e-flux Film is very pleased to present the August 2024 edition of our monthly online series Staff Picks, featuring Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Green Card: An American Romance (1982, 77 minutes).
Green Card: An American Romance is the third and final installment in the Yonemotos’ Soap Opera Series, following Based on Romance (1979) and An Impotent Metaphor (1979). Satirizing 1980s Los Angeles and the city’s burgeoning art scene, Green Card betrays the Yonemotos’ fascination with the melodramatic clichés of American soap operas and the films of Douglas Sirk, drawing on the vernacular of Southern California’s entertainment industry. The video tells the story of Sumie Nobuhara, a Japanese artist studying in the US, who must pursue a green card marriage with an American surfer/filmmaker in order to secure her path to an artistic career, instead of returning home to a conventional domestic life in Japan. Examining an immigrant experience lived directly in the shadow of Hollywood, Green Card explores the mass media’s construction of cultural identity and ideals of romantic love. Using non-actors, the video revels in the absurdity of making work at the crossroads of everyday life in Los Angeles and the mythic dreams produced in the city’s studios. As Sumie says, “The way we see family, friends, relationships—even love—is mass media propaganda.” (MoMA and EAI)
Watch the film here.
Bruce (b. 1949) and Norman Yonemoto (1946–2014), brothers who produced a body of collaborative videos beginning in 1976, deconstruct and rewrite the hyperbolic vernacular with which the mass media constructs cultural mythologies. Ironically employing the image-language and narrative syntax of popular forms such as soap opera, Hollywood melodrama and television advertising, the Yonemotos work from “the inside out” to expose the media’s pervasive manipulation of contemporary reality and fantasy, individual and collective identity. In their highly stylized, deadpan fictions, they decode the tropes of cinematic and television formulas, self-consciously appropriating the artifice and cliches of this “media delirium” as metaphor. In their ironic psychosexual melodramas, including Vault (1984) and Kappa (1986), they decipher the Freudian symbology, psychoanalytic strategies and Surrealist tactics that underlie media representations and narrative texts. The Hollywood myth of romantic love, and its role in the construction of personal desire and cultural memory, recurs throughout their work. The Yonemotos’ critique of America’s mediated culture is informed by their Japanese-American heritage, their youth in Silicon Valley and their relationship to the Hollywood entertainment industry. They write, “Only by understanding the contents and strategies of metatextual nonsense can we hope to put our postmodern spectacle into a new and constructive context.” The Yonemotos have also produced collaborative multi-media installations, many of which address issues of Japanese-American identity in the context of popular media representation, history, and autobiography. In these installations, as in their narrative fictions, the Yonemotos locate meaning in the interstices between myth and memory. They have also produced videos and installations independently.
Staff Picks is a monthly streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.