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Five Films That I've Yet to Write About
By Peter X Feng, Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies
English Department
Still from "Some Divine Wind" by Roddy Bogawa
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Animal Appetites
(Michael Cho, 1991) 19 min.
Distributed by NAATA
If a Vietnamese Pot-Bellied
Pig is a pet, then why can't a dog be a meal? Michael Cho proves social
criticism is sometimes best conveyed by a wise-ass. (Sorry, Michael. Not.)
Dupont Guy: Schiz of Grant Avenue
(Curtis Choy, 1975) 35 min.
Everything
you need to know about what it is (was?) to be Chonk, ranging from parodic
news broadcasts about Chinatown shootings to the poetry of Janice
Mirikitani. Choy's film asks if it's possible to go home again to San
Francisco's Chinatown.
Ekleipsis
(Tran T. Kim-Trang, 1998) 23 min.
Distributed by Third World Newsreel
Each new tape in Tran's
"Blindness Series" raises the stakes: this one muses on hysteria and the
Khmer Rouge to account for a group of Cambodian women in Long Beach,
California, regarded as the largest group of hysterically-blind people in
the world. This isn't the first experimental video to borrow the structure
of the slide show, but it may be the first to lend such significance to the
darkness between the slides.
Looking for Wendy
(Kimberly SaRee Tomes, 1998) 18 min.
Distributed by Third World Newsreel
Tomes uses Dave
Thomas (the fast food shill who is perhaps America's most famous adoptee)
and bio-engineered tomatoes (created by her adoptive father) for this
sublime and ridiculous meditation on hybridity.
Some Divine Wind
(Roddy Bogawa, 1991) 72 min.
Distributed by Third World Newsreel
An experimental narrative
film in the tradition of Jean-Pierre Gorin, Chris Marker, and Yvonne
Rainer. Like the 36 view of Mt. Fuji, the film offers multiple but distant
perspectives on its central character, a biracial Japanese American shaped
by pop-culture histories of WW2 (as alluded to in the film's title, which
refers to Kamikaze pilots).
(Peter dedicates this list to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose films and videos deserve more ink)
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Peter X Feng's "Identities in Motion: Asian American Film & Video" is
forthcoming from Duke University Press.
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