Film Categories: film studies

  • Pizza Roles

    This meta-porn captures our experience, as genderqueer mixed race people of color, living in Seattle during the age of diversity incorporated. Opportunities to explore meaningful differences in experience are cast aside in favor of glossy, diverse, marketing photographs as the ultimate proof of corporate status.

  • Potamkin

    In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world’s most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social vision of left radical politics. This film-biography is assembled out of distorted fragments of films on which he had written, an impression of erupting consciousness. At the Odessa steps, trampling gives breath to the child. The bullet miraculously reforms the face. The Cossacks march backwards, retreating unseen into their…

  • Sex, Politics & Sticky Rice

    Protests, potlucks, and three-ways are just the “tip of the rice bowl” for five Asian American lesbians recounting their adventures in sex, love, and queer activism. They were among the first generation of out Asian Pacific Islander queer activists in the San Francisco Bay Area. While Crystal Jang falls hard for her PE teacher, Gisele Pohan’s immigrant father dares her to join the 1979 Gay & Lesbian March on Washington. Helen Zia and Lia Shigemura keep a “chart” of the various hook ups and break ups. Zee Wong discovers the joys of lesbian sex in her first girl-on-girl menage a…

  • Warning Shot

    One death. Three versions of the crime. James H. Wakasa, a 63-year-old Japanese American bachelor, was shot to death by military police at Topaz concentration camp during World War II. Was it justifiable homicide, an accidental fatality, or second-degree murder? The press said he was trying to escape, the shooter claimed it was a warning shot, the case file suggests he was killed while walking a dog. This experimental film essay uses the “Rashomon effect” to juxtapose the conflicting accounts detailing the circumstances and cause of Wakasa’s untimely death. Part of the Queer Camp Trilogy.

  • Semiotics of Sab

    This experimental film essay explores the poetics of identity through an oblique portrait of gay Japanese American actor Sab Shimono. For more than five decades, Shimono has performed on stage and screen in over 150 roles as warlords, bus boys, and businessmen. Shimono asks, “How is it that we know who we are?” Recalling early structuralist works by Hollis Frampton and Martha Rosler, Semiotics of Sab displays the grammatology of queer Asian American masculinity through conflicting lexicons of race, representation, and selfhood.

  • New Woman 新女性

    New Woman is a meditative journey that investigates the look of the “New Woman” in Chinese silent screen. Through using archival film footage with intertitles also derived from the Chinese silent films, the film explores patriarchal perspectives in the portrayal of women in Chinese silent cinema, and deconstructs their appearances in order to reveal the impressive talent and outlook of the “New Woman”, which have been largely ignored and forgotten. The film features four thematic sections, Virtue, Modeng Woman, Unbound Feet, and New Woman. The footage of each section has been re-worked differently by using relevant hand processing and manipulation…

  • Landscape With Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman

    Edited by Karyn Sandlos and Mike Hoolboom Philip Hoffman has been making personal documentary films for over twenty years. He has devoted his life to examining the narrow aperture each of us uses to bring our own experience into focus. As many of the writers in this volume will attest, telling personal stories is dangerous work. “Landscape with Shipwreck” is an untidy stew of gravediggers and critics, architects and builders. In their conversion of pictures into words, each has used the history of their own naming as compass and guide. These photographs and scripts speak alongside the written word, not…

  • REBIRTH

    “A dance ritual which turns into recreation of the self.” Transformation is a dance ritual. With every move you are born again. With every little step, you cut the umbilical cord. With every turn, you create a new shell.

  • Reinaldo’s Motifs

    In 1927, Reinaldo Ferreira, a well-known journalist and writer who published under the pen name ‘Repórter X’, founded the cinema production company Repórter X Film, through which he directed four films that same year. Among them we find “O Táxi no. 9297” and “Rita ou Rito?…”, where homosexuality, transvestism and drug use feature explicitly in Portuguese cinema for the first time. “Reinaldo’s Motifs” is an audiovisual essay that focuses on a series of recurrent motifs in Reinaldo Ferreira’s cinematic work. A commissioned work by the Cinemateca Portuguesa, in which I tried to play around with these recurrences, in a manner…

  • Twilight

    Exploring the relationship between sound and picture, this film is inspired by the two lights (twi-light) found inside of film projectors. The animation was created by applying both sound and picture directly onto 35mm film. After the soundtrack was created, each individual sound was assigned a specific shape and colour that repeats throughout the composition. Visual shapes were airbrushed and hand-painted onto orange mask (negative film), then printed positive for further manipulation by bleaching or scratching into the film’s emulsion before the final print copy was made. Sounds were made by drawing Spirograph moire patterns onto clear mylar sheets. The…