Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (2003)

How did your ideas about these issues evolve? 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. You mix several genres in Brincando— melodrama, documentary, archival footage—how does that reflect your thinking on identity issues? The narrative form was a way of dealing with non-homogeneity of experience. You have soap opera conventions for certain scenes, such as the scene with the father when he confronts 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 are not aware that there are Puerto Ricans who go in the street and demonstrate around these issues. In that sense, to a post-Act Up, Anglo film culture these kinds of demonstrations may seem passe. But in a context where they have never been seen to begin with, it’s something else. How does Puerto Rican I.D. express your ideas about representation? 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 I shared the values of suburbia to a certain extent. | lived a relatively comfortable middle class existence, but simultaneously | 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 | 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 from Brincotlo el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican also identified with the ideal family, the nuclear family. So the first part of this Signal to Noise piece deals with the ambiguities. 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 cliches 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. 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 strategies 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 Zz, when the viewer’s context rd é changes. So this work is another chapter in my process that began with a realistic documentary, ADS 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. You said you want your work to be commercially viable. Is that synonymous with mainstream? I don’t say commercially 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 transformations. 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 are not being produced today because there’s the perception that it won’t make enormous amounts of money. VOLUME 4 NUMBERS 2&3 @ 33