It’s a Tuesday evening here at Visual Communications, and in a couple of days I’ll be boarding a plane bound for British Columbia to begin the annual trek across both sides of the Pacific to scour the international film festival circuit for intriguing and audacious (not to mention, excellent and crowd-pleasing) selections for the 2010 edition of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. It’s a good thing that I’m practically already packed: I’m in the middle of a major clean-up of the festival archive in an effort to recycle papers that either have no practical use any longer, or are already in an electronic form. “Greening” Film Festival Central while pumping Beyoncé on the iTunes is going along at a brisk pace, yet the more I dump, the more files I discover. And that doesn’t include the boxes of files accumulated by development and marketing personnel, boxes of duplicate records that I neither expected nor have time for. I need a magic wand, but so does just about every other film fest director. I think I’m gonna shut up, recycle, and count my blessings.
Throughout the just-concluded summer, I’ve had a chance to play back taped transcripts of some of the panel discussions from last spring’s Film Fest; and additionally, peruse some follow-up blog perspectives from other individuals sounding off on the current state of Asian Pacific American cinema. What’s been on my mind? The current state of APA cinema itself. One of our panels, featuring documentary filmmakers Spencer Nakasako and Tadashi Nakamura, was entitled “What’s the Matter with Asian American Cinema?”, and had not only Nakasako and Nakamura but the entire audience fumbling around the question of whether over four decades of growth and development of the field has resulted in a cinema movement that is dysfunctional and static. It was hard not to laugh to myself as Nakasako hijacked the conversation (why not…he is clearly a more verbose speaker than Nakamura, and true to form, not at all adverse to stepping on other people’s toes), and hearing the divergent pespectives of filmmakers and audiences both young and old weighing in on the topic. Among the choice nuggets of wisdom was this exchange, gleaned by Nakasako as a result of an e-mail questionnaire he conducted in preparation for the talk:
1) The concensus from the respondents of Spencer’s questionnaire: there is really nothing the matter (or wrong, I must assume) with Asian Pacific American cinema; and
2) One of the current issues that could be seen as “wrong” with the field has to do with the very film festivals (the one I run among them) that purportedly champions APA cinema, and why the programming process is perceived by disgruntled filmmakers as bypassing their efforts for the “Hollywood”-styled preoccupation for features and commercial-leaning works.
Visual Communications has itself undergone several transformations in its own four-decade long existence; questions exists as to its own pertinence in a contemporary mediamaking environment where anybody with the ability to purchase a cheap digital camera and desktop editing equpment can make their own “masterpieces.” So, I’ve skulked around around all summer long pondering what in fact IS the matter with Asian Pacific American cinema. As I view works in the coming weeks and months, and at the same time ponder the questions raised by mediamakers and tastemakers in the field, I’m hoping to arrive at some conclusions of my own.
