Putting a Film Protest in Focus : To Change Perceptions, Latinos Must Open Hollywood Doors

Like every other journalist, I’m a firm believer in freedom of expression--especially the First Amendment’s strict prohibition against any government attempt to censor what we write or report. That’s why I was at first reluctant to weigh in on the side of the many Latinos who are angry about a recent UCLA student film that depicts Mexicans in a crude, offensive manner.

But then I was surprised to recognize someone I know in a photograph of a demonstration against the movie. It was Margaret Garcia, one of the corps of Chicano painters who have helped give Los Angeles a quite lively modern art scene over the last few years. So I called her to ask what a progressive, open-minded artist like her was doing protesting against another work of “free expression.” (I hesitate to use the word “art” for reasons that should become obvious once the film in question is described.)

“Animal Attraction” is the work of George Cunningham, a 28-year-old graduate student in UCLA’s Department of Film and Television. It’s supposed to be a satire on American attitudes toward the Third World, which Cunningham says “we see basically as a place of tourism.” A mock documentary set in a Tijuana nightclub, the film focuses on a female dancer whose act involves copulation with a donkey. The film depicts the simulated sex act graphically, and the Mexican woman involved is shown to be little more than “an ignorant slut,” according to Garcia. It also contains other scenes of life in Mexico that Garcia found demeaning, both as a Mexican-American and as a woman.

Garcia concedes that “good film and good satire are a form of art,” but said she does not consider Cunningham’s film to be art because “Art gives understanding of the human condition in a manner that promotes tolerance.” Garcia fears that rather than enhancing human understanding, Cunningham’s film actually promotes the attitudes that he claims to be deriding.

Of course, like many arguments involving freedom of expression, those are pretty subjective views. But Garcia and other Latinos criticizing the film also make practical points. They note that only three members of the 13-member faculty in UCLA’s film department are minority, none of them Latino. They ask if a more representative faculty might not have helped steer Cunningham away from such a boorish film, or at least advised him to be more sensitive in crafting it.

“I don’t expect to impose my values on any member of the (UCLA) faculty or student body,” Garcia says. “I simply wish to see them presented as a standard many artists do reflect. I would also like to see them represented by a member of the faculty who is not afraid of influencing his students for fear of inhibiting someone else’s artistic expression.”

As to the suggestion she may be promoting censorship, Garcia points to the relatively small number of Latinos and other minority youngsters who have access to prestigious film schools like UCLA’s. “I find this a form of censorship,” she said. And that won me over.

While I believe in free expression, I also have the rare luxury of being able to put it into practice before a potentially large audience. I write a newspaper column and know that my views are likely to be printed where a lot of people can read them. Not many Latinos have that opportunity.

Fewer still have access to the even wider audience that popular film makers have. And anybody who knows the film industry in this town knows that it is still overwhelmingly the domain of a few white males whose taste (or lack thereof) determines what the rest of us will see in movie theaters and on our television screens.

Only last month, the Writers Guild of America made public a study documenting the appalling lack of women and minority writers in the film industry. Among other things, the report’s authors found that from 1982 to 1987, the number of minority writers working in the film industry stayed at just 2.1%, despite the fact the number of writers employed in Hollywood increased during that period. It also noted that several influential production companies do not have a single minority writer on their staff. And what goes for writers also applies to producers, directors, editors and other important jobs in the film industry.

It is because Hollywood does not truly represent the diversity of American society that Latinos have had to tolerate films like “Animal Attraction” as far back as 1914, when one of the first silent movies ever made was something called “The Greaser’s Revenge.” But if Latinos must tolerate such films, they also have the right to try and change the factors that lead to their being made. One way to do that is by pushing to get more Latinos into the film schools where future film-industry executives study, and onto the faculties that teach there.

As long as the Latino activists criticizing Cunningham’s film stick to that issue, I’m with them. But they better not mess with the right of free expression. After all, that’s what lets me write that Cunningham and the UCLA professors who advised him on his film are insensitive jerks.