Asian-Pacific Film Festival Tries to Link People

Try this as a metaphor for our modern times.

The movie projected on the screen is the silent classic “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” with Buster Keaton. A woman, Midori Sawato, stands to one side, voice-acting silent classic voice-acting for the movie’s unheard sounds, describing the action, serving as translator.

The film is a silent American. The sounds are Japanese.

The experience leaps across and blends time, distance and cultures.

It is a translation whose meaning turns to understanding.

Few Americans know of this theater experience, this performance art called benshi . In Japan it is a unique 20th-Century movie tradition as old as imported silents. Benshi artists were and are widely known, made necessary for an audience unfamiliar with English or American cinema humor. While early silents in the United States often required background piano music, the Japanese added another dimension, live musicians and the spoken voice, the actor’s subtle movements and interpretations, a practice in turn applied to Japanese silents.

Now a Los Angeles audience will see benshi artist Sawato perform Tuesday night in Little Tokyo’s Japan America Theater, with the Keaton movie along with “Kid Commotion,” a Japanese silent comedy.

Her appearance, though, is more meaningful than a single night of cross-cultural moviegoing. It is part of a larger project, the citywide Asian-Pacific Film and Video Festival that is scheduled to start tonight and run for an uninterrupted, unprecedented 10 days, an expanding program from the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the generally little-known 22-year-old organization called Visual Communications.

If ever a film festival needed more movies and more viewers and broader audiences, it is now.

Perhaps prophetically, this seventh year of the Asian-Pacific festival is its largest. Last year, it offered seven feature movies along with its spotty scheduling of short films, documentaries and videos. This year, 21 features and more than 30 short films by Asian and Asian-American artists will be shown including tonight’s Los Angeles premiere of Steve Okazaki’s documentary on Hawaii, “Troubled Paradise.” In 10 afternoons and evenings, works by filmmakers from Canada, China, India, Japan, the Pacific Islands, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States will be shown.

The festival’s budget, despite current hard times, is twice the size of any previous period at $36,000, with more dollars coming in this year from the state lottery, the city’s cultural arts program and, for the first time, from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. And support has continued from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Getty, Japan Airlines, Toyota, Hitachi and the Festival of Philippines Art and Culture plus local business supporters like the Pacific Heritage Bank and Aihara insurance.

Obviously the film/video folks of UCLA and Visual Communications have been doing something right.

While the continuing cinematheque-like projects of the UCLA Film and Television Archive are generally well known, Visual Communications has been an L.A. secret that needs telling.

Its name needs some explanation first.

Visual Communications’ roots are multicultural, first evolving from a ‘60s ethno-communications, visual arts program at UCLA, an outreach project for filmmakers of color--Ben Caldwell, Luis Ruiz, Bob Nakamura, Duane Kubo, Edward Wong and Alan Ohashi. That media artist collective reshaped in the early ‘70s as Visual Communications with the idea of producing movies, documentaries, television films and graphics that would convey the experiences of Asian and Pacific people to offset Hollywood film stereotypes of Asians as cunning killers or clowns.

Founding members Nakamura and Steve Tatsukawa wanted visual stories to be told and to be seen. It would simply be a matter of more modern communications, visual communications.

At age 22, the organization is the oldest of its kind in the United States, operating on an independent, nonprofit basis with an operating budget of $300,000. It helps film and video makers produce their works. It provides some editing space at its modest Little Tokyo office, it occasionally rents--usually with a welcome discount--facilities at television station KSCI Channel 18 or the post-production facilities at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

“We can’t put a lot of our limited funds into equipment,” says Linda Mabalot, a filmmaker turned executive director at Visual Communications. “The technology changes so quickly and so expensively. We have to focus on content, on our visual productions so we try to use facilities elsewhere, especially where we get a discount.”

Visual Communications does more than help filmmakers and other visual artists. Its two full-time staff members, part-timers and various volunteers try regularly to take the short films and videos that come from its artists into neighborhoods. Screenings of its “Ethnovision” projects are held often at the William Grant Still cultural center in South Los Angeles and at the midtown Barnsdall facility, depicting experiences and stories of Asians and Asian-Americans. An anti-drug music video, “It’s Up to You,” financed by the Ronald McDonald Charity Foundation and produced through Visual Communications, will be broadcast on KSCI later this month.

“We stretch our dollars,” says Mabalot, who sees more and continued stretching being required in Los Angeles now. “I think we will play a role in healing, but it will take a long time to heal broadly and effectively.”

Mabalot sees her organization as a potential Band-Aid for the schools, able to bring in visual presentations where they are needed. She hopes for mandatory ethnic studies starting in junior high schools where short films about “different ethnic communities, from Appalachia to Koreatown” would be shown. She calls Visual Communications a potential alternative medium for schools lacking in visual programs.

Visual Communications can also take the Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival a step beyond its 10-day run.

“Many of the films and videos of the festival,” she says, “need to be shown long after the festival. There should be a life beyond the festival and that’s in the schools and in the communities.”

It’s an appropriate suggestion, despite the financial restraints that might hinder that from happening.

The festival’s works, including a retrospective of the films of Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan, will be shown at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater along with such Central City locations as Japan America Theater, Laemmle’s Sheraton Grande Theater and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Event prices range from free--a six-hour symposium Saturday at UCLA and the screenings at LACE--to $3 to $5 for most UCLA screenings to $25 for tonight’s Okazaki premiere, a benefit for Visual Communications.

For people who like good, challenging film and want to see great ranges of cinematic work, the festival, says Jeff Gilmore of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, is an opportunity to learn something about a whole generation of emerging filmmakers, to see an evolving group of storytellers.

Some come from Asia and the Pacific Islands.

Some from the United States.

A blending.

Almost like a benshi experience.

Information: (310) 206-3456 or (213) 680-4462.