MAY 2007, Part B: Pondering Wild West Kultcha
The other night, I was rewatching director Chen Shi-Zheng's DARK MATTER (a film that for a variety of reasons was not included in the final program line-up of VC FILMFEST) in order to find some kind of logic -- any kind of logic -- as to the nature of pathological violence. Anyone who has been watching the news the past couple of weeks must certainly be familiar with the massacre at Virginia Tech and the disquieting similarities with the real-life events at the core of DARK MATTER's narrative. For awhile, select members of our programming team did a double-take at some of the other works in this year's Festival and wondered aloud if we would unwittingly upset some sensibilities among our audiences. Things weren't assuaged when we received the full-color advertisement of one of our major sponsors -- a promo for an upcoming computer video game featuring a certain Hong Kong superstar in a pose that unintentionally mimics that of the V-Tech killer's most iconic image. Concerns were expressed, and at least one programmer reacted by asking to opt out of a hosting assignment of one of our films, a body-count film uncomfortably close to real-life events. At the end of the day, with a week's time to consider the connection of real-life events to his hosting assignment, he thought better of his decision and agreed to follow through.
For years and years now, we've been confronted by submissions that trade heavily on "genre" subject matters including violence as a result of misogyny, domestic abuse, gang and/or crime culture -- fill in the blank. I don't know why, but from my personal perspective, many of these works failed in part because the filmmakers were all too willing to employ stereotypes in the name of reality; but mostly, these movies have never sat well with me because they were incompetently made. It's one thing to have to make an audience sit through two hours of shootin', lootin' and killin'. To have to make that audience sit through two hours of inexcusably shoddy filmmaking in the name of "real" portrayals of Asian Amerikkkans in da hood is inexcusable, and as a result I've been mauled badly over the years by filmmakers complaining why I'm so inhospitable to submissions that channel the filmmaking style of Wong Kar-wai and John Woo, but lack an once of soul or craft.
Maybe I'm being too harsh. Or maybe I'm letting my aversions to all things insufferably male-centric come through when I should think better of it -- after all, I'm not THAT big a fan of THE JOY LUCK CLUB. In any event, males, testosterone and guns seem to occupy most of the subject matter that we see. And I'm not so sure I like that.
Though we indeed have works in this year's program that may, at first blush, trade on the very things I despise, I have to reference the acumen of my colleague David: he programs by intuition -- "I understand why you don't like it, but you know, there's a there there..." Maybe I should follow David's advice...we programmed this year's Festival with works we believed in because there was a there there, so we should be brave and stick with our gut reactions. Even if it looks like we, uh, I might be contradicting myself...
posted by Abraham Ferrer @ 7:02 PM
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