beyondasiaphilia

Both Ends Burning: Crossroads festival of artist-made films and video

June 12, 2018 at 7:10 am Leave a comment

Los proyectors

Over this past weekend I caught a few shows at the Crossroads film festival that demonstrated a much more culturally integrated state of affairs in the experimental film world than had existed back when I was a pup. I’ve complained in the past about #ExperimentalFilmSoWhite but I’m happy to report that this year’s festival had a good range of makers from many different ethnic backgrounds. Similarly, it’s still somewhat rare to see straight-up art films in most Asian American film festivals, despite the active production of AA experimentalists for many decades, so it’s nice to see AA art films included in the mix.

Jun Okada has posited that some years ago the dominant AA film festival powers-that-be chose to focus on community-based narrative and documentary filmmakers rather than experimental filmmaking, especially on the West Coast. But when I was coming up as a young video artist back in the day there were several other Asian American experimentalists making work then including Janice Tanaka, Rea Tajiri, Stuart Gaffney, and Shu Lea Cheng, to name just a few, who did get a lot of play in AA festivals. However, only rarely were those artists included in mainstream art film programming and fests.

Singular, Highview, Simon Liu and Warren Ng, 2017

So it’s great that Crossroads’ Saturday night show featured Simon Liu and Warren Ng’s Highview, a gorgeous four-projector piece with live guitar accompaniment. Highview’s live performance emphasized the singular appeal of celluloid, with the rapid-fire clattering of the 16mm projectors adding a percussive backbeat to Ng’s dreamlike guitar line. Liu’s projections capture Liu’s memories of Hong Kong, with the film’s green and red palette evoking the former Crown Colony’s characteristic neon-lit nightscape. The project’s imagery includes hand-processed footage, faces that gradually appear and fade away, and cityscapes and starry nights, with a textural, visceral visuality grounded in place and history.

Resistance, Fluid Frontiers, 2017, Ephraim Asili

Although the Crossroads shows that I saw were heavily on the abstraction tip, there were some pieces that managed to mix in some content and social critique along with all of the visual manipulations. Ephraim Asili’s Fluid Frontiers incorporates readings of Black Power texts overlaid with images of significant African American sites in Detroit and an audio reenactment of Harriet Tubman’s biography, creating an impressionistic portrait of that city’s legacy of resistance and activism.

Direct action, The Sun Quartet, 2017, Colectivo Los ingrávidos

Mexico City artists Colectivo Los ingrávidos tetralogy The Sun Quartet uses as a jumping-off point the disappearance of forty-three student activists to comment on Mexico’s political and cultural tensions and to advocate for direct action in combating injustice and oppression. Peggy Ahwesh’s The Falling Sky ironically repurposes footage from Taiwan’s Next Media animated news sequences to comment on the foibles of the human condition.

The festival was a great opportunity to see a wide sampling of international experimental film and video, but although the filmmakers included represented a breadth of cultural backgrounds the festival’s audience was still predominantly white. After kicking it at CAAMfest, Third I South Asian, and other AZN-focused festivals it was a bit of shock to re-enter the mainstream artworld’s decidedly un-diverse universe. Of course this is not something only seen at Crossroads, since the art world is still mostly a playground for the white educated upper middle class. So I’m glad to see Crossroads drawing in a wider cultural spectrum of filmmakers, as this can only enrich and improve the experimental film world.

Entry filed under: crossroads festival of artist-made films and video. Tags: experimental filmmakers, film festival.