Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (1997)

FN-M: I feel ambivalent. I felt that the film represented the Puerto Rican community in Philedelphia, but it was a massive abstraction of that community. It’s an imagined community. There are many different communities even within that geographic boundary of North Philly. Members of those different communities expressed that they were very happy with the film, that they felt for the first time in memory that they were respectfully represented and had a voice. So to that extent I felt that the film definitely did what it was supposed to do on a basic level which was to provide a tool that AIDS educators could use in order to provoke discussion about certain issues. That didn’t entirely erase the other problems I mentioned before. After the documentary was done, I wrote articles about the process of making the film and how it felt at different junctures of the process. That was a way of expelling my discomfort and making it part of the discussion about this kind of media. It’s not to say that I disinherit the film. It was as important to talk about the process as it was to use the finished video in a particular context. I find that writing about the process is a very important part of it all for me. That's the only way I can navigate a problem. When I'm forced to write about it, I see my own contradictions, ambiguities and gaps. I felt community media was not going to solve the problems for me. I mean those power inequity problems of framing subjects. Questions like: Who are Puerto Ricans? What do they do? Where do they come from? What do they look like? What are their problems? I didn’t share those questions in the same way because I wasn’t a Puerto Rican on welfare in North Philly. That was not my reality although I had an alliance in transforming that reality. EA: Aren't you dealing with these same issues in the narrative form with Brincando El Charco? FN-M: To some extent Brincando was a way of reinventing myself as a filmmaker because the process was so much different. It was a much bigger project that included fiction and documentary forms. It was an exploration, a way for me to find a style, find a way to work. Brincando began as an exploration of identities in the plural. I started by exploring issues that had to do with race in the Puerto Rican community. I narrowed it down. I didn’t want to make universal statements about this. I just narrowed it down to my own experiences, which ultimately was superseded because my own attitudes and practices about sexuality and all kinds of other things changed during the making of the film. So the whole attempt to frame myself even as an autobiographical subject, as a middle class, light-skinned Puerto Rican lesbian saw itself undone. In those five years, I couldn’t even fix myself on the screen for even a very small limited amount of time. So how can | expect my identity narrative to be anything but rhetorical in the best sense of the word. EA: How does Brincando fit into the context of other Puerto Rican work? FN-M: Part of the problems I encountered in conceptualizing Brincando had to do with not having Puerto Rican models. | wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. Whereas if you are a black filmmaker or gay filmmaker or trying to represent issues of sexuality you have context, you are referring to other people, other work. In our case, although we definately have gay writers, actors, etc., there’s no public discourse. In a way talking to gays ES WASSERMAN PHOTO ° — From Brincando EI Charco by Frances NegronMuntaner outwardly would almost be outing them. It’s not that we don't have a gay culture or context, but there are no previous open texts that you can refer to that is immediately picked up on. I felt somewhat lonely. That changed and it's going to continue to change. | wrote an article on Latino lesbian and gay filmmaking in the U.S. and found there was more film production in the last few years than ever before. This state of affairs is in constant flux and is changing for the better in diversity of representation, point of view. EA: How did your ideas about these issues evolve? FN-M: Identity discourse is so rigid in many ways: what your identity is and what it isn't; what you are and what you are not. It's so linear. It's very difficult to encompass simultaneity of even opposite feelings in a discourse of identity. For example, while I politically tend to identify as a lesbian, saying I'm a lesbian doesn't tell you anything about anything. It doesn't speak to ways of relating in a specific cultural context. It doesn’t tell you about my sexuality which is more complex than “lesbian” seems to imply. What I'm trying to say is the experience will exceed the label. EA: You mix several genres in Brincando-melodrama, documentary, archival footage—how does that reflect your thinking on identity issues? FN-M: The narrative form was a way of dealing with non-homogeneity of experience. You have soap opera conventions for certain scenes, such as VOLUME 3 NUMBER2 @ I!