August 13, 2010
6:30 PM – 9:00 PM

Rio II Gallery
583 Riverside Drive, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10031
(Corner of 135th Street)

When I was a junior in college I enrolled in a weekly extra-curricular course on Orthodox Judaism. I was mainly interested in the $500 stipend offered to each student, but in class I listened earnestly and tried to glean what I could. One kernel of wisdom that stuck with me is a teaching that dates back to the Hassidic Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa. The rabbi advised that every person should carry two small pieces of paper, one in each pocket. One piece should read, “ the world was created for me”; the other, “I am nothing but dust and ashes.”

Although this teaching yields numerous interpretations, for me, it sums up the struggle to understand one’s relationship to the environment. On the one hand, human beings are empowered to alter the world; on the other, we are transient and ephemeral, tiny parts of a much greater whole.

Photography is the perfect medium with which to demonstrate this concept. Photographs trick viewers into believing that they are looking at an exact replication of a moment—”time frozen.” Sometimes, the camera even tricks the photographer into believing that he/she can freeze time. Yet almost every person who has used a camera realizes his or her inability to do so. How often do we look at photographs from birthdays or vacations and say, “it’s much more impressive in real life” or “the photos don’t do it justice”? At best, photographs are reminders of a moment, already distant and distorted by the haze of memory. Time, emotion, and the environment that exists outside of the frame overwhelm the ability of photographs to replicate.

In one way or the other, all of these photographs touch upon this tension. I hope that the photographs portray our ability to transform the environment yet our inability to do so permanently. This work is about the struggle for balance—between belief in our power to create and recognition of our limited significance.

—David Tracey—

Does the current 3D “boom” stand a chance? History, business, and aesthetics shape the debate surrounding this unresolved trend in postmillennial cinema.

It would be naïve to think that the filmic image tends toward total identification with the universe that it copies, through the successive addition of supplementary properties from that universe. Perception, on the part of the artist as well as the audience of art, is a synthesis—an artificial process—each of whose elements acts on all the others.

André Bazin, “Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry?”

Returning to the blogosphere a few weeks ago, my RSS feeds were awash with news of the Avatar event that took place on Friday, August 21. Avatar, the newest film by James Cameron (Titanic, Terminator), released a 15-minute teaser on more than 100 IMAX screens nationwide (and another 30 internationally). This specially ticketed, one-night ballyhoo featured an introduction by Cameron himself, who welcomed audiences “to the 22nd century”—effectively hyping up the hype itself. A shorter version of the official trailer was posted the same day on Youtube, far in advance of the December 18 release date.

The publicity stunt highlights not only the film’s automatic franchise status but also its “groundbreaking” new technology—which is pretty cool, I admit. The film, shot entirely in 3D, used improved motion capture gadgetry along with a “Simulcam” (similar to those used at LucasArts and DreamWorks) that enabled Cameron to film, in real time, his actors in their computer-generated environments. That is to say—with little more than an actor and a network of sensors on a sound stage—Cameron was able to raise his camera and instantly see, through the viewfinder, a blue, elvish creature against a jungly backdrop. And long after the actors had gone home, he could “re-shoot” the same scenes, tweak movements, performances, lighting.

Before my inner science geek buys into puffery, my film critic must wonder if—beyond merging the aesthetics of virtual and physical film production—Cameron may have simply reinvented the wheel, to a fault…

I have been following the resurgence of 3D since Up, with mixed emotions. Cameron gives tidings of a cinematic age when “every film will be in 3D,” while Ebert has been kvetching that he would sooner gouge an eye out—just one, of course. Increasingly polarized opinions often focus on one facet of the three-dimensional debate: the history of stereoscopic cinema, new technological advances, the economics of the trend, and its aesthetic value. In discussing the current strengths and limitations of a largely separate art, I attempt here to briefly round these bases.

Cameron wrote an elaborate treatment for Avatar 15 years ago. He claims he was simply waiting for technology to catch up to his imagination—and probably making thwarted efforts to sell major studios on the whack premise. (On that note, “10 Movies Avatar Unfortunately Resembles” on SpoutBlog.) If it was indeed a technological standoff, Cameron is all but a spokesperson for proponents of 3D, who maintain that technological progress has finally met the demands of the medium; 3D movies are here to stay, so they say.

On the other hand, critics of the recent trend point out that stereoscopic cinema follows yet a larger trend: every 30 years or so, it emerges from hibernation to ravage the likes of Hollywood, only to dip back into relative obscurity a few years later. What reason have we to believe that the current boom is any different?

***

Though the mid-50s are often cited as the best example of why 3D is merely a passing fad, feature-length 3D pictures have been around since the 1922 release of The Power of Love—a full five years before the first feature-length talkie, The Jazz Singer. And before that, 3D picture viewers (à la View-Master) predated the motion picture by more than half a century as mass entertainment.

Yale prof Charles Musser describes an “early imitative relationship” between these 3D viewers and filmmaking, citing the novelty of turn-of-the-century movies. Many early films, like the Lumière brothers’ L’arrivée du train—the iconic shot of a train approaching the camera, rumored to have frightened audiences—simulated a 3D feel through the use of extreme perspective and point of view. (Even so, the Lumière brothers reshot L’arrivée du train some years later in 3D.) That said, unlike its flat counterpart, 3D cinema rarely surpassed its novelty status as a “cinema of attractions” until the 1950s. While The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind were competing for Academy Awards, collections of narrativeless, single-shot shockfilms depicted guns firing, water streaming, swordsmen jousting, and pitchers pitching towards the camera in 3D. “They fairly leap at you from the screen!” one ad exclaimed.

Jump to November 1952: Bwana Devil became the first 3D feature to be released by a major studio, breaking movie attendance records only a month later with promises of “A LION in your lap! A LOVER in your arms!” Though it bombed with critics, it decidedly sparked a two-year 3D boom when, two days after its release, Warner Brothers signed a new 3D feature: the original House of Wax (1953). Other notables include Academy Award–nominated Broadway adaptation Kiss Me Kate (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), John Wayne’s Hondo (1953), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954).

A sudden, renewed interest in stereoscopic film was largely a case of tail-wags-dog: the film industry, now at competition with an emergent television, sought to bait spectators back into moviehouses. Wrote Bazin in 1953, “In the last five or six years, the American film industry has lost approximately half of its national audience; this has meant the closing down of five thousand movie theaters (all of France doesn’t have that many).” The solution is always the same: a glittering counteroffensive, a return to spectacle—something that 1950s television, and its bantam resolution of 625 scanning lines, could not soon hope to offer.

It is the same today. Television sets have evolved into “home theaters.” Cable programming has departed from the sitcom aesthetic of television studios, towards programming that emphasizes seriality, production value, filmic cinematography, and star power (that is, “movie stars”). Not only that, but other forms of streaming and home video such as OnDemand, Hulu, and YouTube (not to mention P2P and digital piracy) seem to have revived a war of spectatorship—and a need to justify higher ticket prices, for that matter.

Perhaps even more so than in 1952, a perfect storm for 3D.

***

By 1954, the costs of 3D had begun to weigh on filmmakers and exhibitors. It was as expensive as it was risky to shoot, develop, and project two film strips simultaneously; prints frequently fell out of sync during projection, and the picture appeared darker to those seated on the sidelines. So the industry turned to CinemaScope instead, which offered the spectacle of size in place of plasticity.

CinemaScope was later replaced by seven-story IMAX screens, completely impractical for the average multiplex, before exhibitors returned to 3D. This regression, fueled by cheaper, more efficient (read: digital) equipment, has demonstrated box-office success time and time again, for now. Such are the incredible returns of the Pixar model. 3D is, as far as Hollywood is concerned, worth the trouble.

This summer, I came across two articles in the LA Times, published 6 weeks apart. The first (July 8) argued that 3D was becoming progressively less profitable: In theaters with both 2D and 3D projections of My Bloody Valentine 3D, the latter earned over six times more in ticket sales. For Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, the 3D exhibition earned only 1.4 times as much. The article offers no concrete measure of the films’ grosses, though it was published only a week after the wide release of Ice Age. Even then, for one LA Times writer, the point flew as far overhead as did Scrat, the sabretooth squirrel, who faces bone- and heartbreak in his quest for an acorn.

Valentine is like the narrativeless “shockfilms” of pre-1950 3D cinema. Like any stock horror movie, the plot unravels (like a series of short films in which pitchers pitch and swordsmen joust) in true episodic fashion, from one spectacular murder to the next (that is, a series of shorts in which blood squirts and heads roll). You didn’t plan to see a breakout performance or a carefully constructed story; you went to see a set of walking breasts get pickaxed—in 3D. Frankly, a conventional slasher film whose title includes “3D” offers little incentive to see the movie in any other format. As with the novelty shots of yesteryear: what’s the point of seeing it in 2D? A cheap thrill, even cheaper sans gimmick.

Ice Age, on the other hand, is perhaps more watchable in 2D (though its plot may be similarly flat), if only for its exploitation of the family-friendly animated vehicle. What’s more, whereas My Bloody Valentine 3D was released on approximately 1000 3D screens and 1600 2D, Ice Age figures broke 1600 and 2480 screens respectively. As more theaters equip themselves with 3D projection, and as more 3D features saturate the market, it makes sense that the 3D-to-2D sales ratio would fall; audiences no longer funnel to just a few venues that play 3D movies.*

On August 18, a second LA Times article reported that Ice Age had earned more than $600 million internationally (that figure has since passed the $800-million mark), making it one of the highest-grossing American films of all time (it is currently #22, behind Independence Day, Spider Man, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). About 40% of these revenues come from the 3D exhibition of the film.

It would seem that Hollywood has found a patch for its leak.

***

END PART I

* It is worth noting that the number of digital 3D screens at the end of 2006 was less than 260 worldwide. During the first half of 2007, that number nearly tripled. Projections for the end of 2009 range between five and six thousand.

Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass)

New Wave filmmaker Alain Resnais (Night and Fog, Last Year in Marienbad) is one of those old French guys you study in film school, and—after four years in swirly soap-bubble academia, cut off from most of what happened after the 70s—you hide your embarrassing surprise upon finding out he’s still alive. Suffice it to say, the Diet Coke of his mid-century ego is ‘back’ with another light-stepping arthouse whimsy, a story about a bizarre love affair that begins with a stolen wallet. An interesting choice for the opening night, Grass, which opened to a positive reception at Cannes, marks the 50th anniversary of his Hiroshima Mon Amour. I repeat: this guy is old—exactly one week older than Judy Garland, whose Wizard of Oz has been remastered for NYFF, as well. Funny enough, he’s still 13 years shy of the oldest filmmaker in the festival. That award goes to 100-year-old Manoel de Olivera, Portuguese director of Eccentricities of a Blonde.

Precious

I’ll admit, I’m hugely excited about this one; it comes with a lot of buzz. Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire, has been lauded for its colossal (yet believable) performances by Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, and Mo’Nique—which give the film some marketability in lieu of an otherwise dismal spin of yarn: Precious is an illiterate, obese 16-year-old, eking out a miserable existence in the gothic squalor of the Harlem ghetto. Oh yeah, and she gets pregnant. Twice. By her father. It’s exactly the type of ‘Sundancey’ film that needs a critical push to make itself accessible to audiences (lest it carry the brand of hypermoralizing “inner-city, turn-your-life-around melodrama”). The big criticism here is that, well, it has already played everywhere, and NYFF should have invested in a centerpiece that was not so overplayed—a world premiere, perhaps.

Antichrist

Lars von Trier is a pompous fathead. His new movie will have a talking fox. Willhem Dafoe’s porn double will have his testicles smashed with a wooden plank before a bloody climax. A vagina prop will be cizared.

When the credits for Antichrist rolled at Cannes, boos were muffled by cheers and uproarious laughter. Four people fainted during the premiere, and Charlotte Gainsbourg went on to win Best Actress for her performance as the hacky-sack female lead. A very Danish von Trier called it “the most important film of my entire career.” This was, of course, before he proclaimed at a press conference, “I am the best film director in the world…. All the others are overrated, so that’s quite simple.” He proceeded to talk about how he had just met an ‘overrated’ Martin Scorcese back at the hotel. Talk about balls… That said, he directed Dancer in the Dark, and for that I am forever grateful. Talking fox aside, I have to see this movie for no other reason than I have to see it.

Crossroads of Youth

I’ll admit, I know nothing about this film by An Jong-hwa besides the fact that it was recently rediscovered in the form of a nine-reel nitrate negative, and it is now the oldest surviving Korean film. The screening will feature accompaniments of live music and offscreen narration (by a benshi). Rara avis.

Independencia

The more I read about this film, the less I can afford to wait. At first, I said to myself, “Oh hey, the Philippines. Cool.” I’ll be leaving for Manila a week after NYFF ends to visit my heart in Barangay Ayala Alabang, and as such I’ve taken up an interest in the Philippines. I say this very loosely, of course—I occasionally come across articles in the Times, sometimes BBC. I bombard Google and Wikipedia with queries after I hang up with Manila. Standard fare in trying to relieve, ever so slightly, my unawareness of Philippine issues. So my interest in this film was admittedly superficial, at first.

Director Raya Martin is in his mid-twenties; he is two years older than I. He comes from a family in the arts, and certain publicized elements of his history and upbringing are already familiar to me in a removed, second-hand sort of way. Three years after participating in Cinefondation, a filmmakers’ residency program in Paris associated with Cannes (about which he wrote an interesting series of journal entries), he made Independencia—the early-1900s story of a mother and son who flee (from war-tearing American occupiers) to the mountains. Some years later, a storm threatens their isolation and survival from the countrywide chaos that upon them encroaches.

Morrer como um homem (To Die Like a Man)

I’ll have to catch this film before it dips back into obscurity, which will happen sooner than you’d expect—with a plot that “leads nowhere,” says Variety, it plays to a small audience of queer arthouse stylemongers… and it’s long. Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues has made a seemingly Almodóvar-inspired film about an older travesti who faces younger competition in a Lisbon nightclub, as well as the sudden reappearance of a murderous son she fathered years earlier. The hope is that I’ll find this film more interesting than Variety, if only because of my research in Argentina and my ability to channel a decent amount of queer arthouse savvy (thanks, RG!).

Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces)

I haven’t lost faith in Pedro Almodóvar, though many people have to some degree. (Those people probably never saw Volver.) Los abrazos rotos, which boasts Almodóvar’s largest budget and longest runtime, is yet another Penélope Cruz–laden genre shuffle. The main character is a blind screenwriter who, due to some random series of events, revisits his past—including the car crash that caused him to lose his sight and his woman (Cruz) 14 years prior. What’s more, Abrazos brings promise of hardboiled noir aesthetic.

——-

There’s a host of other exciting movies—White Material by Claire Denis, and Life During Wartime, which sounds like a dark Jewish coming-of-age by fellow Yale grad Todd Solondz (Palindromes)—and this is by no means an exhaustive list. You can find that here.

Great news! I just found out today that I’ll be covering the New York Film Festival for work this year. As it turns out, our programming director and senior programmer will be scouting at Toronto in mid-September, just before NYFF. Timing works out perfectly. The festival ends October 14.

Rather than enter the fest totally green, I suspect I’ll be supplementing their coverage to some degree; there is consistent overlap between the two festivals every year, and both programmers will inevitably miss a lot in Toronto, given the intensity of nonstop industry programming.

The schedule has yet to be posted—the deadline for submissions was less than two weeks ago, after all—but the website brings promise of two retrospectives: one, a festival sidebar marking the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, which will feature “the first major U.S. retrospective of Chinese cinema between establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 and the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.” The other is an homage to Hindi actor-filmmaker Guru Dutt (Pyaasa), whose films during the 50′s and 60′s arguably set the stage for the ‘Golden Age’ of Indian cinema—a period of muscular social commentary and cultural revivalism following India’s independence from Britain (thank you, Barney Bate). He’s like the Satyajit Ray of postwar commercial Indian cinema.

The festival is presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which used to be officially partnered with our organization some years ago, before we secured our own independence (and ushered in the ‘Golden Age of Westchesterian Cinema’).

Playing on break at the “coffee shop” shoot in March ’08.

I composed “Eddie’s Song” in January of ’08. I wanted a standard acoustic pop arrangement, nothing too fancy or unrecognizable. So I began plucking messily at my guitar, and one melody stuck. That’s the way these compositions often begin: as clumsy motifs and desultory descants that—through some mysterious, innate cognitive process—manage to converge into a single tune.

Then, I warble a bit of gibberish. An occasional word, but mostly sounds. My mouth finds a comfortable shape—for “Eddie’s Song,” the dominant rhyme was a very basic “-ong” (e.g. “what did I do wrong?”; “belong in my own bed”; “about us all along”; “writing you this song”; “strong without you”; and the title itself). Less important is the rhyme than the evocation of the sound: Words ending in “-ong” have no glottal stop; the three letters blend together as crossfades do. It is, no pun intended, a long, adaptive sound that can be drawn out indefinitely. Perhaps the least bit sorrowful, it shares the feeling of two jilted lovers who mourn more than just a flawed relationship.

And then, lyrics. These often come shortly before recording—ah, the power of deadlines!—and are written over the sounds so that, even if words do let spoil the intent of the song, some of the original design manages to bleed through.

With that: “Eddie’s Song,” which spawned (more out of boredom than a need to produce early-90s house) a techno remix. And if you were listening extra closely, you might’ve heard a third song that plays on a set of iPod speakers 8:40 into the movie. That is an original remake of Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” which I recorded on GarageBand (as opposed to Nuendo) in the practice booths at Boston Conservatory.

Friday’s screening at Anthology Film Archives was a success! Everyone Who Has Ever Lived Here premiered in Manhattan to positive reviews from audience members and fellow filmmakers alike. A collection of eight films—all markedly different in narrative and aesthetic—played in the “New Filmmakers” summer festival.

Several crewmembers and friends traveled to New York for the event, made all the more enjoyable by a wine-and-cheese reception for Everyone. When the program began, the theater was to capacity (Anthology actually had to turn away a number of theatergoers). Post-screening discussion and celebration followed. On the whole, a nice show of support for (truly) independent filmmaking!

Photos by David Tracey

Another project for which I was contracted: an accompaniment to a series of articles about the Machal entitled “Writing in my Father’s Footsteps.” It appeared in The Forward, a weekly Jewish newspaper founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily, which entered the din of New York’s immigrant press as a defender of trade unionism and moderate, democratic socialism.

“Writing in my Father’s Footsteps” tells stories from a certain battalion in the Machal—a group of volunteers who fought with the Haganah for Israel’s independence. The Machalniks were mostly World War II vets from America and England, but many Jews and non-Jews came from the world over to fight for Israel’s statehood and sovereignty. For this project, I spoke to veterans, Holocaust survivors, and others who knew firsthand the conflict of pre-state Israel. This gave rise to tons of footage for which there is sadly no use in a short, 6-minute spot. The article, by Jonathan Kesselman, is worth a read.

As of late, Correction Fluid Film has been contracted for several web projects, including two seasons of MNN.com’s “On the Streets with Jonathan Kesselman.”

MNN.com, which currently owns the rights to The Adventures of Captain Planet, is an environmentalist site with blogs, videos, and a host of news feeds. Kesselman—best known for his directorial debut, The Hebrew Hammer—starred in three seasons of this comedic series (loosely) about environmental issues.

Check out the first episode, which premiered today: WATCH HERE.

          “El macho latino es solamente macho para las mujeres,” said Carolita, pausing to draw in the white of her cigarette. “No para nosotras.”^[1]
          She was 6’3”, platinum blonde, matching eyebrows. She was usually pretty good at blowing smoke rings, but the wine had been too much, and instead the smoke was brimming over the corners of her mouth.
          She put out the cigarette on a wooden table, leaving ashes in the scratches.

          We arrived at La Fundación^[2] just before closing. It was almost completely empty, the office space as well as the pensión.^[3] We were met by a short blonde woman who must have been in her late forties. We didn’t want to make any assumptions.
          “We’re working on a project about travestismo in the Autonomous City. We were wondering if anyone would be willing to talk with us.” My accent was off.
          “Where are you from?”
          “I’m from the United States. Juan is from here, from Buenos Aires.”
          “You are both very young.”
          “Yes. We’re students.”
          Someone turned on a television in the next room.
          “Most of the girls have already left to work. But I think Ana Maria might be here. Let me see if I can find her.”
          Ana Maria, la morenita, greeted us barefoot and in sweat pants. Her hair was knotted with a pencil, and she was neither painted nor plucked.
          Her bedroom in the pensión could have been that of a little girl. On the shelves were stuffed dolls, old photographs, and a pet fish. Tiny shoes, snacks, and pastels. The room was bright, despite having no windows.
          She noticed I was staring at her television set. It was an old black-and-white porno with an all-male cast.
          “This one’s my favorite,” she mentioned, muting it for the interview. “Me voy a producir. Querés filmarlo?”^[4]
          To ‘produce’ oneself, in travesti parlance, is almost synonymous to the word maquillarse—to apply makeup. The problem with maquillarse is that, frankly, anyone can put on makeup; for a travesti, it doesn’t quite capture the significance of the contents of her bolsito.^[5]
          Nearly all travestis in Argentina work in prostitution, more as a necessity than as a choice. It is often the only option afforded them—a literal or physical consumption that coincides with one based on identity and image. To ‘produce’ oneself implies an element of spectacle: producirse for the clients, who prefer to see them as women (which is very different, I would argue, from wanting them to be women). It is, like many other words typical to the travesti lexicon, a term of both empowerment and victimization that we can trace back to the beginning of the trans movement.
          In 1991, the first travesti activist group, ATA (Asociación de Travestis Argentinas)^[6], began to organize against various social and political fronts, the first of which called for the derogation of the Edictos Policiales and other provincial ordinances dating back to the Perón era (for example, laws prohibiting the public exhibition of clothing of the opposite sex). The majority of these edicts did nothing but arbitrarily empower the police, many of whom exploited—and continue to exploit—this power. With this agenda, ATA began to seek public spaces in which to address these injustices, finding an eventual platform in the Marcha del Orgullo LGBT.^[7]
          While the eighth Marcha was the first to formally recognize and include a trans discourse, there had been a considerable travesti contingent since the third. Although they were expected to contribute funds to the event, the travestis were not acknowledged in the programs, flyers, and overall mission of the effort. Lohana Berkins, one of the founders of the trans movement, notes that “the lesbians rejected our ‘femininity’ and realigned us with the gays, seeing us as one of the many incarnations of their orientation. The gays, on the other hand, simply marveled at our glamour and simultaneously rejected us from their community. It was here that we fought our first struggle for visibility.”
          The way in which travestismo began to make itself publicly visible was very much rooted in the problematic idea of produciéndose. The fabulosity of their dress and choreographed dance numbers—an explosion of plumage, sequins, and semi-nudity—was applauded in part by same public that continued to discriminate against them. Their producción relegated them to spectacle; always the performers, never sitting among the audience.

          Not too long after I met Ana Maria, I began to participate in talleres—health and anti-discrimination workshops designed for travesti sex workers—where I met a number of girls in poorer neighborhoods such as Flores and Constitución. It was not easy, at first, to get them to open up, especially with a camera in hand; they did not want to be studied. Instead, there would have to be some degree of reciprocity. If I asked them about their personal and sexual histories, they would want to know about mine, as well. If I was filming a protest, the girls would want me to switch off holding the three-lane-wide banners as we marched down Corrientes in the middle of winter. If they invited me over for mate, I would bring the facturas.^[8]
          As we accustomed ourselves to each other, so too did we start to speak a shared language. Things made more sense this way.
          The chicas had their own way of talking about themselves. As with any subculture, self-definition becomes an important means of resisting the limiting definitions (in this case, the binarism) of an oppressive dominant culture. The ability to ‘produce’ oneself, then, boasts an entirely different significance for a travesti.

          Until now I have conveniently avoided an obvious question: what is a travesti? The literal English translation is ‘transvestite,’ one who vests him or herself in clothing of the opposite sex. But alas, Spanish already has a word for this: transformista.^[10] A ‘transformist’—an identity (often associated with drag performance) that is indeed transient and ‘removable,’ whereas travestismo is not. When the curtain drops, a travesti is still a travesti. That is, she does not need to ‘produce’ herself to be a travesti, and with this we are heading in the right direction.
          A logical starting point to define la identidad travesti would be the body, el cuerpo. While the intention is not to reduce the travesti identity to an anatomical physicality, the travesti body serves as an entity of symbols that we can use to talk about this subjectivity.
          El cuerpo travesti is itself a sort of tabula rasa, a gendered composite upon which the rigidity of a dominant gender-sexual conscious may encounter both relief and conflict. The body is both sexual entity and political camp. Beyond that, it is a paradox: a feminine form with the power to access male genitality—a relationship that becomes clearer through a discussion of travestismo versus machismo.
          In terms of travestismo, the word ‘production’ refers not to the body itself, but to the relationship between the internal and external manifestations of travestismo, such as those between travesti and client. The body, on the other hand, is not said to be ‘produced’ but rather it is ‘realized.’

          I continued to meet with Ana Maria until I left for the States. She no longer worked the streets. Like some of her close friends, she had a marido (literally, husband) and only worked with preferred clients via phone, e-mail, and instant messenger. As with her, the unproduced girls—without the brick-red theatrics that adorned their lips and matching heels—were entirely different from those in the zonas rojas.^[14] Indeed they were often the same girls, fabulous both in and out of their nightly ensemble, but in private spaces there was little focus on performance; the girls were more willing to relate to themselves and their bodies. This is where I learned how to speak travesti—in the limited comfort of the pensión, not on the street.
          There was a knock on the door. One of the girls had forgotten her eyeliner and came to borrow Ana Maria’s. “They like it when your eyes look bigger,” she said, navigating around her eyelids in the mirror. “They say it makes me look like Bettie Paige.”
          The resemblance was uncanny.

          ”La Pía,” as they called her, was a force to be reckoned with. The night the Federal District passed an act prohibiting travesti sex workers from soliciting in Rosedal—the most popular and profitable zona roja in Buenos Aires—she put to use her most valuable weapon: her cell phone.^[15]
          “If you kick us out of Rosedal, we’re coming to the Plaza!” La Pía led the girls in militaristic fashion—the scene, an olive drab cabaret of go-go boot and miniskirt regimentals. The resulting protest forced the mayor to reconsider.
          Juan, my collaborator at the time, tracked her down at the headquarters of ATTTA soon after the protest. She was dressed in camouflage, with a hip-purse full of condoms. She invited us to one of her workshops, and so we went.
          We were the only men in the room, as per usual.
          “Do you know the life expectancy of una chica trans?” she asked.
          One girl raised her hand, Silvana.
          “Thirty-three.”
          It was common knowledge. I had heard the number before before. When I asked where it came from, most of the girls drew a blank. I later traced it back to a survey done by ALITT, which experienced the death of 420 compañeras during the period of the study. According to the study, the average life expectancy of a travesti was just over thirty, and only one percent were above the age of sixty.
          About 65% of these deaths were AIDS-related (in a country with ostensibly free access to AIDS medication through the public health care system). Of the rest, half were murders—police and clients most common among a host of perpetrators. Other major causes included drugs and surgery malpractice.
          Due to poor access to health services in Argentina, many travestis resort to self-medication and tend to avoid medical establishments altogether. When they do make it into the hospital room, they have trouble verifying their information, as the government refuses to recognize their chosen names. The girls do what they can to distance themselves from the nombre de varón, or birthname, listed on official documentation. The process of identification is often slow and tedious, and to make matters worse, many travestis arrive as critical patients, having waited too long to seek medical attention.
          The first recorded cases of travestis seeking medical attention in public hospitals occurred in 1994. There was commotion in the hospitals; the other patients would not share a bedside with them, nor did the doctors want (or know how) to treat them. They arrived with little money, no family, and a name that was listed nowhere. They left behind troves of unclaimed bodies.
          While improvements have been made over the past ten years of trans mobilization, the health care system in Argentina leaves no reliable structures for travesti evaluation and treatment, and its extensive decentralization makes any change both slow and ineffective. Furthermore, due to a reluctance to formally acknowledge a trans presence in health care, travestis are often made invisible to official statistics. They are included as men or, more specifically, “men who have sex with men.” The effect of this severe misrepresentation ripples far beyond the trans community, especially on the issue of sexual health.
          The nature and extent of the AIDS epidemic in Argentina has great potential to expose a sexual domain that has long been kept secret, especially in a country where safe sex in not the norm, and where many misconceptions exist about HIV and its transmission. Consider, for example, that the majority of the travestis’ clientele tends to be heterosexual, oftentimes married men who put their families, as well as other travestis in a certain barrio, at risk of HIV and other diseases.

          On the side, Xamira worked as “public relations” in a three-story boliche^[16] on the city’s outskirts, where Tuesdays drew large crowds. Tonight, however, we spotted her near the American embassy—high heels and cheekbones, scratching stilettos against the pavement on a cold night in Palermo. It was a busy time for her, and so Juan and I decided to tour the zona roja solo.
          The girls were lined up on the roadside, sometimes in groups of two or three, topless in the coldest winter Buenos Aires had seen in ninety years. Meanwhile, I was wearing three layers, and my fingers were too frozen to operate the camera.
          Nothing seemed to phase the girls, not the cold nor the dark roundabout, which teemed with boisterous clients and onlookers. The entire ballet struck me as odd: for being so consistently excluded from health and education, for not being able to buy groceries without paying four times the price on the register, for the discrimination that has become so banal to the travestis, they really did own the street. The exchange between the girls and their would-be clients was playful. Some of the men arrived on motorbikes with an extra helmet. The girls left with them, perched on the side, legs together.
          “Ay, mami! Vení, vení!”
          One of the girls I had met in the workshops, Silvana, approached four friends in a van. She negotiated for a moment, turned back to Juan and me, and winked sheepishly as the men pleaded with her.
          But alas, no luck for the four friends tonight. “They said they had two more back at the hotel. Six is too much.”
          She flipped her hair.
          “Could get a girl pregnant.”

          I leave undefined, but somehow implicit, the larger relationship between machismo argentino and travestismo argentino. The social and institutionalized discrimination that affects travestismo indexes a social world that is not, as a night in Rosedal might suggest, playful and ordered. There is a more complex relationship between the dominant culture and a minoría muy minoritaria,^[18] evidenced by the strong presence of physical and sexual violence against the girls. The physical abuse, rape and murder of travestis, which often goes unpunished, becomes a way to dehumanize them—to reverse or nullify sexual relations with them.
          And if you listen to the their accents, you will notice that a majority come from Salta, Jujuy, and other provinces far outside the more liberal ripple of Greater Buenos Aires.^[19] Travestismo, in a sense, is migrating and evolving out of poorer areas in which more traditional ideals of Latin American “heteronormativity” are preserved. And it is here that we begin to identifty the paradox of machismo: why it demands what it ultimately aims to destoy.

“Everyone Who Has Ever Lived Here” is officially an award-winning film!

~Howard Lamar Prize in Film and Video~
(Best work in film.)

~2008 GALA Award~
(For the work most relevant to BGLT issues.)

UPDATE:

~Official Selection~
Chesapeake Film Festival

Information about these prizes can be found here.

The DVDs have finally arrived! Each DVD comes with two playable options: “Play” (for full-screen projections and computers) and “TV Safe” (which corrects for the borders of standard televisions). Also included are the original trailer and the complete version of “Eddie’s Song.”

You can order one by following the “Buy Now” link below.

“As the film progresses and unravels the tenants’ intertwining lives, the split-screen and masterful juxtaposition of scenes create mystery and drama. The individual scenes are shot beautifully and impressive if shown independently. While the simultaneous presentation of scenes occasionally detracts from an individual scene’s effectiveness, the film overall succeeds in balancing the scenes’ moods and visual impact to create a highly dramatic and aesthetic result. Mystery, romance, drama, edgy cinematography and superb acting, “Everyone Who Has Ever Lived Here” shows true vision and talent.”

To read the entire review, click HERE.

Click on the image to be taken to the page for Project Focus.

I touched down in Madras just as the sun was coming up. My luggage had not reached the baggage claim, and I had little else but my camera, laptop, and the clothes on my back. Just my luck! To make it worse, no one had warned me about driving in Madras. The streets were busy with cars, trucks, bicycles, livestock, people, and an army of three-wheeled auto-rickshaws, with which I’d become familiar over the coming months. We even fashioned a new sport out of it, one that involved us stuffing as many people as we could into a single auto. On that first day, though, I honestly thought my first drive in Madras would be my last. I hadn’t slept for two days, and I wasn’t about to fall asleep any time soon.

The toughest part was the language barrier. Prior to this summer, I had never heard or seen any Tamil. And my Hindi was limited to the few songs I’d performed at South Asian cultural shows, as well as the bulk of the Devdas soundtrack. It impressed only a handful of people, trust me. In the city, English was here and there, if that. In the villages, though, you were on your own. I think I started learning Tamil in Hande Hospital, having to tell our patients to do simple things during their post-ops and other procedures. And then in the villages, where we examined hundreds of people, some of whom we were able to bring back to the city for treatment and surgery. Once I had become a bit more savvy, I started watching Jetix, a Tamil channel that re-dubbed American children’s programming. When we traveled to rural school camps, this came in particularly handy; if I couldn’t talk to the kids about their health, I could at least relate to them on the level of the Mickey Mouse and the Power Rangers. It was surreal, making friends in a language I barely spoke. Like Thanraj, the young social worker interested in modern Indian philosophy (I bought him a book on his favorite philosopher, Vivekanda, before I left so that he might tell me about it in English). Or Praveen, one of the patients I taught to juggle. In the villages, there were no foreigners. Thus, people were always eager to teach us their customs, many of which varied from village to village. On one particular day, we were working in a village during some festival. We were taken around the village in a small parade, ending up in the village temple, where I participated in my first pooja. Unfortunately, photography was usually not allowed in most of the temples I visited, but I assure you they were absolutely stunning!

Three

Shore Temple at Sunrise.

I would be misleading you if I let you think I spent every moment of my summer working in the villages of Tamil Nadu. It was quite the opposite, in fact. Because I was working with free patients (in hospitals that needed paying patients to stay open), all of my work started and ended very early. My day would start around 6 am, and it would end in the early evening. This left me plenty of time to explore the city… and beyond.

In Chennai, I would often frequent Spencer Plaza, one of the largest shopping malls in South India. I returned with suits, kurtas, and random Western clothes. Otherwise, there were temples aplenty, the Satyam Theater (where I saw a non-subtitled Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, a Hindi blockbuster filmed party at Yale—some of my friends were even there while they were filming one of the [many] love scenes between Shahrukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee), and Marina Beach, the second longest beach in the world. This is me teaching Jules how to juggle on Marina Beach. After a brief lesson, I showed her a few tricks I’d learned from YAGS. Before I knew it, I had an audience! Like, a really large one. And then I had to put on a show. Within no time, I had backup music, a pretty large crowd, and vendors selling to people in the crowd! Also, India was obsessed with Jules’ hair. Whenever we went to the beach, we were always met by a horde of curious Tamilians. Tamilians: “How do you do that to your hair?” “Is it real?” Jules’ reply: “What? You’ve never seen a black woman with a weave before?!” I’m a huge fan of Indian art. For Hannukah, my mom actually found a rare book by some well-known photographer documenting a bunch of really old and famous pieces in India. I’m sure she regretted it when I made her sit down and look at the whole thing with me. “Look, mom! I was there!” It was like ‘Where’s Waldo?’ and a slide show in one. This temple in particular was built around the 7th century, when there was some sort of Chinese influence. I have so many memories of walking around barefoot on hot stone, touching carvings made during the 600′s. At the end of the summer, though, my feet were basically two giant callouses. The Five Rathas in Mahalabalipuram, where we encountered an entire stonecutter village. There, I found jewelery boxes and other tchatchkes…

Gosh, I got to do so much. This is so cliche, but it really was the experience of a lifetime! This photo is from when I rented a houseboat with students I’d met around the city. We floated down the backwaters of Kerala, in Cochin. We even parked the thing and spent the night on the bank.

… until the skies started getting cloudy …

… and monsoon season reared its ugly head!

And suddenly, it was time for me to leave! At the end of my project, once I’d collected all the cameras and said goodbye to all the friends I’d made in Tamil Nadu (which takes a long time when your Tamil is barely passable!), I decided that I couldn’t leave just yet. My birthday was in a week, and I didn’t want to spend it on a friend’s couch waiting for fall semester. So I canceled my flight, gave my mom a heart attack, and flew to New Delhi!

Delhi Gate

The day after I flew up, my three London girls met up with me and we rented out some rooms together.

We explored Delhi. A bunch of little boutiques, stores, malls, theaters… and everything in between. Also, we ate in Delhi. A lot.

Oh, how I missed eating village food off banana leaves…

… but now I was eating in five-star restaurants!

On my birthday, it was off to Aggra to see the Taj Mahal! Actually, I rang in my birthday with Jules at a gay club in New Delhi. Combined, it was honestly the best birthday EVER!

Best… birthday… ever.

I left a lot out (I took over 3000 pictures, some of which are in my Facebook albums, but I only had my camera with me less than 10% of the time), but suffice it to say it was an incredible, incredible summer… The people I met, the things I was able to do, and even the way India made me feel. It’s hard to describe, really. The hardest part was having to leave in the end. I have so many memories from this summer; just thinking about it makes me anxious to go back.

Medically, it was extremely rewarding. The pathologies I was able to see and treat (many conditions that aren’t prevalent in the States), and then watching people explore their restored sight—it was amazing. And then there was the artistic part of the project. The photos that our patients took were arguably better than the bulk of mine! Most of these people had never used a disposable camera before (thank goodness for the diagrams on the back!), and yet they were able to capture these images with a unique perspective, very much in an auto-ethnographic sense. Below is a slideshow of some of their images.

I think about the morning I arrived—jetlagged and soggy—and look back at everything I was exposed to during those months. What a crazy summer.