Lee Isaac Chung’s Munyurangabo (2007) has been one of the more critically-acclaimed releases of the year so far, and the rave reviews alone should have spurred viewers into theaters. But surely its “exotic” provenance – made by a Korean American director, filmed entirely in the language of Kinyarwanda, written by two Americans (Samuel Anderson, the co-writer, is white), with a cast entirely made up of nonprofessional actors – was also something of a draw.
This implicitly raises the question of why the film’s origins would be of interest at all. Perhaps the unspoken assumption is that the challenge of making a film in “unfamiliar” locales makes for a more interesting movie. Or is the director’s Korean ethnicity seen to impart a different directorial sensibility on the material? I can’t read the viewers’ minds, of course. I was there, however, for a slightly different reason.
I became aware of “Asian American cinema” — not just the fact that there were such people as Asian American directors, but “Asian American cinema” as a body of work – quite late, in the mid- to late-90′s. (My tardiness doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested in Asian American movies; it’s because I wasn’t such a rabid movie fan back then.) Self-determination was the order of the day during the struggle for ethnic studies in the late ’60s, and this philosophy was the lifeblood of cinematic productions even three decades later. There was a clear, discernible political ethos in such Asian American movies, characterized by a burning imperative to tell a fiercely personal story – and, by extension, “our” story — by heroically wresting the means of representation from the (white) mainstream.
What these films — indeed, Asian American studies and politics in general — were reacting and battling against was a long history of their culture being ignored and denigrated and devalued. This is not mere political correctness on my part, and I assume it’s the same principle that animates other similar art/film festivals organized around ethnicity and so on. At the very least these festivals provide an actual space for artists who have been told, time and again, that “there isn’t an audience” for their work, or that it’s “too ethnic,” or that they need “a white main character” for the film to even see production.
Indeed, the mere fact that such films existed was cause for celebration. There was excitement, to be sure, in this collective working-out of issues regarding identity and generational difference – almost all sourced, I argue, from Jade Snow Wong’s autobiographical novel “Fifth Chinese Daughter” from 1945, and not straying very far from the original blueprint, i.e., the lead character perceives differences between herself, her strict immigrant parents, and the world outside. These were coming-of-age narratives writ large, its protagonists emotionally torn by the competing demands of Asian tradition and (as it was usually emplotted) American modernity. The endings – where the protagonist triumphantly defeats the binary conflict through creating a third way, being Asian American – were affirmations for the audience as well.
Asian American audiences, including an FOB like myself, thrilled to these films because it was their stories, the literal projection of their racial epiphanies. The films were labors of love, for sure, and, given the arguably racist constraints of film production and distribution, probably wholly funded by credit cards and almost solely dependent on word of mouth for bookings and publicity.
I do wish to point out, however, with fingers trembling slightly over the keyboard, that this didn’t mean the movies were actually very good. This was the mid- to late-’90s, and I felt like I missed out on the earlier, more politically aggressive and experimental engagements with race and identity – those that pushed at the limits of conventional cinematic vocabulary, those that were engaged with an explicit “oppositional cultural politics”, as Darrell Hamamoto puts it. (Granted, films by Trinh Minh-Ha were far less likely to get any sort of screening outside of a festival, if at all.)
The few Asian American films that I did get to watch made me think I caught the wave at the wrong moment: a series of lukewarm family dramedies, practically cut from the same sub-Sundancey cloth, perhaps radical only in the sense that it featured people who looked like me on screen.* Instead, what I mostly saw was an interchangeable series of pedestrian if laudable attempts by directors and writers to translate their personal experiences onto film, which meant you had an interchangeable series of mostly male teenage or twenty-something protagonists, with the narrative and its denouement chugging along a fairly predictable track.
It was the kind of earnest identity-politics movie that would be met by a polite write-up in the Times, if at all, and an overwhelmingly, if disproportionately, positive reception by “the community” (which was invariably obligated to attend) — though completely justified, in the light of what I’ve written above. The movies were “of the moment,” certainly, but that moment probably wasn’t going to last forever.**
I could sense the tide was turning when, at a Q&A after a screening of his 2006 film Ang Pamana: The Inheritance, the Filipino Canadian director Romeo Candido was asked why he made a horror film (of all things) set in the Philippines. His response (and I paraphrase here): Because I was tired of seeing yet another film about identity. His answer was met with resounding applause by the audience. (I clapped, halfheartedly, only because I was puzzled by his pronouncement – his film, I thought, was completely about identity, albeit with a flying bloodsucking woman cut off at the torso thrown in here and there.)
Whether the applause anticipated our current nebulous “post-racial” zeitgeist, or whether it signaled that the audience was “over” its coming-of-age issues, was unclear. To me, it signified that the “genre” had, for the moment, exhausted itself. Whether that meant that the category of “Asian American cinema”, as I understood its imperative to depict “the Asian American experience”, was similarly exhausted — that was up for debate.
And so a film like Munyurangabo – nothing ostensibly “Asian American” about it, except for its director – is a great example of and an argument for a more expansive “transnational” cinema. (For some recent examples, see Cavite, Up the Yangtze, Tokyo!, Boarding Gate, Chinese Box, Flight of the Red Balloon, My Blueberry Nights, The Limits of Control, Letters from Iwo Jima – I’ve thrown very different examples here willy-nilly because they all fit.) This creative cross-pollination – itself a reflection of how cultural and financial capital, not to mention people, circulate around the world and across borders in degrees more dizzying than previous generations — is not new. But a film like Munyurangabo does make the notion of “Asian American cinema” suddenly seem a little provincial.
It isn’t without its problems, of course; Hollywood has been representing the Other in scandalous fashion throughout its history. (The backlash against Slumdog Millionaire, for instance, is predictably though understandably tied to the critique against an imbalanced cultural imperialism: the West, extracting resources – its images, its stories, its actors, etc. — from the Third World. Your opinions may vary.) Munyurangabo – or, at least, its marketers at Film Movement – are aware of this, and it probably explains the blurb from Nick Schager from Slant (“PIERCING and AUTHENTIC.”) splashed across the poster and the DVD, as if non-Rwandan viewers would be able to tell.
But authenticity aside, Munyurangabo is itself a political intervention, guided by (again) the imperative to tell a story from the Rwandan point of view, with the full, active participation of a Rwandan cast and crew, and not through Hollywood spectacles like Hotel Rwanda.
As Chung explains (in a great interview with Michael Guillen on Twitch):
…as I was looking at the sort of films that were coming out of Rwanda, it seemed a little sad that there was nothing that focused on contemporary Rwanda. Everything just seemed to recreate what went on with the genocide. Also, all the films are very much for Western audiences from the Western perspective using Western actors, they speak English, maybe with an accent or something like that; but, nothing in Kinyarwanda, their local language.
In this respect it brings us oddly full circle to the objectives of those early Asian American filmmakers, still resonating through the decades: that of giving voice to the disenfranchised, to tell their own stories, but only on their terms.
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*On the other hand, I can’t overstate the simple but radical importance of the idea that Asian Americans could and should play themselves, and be fully-realized, complex characters, after decades of demeaning Hollywood stereotypes.
The main exceptions to my admittedly snarky, reductive generalizations above are Gregg Araki and Wayne Wang. The latter’s Chan Is Missing (1982), is still in my personal Top Ten, and remains one of the finest examples of independent cinema anywhere. Asian American feature-length documentary filmmakers, on the other hand, arguably hit home runs practically the first time they stepped up to the plate, but that’s for another post.
**The reader will have no doubt detected my cowardice by my refusal to name these films. Call it lessons from the school of avoidance learning; being bitten in the ass by “the community” isn’t a very pleasant experience, I can tell you. You’re welcome to fill in the blanks yourself.
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Hm, maybe I wasn’t tapped into Asian American film during the 90′s so I can’t think of any titles that I’d name here. But as you’ve also brought up the similarity to AA literature, and its themes of reconciling the “ethnic” “Other” self with the American self, I’ll also say that this trope continues to run rampant in AA literature, executed in predictable ways, much to my dissatisfaction.
Posted 26 Jun 2009 at 2:24 pm ¶The very last paragraph spoke directly to the question simmering in my head as I was reading the post.
You’re such an authority figure in my eyes and you really place yourself well in relation to a specific moment in Asian American cinema. I wish I knew if I was sharing that moment with you or whether there’s something new I can learn about the past and our “generation.” Asian American culture is so regionally specific. What was it like where you were? That’s why I’m curious about what you remember seeing.
I can draw a parallel with early 1990s lesbian cinema, some of which got national release for the first time (I think). What, I wonder, is the Asian American equivalent to “Go Fish”?
—Kim
Posted 26 Jun 2009 at 4:16 pm ¶Food for thought–thanks! There’s a lot of discussion about this out in the Asian American film mafia & I have no ready answer for the questions you raise. But it sounds like you might have waded through one too many bad first narrative films. I like to think that most first-time narrative indie filmmakers, regardless of their ethnicity, have a hard time of it since the genre is fairly limited in form (with some exceptions, of course). I think of conventional narrative films as being the formal equivalent of sonnets, in that they have very distinct and recognized requirements and boundaries that are actually kind of tricky to execute. Easy to learn, hard to master. Add to that the fact that feature-length narratives can cost a lot of money and you can see why they’re so difficult to get right, especially on a low budget and on the first try.
Of course there are many exceptions to this rule (Chan Is Missing could count as one, I think). But the glut of crappy indie narratives out there proves that, although seemingly anyone can make a movie if they really want to, not many people have the talent, the chops, and the vision to do it well. So maybe the sheer number of bad indie narratives coming out since the late 1990s just proportionately increased the number of bad Asian American narratives, too. Sorry you had to run across so many of them!
Posted 26 Jun 2009 at 7:01 pm ¶I guess this disjuncture of “ethnic” and “American” will always be something of a “universal” question, and isn’t limited to Asian Americans, and will never go away. Add to that the fact that Asian American immigration doesn’t come in discrete waves anymore — you’ll have a continually replenished population of people for whom these questions of identity will always be a concern.
On the other hand there’s no reason why these questions have to always be presented as generational conflict, as if these (mostly young) cultural producers need to channel their slaying of their elders in some more productive fashion. =)
One work of AA lit that came to mind that dealt with the same “ethnic” / “American” split was Gene Yang’s “American Born Chinese”. There’s something slightly predictable in its “lessons”, but it’s done in such a smart and radically inventive manner — the interlocking narratives, Yang’s literal envisioning of the ethnic/American split, the way he infuses high school drama with a sense of the epic (again, literally) — that I’d forgive Yang anything.
I’ll post replies to the other comments later!
Posted 27 Jun 2009 at 10:56 am ¶Hey Kim, the real authority figure here is Valerie, who teaches, writes about and makes the stuff. =) I won’t really name any names, except to note that there’s an entry on this blog about one of those movies, and that the whole identity-politics genre really stretches into the early 2000s. Again, I have no trouble with the topic, just the way it’s predictably presented.
I know we’ve talked about this before (over barbecue, yes?): that being Asian American in the SF Bay Area would have been rather different in NYC (or Baltimore, or Ann Arbor, or wherever). These sorts of movies, especially the independently-distributed ones, would have been shown only in select cities. (And as someone who only arrived in the U.S. in 1990, I had a very different relationship to these movies — which partly explains my impatience with them.)
I do remember when “Go Fish” came out, but didn’t see it (though I have vague memories of “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love”, also from around that time). Looking at the fairly divided reviews on Amazon, though, I think I see what you mean — terrible acting, but important for its time, “we wouldn’t have ‘The L Word’ without it”, et cetera.
Posted 28 Jun 2009 at 3:04 pm ¶Hey Valerie — I really liked your comparison to sonnets (though I defer to Barb above about those). I guess I wasn’t thinking of those particular requirements, and I’m not really sure what they would be — you mean in terms of appealing to investors, or just how film schools make them do their theses? Do screenwriters go to workshops and are told to “write what they know”, which explains the glut of racial-epiphany movies?
So tell us more about “Sin Nombre”!
Posted 28 Jun 2009 at 6:57 pm ¶Okay, this is going to be a long reply.
re: sonnets. What I meant is that English sonnets have a very rigid rhyme, syllable, and line structure that must be adhered to in order to be considered a sonnet. But within that strict form you can do anything you want. Shakespeare was a master at the English sonnet & was able to create all kinds of different moods despite the sonnet’s formal strictures.
Similarly, feature-length, Hollywood-style narrative filmmaking has a very strict set of formal considerations–a beginning, middle and end, actors speaking dialogue, unobtrusive camerawork & lighting, “happy” endings where evil is punished & good rewarded, privileging heterosexuality, upholding or restoration of the status quo, etc. Some directors can work within this strict form to create great works of art. And other directors, notable Godard & the rest of the nouvelle vague as well third cinema directors, and some few “indie” directors, actively subvert or distort this style.
For the most part, most film schools teach Hollywood narrative-style filmmaking and most narrative directors adhere to that style. So that’s where I see the similarities between the sonnet and the narrative feature film in that they both are very codified forms of expression that are easy to recognize and imitate but not so easily mastered. Plus feature-length narrative filmmaking is potentially a very complex and expensive process, so when low-budget indie filmmakers attempt to replicate the Hollywood style they often fail miserably.
As far as Asian American filmmakers are concerned, imho AA films were a lot more interesting when they followed tenets of third cinema rather than Hollywood filmmaking, meaning when AA directors were trying to undermine the status quo & use film as a means of revolution rather than what too many of them do now, which is to ape Hollywood conventions (for whatever reasons). The turning point may have been in the early 90s when The Joy Luck Club was a surprise success, because after that too many AA directors tried to make a box-office hit at the expense of innovation, community engagement and the use of film as activism. So I imagine that a lot of the crappy AA films that you refer to came out after that time.
This is just my opinion as an old-school socialist, though, so please take it with a grain of salt. There are plenty of exceptions to the rule and I don’t think AA film should be stuck in one mode (activist filmmaking or Hollywood filmmaking, for example) any more than any other. Colma: The Musical came out just a couple years ago & it was brilliant, and it was all about being a genre film.
I still think there’s plenty of room for identity-based films, too. Maybe there’s just so many AA movies out there these days that, again, by dint of the sheer numbers there are a lot of bad ones. I saw a couple pretty impressive AA features at the last SFIAAFF Treeless Mountain & Children of Invention, so there’s still hope. But my favorite AA movie this year is Tad Nakamura’s A Song For Ourselves, which is an old-school, community based documentary, so identity films can still be relevant if they’re made by the right director.
RE: Sin Nombre–I’m afraid you’ll have to wait to read the post on my blog. Let’s just say it was beautiful, terrifying, and well-made, but missing a few key elements that would’ve made it great. And in some ways it was deeply conventional, despite its unusual subject matter.
Posted 28 Jun 2009 at 9:16 pm ¶Just wanted to thank you for your very generous response, Valerie! I now understand your point about sonnets and Hollywood narrative filmmaking better… though I do wonder whether The Joy Luck Club was what spurred those filmmakers to shoot for a crossover hit. Of course, not everyone can be Wayne Wang, and JLC already had a built-in audience from the zillions of people who read the book. (I’m reminded here as well of Sandra Liu’s essay in “Countervisions” where she bravely defends Wang for making a mainstream production like JLC. I figure if making movies with Queen Latifah or Natalie Portman lets Wang make movies like his last two, then more power.)
Thanks for reminding me about Colma: The Musical, which I loved. I think my favorite Asian American film at the last SFIAAFF was Jennifer Phang’s Half Life — also a debut feature — and that was firmly outside of any genre (except for apocalyptic suburban dystopia).
Posted 29 Jun 2009 at 11:15 am ¶Post a Comment