I Was Born, But... (2002) film still [Enlarge in New Window]

Roddy Bogawa: I Was Born, but...

One finds Roddy Bogawa and his hybrid films situated at a quirky confluence of cultural streams. The filmmaker's family goes back five generations in Hawaii, where his ancestors emigrated from Japan before the island was a state. Bogawa himself was born in Los Angeles, then moved to New York after graduate school. When in school at University of California at San Diego, he transitioned from art and sculpture to experimental film. He now commutes between his home in Manhattan and New Jersey City University, where he teaches film production. All in all, Bogawa's life has been one of movement, transitions, and transformation. Not surprisingly, his films over the past 10 years are equally mobile and hard to pin down, merging narrative and documentary techniques in the service of Bogawa's quest to probe the relationship between individuals and the environment in which they live.

"Identity politics is submerged in culture," Bogawa says. "My work addresses that obliquely--it's mainly about culture and history." The 40-year-old filmmaker's latest project is to delve back into his teenage years and figure out why he, as a Japanese-American in California in the late '70s and early '80s, felt drawn to the punk scene and immersed himself in the music, fashion, and attitude of the era. I was Born, But . . . is a feature-length film that is a cross between a narrative and documentary. The title is borrowed from Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu's 1932 silent film, and Bogawa says he intended his piece to be a sort of homage "to the themes to which Ozu dedicated his life's work -- moments of conflict between tradition and change, the impact of modernization on differing generations."

In Bogawa's rendition, those moments of conflict are internalized. "The [film's] main conceit is that I became a punk and marked myself as different in order to hide my difference," he explains. Bogawa provides the film's voiceover narration, telling his own story. He calls it a "documentary biography" or even "documentary autobiography," with a lot of the presentation leaning toward the metaphorical or abstract instead of the literal, such as putting together found footage to represent some themes instead of using footage of himself. The film is a mixture of mediums, including Bogawa's own stills of punk bands from the era and recent 16mm footage he shot in the clubs he used to frequent. While he was filming additional footage in 2001, disco and punk rocker Joey Ramone died (it happened to be Bogawa's birthday), and the director shot material of the tributes fans were leaving in front of clubs.

Cultural difference, self-definition, and revolution are themes that also run through Bogawa's feature Junk (1999), as well as his first feature, Some Divine Wind, which was part of the prestigious Sundance dramatic competition in 1991. Both of these films, as well as shorts like If Andy Warhol's Super 8 Camera Could Talk or I'm Simply Overwhelmed, I Just Don't Know What to Say--Thank You. Good Night, exhibit Bogawa's style, which he describes as being influenced heavily by the European avant-garde of the '70s, Andy Warhol, and fine art. The director frequently uses disparate or fragmented images while keeping an underlying narrative going. He also works with found footage, recutting scenes from various films, or integrating landscape images from Vietnam War movies or crowd shots from rock concert movies.

Bogawa usually starts with something like a traditional script and then wends his way to something less concrete. "A lot of my work is about the process of filmmaking and how the material shifts during that process," he says. "So even though I write fairly traditional scripts, it changes. I think that goes back to having studied with sculptors." For him, the block of material he's working with takes shape as the film goes along. He adds, "I think that's what makes it different from traditional filmmaking and what drives me as a filmmaker."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | Asian Themes | Americana | History | New York | 2000