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Scene from Takeshi Kitano's
VC Film Fest Turns Barely Legal
The Los Angeles Visual Communication Film Fest celebrates its 20th anniversary, bookended with a look back at Wayne Wang's classic, "Chan is Missing" and Beat Takeshi's wondrous "Zatoichi."
"Tonight we're setting things right." - Abraham Ferrer, Co-Director of VCFF.
The VCFF: Opening Night
In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Visual Communications Film Festival, I drove my twenty year-old car to the opening night. When I pulled up, the sight of my ride moved the valet guy at the Directors Guild Theater to say he'd take three dollars for parking, not four. Wayne Wang's breakthrough classic, Chan is Missing stood the test of time much better than my 84 Camry. Despite twenty years, the slangy, fast-paced dialogue didn't feel dated, but seemed as crisp as the newly restored print, courtesy of the Pacific Film archive. As they showed clips plotting Wang's career since Chan, I was shocked - shocked to find he was the man responsible for The Joy Luck Club, that film with the inescapable tiger and jade aura. Watch his unsterilized represenation of San Francisco's Chinatown circa 1981, and you almost forgive him.
In fact, the look back seemed to prompt Wang to muse that perhaps it was time for him to get back to indie basics with his three person crew of soundman Curtis Choy and cinematographer Michael Chin. "Chan is still missing," said Wang, referring to the invisibility of Asians in TV and film. Part of that may be remedied by ImaginAsian TV, the first all-Asian cable channel network which announced their projected launch in August, marking the rescue of Asian television programming from "the ghettoes of public access."
The After Party
The VCFF: what better place to find scads of aspiring Asian models/actresses in short skirts? What better way to approach them than as a photographer? I learned this principle of festival demographics as my editor and I tried to get sound bytes from festival personages at the after party. It became apparent that neither of us had yet mastered the graceful exit when it took nearly ten minutes to escape from the clutches of a photographer who almost seemed to have a scarlet AF (for Asian Fetish) branded on his forehead.
Closing Night
Closing night rocked with an advance screening of Beat Takeshi's Zatoichi, Takeshi's remake of the classic samurai character played for two decades by Katsuo. About two-thirds of the way through this wondrous film, I realized how long it had been since I'd had this sensation: a simple, unforced desire to see the next scene. Zatoichi moved from one condensed scene to the next so unpredictably and gracefully that I hardly felt time passing - it brought to mind Bresson's words: "running underneath like a painter's eternally fresh canvas." Don't trust the trailers or the invariably garbled synopses, which tries to mould the film inaccurately into the formulas of the samurai genre. Takeshi is a master: one can almost feel how easily he takes the genre to its limit, and the accompanying joy of his effort.
For more information on the 2004 VCFF, visit: www.vconline.org.
Date Posted: 5/5/2004