Asynchronicity and Fragmentation in Canadian Queer Experimental Film (1990-2000)

Curatorial Essay by Chris Chong Chan Chai

“We will create a rhythm that is uniquely ours - proud, powerful and gay”
(Makeda Silvera in Exposure by Michelle Mohabeer).

Experimentation requires risk, and risk means entering a space that is unknown. When experimentation involves the medium of film and video, artists often embark on a personal exploration of the unknown through audiovisual interventions. Specifically, artists who are “culturally dissonant” from the mainstream tend to create and mobilize— often out of necessity—a specific set of techniques which helps them reflect upon how they feel about, cope with, and overcome everyday discrimination and violence. Cultural dissonance describes the feelings of alienation and disassociation that arise when one’s identity is marked by gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and/or class differences. When marked as “Other,” one’s lived experience, then, becomes a daily series of dissonant interactions, which can be translated in the act of recording, editing, and exhibiting experimental film. Cultural dissonance can therefore lead experimental filmmakers to explore techniques such as asynchronicity and fragmentation, both of which are showcased through this program of films by Michelle Mohabeer, Janine Fung, and Midi Onodera.
 

In Exposure (1990) by Michelle Mohabeer the filmmaker speaks potently to the difficulty of accessing one’s own history as a former colonial subject. Those who have experienced or are experiencing cultural dissonance, Mohabeer tells us, must cobble together the pieces left behind. The documentary begins with three phrases spoken by three queer racialized voices: “I was born... I was born... I was born...” Although the words spoken are from a present time, the images are from a different era, as each phrase is paired with the speakers’ black and white baby pictures from decades past. As the voice and imagery diverge from and re-emerge into one another and take the viewer in and out of linear time, Mohabeer reflects on how queer and racialized filmmakers facing cultural dissonance can express their own out-of-sync histories. Furthermore, the space between the two timeframes allows the filmmaker to speak to the gaps—both historical and identity-related—the Japanese and Afro-Caribbean women centered in the film each experience.


As Mohabeer demonstrates, both history and memory can be difficult to articulate within a linear timeline. In Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994), Mohabeer opens the film with a quote by cultural theorist Edward Said which speaks to exile as an “unhealable rift between a human being and a native place.” This rift is experienced, too, by those who face cultural dissonance, as removing—or exiling—parts of histories and memories which results in becoming out of sync. Yet, being out of sync becomes an opportunity for filmic experimentation. In one of the opening scenes of Coconut/Cane & Cutlass, two naked women embrace and kiss in the present, while a moving image of a wooden barb-wired shack, possibly re-staged from the past, is rear-projected behind them. Floating the past as a backdrop to the lovers’ present becomes a poetic, asynchronous telling of the cultural allusions that haunt today’s queer intimacies.

In the film, Mohabeer asserts: “the eternal quest for selfhood, identity, and a sense of belonging are but vein attempts to sooth all that is dislocated and dispossessed within our psyche.” The film further visualizes and verbalizes two different timelines of the artist’s dissonance with their own ancestries. The voiceover states, “I alone today am alive. I remember.” The words spoken in the present are paired with historical images of labourers in sugar cane plantations—one of them being the artist’s grandmother. The film thus experiments and engages in the artist’s emotional expression from two different time periods simultaneously. Asynchronicity becomes the only tool to solidify the emotions of those trying to come to terms with their own out-of-sync histories as well as their ongoing separation from heteronormativity and whiteness.


Alongside asynchronicity, fragmentation can also be used to express cultural dissonance. As opposed to the concept of “roots,” used as a metaphor for connectivity to one’s own cultural history (Hayes, 2016), fragmentation breaks the flow of the narrative and the format of the medium to express experiences of cultural dissonance. Fragmentation, in particular, interrupts the notion of roots that link one cultural experience to another; if roots form in a connected fashion, fragmentations are sporadic, disruptive, and random, formed upon unknown grounds and languages. Historical amnesia, erasure, and inaccessibility to one’s past, for instance, contribute to this fragmentation. Instead of looking for the missing pieces, however, it is possible to embrace fragmentation and mobilize it as a tool of experimentation.


Janine Fung’s Leftovers (1994), a portrayal of a Chinese family unit with multiple cultural and intergenerational influences, is rife with fragmentation. In particular, the film fragments its visual and audio construction to reflect the family’s reaction to the narrator’s lesbian friend, Carol. In one scene, the protagonist’s voiceover states that her mother approaches her, waving a knife that was used to slice the turkey, but the image does not appear until the end of the film. By misaligning or fragmenting this image away from the corresponding voiceover, Fung avoids the explanatory approach of conventional narrative films. Instead, the image of the narrator’s threatening mother is used at the end of the film during a rendition of the song “Smoke Gets in your Eyes” performed by opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa. The fragmentation of this image from its logical voiceover disrupts the flow of the main storyline and becomes a way for the filmmaker to allude to yet another layer of the story: the cloud of antagonism and homophobia within the narrator’s family circle. In essence, Leftovers utilizes narrative fragmentation to create a dissonance in the storyline that mirrors the dissonance within the narrator’s own lived experience.

This fragmentation technique is further mobilized in Midi Onodera’s The Basement Girl (2000), in which the filmmaker thoughtfully uses the breaking of a consistent format to echo the experience of the protagonist, “the basement girl,” who is going through a painful breakup. Onodera sends the viewer into a netherworld of anime, film, and television textural motifs, as multiple shows and films are injected into the narrative—quick cuts jarring the flow of the timeline, flipping joyful television anthems into abrupt static interludes. Fragmentation, here, takes the shape of picture-in-picture, animation within live action, digital manipulations on filmic emulsions, and a multitude of filters and effects which play with linearity. This results in an anxious and aggressive edit of found and recorded footage painted with pixels and colorations.

The act of fragmenting media in this way not only distorts direct representations of the subject or subject matter, but in doing so, Onodera also conjures the emotions experienced by her protagonist. For instance, Onodera relates the experience of the basement girl to the death of Princess Diana and the life she left behind. A scene depicting scrambled eggs mirrors the film’s scramble of random snippets of medias and formats, but also the protagonist’s life falling apart. The Basement Girl also references Mary Tyler Moore and speaks of a woman re-invented. But what does this re-invention look like? Again, the window of experimentation is open for both the artist and the viewer to experience together. “She inhabited a different dimension between time and space,” says the voiceover as the normalized feminine Moore promenades along the lakeshore, trying to find happiness and to be more than herself, more than what society has planned for her.

Although the basement girl is white, Onodera still manages to speak to the idea of racial dissonance through her film. The Basement Girl, indeed, evokes the idea of cultural separation as footage of a white couple eating sushi appears on screen around the 8-minute mark. The fried egg analogy mentioned earlier further parallels the filmmaker’s relationship to the White world—perfectly separated from its Yellow-skinned core, a dissonance of cultures best scrambled. Embracing this fragmentation offers the filmmaker another plane of storytelling between archival clips and formats that reflect a cultural separation of race and sexuality all in a single egg.

In all four of the films within this program, cultural dissonance is expressed through the use of experimental techniques. Within Mohabeer’s Exposure (1990) and Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994), the technique of temporal misalignments in the form of asynchronous visual and audio clips conjure the past and present simultaneously to explore issues of identity and belonging. The technique of fragmentation, as seen through Fung’s Leftovers (1994) and Onodera’s The Basement Girl (2000), takes apart the narrative storyline or uses various textures and formats to express another layer of understanding for the audience. The lived experiences of filmmakers, such as Mohabeer, Fung, and Onodera, who identify as queer and/or culturally dissonant, therefore, have been translated into specific AV techniques as a necessary means for storytelling.
 

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