| HOME | FILM | ESSAYS | WUYUETIAN |
It may sound strange, but this documentary made up almost entirely of long, static shots and low-budget concert footage is the most cinematic thing I've seen in years. After the death of Joey Ramone in 2001, Roddy Bogawa left New York for his native LA to revisit his youth in the LA punk scene of the late Seventies and early Eighties. He ended up going far beyond that, to Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11, among other things, but the core of I Was Born, But ... is punk and its place in the artist's life.
The movie's title comes from the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu's 1932 silent film I Was Born, But ..., a wry and contemplative movie about youth, maturity, and family life. Like Ozu, Bogawa understands the power of the long, stationary shot. In the Q&A after the screening, Bogawa said he wanted to leave a lot of space in the movie for contemplation. He's actually taken it beyond Ozu to the point where the film is almost all contemplation, and by necessity, as much the viewer's as the director's.
Watching it, I often struggled to figure out the symbolic significance of the image on the screen: The many shots of restaurants and stores in NY Chinatown, the people waiting to pose for studio portraits, the ripping of red cloth. Maybe I was being too analytical. I do know I wasn't bored for a second, because the film was infused with the spirit of the director and his mood. Two of his idols are suddenly gone, he gets lost in his hometown, even his childhood pictures seem unfamiliar.
As Asian-American punk band Seam sings in one of the great songs in the film, "I'm there with you." Bogawa takes us all on a journey. What could have been the most self-indulgent film in the world, including scenes of the director leafing through old LA Weekly newspapers reading ancient news items about long-extinct bands, turns out to be a personal journey that left the audience last night rapt and (mercifully) silent.
I take note of the overall response because I was too close to the LA sections of the film to judge them as a typical viewer. Though I wasn't on the punk scene or even a big fan of punk, I'm sure I was out on those same nights, around the same age, and I remember those streets that look, as Bogawa notes, almost unrecognizable in the daylight and after years away. The most powerful scenes in the film are the shots of these clubs, most of them now converted or gone, in the unrelenting midday sun of LA. He shoots them head on, silent, with slow, gritty guitar forming the soundtrack. Identifying titles on a black screen pop up, then the shot again, like a solemn tribute. When the shot of the Viper Room came on, I got another part of what he was doing. As with the rest of these clubs, people walking down the street didn't even notice the camera -- it's LA, after all. Least of all across the street from a "famous" celebrity haunt on the Sunset Strip. But Bogawa puts up an intertitle that identifies it as a former punk club, the Central. He's in the middle of Hollywood, capturing it on film, but he's saying something different by the way he's using film. And suddenly I realize that we've barely scratched the surface of the medium.
Thank you, Roddy. I'm there with you.