Film Matters Magazine

Author and filmmaker Vikkramm Chandirramani

As a call and response to online dating and a prevalent reliance on social media, writer/filmmaker Vikkramm Chandirramani offers a comedy short Destiny, set in modern India, through which he explores and readdresses preconceptions of romance expectation, attitudes toward the salience of social media outlets, and a reversal of gendered stereotypes. Over the course of our interview, as Chandirramani and I indulged in conversations both formal and causal, these amicable dialogues were the product of a somewhat freeform approach. What stems from this is not merely a discussion of the themes within the short, but also a cordial exchange between two admirers of cinema and literature, from divergent corners of the world.

Matthew Johnson: It’s a pleasure to be able to talk to you about your short film Destiny, which I enjoyed very much! To start, have you any opening thoughts you would like to share with us about the film? The availability of your film through both YouTube and Vimeo has already ensured quite a large list of viewers, along with celebrated screenings at various international film festivals. How might you expect your audience to receive your work, and are there any main takeaways that you hope to share from the film?

Vikkramm Chandirramani: The response to Destiny has been overwhelming! It has surpassed my expectations and those of my crew. I received the Best Foreign Film award for it at The Ridgewood Guild International Film Festival, held at Ridgewood, New Jersey, on May 9, 2018. As we speak, Destiny has crossed 2.8 million views on YouTube. One of the reasons people have loved the film is because it is very much in sync with contemporary times, especially in urban India. With social media and the internet taking over our lives, people use apps to search for prospective partners. Destiny is a film meant to entertain and there was no conscious effort on my part to give out a message through the film. Yet, I believe that, while the way our life shapes up is determined to some extent by the choices we make, there are large parts that we have no control over. When one looks back on one’s life objectively, one would realize that serendipity or chance played an important role in how it has all turned out so far. This seems true in many areas whether it is meeting our soulmates or the career we choose. Also, some things are not meant to be. Irrespective of how hard we try we can never turn some of our fondest desires into reality and, at times, it is best to accept this gracefully. From the poorest man to the richest, almost everyone has had their heart broken or faced disappointments at some point. These are equalizers in a time and age of ever-expanding gaps between the haves and have-nots. Continue reading →

John Bredin. Courtesy of John Bredin

“Can we imagine a Hollywood for the greater good?”- John Bredin

John Bredin is a writer, educator, visionary thinker, activist, TV show host, filmmaker, actor, and businessman. His prevailing project honors his ancestral connection to one of America’s first movie stars, Blanche Walsh, who was excluded from the history of times past due to the unaccounted whereabouts of the only film she starred in, Resurrection (1912). Martin Scorsese, the filmmaker who doubles as a film historian, has noted the weight of lost films in present-day society: “With every foot of film that is lost, we lose a link to our culture, to the world around us, to each other, and to ourselves” (Ochoa). Although Walsh’s film remains missing, John Bredin articulates the unrecorded life of Blanche Walsh for our culture, the world around us, each other, and ourselves in hopes of earning, in Walsh’s remembrance, an honorary Oscar and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Ultimately, Bredin is devising a pathway, in film scholarship, with sufficient room to grow, for an Old Hollywood star, Blanche Walsh, with cultural, traditional, and historical remediation as the pathway’s destination. By rewriting the birth of cinema and preserving the power of love and social justice, upon which its foundations were assembled, he aspires to impart a Hollywood that serves the greater good. John Bredin participated in this interview with Film Matters via email in summer 2018.

Lily Frame: Elaborate on your previous career paths as a writer, educator, visionary thinker, activist, TV show host, filmmaker, actor, and businessman.

John Bredin: I wrote a story at the age of eight titled “The Horse Player.” It was a satire on my uncle Ally, a real-life Damon Runyon character who lived in New York City and was the black sheep of our family. He loved to play the horses, palled around with a famous gangster, and came out with funny sayings like “No munya, no funya” and “Romance without finance is a nuisance.” I found him colorful and fascinating enough to want to write about.

Growing up, I was a shy, bookish kid, attracted to literature and writing but never one of the “cool” ones. I would’ve been a nerd in Happy Days, one of my favorite TV shows in the seventies—never the Fonze! In some way, my entire life project has been a struggle to find my voice, in the community and in the world. To learn how to tell my stories with confidence; and maybe even panache. A project that grew more focused when I became an English professor (helping others to find their voices) and, now, as I call myself: a teacher with a talk show. As my political consciousness grew, I also discovered the link between language and power in society; which added a democratic, liberating aspect to my vocation.

In my brushes with the business world, I found myself too humanistically oriented, not cutthroat enough to fit in. Like when I got fired from my job as a bank teller for talking too much to the customers! It makes me laugh now when I realize I was “in rehearsal” for my future career as a talk show host. In my brief foray into real estate, reacting to the selfishness and emptiness I sensed, I created a think tank called the Ethical Business Society, along with a radio show, New Bottom Line, to nurture a more humane corporate culture which puts the needs of people and the planet over profits. And I wrote a series of books on ethical business with titles like Money for Justice and Spy in the House of Capitalism.

In 2010, I found my true calling when my wife Claudia said “yes” to my dream of creating a TV show. Together we launched the nonprofit talk show Public Voice Salon, an open dialogue on education, the arts, and social change. Dedicated to keeping alive the humanities in an increasingly technocratic society, we believe in the importance of community, imagination, stories, and the art of human dialogue: subjects rarely discussed on mainstream media. We’ve featured some of the world’s leading intellectuals and cultural luminaries as our guests. Not to hawk products, but to discuss ideas. Recently, we visited with towering literary critic Harold Bloom at his home in New Haven, Connecticut. Harold issued a dire warning about the growing neglect of literature in the academy; a warning we take seriously. Continue reading →

Dr. Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park

CCGL9001: Hong Kong Cinema Through a Global Lens is a MOOC – a massive open online course. It originates from the University of Hong Kong by Professor Gina Marchetti, Dr. Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park, and Dr. Stacilee Ford. The course endeavors to bring Hong Kong cinema into the spotlight through a variety of lectures, discussions, and a list of films to view during the course. The MOOC runs on a platform called EdX and the next offering of the course will begin in September. The course encourages its students to connect globally and learn more about the impact of Hong Kong cinema on world cinema. We interviewed Dr. Aaron Magnan-Park in summer 2018 to learn more about the course and what it entails.

Catherine Colson: Tell us about the Hong Kong Cinema Through a Global Lens MOOC.

Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park: Our MOOC is the first half of a semester-long general education course by the same title under our Common Core curriculum. It addresses the Hong Kong films, genres, directors, and actors who make this cinema globally important as well as the lesser-known local films that connect more closely with the local population from a critical perspective. Given the global emphasis, we empower our students to create individual positions on how these Hong Kong films connect with larger forces at play ideologically, aesthetically, culturally, economically, and intellectually. These are then connected with issues of gender and cultural identity, critique, and analysis.

The MOOC consists of six lectures. Each lecture topic is based on our own individual research and publications so we can provide in-depth, comprehensive, and nuanced insights. Each lecture is designed to further discussion so that individual participants can form their own critical positions. Professor Gina Marchetti provides lectures on Jackie Chan and the new global kung fu craze, Andy Lau’s Infernal Affairs (2002) and Hong Kong’s disintegrating identity crisis, and Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) as a landmark art film of global proportions. Dr. Stacilee Ford gives a lecture on migration melodramas centered on a close reading of Mabel Cheung’s An Autumn’s Tale (1987). My lectures cover Bruce Lee and the first global kung fu craze and John Woo’s changing heroic bloodshed aesthetic rationale once he begins working in Hollywood by comparing The Killer (1989) with Face/Off (1997). Continue reading →