Film Categories: media studies

  • Link 8

    Link 8 is an interstitial docufiction that follows a group of individuals participating in a situational wellness center. Through a new type of algorithm users are matched and transform.

  • Final News Report

    In this film, one evening’s TV news broadcast from an American channel is juxtaposed with the soundtrack of daily game shows, commercial messages and other found sounds from television viewing. How and what events get capsulated into the 30-second clip? What are the messages of such reductions? Certain themes of militarism, arms use, and the deployment of new weapons recur as symbols of American manhood and popular culture. The film suggests that the choice of news events and the way they are reported reveals more than mere facts. This reductive process necessarily contains the hidden ideology of our times, how…

  • 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.

  • Ode to the Nine

    “Ode to the Nine” is influenced by video artist Jon Rafman. His work “9-Eyes” and “You, the World and I” inspired the filmmaker to make this video piece. This short experimental video allows the filmmaker to ponder the relevance of the moving image and what impacts it has on the Native experience of the past, present and future.

  • Video Home System

    ‘Video Home System’ traces the convergence of popular culture and politics in Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s. This video showcases the connections between pop culture and nationalism, and how bootleg economies kept the cinema industry alive during periods of censorship. Image description: A young man sits at a desk behind a pile of VHS tapes, illuminated by a desk lamp. The wall behind him is vivid green.

  • Untitled

    A performance film consisting of a string of five slow motion portraits of a young woman. Each portrait varies in length and gesture as her myriad expressions invite our gaze. With each action performed in dead silence, stretched to the limits of voyeuristic levels of comfort, the simple act of looking is made fragile. A curious exchange is established between spectator, creator, and subject through a careful appropriation and reframing of social media conventions and advertising iconography transposed into a cinematic space—pointing to a cycle of regressive media consumption.

  • BLU In YOU

    Walter Benjamin suggests that film is comparable to surgery, the instrument allowing the operator to penetrate the body of the subject while, paradoxically, maintaining his or her distance. This statement self-reflexively sets up the female spectator at the helm of the art-installation opening of Blu in You—an eloquent essayist film with visual conversations that dissects historical and contemporary representations of the black female body, sexuality and subjectivity. The female spectator (Melanie Smith), views the staged art installation conversations between visual arts curator (Andrea Fatona) and writer (Nalo Hopkinson). The conversations begin with a cultural history of violence, ethnographic display and…

  • Framing Agnes (short)

    In the late 1950s, a woman named Agnes approached the UCLA Medical Center seeking sex reassignment surgery. Her story was long considered to be exceptional and singular until never-before-seen case files of other patients were found in 2017. Watch as preeminent trans culture-makers of our time breathe new life into those who redefined gender in the midcentury. Starring Zackary Drucker (Transparent), Angelica Ross (Pose), Silas Howard (By Hook or By Crook), and Max Wolf Valerio (The Testosterone Files). “An incredible film that transforms the most difficult of archives and shows us critical trans study in action, on screen—I will be…

  • Three Casualties

    “Three Casualties” is an investigation of three movie scenes, showing stunts that lead to the deaths of the stunt doubles performing them. In some cases these scenes remained in the films whereby the audience witnessed an actual death on screen while simultaneously watching a fictional one.