For the last post, I went to see the screening which was held in the Whitney Museum. This 64 min film was called “SHAKEDOWN”, directed by Leilah Weinraub who was born in Los Angeles, showed this dreamlike, intoxicating portrait of Los Angeles’s African American lesbian strip club scene in which the network of female performers attached to a weekly party called Shakedown take center stage. This film certainly gave me a different perspective in which how the sexual display was built and the desiring gaze of queer women of color in this utopian community. This was one first time watching the film which was related to the topic of queer African-American women in the strip club and certainly made me think a lot of how the queer community was behaving during the 90s and up until now. After seeing behind the scenes of the dancers trying to make their way of living, I feel these rarely untold stories gave me more appreciation on queer women of color, and how the existence of this club played a major position inside a lot of people’s life in their community. The way how the director was shooting the film with all low lighting made the dancers’ appearances more mysterious and wanted to know more about their stories which were ignored by the mass media and I feel we certainly should get to know more about the community in various perspectives and understanding their thoughts and life experiences.  

          The classical trip to the Whitney Museum was definitely the highlight of my day.  Since this was my first time to go to that museum, my curiosity definitely got fulfilled by those amazing art works and short videos inside the exhibition. The video piece I saw was called “A very long line” by Postcommodity. This was projected in a room with several projectors pointed at each side of the wall. All you can see was grass behind those bars and you can see the landscape moving while the video is playing. This meant to show show the border between the United States and Mexico and what I got upset was those bars because to me I feel like the green grass present the pleased life but they got blocked by those bars and made me think of this whole intense political issue of immigration and as one of the immigrants who moved to New York from China, hearing those who got trapped because of this border made me think a lot about this issue, even though the video is just showing the moving landscape along with the bars, the meaning behind it was thought-provoking. Besides the short video, one art work which got my attention was various toys moving along the circle with a iphone set close to a side of the moving panel and show the view of how each object is clearly portrayed on the phone. I think that was very interesting because of the idea of getting various objects moving while catching up with many good angle shots using the phone and people could see different view of the toys with different perspectives.

        I chose to watch this film named “Akher Wahed Fina(The Last of Us),directed by Ala Eddine Slim in MOMA. This 95 mins film reveals the story of two men silently traverse a vast landscape, they get in the back of a smuggler’s truck. Sooner, they get attacked by men with guns and one of them escapes to sea, he sooner finds himself in an endless forest, where a kind of spiritual journey unfolds. What makes this film interesting to me at first was that it is dialogue-film, which to me is a rare thing to discover in films that are created nowadays. But that also puts the challenge in character’s facial expressions and the arrangement of the outline in order to keep the story cohesive to the audience. The protagonist’s facials expressions and the scenery shots got me interested the most in this film. I like the way how the director first uses close-ups on the protagonist to enlarge his emotions and then jump out to medium shots of his whole body and then long shots combining with the scenery and himself to show the loneliness of him trying to find a way out but somehow get surrounded by all the objects in the forest. There were some lines displayed after the gunmen trying to attack him and he was escaping to somewhere else, I remembered clearly there was one line that says “I vomited humankind, I surrounded myself along with natural and forest”. That was my favorite line in this film and I think that also highlighted the central idea which is to mark down the negative side of humankind and how it deeply affected and destroys the beautiful nature between each other. The man is a traveler, but the cruelty of humankind gave him disappointment so he then ends up with finding himself in the forest and looking for his own path. There was one scene when he fell into the big hole and underneath he found out the dead body of the baby bear and the sharp weapon that were used to kill the bear and he also got stabbed because he fell down and the weapon went through one of his knees. That made me think of the nature of humankind and how people create weapons that are fatal and use them against each other and nature species. The man also struggles with wolfs in the woods and that lights up one of the theme of this film : the struggle between man and nature and also the situation with contemporary migration. Towards the end I found one shot was very interesting to think of which is when the man was sitting by himself after seeing the death of old man who healed his wound. At night here came up with the bright light focusing upwards the man and as the man moves, the light moves as well. But the light doesn’t approach any closer, it was just in the further distance and lights up towards the man. The film leaves the open ending which the protagonist took of all his clothes and stands in front of the river and show his back to the audience. That makes me think whether he then jumps into the water and committed suicide or he wants to go up to the waterfall and discover the path or he gave up on his human nature and disappear in the woods.After all, I think this film evokes ourselves to think the humanity and struggles between humankind and nature.