Linda Chiu-han Lai
2021戲門
Linda Chiu-han Lai
Door Game is a narrative game playing with the found footage of a number of family ethics melodramas from HK Cantonese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. By re-assembling loose fragments into some kind of coherent structures, I reveal the hidden logic of the genre, exposing the repetitive elements. Through story-creation, my critique of the gender-biased, formulaic quality inherent to Cantonese melodramas evolves. I want to expose the arbitrariness of pathos and ethos in the Cantonese melodramatic tradition, especially to point out how narrative logic turns open options into moral necessity, and how a particular form of morality is turned into absolute truth via plotting… - http://www.lindalai-floatingsite.com/content/video/data/published/doorgame/index.html
Door Game
六度分離∶準備好未？
Linda Chiu-han Lai
The video is a narrative game reconstructing Lai's own video diaries (1990-2003) and found footage. It plays with the thin line between remembering and fabricating, recording and staging, documentary and story... It shows 13 women's stories as a network of acquaintances, each in an isolated moment of her life. Questions on the practice of auto-ethnography are raised via "the politics of the everyday."
I Told Them My Camera Was On
重重門。門對門。
Linda Chiu-han Lai
A game of montage art, Doors Medley is a re-mix of two existing work of mine – Door Game (2005, 26m) and Door Games Window Frames (2012, 11m30s), which explores visual mannerisms and formulaic structures of film melodrama of the 1960s in Hong Kong. Doors Medley highlights specifically gender paradigms embedded in popular culture. From anthropology’s viewpoint, we have created drama and we also reenacted the drama we create. Popular cultural texts fine-tune specific course of events with narrative logic, which we fervently imitate to act out our daily roles. Isolated narrative fragments, as they are subject to free combination, reveal their hidden predispositions.
Doors Medley
Excitable Speech: All About Cinderella
Linda Chiu-han Lai
The myth of Cinderella undergoes a series of generative twist to illumine the inventive power of speech. 11 children and 3 educated women engaged in a game of improvisation via their talking-head camera presence. Tale-telling to some children is the realization of creative instincts, to others the performance of self, or it's simply a tedious pedagogic vessel. My research-creation completes with adult women transforming the usage of Cinderella-objects into agents of their own stories, however fragmentary or elliptical. The event of tale-telling woke up the child in them; children language was appropriated to perform unarticulated subjectivities. Gender is a complex system, most revealing in language-in-action. The coda is a grand finale celebrating the magical power of objects and their own unlimited lives. Story-telling is the most primitive form of play. Harmless it may look, it is also the most sophisticated embodiment of ideological workings.
Excitable Speech: All About Cinderella
搖擺過路人
Linda Chiu-han Lai
Trespassing World Cities records how I struggled away from the tourist video style to seek for an impersonal form to pose my response to a world of big cities whose individual distinctive is increasingly blurred. This is a travel journal in the literal sense of the term. The video records my walking through a dozen of major cities around the world, repeating routes and activities, between 1999 and 2005. The mythology of the multiple colors of diverse world cultures shatters. I found myself doing the same things, repeating places I have visited, and inside my mind is often a totally different world irrelevant to the places I visit. Globalization is a popular catch word, the token of economism. Personally speaking, it is a form of irony.
Trespassing World Cities
