Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (1997)

the scene with the father when he confront’s his daughter’s sexuality and there's a fight. Then you have kind of a literary voiceover that's poetic and plays with image that comes from a different documentary tradition. You have all this archival footage that's used pretty traditionally except the story being told is very different. Then there is the contemporary gay and lesbian demonstration footage. Part of the reason I put it there was you never see that. In Puerto Rico, gay and straight, most people ere ma I WhO ‘'aré not aware that there are Puerto Ricans who go in the street and demonstrate around these issues. In that sense, to a postAct Up, Anglo film culture these kinds of demonstrations may seem passé. But in a context where they have never been seen to begin with it's something else. EA: How does Puerto Rican I.D. express our ideas about representation? FN-M: In this last piece for “Signal to Noise,” a three-part series on ITVS, they >» wanted me to use some of the conventions I used in Brincando as a personal narrative and there's a voiceover that guides you through three sections. The first phase is seeing television as a child when I imitated American TV, using a lot of my home movies. I didn't see any difference between the white people I saw on TV and me because | shared the values of suburbia to a certain extent. I lived a relatively comfortable middle class existence, but simultaneously I identified with the more subversive programs. For me that meant the Addams family. I loved Jeannie's cousin in J Dream of Jeannie, who was bad, as opposed to Jeannie who I thought was silly. At the same time I identified with the nice house, the nice car and so forth. In the Brady Bunch, for example, my identifications tended to be with the boys because they were more out there than the girls. I also identified with the ideal family, the nuclear family. So the first part of this “Signal to Noise” piece deals with the ambiguities. |. Of Lonesome Stars & Broken Hearts: Trends in Puerto Rican Women’s Film/Video Making, Frances NegronMuntaner (work in progress). 2. Watching Tongues Untie(d) While Reading Zami: Mapping Boundaries in Black Gay and Lesbian Narratives, Negron-Muntaner (work in progress). 3. From Puerto Rican I.D., Signal to Noise, PBS. For more information: Brincando EI Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican, Women Make Movies, 212-925-9606. Staying Cool, Congreso, 215/625-0550. Homeless Diaries, Receding Coastline Pictures, 215/242-6469. The second part deals with coming to the U.S. and learning that here I'm a person of color and what that means symbolically. It means the association with all these clichés of crime and danger, of excessive sexual behavior and so forth. At that phase, I thought all these things were oppressive. I was framed with stereotypes, and I took it on. I tried to fight it in its own terms. 12. @ ANGLES The third section deals with how I look at and make television now as someone who grew up to be a filmmaker. How do I deal with trying to challenge some of those stereotypes? Instead of framing the discourse by responding to the stereotypes, I try to displace them with questions: What does it mean to be a slut? What does criminal mean? I try to reconstruct the discourse and give a visual alternative. Instead of trying to answer those stereotypes, I give the reality back with a difference so you can see how ridiculous they are. For me part of the discussion is about the limits of television. You sometimes lose the stategies of narrative to gain an audience or the means of production. The process of making it yielded a lot more insights than those in the piece because of the conventions I had to deal with and conform to. I wasn't trying to invent myself as a subject. I wanted to show how the meaning of the images is constantly changing when the viewer's context changes. So this work is another chapter in my process that began with a realistic documentary, AIDS in the Barrio, then went to a community grassroots video, to an experimental deconstructive thing (Brincando), and then to this piece that is a dialogue with the public sphere. Each piece addressed questions in different ways. EA: You said you want your work to be commercially viable. Is that synonymous with mainstream? FN-M: I don't say commerically viable in the sense of making millions. Because my subjectivity as a Puerto Rican woman places me at the margins of American culture, for me being mainstream would require a number of tranformations. What I mean by commercially viable is an enterprise that can reproduce itself without overdependence on the public sector since all the public sources are shrinking. You either stop being a filmmaker because you don't want to compromise or you keep being a filmmaker and you try to find the way you can work. It's a very impure and contradictory process. The same applies to exhibition: Who do you want to show your films? There are audiences that want to see certain kinds of media that's are not being produced today because there's the perception that it won't make enormous amounts of money. I see film—alternative or not—as fitting into a market structure. Even if you keep the process of experimentation, you address the question of how to make something pleasureable and insightful at the same time. If it's not consumed in a mass market, it's consumed by libraries, film schools and so forth. It's bought, it's consumed. Even work that was once perceived as radical is now a commodity. How can you pretend that alternative film is not inscribed for some kind of market? EA: What do you get from filmmaking as a means of expression? FN-M: I love it. I'm a production junky. To me filmmaking is a different way of knowing than writing—which is more openended, a way of recognizing the contradictions that are part of living. I write literature, fiction and poetry. I do what would be considered academic work, and I also make films. They are all very different ways for me to experience life. The biggest thrill is when I'm in front of an audience, and they engage in dialogue. When they tell me what they feel, what they saw, what they didn’t like. They have insights that I don't have. It's that point of dialogue that makes it all worth it. O