Filming Difference: Actors, Directors, Producers, and Writers on Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Film (review)

Filming Difference will be of interest to those who seek to understand how the scholarly discourses around identity politics intersect with the practice of independent and academic filmmaking in the United States. For the most part, the contributors are politically self-conscious U.S. filmmakers situated within academia. Although this description may seem slightly narrow for a collection bearing the bold title Filming Difference, the book does engage an impressive array of perspectives and filmmaking practices, from independent documentary to experimental agitprop to mainstream action cinema and episodic television. If the volume loses something by so strongly favoring voices within academia, its emphasis on production turns that deficiency neatly into a virtue. The essays and interviews gathered here provide a vivid picture of artists' struggles to instrumentalize the thorny theoretical discourses that are addressed in many classrooms. It is, finally, less a discussion of filmmaking than a casebook on the praxis of identity theory.

The collection's editor, Daniel Bernardi, directs the Film and Media Studies program at Arizona State University in Tempe; hence, some of the collection's most exciting work appears in the closely related sections entitled "Border Visions" and "Global Identities," both of which contain essays by southwestern filmmakers whose work addresses the U.S.–Mexican border. John Thornton Caldwell's "Indigenism, (In)Visibility: Notes on Migratory Film" surveys the UCLA-based filmmaker's longstanding efforts to show how expressive identity is conditioned by the administration of space in contexts ranging from the southwestern United States to Papua, New Guinea. This same concern with the politics of identity and space prevails in many of the essays in these two core sections. As if to exemplify Caldwell's insistence on the complexity of these knotty questions, Arizona State's C. A. Griffith tells the thrilling and hilarious story of making her feature Del Otro Lado in and around Mexico City. Her unruly band of filmmakers roves the city, confronting racist and homophobic art directors, turning ruined buildings into impromptu sets, and pirating electricity to run their lights. In Griffith's account, a film about the provisional nature of intercultural space becomes an instantiation of that same provisionality.

Not everything here is quite so much fun. The ethical burden of difference is also a distinct area of concern for these filmmakers. Director Sheldon Schiffer's essay on casting, for example, candidly addresses Schiffer's nearly obsessive awareness of how the physical appearance of his actors confirms or disrupts stereotypes. If his thinking verges occasionally on the torturous, his refusal to shy away from the painful intersection of (presumed) audience expectation and his own representational ambitions stages the profound difficulty of representing racial difference. Similar observations could be made about several of the essays and interviews in Filming Difference. Fear of perpetuating stereotypes emerges again and again. Some filmmakers, like Schiffer and Aaron Greer of Loyola University Chicago, struggle to purge their films of images that run the risk of supporting racist or otherwise objectionable typologies. Meanwhile, disability-rights director Laura Kissel explains her painstaking polemical use of existing images of disabled people, and Celine Parreñas Shimizu analyzes experimental filmmaker Machiko Saito's ironic deployment of sexualized stereotypes of Asian women. In these cases, the anxieties associated with making images of difference become the substance of the representational act and, perhaps, threaten to overcome it.

The ingenuity and commitment of the filmmakers goes a long way toward overcoming this ethical difficulty, but some of the contributors to Making Difference take a somewhat lighter approach to begin with. For example, new media artist John Jota Leaños's comic essay poses as a whimsical interview of Leaños by José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican satirist who died in 1913. Leaños uses this conceit both to acknowledge his debt to Posada and to address the historical typology that characterizes his work, which involves blank outline drawings inspired by the Abu Ghraib photographs, sometimes superimposed over...