This essay reflects on Spencer Nakasako's groundbreaking video work with Southeast Asian refugee youth and explores Nakasako's significant role in media histories not just in relation to Asian America, but to American media culture writ large. It pays particular attention to the role and rhetoric of the “amateur” in Nakasako's work, and the ways in which Nakasako transforms low-resolution, independent videomaking into an aesthetic as well as political force. Nakasako's “video diary” series, often called the refugee trilogy, emphasizes the significance of making film with and about community through both content and modes of production. Highlighting the ways in which gender comes into play in Nakasako's work, this essay focuses on Kelly Loves Tony (often the least discussed of the trilogy), and also includes material from recently conducted interview with Spencer Nakasako on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his trilogy.
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Spring 2020
Research Article|
March 01 2020
Love and Amateurism in Kelly Loves Tony
Viola Lasmana
Viola Lasmana
Viola Lasmana is currently completing a book, Shadow Imaginations: Transpacific Approaches to Post-1965 Indonesian Archives, on the reconstitution of Indonesia's decimated cultural archive. Her work has appeared in The Cine-Files, Visual Anthropology, make/shift: feminisms in motion, Computers and Composition, and Interdisciplinary Humanities. She is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
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Film Quarterly (2020) 73 (3): 47–53.
Citation
Viola Lasmana; Love and Amateurism in Kelly Loves Tony. Film Quarterly 1 March 2020; 73 (3): 47–53. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2020.73.3.47
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