was intrigued by the thought of a mind at work
behind all this crap.
Far more successful was "Calle Chula" by
Veronica Majano, which seemed to me to accomplish it's
apparent goal: to reclaim the setting for its
character. In the face of an amazing period of
gentrification, the long-standing Hispanic community of
the Mission is facing challenges with its history and
place in trying to define who they are and what they
should stand (up) for. This wonderfully offhand
narrative doubles back on itself repeatedly, pondering
the reality of its own existence while recollecting
names and events with a magical sense of
affirmation. The misty quality of 16mm is put to
good effect in this surreal but assertive work.
The last and longest piece, "Imagining
Place" by Anita Chang, rang me up like a pinball
machine with thoughts I hadn't had in years. In
questioning her sense of belonging in various places
(home, Malaysia, Taiwan, an agricultural colony in Santa
Cruz), she makes a series of wonderful observations
about herself (such as how in the predominantly white
colony she won't associate with other Asians for fear of
being pigeonholed into that identity). She also
interviews a wide assortment of Bay Area people about
their feelings of belonging in America and in their
neighborhood, with varying degrees of impact (the best
is an Englishman who has lived in America for four
decades; his warped accent is mesmerizing). It's
an expansive but murky work that loses steam over half
of its length, and is only helped occasionally by the
journal entries she splashes intermittently on the
screen.
I have to give her a lot of credit though for making
me think like I haven't in months. Through that
film I realized that of all the places I've been, my
mother's home, Taiwan, is where I least felt I belonged,
because it was so damn suffocating -- too much family
keeping watch. Whether it was China, college, home
(when Mom wasn't around) or even work, I'm happiest when
I feel bound only to my desires and not burdened by
unrelenting pressures of expectation and
demand. I admire a highly personal work like Anita
Chang's for these insights as much as I deplore it for
overindulgence. These works goad me to make my own
statement, and goad me further to make them better than
these that were seen by the young and supportive
audience of which I was a member on this
night.
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