Asian American Studies Conference Screenings

Because I am tragically old and school wears me out I sometimes take a nap on Friday afternoon. This past Friday was on of those days. As I napped I dreamt of a yellow tabby cat trying to escape. Apparently it was my responsibility to capture it. The cat was fast and elusive, but I kept after it. When I awoke I realized the cat was a symbol for an opportunity, an outside event that I could blog about. It represented one of those elusive events that were rapidly getting away without my participation. The Asian American Studies screening at 7:30 that evening had become my dream cat.
The dream made me think of Eisenstein's montage theory. When you put two images next to each other you create a third thing, a different thing. My subconscious had worked like Eisenstein's montage. I had a goal, to attend a screening event. I also had an opportunity, the AAS screening. The two together became a dream cat.
What I'm getting to though, is not dream cats, it's Krutie, one of the most interesting of the short films screened Friday night. It was probably the film closest to documentary of the six presented. It was not experimental, it was more like a performance piece. The reason I associate it with dream cats is because of montage; a montage of the filmaker, Krutie Thakkar, in different guises, affecting different voices, sitting on a green couch. Accompanying Krutie and the couch were titles of both Sanskrit and Russian definitions for the word Krutie, a floating crouton and banana-rama-fo-fama type rhymes scrolling across the screen. Independently the images seemed to make no sense, but together they created a third thing. No, not a dream cat, but the concept of a young woman searching for identity.
Of the other five films screened, there was a good one, a bad one, and three that were so-so. The bad one was Texas Girl , about the Korean wife of a marine adjusting to life in his west Texas hometown. The distracting element of the film was that the woman, who supposedly just moved from Korea, had a Texas accent. She actually used better grammar than her husband. Another problem with the film was that it exploited every scene to make the marine husband look like a crude racist redneck. He became a one dimensional cliche undermining the story.
The good one was North of Ojinaga. A Japanese woman and Mexican man are smuggled across the border and abandoned by their coyote in the west Texas desert. They can't speak each other's language but begin to communicate using iconic American objects and advertising phrases. This film, unlike most of the others, had a logical structure and actual story. The photography was also a step above the others.
So, now I'm wondering why the cat in my dream was a yellow tabby when I prefer the darker calicos. Well, perhaps another day, another dream.