Identity in Crisis in Midi Onodera’s Short Films:

Curatorial Essay by Axelle Demus

At a 2023 conference held at Concordia University on the history of Media Arts in the UK and Canada in which Midi Onodera participated, Onodera began her talk as follows:

“Over the years, I have been labelled an ‘experimental filmmaker,’ an ‘artist filmmaker,’ an ‘independent filmmaker.’ Currently, I’m a ‘moving image artist.’ These labels speak to the kind of work I have done over the years. I’ve also been labelled a ‘person of colour,’ a ‘lesbian,’ a ‘feminist.’ These are simple, shorthand labels that don’t begin to explore the complexities of who [I am] and the kind of work [I do].” (Onodera, 2023)

Onodera’s works are, indeed, complex audiovisual experiments, that have, over the years, explored topics of race, gender, desire, intimacy, sexuality, place, isolation, memory, and history. These themes are all connected to Onodera’s exploration— sometimes direct, sometimes oblique—of the question of identity: her identity as a lesbian, as a woman, and as a Canadian of Japanese descent, as the above quote suggests. Onodera’s films, however, often trouble, disrupt, and shift what constitutes “identity” altogether. And, as the question of identity is intimately linked to that of representation, her films raise further questions: What constitutes representation? What makes a film, for example, a “lesbian,” “feminist,” or “Asian-Canadian” film? What does an experimental film even “look like?”

On the one hand, Onodera’s work, however ground-breaking, does not exist in a vacuum. Experimental film scholar Michael Zryd, for instance, frames Onodera’s contributions as part of the “surge of women filmmakers creating a feminist avant-garde” in the late 1970s and 1980s, thus placing Onodera’s work alongside that of filmmakers Kay Armatage (CA), Patricia Gruben (CA), Brenda Longfellow (CA), Su Friedrich (US), Barbara Hammer (US) and Yvonne Rainer (US). This avant-garde, they argue, “made films that integrated earlier modes of experimental films (e.g. psychodrama, structural film, screendance, expanded cinema) with feminist themes” (Zryd, 2022). Tess Takahashi further posits that Onodera’s work is also situated within “the proliferation of queer experimental documentary films and videos... which explores and complicates racial, sexual, and gendered identity” that took place in the mid-1980s in Canada (Takahashi, 2019).

It is important to note that, while intersectional understandings of identity are almost taken for granted within today’s activist, academic, and artist circles, when Onodera began experimenting with film, such understandings were, for the most part, lacking, as the various social movements that originated in the mid to late-1960s and 1970s were consolidating themselves on the basis of “identity politics.” As Onodera herself explains, despite the exciting developments that occurred in the 1980s— feminist debates about censorship and pornography, the development of gay and lesbian film festivals, the beginnings of multiculturalism—communities were nonetheless “completely separate from each other.” She states:

“Any kind of cross-over was usually viewed with suspicion. How could I love punk and call myself a feminist? The gay and lesbian movement at that time was predominantly white and issues of race hardly ever entered into discussions of equality and the reverse was the same for various ethnic communities.” (Hoolboom. 2008, 140)

These contextual elements are important to take into account when thinking through the meaning and significance of Onodera’s body of work. At the same time, Onodera’s films reflect her own aesthetic, voice, and concerns as an individual—as exemplified by the many personal, even autobiographical, threads that are beautifully woven within and between her films. As such, it can be quite difficult to categorize Onodera’s films under a particular “rubric” or “theme.” In this essay, however, I explore how the theme of identity in crisis plays out in Onodera’s films, delving into the suggested selection of Onodera’s films in chronological order and tracing connections between them.

idiot’s delight (1983), the first film in our selection, is a meditation on the taboo topic of celibacy. The title of the film cheekily hints at the idea of chosen, purposeful solitude, as indicated by the quote at the beginning of the film: “Almost any solitaire game is often humorously called ‘Idiot’s Delight’ - The Official Rules of Card Games.” idiot’s delight juxtaposes black and white still shots of landscapes and gravestones with moving images of waves hitting the shore—colourless yet sensual images meant to represent the absence of intimacy and the death of sexuality (Mullen). Like the ambivalent nature of the images themselves, the voiceover does not take a stance against celibacy; rather, it articulates various viewpoints, from thinking of celibacy as an unwanted identity and involuntary decision, to framing it as an empowering and gratifying choice. At the same time, the film hints at celibacy as being, in today’s attachment theory speak, an avoidant trait that stems from feelings of alienation towards an object of affection. The themes of idiot’s delight, therefore, beautifully set the stage for the rest of Onodera’s filmography featured in this collection.

In Ville-quelle ville ? (1984), Onodera further explores the themes of displacement and isolation, as the narrator feels alienated from the city of Toronto—a city which she was “born in,” “grew up in,” “lives in,” yet “doesn’t understand.” This alienation is partly framed as being the result of dull and monotonous daily rituals and urban routines: “She woke up, coffee, coffee, cigarettes, transit, punch in, lunch, coffee break, punch out, transit, dinner, a show, a play, drinks, bed.” Yet, the narrator also implies that these feelings of alienation may be linked to her identity, as the words “Chinatown,” “gay bars,” and “girlfriends and boyfriends” are sprinkled into the narration as markers of difference. When talking about Ville-quelle ville ?, Onodera indeed asserts: “I feel like sometimes I wear so many ‘identity hats’ that I automatically feel somewhat displaced or divorced from the various communities that exist” (Onodera in Mayne 2003, 54). This divorce, or displacement, is accentuated in the film by the fact that, although we hear the monotonous voice of a woman narrator throughout, we never see her. As such, this lack of image effectively blurs the narrator’s identity and troubles any kind of simplistic associations.

The same voice, in fact, delivers monologues in all three films that make up Onodera’s triptych, “Three Short Films,” which is included here. In The Dead Zone (1985), the woman narrator laments her serial monogamist patterns—which have become as tedious as the “rhythmic pattern of the falling rain.” Again, there are several layers to Onodera’s short film. On the one hand, the film speaks to the monotony of city life and of relationships, strongly echoing the topics explored in Ville-quelle ville ?. This monotony, in that sense, speaks to a universal viewership. On the other hand, being stuck in the “dead zone,” or the stereotypical pattern of leaving one’s relationship yet “U-hauling” with someone else soon after, speaks particularly—and affectively—to lesbian audiences. Finally, the film speaks to the narrator’s own experience of intimacy as a desirable yet somehow unattainable experience, as it also addresses and questions the ways in which her relationships may be tied to her own feelings of self-worth and (in)security.

MADE IN JAPAN (1985) moves the viewer from the micro-level of the Canadian city to the macro-level of the nation, as the off-screen narrator ponders her relationship to Japan as a Japanese-Canadian woman while reflecting on how globalization and media have begun to affect that relationship: “She had never been there before, but she thought one day she might go...But for now she was content with the knowledge she gained through the television shows, the foreign films, the stories people told, and the music,” the narrator tells us. At the same time, the narrator reflects on the supposed desirability and hegemony of whiteness:

“Once she saw this fashion magazine. Instead of models with black hair and traditional dress, there was picture after picture of people with blond hair...wearing Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, polyester jumpsuits and Levi’s. Even their eyes looked like they had been fixed. Opened up, wider, larger.”

By contrast, the narrator also exposes the stereotypical portrayals of “exotic” and “foreign” (read: non-Western) nations and subjects: “A friend told her that if she went, she had to be careful. In some restaurants they serve a delicacy for tourists only: a poisonous blowfish...Her friend also reminded her not to drink the water.” The film thus delivers a pointed critique of the demonization and/or fetishization of the Other. As the narrator repeats, twice: “It appealed to her, it was so different.” On yet another level, as Onodera’s films always seem to be so richly layered, the film speaks to—or “riffs off,” as filmmaker Richard Fung puts it—Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil (1983), which would also inspire Onodera’s 2005 feature length experimental, I have no memory of my direction (2005), in which a Canadian-born Japanese woman “dreams her way through Japan” (Fung and Onodera 2007, 34).

While the triptych and idiot’s delight are not so explicit in their treatment of sexuality, TEN CENTS A DANCE (PARALLAX) (1985) is a reflection on desire and intimacy that explores lesbian relationships, gay male relationships, and heterosexual relationships— and the shared feelings of alienation that can also sometimes arise from our desires for (sexual) connection. In doing so, the film is divided into three distinct sections. In the first vignette, an Asian-Canadian woman (portrayed by Onodera) and a white woman (played by Canadian artist Anna Gronau) flirt at a Japanese restaurant, as they discuss whether they should have sex. They talk at length, but nothing happens. This scene, much like the “U-haul” commentary Onodera makes in THE DEAD ZONE, is meant for an “insider” audience of lesbians.

As Van Leer notes,

“To straight audiences the result is austere, beautiful, and moving. To lesbian audiences, who recognize the overstatement of the dialogue and mise-en-scene, the scene is also very funny-camp deadpan masquerading as social realism.” (Van Leer 2012, 54)

This vignette is followed by two gay men having anonymous sex—this time, without talking about it—in a public washroom. The film concludes with a man and a woman engaging in phone sex. The man gets off, while the phone sex operator is disengaged from the scene, visibly bored and painting her nails.

At the same time as the film deals with specific and separate sexual experiences, the film’s message remains universal: a split screen is used throughout the film, creating a dividing line between the protagonists to symbolize the distance that separates all of us. Feminist scholar Judith Mayne, indeed, highlights that the film “suggests simultaneously the difference and the analogy between different sexualities. For all the participants in the film enact rituals of erotic connection and distance” (Mayne 1991, 179). Yet, when the film was released, not everyone resonated with Onodera’s message. The reception of the film by lesbian audiences, in particular, presciently highlights the problems attached to fixed identity categories which Onodera explores throughout her work. When the film was presented at the Frameline Festival at the Roxie Theatre in San Francisco in 1986 under the rubric of “Lesbian Shorts,” lesbian audiences were dissatisfied with the second and third sections of the film precisely because they depicted sexual acts other than “lesbian.” As Mayne explains: “By all accounts, the film precipitated something close to a riot, with a considerable portion of the audience booing the film and demanding its money back” (Mayne 1991, 178). Queer film theorist B. Ruby Rich further adds that the audience felt alienated from the experimental nature of the film: “The whimsy of the lesbian filmmaker’s satire was lost on its public, which additionally took exception to the avant-garde split-screen strategy” (Rich, 2003, 34).

Finally, C’est à qui, cette ville ? (2022) responds to Onodera’s 1984 film, Ville-quelle ville? 38 years later, the narrator, still in Toronto, feels equally alienated from the city, albeit for different reasons. The city has changed, too much, perhaps, as the narrator struggles to find a sense of belonging in a city that seems so unfamiliar. The narrator asks: “She wondered if she still belonged. Could she still call it her city if she no longer recognized it? The places that she pictured in her mind were nowhere to be found. Lost in her memories. Bulldozed by time.” Gentrification, too, bulldozed “the places she pictured in her mind,” as new developments have transformed the city to the point of nonrecognition. The narrator tells us: “There were condos, condos, and condos.” Her community connections have also eroded, further contributing to the narrator’s sense of unbelonging, as she has lost her parents and “outlived her cats, her aunts, and several uncles.” Technological developments have also replaced genuine, face-to-face connections; the narrator is now practically voiceless, as she spends days without speaking to anyone. As an aging queer woman, she is also slowly becoming invisible: “She was becoming old. Greyed out in her surroundings.” As such, the film comments on the difficulties of growing old in a city that does not value community members who are no longer able to actively participate in the capitalist economy. Yet, although she feels like she is “no longer a part of the city,” the one “she grew up in,” the narrator is determined to stay—and eventually die—in the city. After all, despite everything, this is still “her city.”
 

The selection of Midi Onodera’s short films shares a similar, idiosyncratic experimental aesthetic, which is not divorced from the issues and topics broached in her work. Yet, Onodera’s relationship to the label “experimental” and to the genre as a whole, is as complicated and fraught as her relationship to identity. Because of her “punk, feminist, Japanese background,” Onodera gravitated early on toward experimental film, as she felt that it would allow her to “express [her]self on [her] terms rather than conform to mainstream expectations of cinematic representation” (Hoolboom 2008, 139). However, if Onodera was drawn to the films of Joyce Wieland, Maya Deren, Man Ray, Dali, and Kenneth Anger, she failed to relate entirely to the structuralist tradition of experimental filmmaking pioneered by the likes of Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow, and Hollis Frampton. As Onodera explains: “I tried to like the work, really, I did. It just never touched me” (Onodera in Hoolboom 2008, 139). 
 

Neither did Onodera entirely fit in within Toronto’s experimental film scene, which, in the 1980s, primarily emerged out of The Funnel Experimental Theatre Co-op (1977-1988/9), an artist-run centre dedicated to the production and exhibition of experimental films (Barton, 2023; Shedden, 2022; Mullen). Despite being a place for women and queer people to make and watch experimental work, the organization remained dominated by white, cisgender men with rigid ideas about what experimental film should look like and who it should be made by (Barton, 2023). Because of this, Onodera rapidly felt disillusioned with the Funnel’s ability to support her work:

“At first, I believed I had found my home, a community of like-minded people. But in the end, the utopian world I thought I had found didn’t really exist...[I]t’s not that I faced distinct and direct racism, homophobia or sexism. It’s just that there was this undercurrent of tension, this off-kilter feeling that I was intruding, that I didn’t really belong.” (Hoolboom 2008, 140)

These feelings of alienation were further compounded when, upon seeking funding for her 1988 film The Displaced View, in which Onodera explores Japanese-Canadian history, her proposal was rejected on the grounds that her film was “not experimental” (Barton 2023). Onodera staunchly opposed such narrow conceptions of experimental film, as she “did not subscribe to the idea that ‘experimental’ film had to be ‘difficult’ or ‘obscure.’” Rather, she sought to explore "the technical aspects of film as they relate to the content” (Onodera in Hoolboom 2008, 140). Onodera then created her own genre: the “experimental narrative” (Zryd, 2022).

Aesthetic patterns are noticeable throughout the selection of films in this guide. Successions of impersonal medium and wide shot “tableaux” of landscapes and cityscapes, for instance, often engulf the viewers, giving the films a “painterly aura.” Although TEN CENTS A DANCE (PARALLAX) is the only film in this selection in which human subjects are depicted, these subjects, however, are filmed from a detached viewpoint, as the still camera in this film, too, is positioned as merely an observer to embody the distance present in all of Onodera’s films. Format also plays an important role in Onodera’s “experimental narratives.” Four of the films in the list were made on Super-8, which gives the films a familiar, recognizable look. This consideration is not purely aesthetic, however. As Onodera notes: “Super-8 seemed to be the cheap format of choice for the economically struggling dyke” and for works “made by queers of colour” (Onodera in Hoolboom 2008, 143). Yet, again, Onodera refuses to stick to just one format—hence her use of 16mm, and, later on, toy camera and digital video formats—constantly disrupting our expectations of her identity as a filmmaker. Furthermore, Onodera’s visual aesthetic cannot be separated from her attention to sound. In addition to the ever-present narrative female voice, the songs featured in her films have been carefully chosen, often working in tandem with, yet sometimes purposefully disrupting, the narration. The Bach Aria for flute and strings that accompany the narration of idiot’s delight allows both the narrator and the audience to pause and reflect on the topic of celibacy, while the jazz soundtrack of Ville-quelle ville ?, for instance, immediately evokes the film noir genre, complimenting the visual aura of the film: dark mood, dark character, dark lighting (Salamone 2016, 151). Jazz music also adds to the film’s meaning, as noir cinema typically invokes a specific kind of character. As Frank A. Salamone argues, the noir character is “lonely, a bit cynical but still, at root, romantic” (151). The soundtrack, then, helps make sense of the narrator. In the background of MADE IN JAPAN, “Mushi no Aikata,” a traditional Japanese instrumental song, serves to conjure up the fantasies of “otherness” that the narrator speaks of. In TEN CENTS A DANCE (PARALLAX), on the other hand, the emphasis is on silence, to convey what is left unsaid and the impossibility of ever being able to communicate fully with other people. Finally, the optimistic tone of Frank Sinatra’s popular song “L.O.V.E,” which makes up two-thirds of The Dead Zone, deeply contrasts with the joyless, sardonic narrative voice. At once complementary and alien, sound and image both play an important role in Onodera’s works.
 

All of Onodera’s films presented in this guide question and disrupt preconceived notions of what makes up identity—whether it’s one’s location, sexuality, race, or a mix of all three. Additionally, the films that we have selected reflect beautiful yet complicated relationships between the universal and the specific, between subject and object, between the here and there, and between personal and group identity. Finally, content and technique influence and inform each other to create complex, layered works that defy easy categorizations.
 

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