An image from No Movie by Harry Gamboa, Jr.

I have just published a book I never expected to write: an account of “Chicano cinema” that starts within the federal government and on American public affairs television - and not on the silver screen as one would expect or hope. The book, Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (Minnesota), provides a pre-history of the minority and identity-based cinemas since the 1970s.

But as I finished I was left with a haunting image of a No Movie by Harry Gamboa Jr. (see illustration) Gamboa and other members of the Chicano avant-garde group Asco developed the No Movie in the early 1970s as an image-and-text and performance-based commentary on Hollywood’s portrayal or non-portrayal of Chicanos. But it also commented on Chicanos’ desire to be part of Hollywood! To that extent, this particular No Movie, called “Chicano cinema” (1976), seemed to provide a useful avant-garde commentary on the very history told in my own book.
Gamboa’s “Chicano cinema” offers both a Chicano commentary on the role of language and the mass media in race relations and a satirical critique of Chicano cinema, especially the filmmakers associated with KCET-TV and the Chicano Cinema Coalition. In the image – from a conceptual performance staged in 1976 and published as part of the proceedings for a conference on the U.S.-Mexico border at the Center for Third World Economic and Social Studies in Mexico City in 1983 – Gamboa portrayed a fallen gunshot victim (visually coded as a Latin revolutionary) whose last gesture had been to scrawl “Chicano cinema” on the nearby wall.

While the gesture links Chicano cinema with street expressions (murals and graffiti), it adds an insightful ephemeral dimension: “Chicano cinema” is written on a paper roll taped to the wall, with small portions of the first and last letters spilling over onto the wall itself. Thus the No Movie comments on the film medium as a tool for social protest. The paper roll, like the silver screen, lacks the material “fact” of graffiti, but is nevertheless portable and reproducible, leaving behind some traces of its impact. Still, for the non-commercial and ethnic-identified filmmaker the “message” worth dying for amounts to no more than the naming of a new genre: Chicano cinema.

This performance was first published at the high point in the development of a Chicano cinema. By 1983, its practitioners had gained a toehold in noncommercial circuits (public television, national endowments, and foundations), had directed studio-released feature films (Zoot Suit, 1981; The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, 1982; and El Norte, 1983), and had become regular participants and manifesto writers in a modified New Latin American Cinema. The Chicano Cinema Coalition was a major force in these efforts to situate Chicano cinema within the divergent institutional contexts of New Latin American Cinema, New American Cinema, and Hollywood. The coalition also fought against itself over whether the apparent access to Hollywood represented an extension of a radical agenda or middle class reformism. By 1984, this would be a moot point: access to Hollywood ended abruptly and radical politics became more moderate in the face of a hemispheric neoliberalism.

For his part, Gamboa parodies the debate over a “liberal” versus “radical” ideological function for Chicano cinema, pointing out that both camps sought the same goal: access to and success within the American film and television industry. And he makes this argument through one of the first public critiques of the masculinist sexual politics that undergird Chicano cinema: Gamboa’s bloodied revolutionary leans against the wall, one hand holding a gas nozzle protruding from the wall, the other hand shoved down his pants feeling his genitals. In neither case does the revolutionary achieve what he wants as the product of his defiantly public act of self-naming and self-stimulation: a feature film and sexual intercourse. Writing nearly two decades later, Rosa Linda Fregoso made this critique manifest within academic discourses: In a society where feature-length films signify mastery over cinematic practice and in which 35-mm symbolizes power, the accumulation of “cultural capital” becomes a self-generating process. In other words, making a Chicano 35-mm feature film translates into a certain prestige that virtually guarantees greater critical and scholarly attention as well as film reviews in the mainstream media. In a phallocentric society, power is measured by big-ness (as in feature-length films) and penetration (as into the Hollywood industry). These are the crucial markers or signs of success, of “making it,” of coming ... into fruition, that is. Gamboa’s explicit, and equally humorous, commentary on the congruence between discourse and intercourse within Chicano cinema nevertheless exemplified its very ideals.

The No Movie did not negate Chicano cinema, but, rather, pointed to a double standard that conflated public ethnic demands with private masculine desires. The No Movie then enacted the social function claimed by Chicano cinema itself: reaching a “Third World” international audience and disrupting the status quo. Even more, the No Movie served as a pointed reminder that Chicano cinema had perhaps foregrounded the politics of access and revolution at the expense of the “make-do” aesthetics and local orientation of the Chicano movement.

The No Movies suggest the paradoxical nature of Chicano resistance to Hollywood and the mass media. There are no easy “messages” here that take for granted the existence of a value-free medium. And yet, as Gamboa’s work testifies, there is an urgent need to communicate both within and across communities. Gamboa shifts the analysis of minority representation away from its usual focus on textual content and toward the structure of exclusion itself. But as a social actor, Gamboa must also speak beyond the peculiar conditions of his expression, lest he fall into self-referential abstraction and aestheticism. In reversing David James’s argument in Allegories of Cinema, Gamboa’s No Movies begin as an allegory of exclusion from cinema in order to address other social relations within a mediated national community.

What unites the history told in my book with Gamboa’s No Movies and most other Chicano film and media arts practices resides in neither a cultural essence nor a cinematic style, but, rather, in a political imperative: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." And the hedgehog must find many ways to voice the one big thing that it knows, since the fox controls the communications networks and refuses to listen to anything else. In terms of access for Chicanos, today is little different from two decades ago, but the media landscape itself is almost unrecognizable. As such, Gamboa’s warning continues to be relevant: “As Hollywood continues to shoot Chicanos, Chicanos will have to shoot right back.”

Welcome to the new millennium.

Editor’s Note: To order Shot In America visit www.upress.umn.edu or call 612.627.1970.