Features
A Life in Rewind
Movie lover's screenplay offers ideal medium to tell story and hold memories
BY TERESA PITMAN
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| English professor Elaine Chang has written a feature-length screenplay that she hopes will one day appear on the big screen. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
Prof. Elaine Chang, English and Theatre Studies, loves to watch movies, talk about movies and write about movies. She's made and exhibited short films. Now she's gone a step further and, with funding from Telefilm Canada, has written a feature-length screenplay that she hopes will one day appear on the big screen.
Despite Chang's love of film, her screenplay didn't start out in that format. At first it was a research project that she expected would turn into an article or perhaps a book on “family plots” in immigrant narratives, but it evolved into a screenplay because she ultimately began to see film as the best medium to tell the story.
“I needed to find a way to help people in the present engage in the story of what happened in the past,” she says. “The result is a supernatural mystery — with ghosts in it. The present-day narrative is linear, but the flashbacks to the 1920s are fragmented and non-linear, as memories and this particular history tend to be. The process of working that out has been challenging but also very satisfying.”
With the first draft completed, she and her partner, screenwriter and producer Michael Capellupo, are working on revisions to meet their Telefilm deadline, then will explore production possibilities.
Although this is her first venture into feature screenwriting, Chang is no stranger to publishing. Her first book, Reel Asian: Asian Canada on Screen, was released in November 2007, and she is co-editor of a second book almost ready to hit bookstore shelves (“we're just checking the galleys now”).
Reel Asian examines Asian-Canadian film and video across the country. “The book is building an audience for itself,” says Chang, who considers the publication a starting point for discussion about Asian-Canadian community and identity.
The second book, titled Decentre: Concerning Artist-Run Culture / à propos de centres d'artistes, includes contributions from more than 100 people.
“The expression ‘artist-run culture' refers to cultural production and exhibition channels primarily supported by artist collectives and government sources, rather than by commercial galleries, for example,” she says. “The book focuses on the visual and media arts, but the term also includes performance and other arts.”
Is an artist-run culture a good thing? Naturally, with that many contributors, you'll get some diverging opinions, says Chang.
“A lot of people celebrate the freedom and autonomy afforded to independent artists. Artist-run centres are often places where emerging artists find mentorship and ways of breaking into the art world.”
She quotes one contributor to the book, A.A. Bronson, who says: “The genius of the artist is his ability to crap on the hand that feeds him.”
Says Chang: “In other words, artists should dare to provoke and even offend the status quo, revealing a society's dark and suppressed secrets.”
In some ways, artist-run centres make this more possible because artists don't have to make commercial appeal a priority, she says. The downside is that the reliance on government funding can influence the models the organizations choose.
“The book brings together these contradictions and explores both the pitfalls and the possibilities.”
Another current project she's working on is an article about Japanese-Canadian filmmaker Midi Onodera, who created a feature-length experimental film called I Have No Memory of My Direction. Chang hopes this will eventually become a chapter in a new book on the role of forgetting in communal histories.
“The raft of recent films and books thematizing Alzheimer's disease, short-term memory disorders and the like suggests a widespread cultural interest in the topic. I'm intrigued by memory loss as an actual means of historical engagement. For example, Asian-North American literature is filled with examples of what might be an injunction to forget the past, burning personal documents associated with the Chinese Exclusion, subduing the most painful parts of a family's ancestral history. So I would like to consider how we remember and how we forget — as equally constitutive parts of the whole process of collective memory.”
Born and raised in Vancouver, Chang earned an MA and PhD at Stanford University and taught at Rutgers University before arriving at U of G in 2000.
“My plan was always to come back to Canada,” she says. “When this opportunity at Guelph came up, the timing was just right.”
Winner of the Central Student Association's 2004 Teaching Excellence Award, Chang has the fundamental strengths of all good teachers: she loves teaching and sincerely cares about her students.
“The best students here are curious and eager and really try to find meaning in the material, no matter how esoteric,” she says.
The students who nominated her for the award lauded Chang for her “thought-provoking teaching style and open-minded approach to learning, and for creating a welcoming classroom environment.”
“Teaching, writing and editing are my work — the ways I make my living,” she says. “But it's nice that, for me, these things a lot of the time are also really, really fun.”